Today’s passage: Hebrews 10:26-31
Helpful thoughts:
- Remember the original audience, the Hebrew people. If someone continues in sin (Including rejecting Christ in favor of preferring the Old Testament sacrificial system) deliberately, there no longer remains a sacrifice.
- If a Hebrew person wanted to reject Christ and go sacrifice a lamb, that sacrifice would not only be ineffective, it would also be an additional act of rebellion, because the only acceptable sacrifice to God now comes through the blood of Christ.
- Knowing that the previous passage exhorts believer to hold fast to their faith in the faithful God, this passage is to be read as an encouragement for true believers! True believers were going to believe in Christ!
- If a Jew (Or now today, even a professing Gentile believer) rejects God the Son after having participated in the set-apart people of God, he or she will have outraged the Spirit and deserves the vengeance of God. This is heinous sin against God.
- Apostates (Those who profess faith and later reject Christ) give evidence they were never truly saved by their fruit.
- Real Christians change and persevere (Romans 8:28-30).
Questions to consider:
- What does it mean to “go on sinning deliberately?” Repentance is a change of mind which results in a change in actions. What does a person who goes on sinning deliberately refuse to do?
- What would be the specific repentance required first and foremost for a Hebrew person in the first century AD? What did they need to believe about the Christ? How might this passage be applied more often today (Perhaps for a Gentile who grew up in a Christian home, in the church)?
- What more do we learn about God in this passage today? Our God is certainly loving…and what other attribute is communicated in these verses? What would be our right response to this knowledge? How does it sharpen our understanding of His love as well?