From time to time I’ve come across someone who has put their faith in God by trusting in his Son, Jesus, for their righteousness, yet they are assailed with fear and condemnation by a passage of scripture found in the Epistle to the Hebrews.

 For if we go on sinning willfully after receiving the knowledge of the truth, there no longer remains a sacrifice for sins, but a certain terrifying expectation of judgment, and the fury of a fire which will consume the adversaries. Anyone who has set aside the Law of Moses dies without mercy on the testimony of two or three witnesses. How much severer punishment do you think he will deserve who has trampled under foot the Son of God, and has regarded as unclean the blood of the covenant by which he was sanctified, and has insulted the Spirit of grace? (Hebrews 10:26-29)

The faith of these dear ones strikes me as sincere as evidenced by the conduct of their life. Far from perfect, they nevertheless go about life quite differently than they used to, the Master’s words taken to heart and his Spirit quickening their conscience towards both their heavenly Father as well as their earth-bound brothers and sisters. Even so, they fear this passage applies to them because they either remember or are in the very midst of stumbling—sometimes badly! They have done wrong even in the face of knowing it to be so.

Welcome to the Church, the body of Christ…

I don’t say this to be trite or glib. It is simply a fact. Even the most ardent believer stumbles and sins. Remember David? It wasn’t enough that David committed adultery with Bathsheba. Upon learning she was pregnant he went so far as to have her husband murdered in a vain attempt to keep the whole thing quiet and have Bathsheba all to himself.

God called David his friend.

Then there is Peter, the disciple who denied he even knew Jesus because he was scared of the possible consequences. So he lied. Even after Christ’s resurrection from the dead, facing peer pressure, Peter took the low ground and decided for appearance sake it was better for him not to take his meals with non-Jews. That is, until Paul corrected him publicly.

The Bible is full of examples of folks who screwed up even though they loved God and proved it by lives markedly different from those of mainline society. They had “knowledge of the truth” but, on occasion, made some bad choices.

Being a follower of Christ doesn’t mean we aren’t going to sin—even willfully sometimes. What it does mean is that we aren’t going to be able to live the same sort of life we did prior to the time we believed God, repented of our self-directed life, and put our trust in Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit’s ability to clean us up and set us free from a life of continuously willful sinning, the sort where we could care less what God has to say or what claims he makes on us, his beloved children.

Happily, the same book of the Bible does have something to say to my troubled friends (and me!) about those situations where we make the poor choice to deliberately sin.

For those whom the Lord loves He disciplines, And He scourges every son whom He receives.”  It is for discipline that you endure; God deals with you as with sons; for what son is there whom his father does not discipline? But if you are without discipline, of which all have become partakers, then you are illegitimate children and not sons. Furthermore, we had earthly fathers to discipline us, and we respected them; shall we not much rather be subject to the Father of spirits, and live? For they disciplined us for a short time as seemed best to them, but He disciplines us for our good, that we may share His holiness. All discipline for the moment seems not to be joyful, but sorrowful; yet to those who have been trained by it, afterwards it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness. Therefore, strengthen the hands that are weak and the knees that are feeble, and make straight paths for your feet, so that the limb which is lame may not be put out of joint, but rather be healed. (Hebrews 12:6-13)

And in the book of 1 John, Chapter 1:

If we say that we have no sin, we are deceiving ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, He is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. If we say that we have not sinned, we make Him a liar, and His word is not in us. (vv 8-10)

Again I say, to be a Christian is to battle with sin!

So, who is this dire warning from the Bible directed to?

The verb found in the phrase, “sinning willfully” is in the present tense denoting someone whose very lifestyle is a constant stream of willful sinning. (The sort of lifestyle that was once mine until Jesus changed everything.) And there is a qualifier that we need to pay attention to as well: “after receiving the knowledge of the truth”.

It is an ominous warning! As to whom it applies, I leave this to God, who alone knows the intimacies of every human heart.

What I do know is that it doesn’t apply to anyone who is trusting Jesus to help them overcome the sin in their lives. Such a charge doesn’t have God as its source. Of this I have no doubt! Trade your fear in, dear ones, for the truth. Jesus, our Elder Brother and Savior will bring us safely home!

There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus! (Romans 8:1)

~michael