The Palestinian Apostates
T. Guthrie, D. D. Hebrews 6:4-6 For it is impossible for those who were once enlightened, and have tasted of the heavenly gift… Under a fierce, though — thanks to Roman supremacy — a bloodless persecution, the intensity of which no one at all familiar with Jewish hate will be at a loss to realise, members of she churches were falling away, first into backsliding, then into apostasy, to the extent of returning to their temple service; and the difficulty of reclaiming them from amid those environments prompts the apostle to impart to his warnings special potency and pungency. I. Notice THEIR PREVIOUS CHARACTER AND POSITION. The state that preceded their apostasy, if there be meaning in words, was that of actual conversion; and but for the exigencies of a vicious creed no other idea would have been entertained. They were " once enlightened"; and the same word is used of them in the tenth chapter under the rendering "illuminated." No stronger expression could be used to denote conversion. "Once ye were darkness, but ye are now light in the Lord." Again, they are here affirmed to have "tasted of the heavenly gift," which, however it may be explained, it would be arbitrary in the extreme to understand as falling short of salvation. The same remark applies to the next thing attributed to these apostates, "they were made partakers of the Holy Ghost." Full of the Holy Ghost we need not suppose them to have been; but none the less does the expression denote the saving fruits of faith as contrasted with the fruits of those that continue in the flesh. (Compare Galatians 5:19-25; Ram. 5:5.) On the same principle, consistency demands it at we explain the attribution — "they have tasted the good Word of God," in the spirit of David in such places as Psalm 19. and 119., or of Jeremiah when he sweetly says, "Thy Word was found of me, and I did eat it, and Thy Word was unto me the joy and rejoicing of my heart." "To the above tastings," or spiritual experiences, the apostle adds that those apostates h d "tasted the powers of the world to come"; or, as the expression means, "the age to come." This was the New Testament age, and had long been familiarly so denominated. The word "power" is the same as that rendered "miracles" in Hebrews 2:4; and it is here intimated, therefore, that the spiritual evidences and influences so grandly characteristic of that period had previously operated their due effects on the minds and hearts of these apostates. II. We now pass to THEIR PRESENT STATE — that of men who have apostatised. 1. The fact of their apostasy is expressly affirmed. They had " fallen away." Their fall, as we shall see, would not be precipitate. The gradient of the downward path is at first exceedingly imperceptible; it is not till a further stage down that it becomes recklessly headlong. 2. Let us now pass from the fact to the nature of their apostasy. It was a lapse from all the Christian experiences above detailed, and that by a lapse from the source of these — namely, faith, and from all the means by which we are enabled to " stand fast in the faith." This lapse would be stealthy, and so in fact the word implies. It was probably no sudden flight, no leap, no bound, no run, or even deliberate, walk, but a partially passive and insensible process of "falling away." Like the fleecy envelopment of air which, from its yielding nature, falls behind in the diurnal revolution of our globe (causing our trade and oblique winds) such retrogressors gradually yield to dragging influences and lag behind. First, the Bible is neglected, then prayer, then family duty, then Christian converse, then Christian zeal in every form, then the Sabbath, the sanctuary, and all the means of grace. At whose bidding? we need hardly ask, seeing the seducers are legion. It may have been at the prompting of Mammon, or of Belial, of vanity, or of pride. It may have been in the name of free thought, under the license of free speech, or under the baser dictation still of indolence and cowardice that shrink from encountering pain, and toil, and loss. Any way, the sphere of salvation in the soul contracts and grows dim; the fruits of the new life shrivel up; the heart, now " an evil heart of unbelief, departs from the living God," and day by day becomes "hardened through the deceitfulness of sin." III. Let us now endeavour to understand Him: IMPOSSIBILITY HERE AFFIRMED Of again renewing these recreants unto repentance. Be it noted in the outset, that vain is the attempt of those who would substitute for the word "impossible" some milder translation, such as "difficult," or the like. In the original, just as in our version, the word incontrovertibly and immovably stands "impossible." But then the question is still left open to us — In what sense impossible? First. and surely plainly enough, no such thing as absolute impossibility is for a moment to be thought of, for we are here in a far other sphere than that of strict omnipotence. We are in the moral sphere; and in the moral sense only are we to understand the word impossible. And even in that sense the impossibility lies not on the side of God, but wholly on the side of man. How? Only in the moral sense; and in no such sense even of the moral kind as need doom any apostate to despair, though certainly such as ought to make his ears tingle and his knees tremble, and his frame shake and his heart quake. It was impossible to renew those men, merely in the sense of Christ's impossible, when He said, "How can ye believe, who receive honour one of another?" — this state of mind, while it lasted, being a moral bar to their believing: but then it had no need to last. It was impossible, in the sense in which we ourselves freely use the word every day; as when we say, It is impossible to love this man, or hate that man, or to respect or trust that other — that is, impossible only in the sense of being extremely hard or difficult by reason of moral dispositions or circumstances; which moral causes, however, it is all the time understood by us, it is quite in the power of the man concerned to alter or surmount, if he choose. IV. THESE MORAL CAUSES FOR THE IMPOSSIBLE, in the case of the apostates in my text, it only remains that, in the last place, I now briefly explain. For very special they were, and frightful in the extreme — amply sufficient, and more, to account for the very strong word "impossible" which the inspired writer here employs. These singular causes are briefly but expressively set forth in the appended reason, "seeing they crucify to themselves the Son of God afresh, and put Him to an open shame." They not only renounce Christ, they do it with every circumstance of contumelious indignation and scorn. They re-enact for "themselves" what they are now too late literally to join in — the crime and the jeering concomitants of the Saviour's crucifixion. This they do, not only in the arena of the inner spirit, but in open avowal, by shamelessly homologating and glorying in the deed. They say, "though for a time deceived, we now see that the deed was right." They this gather into themselves the combined virulence of both Jew and Roman; for while with the Jew they cry, "Crucify Him," with the Roman they do in effect "crucify Him," so far as it is in them to re-enact the deed. And unlike that tumultuous rabble, who were stirred into frenzy by their rulers, and borne many of them they knew not whither, so that Christ affectingly said of them, praying, "They know not what they do," these apostates, on the contrary, re-enacted the crime deliberately, from amid the full flood of gospel light, and life, and power, and after they them elves had tasted the sweets of gospel love. This, the terrible attitude and its implications, were explanation enough of the word impossible, were we to say no more. But to stop here would leave unexplained the fact, otherwise incredible, how they could ever have been led to take such an attitude at all. This is the only thing further I have to explain, and then the shadow over the word "impossible" will have deepened into the most hopeless gloom. The explanation is to be found in the strongly marked peculiarities of the Jew, and in the then conditions of social and religious life in Palestine. These were such as to leave no neutral ground. A Jew's wrath, in religious matters, easily intensifies to frenzied rage. Hence their scorn of Jesus, their vindication of His death, their hate of all who bear His name, their practice by spitting, gesticulation, or terms of execration, of blaspheming and cursing the Holy One under the opprobrious name of "the Nazarene." In such a state of society, to renounce Christianity was not to lapse into negative indifference; for indifference or neutrality there was none. It meant positively a return to Judaism; and to Judaism aroused awed armed in deadly antagonism to Christianity. The process would be this. Expelled the synagogue, put under the ban, disowned by their nearest, if they perished in clinging to the hated Nazarene in spite of the entreaties, the tears, and ere long the curses of their kin, the Palestinian Christian would at first waver, then absent himself occasionally from the Christian assemblies. Urged by his relatives, the occasionally would become frequently, till, now fairly on the decline, he came to abandon them entirely. And now the entreaties, the blandishments, the impassioned warnings would be renewed. Let him only pass through the needful discipline and be welcomed anew into the synagogue and into the bosom of his home. He does so: and the die is cast. To quit the church for the synagogue was to pass from one hostile camp to another, with no intermediate resting place or ground even for parley. It was to quit all Christian ordinances and restoring influences, and to raise a brazen wall between. And it was to enter the synagogue to join the anti-Nazarene crusade. The apostates, and with proverbially apostate zeal, now persecuted the faith they formerly preached. In conclusion, there result two vitally important lessons, which we briefly state in Scripture language. 1. "Let him that thinketh he standeth take heed lest he fall." 2. "Let the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts." (T. Guthrie, D. D.) Parallel Verses KJV: For it is impossible for those who were once enlightened, and have tasted of the heavenly gift, and were made partakers of the Holy Ghost, WEB: For concerning those who were once enlightened and tasted of the heavenly gift, and were made partakers of the Holy Spirit,