Word of Salvation – Vol. 45 No.19 – May 2000

 

The Future of a Fruitless Field

 

Sermon by Rev A Van Drimmelen

on Hebrews 6:4-12

Scripture Readings: Isaiah 43:1-7; Hebrews 5:11-6:12

Suggested Hymns: BoW 527; 167; 383; 374; 159

 

Congregation of the Lord Jesus Christ.

The main point of the passage in Isaiah is to encourage God's people not to fear, no matter what man or the forces of nature can do to them.  This is the command repeated in verses 1 and 5: “Fear not for I am with you..." says the Lord.

After each of these commands God gives His reasons why His people should not fear.  In verses 1-4 God argues like this: You should not fear because what I did for you in the past proves my love to you; that I care for you.

I have redeemed you (from being slaves in Egypt), I have called you by name, you are mine (vs.1).  So you can count on me to help you when deep waters are raging and fire threatens to destroy you (vs.2).  I am the Lord your God, your Saviour, you are precious to me.  Look, haven't I overthrown other peoples in order to save you? (vss.3-4).  So don't be afraid of the trouble coming upon you.

Then verse 5 repeats the command – don't fear.  And we have a new argument in verses 5-7: I am with you!  For a people living in exile, people who are facing a huge setback so far as their national pride is concerned, with the judgment of being dispersed among all the nations of the earth, dispossessed, God says – this is not my final word.  Instead – I will gather you again.  For you are called by my name, I created you for my glory.

Were they fearful?  YES!  But, did they belong to the LORD?  YES!  Did they come under divine judgement?  YES!  Did God love them enough to warn them and then pledge His faithfulness to them again and again?  YES!

Why is it that at rock bottom God moves to help His people?  Verse 4 says, “Since you are precious and honoured in my sight and because I love you.” Is that the answer?  Yes.

When the apostle John said, "God is love!” he, no doubt, meant that no matter how deep we probe into the motives of God, we will never arrive at a layer which is not love.  But this text lures me down, down, down into the heart of God.  It raises a question.  In order for Israel (God's chosen people of that era) to be precious in God's sight, they had to have the motivation to keep going, to hang in there, to persevere in their faith and life.

Before the creation of the world God knew you and me.  He wrote our names on the palm of His hand so He would never forget us.  He chose us for His glory.  He does that because it is consistent with His character to love, even when we are conceived and born in sin and our natural inclination is to want to hate God.

So the deeper question is, why does God persist with us?  Why did God bring into existence a people whom He could regard as precious?  Verse 7 gives the answer.  God created Israel for His glory.  The existence of Israel was planned and conceived and achieved because God wanted to get glory for His name through her.  And He will do it also with us because He wants the whole world to love and honour Him.  For that reason God's people will always persevere.  And today we ask "how"?  How will we persevere?

One of the ways God causes us to persevere in faith and be saved is by warning us that we could make shipwreck of our faith and be lost.  God graciously warns us that we could drift away and be lost.  God warns us to grow in the love and knowledge of Christ so that we will not drift away and be lost.

Now the first time I realised this, something inside me was saying, my assurance and hope are not particularly helped by being told that I might drift away from God and be lost.  Can you see why I say that?  We all come to the Bible with a need for hope, encouragement and strength.  And a passage like Isaiah 43 goes a long way to meeting those needs.

But we also come with a set of expectations, sometimes learned from our culture, as to how those needs are to be met.  Like patients coming to the doctor with prescriptions already written in their pockets, which we expect the doctor to sign for us.

But more often than not, the Bible takes a radically different approach to meeting our need for hope and assurance.  We have to make a very crucial choice.  Will we reject the Bible's prescription and go to another doctor who will endorse our prescription for hope?  Or will we humbly admit that God knows us better than we know ourselves, loves us more than we love ourselves and look patiently for the wisdom in His prescription and advice?

That's where I was, and that is where some of you are.  Eager to attain the spiritual health of full assurance and hope, but very sceptical that the prescription of Hebrews 6 is of any help.

From the context of this passage, we can see that the main aim of Hebrews 5:11 through 6:12 is to help us have full assurance of hope.  We see this in chapter 6:11 – "We want each of you to show this same diligence to the very end, in order to make your hope sure."

But we also saw that something was starting to ruin that assurance among these Hebrew Christians.  The problem is called laziness in chapter 6:12 and it's called “slow to learn" in chapter 5:11.

You can picture a gymnast part way through her floor routine, starting to get fatigued, and because she is feeling weak she starts to feel uncertain that she'll be able to complete her routine.  She springs into a high double back flip on the balance beam.  She is almost overcome by a panic that she can't pull out of it.  The coach has seen this coming and knows that there are two things (or three as we will see) that this gymnast needs.

She needs immediate help to get down without breaking her neck.  And she needs some counsel about being slack during practice.  To get her down the coach shouts, "Find the floor!"  In our study of our passage from Hebrews, this means for the struggling Christian to look to Jesus.  He is firm and sure and gives hope and strength.  Jesus gives us our balance in panicky situations.  In Hebrews 3:1 and 12:2 we read: "...fix your thoughts on Jesus" and "...fix your eyes upon Jesus.”

After the competition is over the coach tells the gymnast that one of the reasons she got into trouble was failure to practice the basics every day.  A similar thing is said in Hebrews 5:14: “...solid food is for the mature, who by constant use have trained themselves to distinguish good from evil."

In other words, this gymnast, these Hebrews Christians, had not been putting their faith into daily practice.  And when the organ of faith is not used it begins to die.  And its faculties of discernment become dull and sluggish.  And when the faculties of split-second discernment become dull, a gymnast begins to lose confidence, and when a well-founded confidence begins to go, a terrible accident may be just around the corner.

Which brings us to the third thing that God says to His people.  The first was the urgent cry: Look to Jesus!  He is a great Saviour!  The second was the serious counsel – go back to the basics and practice.

And now the third thing – the coach gives a grave warning to the gymnast: if you ignore my advice and continue on neglecting to practice you will become weaker and weaker and one of these days you are going to break your neck and never compete again.

And when the coach says that, it is not because he desires to see his gymnast come to nothing.  He wants his gymnast to succeed and win.  So also God tells us very specifically what His desire is for His church in chapter 6:11-12: He wants His church to have full assurance and hope and confidence.  He wants His church, in the words of vs.12, to have faith and patience.  And he wants His church to inherit the gold medal in the last day.

We have been pointing to some similarities between the way a coach seeks the well-being of his gymnast and the way God seeks the wellbeing of His church.  But the difference between God and some spiritual coaches of our day is that God does not want to give any false assurance to Christian believers whose faculties are dull and spiritual muscles are weak, who won't exercise their faith in acts of daily obedience.  The false assurance some spiritual coaches offer is even more likely to lead to a broken faith.

So God does not say to His children: you ought to put your faith to practice, you know.  But whether you do or not, or even if you don't finish your routines in the future, or even if you quit your spiritual routines, you will get your trophy any way.  God will welcome you into heaven.

Instead hear what God says, and in the context of this passage, He is using the image of two pieces of farm land, one that bears crops and one that produces thorns and thistles.  “It is impossible for those who have once been enlightened, who have tasted the heavenly gift, who have shared in the Holy Spirit, who have tasted the goodness of the Word of God and the powers of the coming age, if they fall away, to be brought back to repentance, because to their loss they are crucifying the Son of God all over again and subjecting him to public disgrace...” [Hebrews 6:4-8].  We need to answer four questions about this warning so that we can understand it and put it to work in our own fight to maintain the full assurance of hope to the end.

1.  What is the danger?  Eternal condemnation, or something less?

2.  What brings this danger to reality?  What must we do or not do, so that this danger will not happen to us?

3.  If this danger does happen to a person, then were they really born again, justified, adopted into God's family and sealed by the Spirit?

4.  Should we – who believe that we are God's elect, justified by the blood of Jesus, reconciled to God and indwelt by the Spirit of sonship – should we apply this warning to ourselves?

Our first question was: what is the danger?  Eternal condemnation, or something less?  The danger is real forsakenness from God forever, the final curse of God and the fire of hell.  The Bible here is not talking about a mere setback in life, some disciplining of the child of God.  It is talking about a final fiery curse.

Let me give you reasons why I think this is so.  The two pieces of farmland that are compared in verses 7-8 suggest that God's final curse is in view.

Look at the first piece of farmland (vs.7): “Land that drinks in the rain often falling on it and that produces a crop useful to those for whom it is farmed receives the blessing of God.” But the second piece of farmland.” (vs.8): “Land that produces thorns and thistles is worthless and is in danger of being cursed.  In the end it will be burned.”

The two fields represent two kinds of persons.  The one is a fruitful person and the other a fruitless person.  Three words point to the final condemnation of the fruitless person.  The fruitless field is worthless (cf Rom.1:28; 2Cor.13:5-7; 1Cor.9:27; 2Tim.3:8; Tit.1:16), and it is about to be cursed, and its end is fire.  Worthless, cursed, and destined for burning.  That is the language of final condemnation.

So, not just some temporary setback but the curse and destruction; the loss of never seeing the Lord Jesus and being burned in the fires of His righteous judgment.  Hebrew 10:27 calls it "...a fearful expectation of judgment and of raging fire...!"  And Hebrews 12:29 says, "Our God is a consuming fire."

Our second question was, what brings this danger to pass?  What must we do or not do so that this danger will not happen to us?  Hebrews 6:6 speaks of apostasy or falling away.  If they commit apostasy (fall away) then they get beyond the ability to repent.

Now, what is involved here?

It tells us that more than a simple change of mind is involved.  What is involved is a life that is persistently fruitless.  A life that grows hard and callused to the convicting power of the Holy Spirit.  That's the point of verse 7, the fruitless field.  What brings the curse of God down on a person in this text is that they have drunk the rain of God's goodness year after year but have not brought forth any fruit.  To use the words of chapter 12:14, they have not pursued holiness and therefore they will not see the Lord.  The issue of apostasy is not primarily doctrinal, but practical.

It is the problem of chapter 5:14, where they are unwilling to put their faith into practice, and so their faculties are getting dull.  Right and wrong are becoming blurred and the writer says, if you don't stop drifting (ch 2:1), and neglecting your salvation (ch 2:3), and giving up meeting together (ch 10:25) you are going to be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin and fall away from the living God (ch 3:12-13).

If you allow yourself to drift down the river of sin with no effort in holiness and no growth in grace, there will come a point of no return.  This is the great error of those who profess to be Christians but live a worldly life thinking that they will clean things up in their old age.

I've told the story once before of the vulture who spotted the corpse of a fox on a big hunk of ice floating down the river toward Niagara Falls.  He flies to the ice, lands and begins to eat the fox.  He watches the falls approaching and hears the warnings of danger, but he tells himself that he has wings and is free and does not need to pay attention to such warnings.  He is destined for the sky.  At the last minute he finishes his feast and spreads his wings but he can't fly because his claws have frozen in the ice and he is dragged over the falls to his destruction.

And so it will be with people who have heard the warnings of the Bible to abandon their worldly cravings and pursue holiness, but who nevertheless say, I have wings, I am a Christian.  I can fly anytime I want to.  The day will come when they may try but they will not be able to repent because they are so hardened and so addicted to the world.  They can't even feel one genuine spiritual prompting of God (cf Esau, ch 12:17).

The third question was, can this happen to persons who are really born again, justified, adopted into God's family, sealed by the Holy Spirit?  My answer is NO, it can't.  There are the promises to God's people of old.  It began in Genesis 3 and was confirmed on oath to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.  We saw that very clearly in the case of Isaiah prophesying to a people in exile.  Yes, there were setbacks, real discipline, but it was temporary, not eternal.  Saints will face setbacks.  The Bible even regards the death of a Christian as just the final sting of sin.  Nothing more.  It is our entrance into glory.

There are many texts in the New Testament that would demonstrate that God will preserve His saints.  “And those he predestined, he also called; those he called, he also justified; those he justified, he also glorified” (Rom.8:30).  That is to say, those who are justified by faith will definitely be glorified.  Christ's atoning work on the cross is God's YES and AMEN to that promise for us!!!

Let me show you two texts from the book of Hebrews which teach that once you belong to Christ, you always belong to Christ.  Hebrews 3:14 (NASB) says: “We have become (note the tense of the verb!) partakers of Christ, if we hold fast the beginning of our assurance (well-grounded assurance, not false assurance) firm until the end.."

Note carefully: it does not say that you will become a partaker of Christ if you persevere.  It says you HAVE become a partaker if you persevere.  The point is that persevering does not earn your participation in Christ, it verifies your participation in Christ.  Perseverance is not a payment for getting into Christ.  It is a proof that you are in Christ.  So we would have to say, the person who drifts along in sin and makes no effort to pursue holiness does not fall out of Christ.  He was never in Christ.

And the second text is Hebrews 10:14 – “...because by one sacrifice he has made perfect forever those who are being made holy.”  In other words, when Jesus died, He perfected a group of people forever.  He has done this in the past.  It does not say that His death will perfect them if they get holy.  It says that his death HAS MADE PERFECT those who are being made holy.  It has been done and it is eternal.

This is the same kind of thought we saw in chapter 3:14.  The pursuit of holiness (sanctification) does not earn us this perfection that Jesus secured for us in the past.  Instead the process of sanctification simply shows that we are among that number who were eternally perfected by the death of Jesus.

So a person who drifts into sin and neglects the pursuit of holiness and so falls away from God, is not a person who was once saved by the death of Jesus, and then lost that salvation.  Because Hebrews 10:14 says that salvation is an everlasting fact for a certain group of people.  And we base our assurance on being part of that group of people.  It is the reason we persevere in faith and pursue holiness.

So I make the conclusion, if someone drifts away from God and makes shipwreck of faith, they do not lose a salvation that they once had.  Instead, they show by their lack of perseverance that they never truly belonged to Christ, were never born again, justified, adopted, and sealed by the Holy Spirit for the Day of redemption.

Finally, then, we ask, if this is so, should those of us who believe that we are God's elect, justified by the blood of Jesus, reconciled to God and indwelt by the Spirit of sonship, should we apply this warning to ourselves?  Should we read Hebrews 6:4-8 and take any notice of it ourselves?

The answer is, yes, we should.  For at least two reasons.  When the writer of this book finishes his warning in chapter 6:4-8, he says in verse 9, “Even though we speak like this, dear friends, we are confident of better things in your case – things that accompany salvation."

In other words, the author of this Hebrew letter has a strong confidence that his readers are NOT going to make a shipwreck of their faith.  They are not going to commit apostasy and fall away from God.  They are going to persevere.  But he knew this when he started writing this warning in chapter six, just five verses earlier.

So we can conclude from this that the writer still wants the people, whom he is very confident about, to read his warning and take it to heart.  That is his prescription, the spiritual doctor's warning for the congregation.  Remember, it was the church that was slipping, losing their grip and getting lazy.  The other reason I believe this prescription is for the saints is because of what he says in vs.4-5 about the person who can fall away from God.

• That person can be enlightened, have much truth and insight into the Bible and the gospel.
• He can have tasted the heavenly gift and be a partaker of the Holy Spirit; the very Spirit of God can be at work in his life convicting him of sin, drawing him to Christ, revealing truths.
• He can have tasted the goodness of the Word of God, sat under its influence from his parents and Sunday School teachers, and pastor, and even confessed it publicly in church.
• And, as Jesus says in Matthew 7:22, such a person can even prophesy and cast out demons and do mighty works in Jesus' name.

All this!  And yet he can hear the dreadful words in the last day, "Away from me, you evildoer!  I never knew you."  For those two reasons I say, yes, we all should take notice, when we read the warnings of Scripture.

But still we ask...  why?

• If we have the burning confidence in our hearts today that He who began a good work in us will carry it on to completion, until the day of Christ (Phil 1:6)...
• And that God will equip us with everything good, working in us that which is pleasing in His sight (Heb 13:21; Jude 1:24)...
• That He is able to keep us from falling and to present us before his glorious presence without fault and with great joy...

Then why should we take the warnings against falling away so seriously?

And the answer is really very simple: God's way to keep us from falling is by enticing us with promises and sobering us up with warnings.

The point of the promises is to engage our feelings for the eternal glory of God.

The point of the warnings is to disengage our feelings from the fading glory of this world.

The point of the promises is to make our mouths water at the prospect of infinite happiness in God.

And the point of the warnings is to make our hearts tremble at the prospect of falling under the wrath of God.

And so the warnings of the Bible support our assurance in this way: they make us aware of the real danger of careless spiritual drifting.  They then send us back to the two main sources of assurance that we saw earlier:

1.  looking to Christ and all that he has done; and,

2.  exercising the organ of faith in the pursuit of the holiness without which no one will see the Lord.

Amen.