Transcript
And before I take my first question, let me get my Bible open again to that. All right. Uh, questions, Bob.
Hebrews 10:26. Hebrews 10:26.
Yes. Um—
Where it talks about, uh, a sacrifice. Is that referring to Old Testament sacrifice? “It no longer remains a sacrifice.”
I really should turn that question over to the distinguished gentleman here, John Nemo, but I’m going to give you my opinion about it. Uh, Bob, I think that this is a reference to the sin of apostasy, the willful turning one’s back on the Christian profession, forsaking the assembling of oneself together with others, as indicated in verse 25. And I think the writer is saying, if you do that, you turn your back on the sacrifice that Christ has made for you. There’s nowhere that you can go to find a sacrifice that will meet your need. There’s nothing else out there.
That’s correct. Uh-huh. Right.
That would be my understanding of it. All right. Right back here.
Question: Some people interpret it differently, like the word salvation and the different warnings. Did you ever believe along the same lines that the other people had believed? And if you did, what brought you over to the other side and how you came about that?
That’s an interesting question. Uh, I think I could honestly say that while I never, uh, actually held some of the views, uh, that others hold on Hebrews, that, uh, in my early years as a Christian, I did not have a clear fix on the message of Hebrews. And one of the things that has helped me, not only in the Epistle to the Hebrews, but throughout the New Testament, is not to have what I would call a knee-jerk reaction to the word “saved” and to the word “salvation.”
And when I discovered, uh, that, uh, from the standpoint of the Greek language, these were very flexible words—really, the word save in Greek means deliver, and the word salvation means deliverance—and it’s surprising how the force of a text is changed for us who read our English Bibles when you substitute the word deliverance for the word salvation, because the word salvation tends to evoke theological connotations, in particular those that are related to our salvation experience.
So I think it is a task that all interpreters of the New Testament must undertake, that when they encounter the word salvation anywhere in the text of Scripture, they ask the question, um, in the context of this use of the word salvation, what are we being saved from? What are we being delivered from? And I think that, uh, close study of the New Testament shows that there are a number of different ideas throughout the New Testament, uh, to which the word save can be applied.
One of the things that is hidden from English readers is the fact that the word was sometimes used in the Gospels of the healing of the sick. “Your faith has made you well” may very well be a translation of the Greek word for save. As a matter of fact, this is essentially true in English. Of course, this is a very flexible word outside of a theological context. And I remember—I’ve told this to some of you, probably—but I remember a case where I was asked to talk to a young lady about eternal salvation. And I went through the gospel and I said to her, “You need to believe in Christ, uh, to be saved.”
And, much to my surprise, she said, “I have believed in Him, and I, I, I was saved.” Uh, this kind of surprised me. So I said, “Tell me about it.” So then she told me that one time she had been driving a car, and she didn’t have her license with her, and she got involved in an accident, and the police came, and she, uh, prayed to God to save her from getting into any trouble. And she believed He would, and He did, and she didn’t get into trouble. So she had been saved by believing in the Lord.
And suddenly I realized, you know, she’s on this track and I’m on this track, and the word save didn’t communicate to her, uh, automatically in the way it does to many of us who are, who are, uh, accustomed to this usage of it. And that was generally true in the Hispanic work that I do, uh, in my earliest experience in that work. Uh, it was surprising, the connotations that the word save could have for the typical person that I talked to, and they were by no means, uh, exclusively, uh, what we would call a salvation-from-hell connotation.
So I think that that’s just a simple, fundamental rule that applies everywhere where you study the, uh, New Testament. And I also think that at some point or other I began to look more closely at the warning passages. Uh, I think maybe at some stage of my career or another I might have hovered on the brink of the professing-Christian view, that I heard it a lot, although I doubted it when I heard it a lot of times. And as I looked at it more closely, it seemed quite obvious to me that the terminology has to be strained beyond recognition to make it anything less than a description of Christian experience.
And in particular, the verse we looked at, uh, in chapter 10:29, “the blood of the covenant by which he was sanctified,” you have to rip that out of chapter 10, uh, to get any kind of an idea that this is referring to an unsaved person. So eventually I would say that although my ideas were not always, uh, very clear on the Epistle to the Hebrews, by study I came to the conclusion that some of the propositions were obviously false, and that we needed to ask new questions of the text and try to find out what, in fact, the text is trying to say.
Questions? Yes, Arch.
Um, the writer of the book of Hebrews uses the word righteousness numbers of times.
Yes.
For you referred to Noah, who became an heir of righteousness. He talked about working righteousness. Um, righteousness is a word that has always been hard to get a handle on in our thinking as Americans. Uh, can you come up with a phrase or anything that would help us understand the word overall as it’s used in the Scripture, and in the peculiar way in the book of Hebrews?
Well, um—
Is there a synonym? Is there a, a short phrase that sort of summarizes what the Bible means when it talks about righteousness?
I think if we are talking about the verbal idea, to do righteous, to be righteous, we are basically talking about to do the right thing. Righteousness is the, uh, character that a person has if they do the right thing. Now in Pauline thought, of course, uh, nobody really does the right thing, uh, sufficiently to have a righteousness that avails in the presence of God. So God imputes righteousness as though we had never done anything wrong and had always done everything right. He imputes that righteousness to us by faith in Christ.
Another way of saying this is that God clears us before the bar of His justice. So if I go downtown and I’m charged with a crime, I might be declared righteous in terms of that particular crime if the judge or the court finds me innocent. So what God does in justification by faith is to find us innocent of all our flaws, and positively righteous in His sight, not because of things we have done, but because His righteousness is imputed to faith.
But I think that the basic idea of, uh, righteousness is having the character of one who does right. Uh, righteousness is the act of doing right. Being righteous is having the character of one who does right, and doing righteousness is doing the right thing. Something like that.
Now the word righteousness is often—the same word in the Greek language—is often translated justice, justification. I mean, they seem to be related concepts.
Well, the word justification, of course, is, um, a form of the family of words to which the word righteous belongs. But the English translation does not, uh, make that connection for us. In other words, justify doesn’t sound to us automatically as if it’s a form of the idea of righteous. But nevertheless, the fact remains that the Greek verb means to declare righteous.
The problem is we, we talk and we use the word like, “I, I try, I’ll justify myself action.” We have some familiarity with the word justify.
We don’t have any familiarity with the word righteous in everyday language. So that’s why it seems to be hard to get a handle on it other than saying, “Well, it means to do right.”
And you say the character of somebody that does right. But I’m just wondering if there’s, you know, I guess that’s the best we can do. I don’t know what else we can do.
I think it is probably true, what you say, that the word righteous is not in very common use in everyday English.
So, “all righteous,” we understand.
We sure do.
And if we say that he’s a good person, we understand what that means, right?
We just don’t generally use the word righteous. Righteous, in that sense, would be very similar to saying—
Good person.
“He’s a good person.” Well, that’s, that’s how the language changes. Our own language changes and leaves us, uh, with the necessity of defining the terms that are familiar from the Bible. Sometimes—
Early English, I think, had a better—
Yeah. Yeah. I agree.
John, could you walk us through Hebrews 12:8, since that’s often used for the false professor’s view? “But if you are without chastening, of which all become, uh, partakers, then you are illegitimate and not sons.”
The way in which that is usually interpreted, as I’m sure John knows, is that if you don’t have chastening, that is an indication you’re not a Christian. And therefore the, uh, word illegitimate is a functional equivalent here, on that view, to being unsaved. I have, over the years—I used to hold that view—but over the years I have come to doubt it very severely. And I believe, however, that the author is still here within the parameters of his discussion of heirship, and that this, uh, terminology was comprehensible, uh, within the Greek or Roman culture to which the author and the readers belong.
Uh, an illegitimate son was a real son, but under Roman law did not really have any, uh, standing in terms of inheritance or heirship. And, uh, so I think that, uh, what the writer means to say here is that the educational process, uh, the chastening that we have talked about here—but that is a translation of the Greek word paideia, child-training—that God child-trains, uh, the, the sons who are heirs. But the implication of the epistle is that in the case of those who are throwing their heirship away, uh, He deals with them in retributive, uh, justice, something like that.
So I think that that’s the view that I would prefer, but I would also concede that I’m still open to persuasion on the other view. But I think that that is probably a better view in the context of the book of Hebrews. I know I haven’t answered all your questions. Uh—
Question: What about “the sin which so easily ensnares us”?
Well—but what would you say the sin is?
Question: No, I think this is a general statement about sin, and the word “ensnares” is maybe not the very best, uh, term here to translate it. The sin that’s, you know, all around us and that sort of thing.
You don’t see it as a specific sin?
No, that we’re to run with patience, uh, the race that is set before us. Uh, we’re to lay aside every weight and the easily ensnaring sin that is everywhere, that, that milieu in which we have to run this race. And I don’t think he’s thinking of a specific sin.
Question: Generic reference to—
Yeah, just like it’s a generic reference, as far as I can see, to weight—whatever hinders you, whatever drags you down morally, uh, do away with these things and get on with the race. Something like that. Yes, Fred.
In chapter 6, 4 and 5 talk about the one who falls away, and basically nothing to do. Question as to our responsibility, even though there may not be anything to do then. Also takes up discussion going back to, to Romans 1 and those who hide the truth—mankind—our responsibility, I guess. Contrast that. I’m not interested—I think it’d be shared—that.
Okay, we were talking about Romans 1 and the fact that the wrath of God is manifested against those who are ungodly and unrighteous, and who suppress the truth in unrighteousness. And here I think we’re talking about the general condition of mankind, uh, turning their back on the truth. Uh, what he has particularly in mind at that point is the manifestation of God in creation. Even though it’s manifest, people have turned their back on it. They refuse to acknowledge it. They suppress it. Uh, they act wickedly. And, uh, as part of His retribution, as a manifestation of God’s wrath with that, uh, He turns man over to the consequences of their degradation. They sink down and down and down.
The collapse of a culture of the type that we are witnessing in America today, in my opinion, is directly related to the fact that increasingly America no longer acknowledges the spiritual realities that were more widely acknowledged, uh, during the early era of our, our country. And I think we’re paying the price for it in, uh, the increasing, uh, decline of morality, the rise of addiction, the increase in broken homes. On and on and on the list goes, uh, in terms of the consequences that flow directly from man’s sinfulness and refusal to acknowledge the truth.
But in Hebrews, we’re not talking about that kind of general condition. And it seems to me, after we put the book of Hebrews together, we’re talking about the man who throws his confidence away, who abandons the Christian meeting. We’re talking, in very simple, down-to-earth terms, about an apostate, someone who is saved, but now wants to throw it all overboard. He wants to, to have nothing to do with Christianity. He no longer professes to be a Christian. He no longer goes to church, that kind of thing.
And then what we are told is that God is a consuming fire for such a person, that God repays that kind of slight to His grace with very bitter judgment. So that’s a different thing than the general wrath that, that falls upon mankind as a result of their degradation and denial of the truth. So I think in this, in this epistle we are really being warned that once a person takes this step—and we understand, most of the people that I have known through my Christian ministry have never done this. But the gentleman that I was referring to, uh, during the course of our presentation is a man who has done this, and there are others, of course, like him.
And so when this kind of a departure from God occurs, one can anticipate that somewhere down the road there will be severe retribution for this person.
Our follow-up question would be our responsibility to this person and this person.
Well, it seems to me that, of course, as I did with my friend, I tried to talk to him, but he was a blank wall. I might as well have been talking to an empty pew over here. Uh, he was having no part of it. And after that, um, I didn’t attempt to talk to him again. Of course we didn’t live in the same city. But I think at that point my responsibility was to, uh, pray for him.
And as I suggested, my own understanding of the warning in Hebrews 6 is not that it is impossible for the person himself to be brought to repentance, but it is impossible for us to renew that person to repentance. That means it’s got to be God’s job. And the implication of this context is that God will do the job, if He does it at all, through the medium of His, uh, retribution.
So if this man—and my friend is a perfect example of this, because he worked with me in the Christian ministry that I have been involved in for so many years. He was a fruitful, productive Christian. He was a delightful person. He was one of my best friends. He was also Greek, by the way, which gave him a special inside track with me. And we got along famously because he knew I liked Greek. And he was a very fruitful person.
So he was like the field that, uh, produces good fruits, that has harvest on it, and the rain comes down and the fruit grows. But then the condition of that field changed dramatically until it was overgrown with thorns and thistles and undesirable things. And at that point the writer of Hebrews says, uh, there has to be a burning. You have—God has to burn this off. Now that may, and I think, uh, probably often does, result in the death of the individual. But the illustration that the writer uses is open-ended enough to permit the deduction that since that’s the purpose of burning a field, to reuse it again, that that’s a conceivable, uh, result of the severe judgment of God.
But I think what this tells us is I can’t do that job myself. I’m not going to be able to sit down with him and talk him back into an attitude of repentance. I’m going to have to leave him to God. And maybe my role, therefore, is to pray that he will respond as well as possible to the difficulties that God is certainly going to send.
Question: I can’t remember the Scripture that—rejoice back—
Yes.
Well, I think that is talking about the straying Christian. Uh, that’s, uh, Luke 15. And, uh, I think what’s involved here is the very typical thing that a Christian drifts away from the Christian assembly. Not that he stopped being a Christian, not that he denies his Christian profession. He’s just, you know, living in the world now, walking in the world’s ways, all right? That kind of a person can be brought back. And, uh, the Christian church should be actively involved, as much as possible, in, in, uh, seeking the person and being used in the hands of the Lord to restore him.
Question: The tabernacle. What does that tell us about—
Saying, “Pe those questions so we can get them on the table.” We don’t have the mic traveling around anymore. I’d rather Fred repeat that, uh, question if we—here comes the mic. Fred, uh, go ahead.
And some of us are loudmouths.
Okay. The first question was, if the earthly tabernacle was patterned after the heavenly tabernacle, what does that tell us about what heaven is like? And secondly, now that Christ is seated and He has entered this Holy of Holies, and yet He’s still the minister of this tabernacle, what is, what is He actually doing?
Okay, those are two very good questions. Of course, you remember that Moses was told,
See that you make everything according to the pattern that was showed you in the mount.
And when we get into Hebrews 3, it sounds very much like the tabernacle is a pattern of the things that should come, that is, uh, he obviously is referring, therefore, to the heavenly ministry and, and, uh, the heavenly tabernacle and so on.
If you, if I had a diagram of the, uh, tabernacle here, of course, and we could set it up this way instead of make it flat this way, set it up this way, uh, at the bottom there would be the court that goes all around the, uh, temple, and there would be the altar in the court. Then there would be the first part of the tent where the Jewish priests went and where the showbread was and where the lampstand was. And then beyond that—understand I’m setting it up this way—uh, there is the Holy of Holies.
So if the altar represents the cross, that the, the court somehow represents, uh, earth where Jesus came and died, and I would suggest that, uh, the heavenly places, uh, are the areas of spiritual warfare in which Christians are engaged, according to the Epistle to the Ephesians, and then that this inner court represents the throne room of God, the, the presence of God, that in a very loose way—we should not imagine that the tabernacle gives us the actual shape of this—but the pattern is like the pattern that I’ve just suggested there.
And then it seems to me that since the writer of Hebrews has made clear to us that there’s no more sacrifice for sin, and that the, uh, finished nature of His sacrificial work is signaled by the fact that He sits down, whereas the Jewish priests never got to sit down, that what we are then saying is that as He sits at the right hand of God, He, uh, lives to make intercession for us.
And thinking of it in this very intimate way, a son sitting next to his father on two chairs, or on the same chair—sometimes the ancient thrones were long thrones. And the statement that is made at the end of Revelation 3 makes us think of the possibility of the Father sitting here and the Son sitting here, at His right hand, on one throne. But then whenever there is a need, He turns to the Father and says, “I would like to ask for this for Fred, or for Zane, or for Arch, or for John Nemo, or for Jack, or for anybody who’s out here. I want to pray for them. They’re facing this situation. They have this need. Let Me ask this for them.”
We have a classic example of that, of course, in the prayer that Jesus prays for Peter. He says, you know,
Satan has desired to have you, that he may sift you like wheat, but I have prayed for you that your faith not fail.
Now, that’s interesting. He doesn’t say, “I prayed that Satan wouldn’t get his hands on you.” He didn’t say, “I pray that you won’t pass through this temptation.” He says, “I pray for you that your faith not collapse, and when you are converted”—that indicates that He prayed for the turning back of Peter—“strengthen your brethren.” I have prayed that you will come through this and be a source of strength to your brethren.
And this, this gives me an opportunity to say something that, that I don’t know exactly where this dawned on me, but I have come to realize that I, when we get to heaven, I believe that we are going to be positively and overwhelmingly astounded by the number of good things that happened to us in contrast to the bad things that could have happened to us as a result of the intercessory work of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.
We don’t know what—you know, if I could tell you what He was asking God for me right now, it would be interesting to know. But it’s probably better for me not to know. But whatever it is that He is asking for me at the right hand of God is the best thing that I could possibly have, uh, given all the circumstances that I’m in. So I think that’s the way we should think of, uh, the great High Priest, seated, seated at the right hand of God, engaged in this continuous intercessory work on behalf of the saved.
Question: How is that different from the Holy Spirit and His intercessory—
The Holy Spirit intercedes through us, uh, and as part of our prayer life. That’s the way I understand the Romans passage. And this is intercession at the right hand of God.
Jack, you had your hand up.
As I was listening to you this evening and this morning, uh, regarding the apostate Christian, and I have occasion to know a couple of those similar apostate Christians as you have described this friend of yours, and I also understood you to believe—understood you to say—that there really wasn’t anything more that you felt you could do for this apostate Christian friend of yours. And, and I also understood you to say that when a believer reaches the apostate state, as I believe some people I know and this friend of yours has, that there really is nothing that we can do.
Is that correct, or—
Yes, with the only exception being prayer. We can always pray, but I think it would have been counterproductive for me to try to carry on a correspondence with this guy or go back and see him. If we had crossed paths again, I might have been reticent to say something. But if the occasion came up, just because I felt I had a duty to say it, I would probably have said it. But the fact remains that I would have been thinking, you know, nothing that I say is really going to change him. Only God can change him. That would be my attitude.
And you’re saying that God can only change him by bringing hardship on him personally, maybe the threat of losing his life or losing everything that he has, anything, something that’s dear and precious to him, before he, in other words, he has to be on his back or on his knees before he’ll begin to turn, perhaps, maybe turn back to the, the, the God that saved him in the first place.
Yes. Assuming that he’s—but you set down these conditions when you first mentioned it. So, we’re talking about an apostate.
Yes.
And the writer of Hebrews is tantalizingly unspecific when it comes to describe exactly the proper way to deal with that person. And of course, even when God is dealing in this retributive way with the apostate, God’s desire is that the apostate will return to Him. And that is not impossible, as I understand the book of Hebrews. But the Epistle to the Hebrews does not give us a high level of confidence that it will occur.
Do you think that the, that apostasy, if there is such a word, in the Christian community is, is increasing these days with this liberal nation that we seem to live in anymore?
I suspect that it is. And, uh, my own exposure to things suggests that, uh, that the place where people are likely most likely to become apostate is in some institution of higher education where they’re exposed to liberal unbelief continuously. I remember that my colleague at the seminary who taught Hebrew, Dr. Bruce Waltke, told me a number of times that when he went to Harvard for his, uh, PhD degree, he said, “That was the most difficult period of my life in terms of just holding on to my faith.”
Every day he goes into class, here are these intellectual scholars who pooh-pooh the, uh, validity of the Old Testament, which they profess to be studying. And it was all, uh, what Bruce told me was, “It was all I could do with the help of God to hold on to my, uh, Christian faith.” And then he told me, he said, “Now that I’m away from there, I realize I imbibed more than I thought I did, and I’m having to unlearn it.” So that’s, that’s a very difficult kind of environment. Many Christians go into it. The lure of higher degrees and, and the prestige that goes with PhDs is sometimes a seduction into that kind of a situation. But the dangers are very real.
And I think that occurs a lot there. But it can occur in other environments and circumstances as well. As I say, fortunately, most of the Christians that I meet who are away from the Lord are just simply out there in the world, doing something they shouldn’t be doing. And they’re not, uh, committed to the will of God in their lives. And I’ve got a lot more hope for people like that, because God is, uh, constantly in the process of bringing people like that back to Himself.
Question: Yes. Right over here. Yeah.
Question: How does a believer deal with a—how does a believer deal with someone who’s apostate? Do they treat them as a non-believer or as a fallen-away believer?
Well, given the gentleman that I’m referring to, uh, in my own experience, it would be hypocritical of me to think that he was a non-believer. I’m convinced he was a believer. When I knew him, worked with him, talked with him, ate with him in his home, I’m convinced he was a born-again believer. So I can’t treat him as an unbeliever.
Uh, now the chances are good that even if he lived in the same city with me, we wouldn’t have a lot of fellowship together. I suspect he wouldn’t want it much more than I would want it. But I would, uh, go out of my way, whenever I had contact with him, to show him grace and, you know, don’t treat him as an enemy, but, uh, treat him as a brother. If he wants to say something to me about it, I’ll express my concern. But I will not delude myself into thinking that something I’m going to say, or something that I’ve got to say to him, is going to do the job.
I think that’s what, what happens here, is that you can kind of relax about it and, and be as nice to the person as the situation permits you to be. Don’t deny their Christianity if you have good reason to believe that they’re Christian. And maybe God will let you say something that, after the judgment has fallen, will be helpful.
Question: Yes. Right here.
Question: Yeah. In reference to your friend, um, the, uh, response from a five-point Calvinist would probably be, “Well, maybe that person was never saved at all.”
I don’t maybe, but, uh, almost certainly not.
Question: And they—what would be your response if they said that? And also, uh, you know, only God knows if they’re saved. What would be your response to that type of person?
Um, assuming that I, uh, retained my cool, uh, I would probably say to them, I don’t think you have any grounds for questioning their salvation. They’re a real believer in Christ, and I don’t really accept the premises of your system of theology. And as far as I can see from the Bible, they’re born again.
Let me tell you an interesting story. It relates to the individual I’m, I’m talking about. I was talking to a colleague of mine, who shall remain nameless for protection of the guilty, I guess. Uh, he was a reasonably strong Calvinist. He used to call himself a four-and-a-half-point Calvinist. I never knew exactly what that was, but that got the point across. He knew this, this man as well as I did. So we were talking one day outside his office at the seminary, and I was, you know, talking about this individual.
And then he said to me—I couldn’t believe he said that—he said, “Well, maybe he’s one of the Lord’s own and the Lord is not finished with him.” And it was all I could do to keep my mouth shut and say, “How does that fit with your theology?” But when it came right down to the bottom line, this is a person he knows and cares about. He was willing to entertain the thought that maybe, you know, maybe, and maybe he’ll come back. What naturally I was, what he was saying.
Question: Okay. I, you know, I was just talking about the spiritual condition of this guy, and that he was an apostate and so on. I don’t know whether I used the word apostate, but that was clear in the conversation. And my colleague on the faculty, who should have said to me, “Well, he was probably never saved at all.” That’s what his theology should have told him to say to me.
That’s right.
That’s right. But what he actually said to me was contrary to what he would usually have said about a case in the abstract, because this is a guy that was a friend of his. And some of my other colleagues on the seminary faculty told me about this guy, that when they talked to him, they, they would jog with him and so on. They said when they talked to him, uh, his theology didn’t really come through very clearly. He, he talked in practical terms very much about individuals and individual cases as they would.
So here’s a guy who I think intellectually is almost five-point Calvinist, but down on the practical level, something else is happening. And I’ve always said one of the condemning features of five-point Calvinism is not only that it’s unbiblical, but it’s totally impractical and divorced from everyday life.
Question: Well said.
Thank you. Okay. Yes, John.
I’m staying on—
Can you talk into the—he’s handing you the mic there.
I’ll stay on the same topic, but I’d like to move to a different book that I know that you’re familiar with. That would be 1 John chapter 5.
Yeah.
Uh, with regard to verse 16, the, uh, antecedent, or what exactly it is that the person is not to ask about, has recently come up for some critique.
Okay. So the verse,
If anyone sees his brother sinning a sin which does not lead to death, he will ask, and He will give him life for those who commit sin not leading to death. There is a sin leading to death. I do not say that he should pray about that.
It’s normally been understood as, well, if you recognize that this person is praying—I mean, is dying the sin unto death—don’t pray for him. And an alternate, uh, approach has been suggested, and that is that, don’t ask for conscience’ sake to try to figure out whether God has this person under sin unto death or not. Go ahead and pray for him if you are so motivated.
I, uh, when I respond to John’s questions, I have a feeling sometimes I, I may miss a point or two. But let me give you an answer and give you a chance to follow up, uh, if you want to do that. When he says, “I do not say that he shall pray for that,” I don’t think that’s the same thing as saying, “I am saying that he should not pray for that.” I think what John is saying in this passage is that if we recognize that the person has committed a sin that doesn’t lead directly to death, and most of the sins that we see, uh, in the Christian community are like that, that then we do have a responsibility and an obligation to pray for that person.
But if we see—if, if it’s another case, uh, there is such a thing, he says, as sin unto death, and I’m not, uh, saying that you have to pray for that. All right. What that means is, even if I thought for sure that the person has committed a sin unto death, uh, I still would not be forbidden to pray for that. I could pray for that. I just don’t have a direct command to do so. I am not under obligation to do so.
And therefore the intermediate areas where I don’t know whether it’s a sin not unto death or sin unto death, it seems to me that the command to pray for the sin not unto death presupposes that I know that the sin is not unto death. And therefore that this also applies in cases where I’m not sure whether a sin unto death has been committed or not. So that in that case, uh, once again, I do not have a command to pray for that person, but I do not have a command that forbids me to pray.
Question: Hand down. Well, example—
Well, let’s suppose that you had a member of your congregation that went out and sold a piece of property and, and, uh, came into the auditorium here at Coast Bible Church, and they said that they were giving you the full price of the property, and actually they’re only giving you half the price of the property. Suppose that happened. I, you, you know I’m referring to Ananias and Sapphira. I would suspect that they might have committed a sin unto death, given the scriptural, uh, example of that. I’m not sure I would be absolutely sure of that, for the simple reason that the circumstances of the early church, the unity, the presence of the apostles, the work of the Holy Spirit was so much more dynamic and so on than it is today.
But I would at least have some grounds on the basis of Scripture to suspect that maybe I was looking at a sin unto death. And if I—
Question: If they die, though, how do you know it’s a sin unto death?
Well, if they survive for any significant—I don’t expect them to drop over dead in front of your lectern or anything like this.
Question: Yeah, that’s what happened to them. But the sentence of death doesn’t need to—
The sentence of death doesn’t need to necessarily be the next moment. But if it’s not reasonably soon, then it’s obviously, uh, not a sentence to death. So I could conceive of this kind of situation arising. Uh, he might walk out of the auditorium. I might not know whether a sin unto death had been committed. If I pick up the papers tomorrow or next week and he’s dead, I, I would have some evidence that a sin unto death had been committed. But given my uncertainty in the case that I’m describing to you, I wouldn’t be required to pray for that person. But I wouldn’t be forbidden to pray for the person.
Question: We’re not forbidden?
We are not forbidden to pray for anybody. That’s what—that’s right. “I do not say that he should pray for this.” In other—that’s different from saying, “I say he should not pray for this.” I’m just not saying that you need to pray for this, is John. Yeah.
Can I ask a question on Hebrews 12:15?
Sure.
Uh, it talks about, uh, “looking carefully lest anyone fail of the grace of God, the root of bitterness spring up in his life, poisoning life,” so forth. Uh, what, what do you think about that as a both psychology of the verse at face value and then connecting it, first of course, in its context?
Well, as I, uh, indicated in going through this, uh, admittedly very rapidly, I think the exhortations that, uh, begin in verse 12 are really to the corporate body, and that, uh, he is encouraging people to strengthen those whose knees are weak and to take a concern for the other members of the body, uh, so that they might be strong enough to go on in the Christian pathway as God wants them to go on.
And the Christian body needs to take care that there’s not some root of bitterness creeps up in the church, somebody who is deeply embittered by some experience they’ve had, or by possibly relationships within the church. In other words, the passage to me, uh, argues that the church as a community should be alert to the spiritual needs that, that exist in the church, and they should try to nip problems in the bud so that they don’t develop to the point where we have this profane person after, you know, they’ve been in the church and they’ve been bitter for years and finally they decide to chuck it.
The church should have, uh, taken some kind of heed to their need long before that, and tried in some way or other to deal with it. That obviously is—
Pretty convincing.
Well, yeah. And, uh, you know, all of us who are in the ministry, uh, it’s one thing to talk about this in the abstract, but when we have actual people that we have to deal with, sometimes that’s a lot harder. Advice I, I was given as a young man was, you know, let him, let him alone. Let him go ahead and sulk and leave the church and don’t bother to chase after him. But of course, I think as a shepherd, that violates the whole concept of being a pastoral shepherd.
On the other hand, it’s, uh, it is difficult.
Yeah. And I don’t think this is just simply aimed at the pastors or even the, the elders, that this is the body. Uh, if we have a really embittered person in the church, that ought to be a concern for the whole body. And a lot of churches would be better off if they were concerned about it early on than, than later, when the thing, uh, causes, uh, significant difficulty. “Lest there be any root of bitterness springing up to cause trouble.” Uh, a bitter person in a church is a root from which trouble can grow.
John, that would seem—
It would seem that this passage is, uh, set opposed, in a sense, to the, uh, passage with regard to us not having the tools to deal with those that have forsaken the assembly.
That’s right. That’s right. That’s a good point. While they’re in the community of Christians, we can deal with them. We should deal with them. And we may prevent them from taking the step against which the author is warning his readers. When they’ve left, when they’ve apostasized, then there’s really nothing we can do except prayer.
It is such a gray area.
I don’t think it’s a gray area at all. And going back again to my friend, if you had asked him if he believed any of this, his answer would have been, “No. I don’t believe any of that anymore.” So when they have accepted the gift of Christ as their personal Lord, and then at some point in their walk they turn and deny, or deny that they ever were a believer themselves, that they ever really trusted Christ, at that point—
That’s right, when they have said to me, “Yeah, that’s what I used to believe, but I don’t believe it anymore.”
Question: They can’t get it back.
No, they can’t. You know, I, years ago, I had some Hispanic, uh, young men in my car with me, and there was a fellow who had gotten saved recently, and he said to me, sitting in the back of the car, he said, “Say, what happens if you got saved and you don’t want to, don’t want to be?” And if I was not as perceptive a theologian as I pretend to have become since then, and had I been, my answer to him should have been, “It’s too late.”
Question: It’s a one-way gift.
Yeah. You’re what? What? Make a pardon?
Question: One-way gift.
It’s a one-way gift. You can’t give it back. Just like when you’re born into a family on earth, you can go down to the courthouse and change your name, and you can say, “I’m, I’m not a member of the Hodges family.” But there’s no way of giving back the gift of life that they’ve given you. It can’t, it can’t happen.
Question: But right back there in the eternal state—
You’re talking about the apostate?
Yes.
At that level, growth has stopped, it seems to me, and retrogression has set in, and we are sliding back into a situation where God will deal in a very firm and, and judgmental manner with that. Uh, once we’ve abandoned our profession of faith, we no longer even believe in God, much less pray to Him, much less rely upon Him. There can’t possibly be growth. Yeah, the relationship is there, but it’s like a son who has moved out of the house and across the country and never telephones, never writes. Um, he’s lost contact with his, uh, parents, with all of the consequences that can, uh, in fact flow from that.
Question: Yes. Uh, my question is, uh, once an apostate, at that point, uh, loss of eternal reward—um, how much of that would you say is lost? Um, complete loss of all reward? Um, and where do you think the wedding feast, uh, will fit in with that? Um—
I believe the writer of Hebrews is talking about the specific reward of co-heirship with Christ, receiving this unshakable kingdom. And it is clear, not only from Hebrews, but also from the passages that we read from the book of Revelation, that one of the conditions to co-reigning with Christ is perseverance, uh, to the end. “If we endure, we shall also reign with Him.”
Now, however, we have Scripture that indicates to us, for example, that a cup of cold water will not lose its reward. So let’s suppose this person has lived for ten years doing things that were pleasing to God. There will be rewards for that. God is not unrighteous, as he says—as the writer of Hebrews says—to forget your work of love and so on. God doesn’t forget the things you’ve done for Him, and God will reward those things.
But this is the greatest of all rewards, uh, in the New Testament, the most to be prized and the most to be aimed for. And the loss of this is a tragedy for any believer.
Yes. Uh, Fred.
Zane, going back to the book John was talking about moments ago, and same, same chapter in fact, um, right after “sin not leading to death,” “sin leading to death,” there’s a verse 18 which I don’t understand. I’ll read it to you.
Okay, read it to me. Yes.
“We know that whoever is born of God does not sin, but he who has been born of God keeps himself, and the wicked one does not touch him.” This seems contrary to what I believe.
Well, this, of course, is one of the classic issues, uh, raised in the, uh, Epistle of John. And, uh, without going deeply into, uh, an explanation, let me give you the answer that I give, and then if you’re interested in a fuller discussion, I have a commentary done by GES on this.
But basically, it seems to me that what the writer of 1 John is saying is that the regenerate person as such does not sin. The total person sins. “If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves.” But “everyone who is born of God does not sin, because God’s seed abides in him, and he cannot sin because he is born of God.” What does this mean to me on a practical level?
Well, it seems to me that what happens to us at new birth, at regeneration, is that God lets the old inner Zane Hodges die and replaces him with a brand new Zane Hodges. This brand new Zane Hodges is sinless. But the brand new Zane Hodges lives in the old Zane Hodges’s house, which is programmed to do what the old Zane Hodges found it natural to do. And now suddenly I’m living in this, uh, dump which is my physical body, and I’m saying, “O wretched man that I am, who shall deliver me from the body, this body of death?”
This, you know, I, I delighted in the law of God after the inner man, but I find another law in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin, which is in my members. Now that we have computers, and now that I finally have come out of the Neolithic Age and can operate computers to a limited extent, I, I found a new illustration for this, because the body, it seems to me, can be compared to a computer.
And I don’t know about your computer, but when I sit down at the computer, sometimes it does what I want it to do, and sometimes it does not do what I want it to do. And sometimes it gets so fouled up that I have to have assistance from outside to get it up and running again. And that’s the problem, uh, that we have with, uh, the body. It’s a bad computer. It was, uh, nicely adjusted to the old self, but poorly adjusted to the new self. And I, as a newborn Christian, I have to learn how to operate in this body in accordance with the instincts and the nature that God has granted me through the redemption experience.
So one way of describing Christian, um, progress and maturation is to say we learn how, by the power of the Spirit, to operate the body better than we knew how to do the moment we were saved. And almost everyone goes through a Romans 7 period because they think it’s just a matter of making up your mind. And when my computer goes haywire, I can make up my mind that it should do the right thing, but that doesn’t help the computer.
So we then learn that we are really unable to do this without the assistance of the Holy Spirit. That’s Romans 8, okay? The Holy Spirit is the one who does this transforming work. So the passage you quote in 1 John is, is dealing with that truth.
No hands are up. So maybe I’ve exhausted the questions. Before you leave, and I, on behalf of our church family, I’d like to present you the check. And, uh, we, uh, collected about $6,500 for this.
Oh my.
Zane’s been having a lot of struggles, I think, uh, and it’s just neat to see how God provides.
Well, thank you very much. I want to thank the church and everyone who participated. I can’t even tell you how grateful I am. I, I told Arch that just before I left Dallas, I said to Lewis, “I’m going to California with my last $35.” So, uh, on Sunday—that was on Saturday. I told him Saturday night. On Sunday he comes to me after the meeting and he hands me $25. He said, “I don’t think you should go to California with only $35.” And he said, “We’ll take this out of Verdad y Vida.” And he gave it to me. But thank you so very much. I appreciate it indeed.