Thoughts on Hebrews 3-4

Today’s reading: Numbers 10; Hebrews 3-4

In Hebrews 3 we are introduced to a tension that might make a decent chunk of the church today uncomfortable, but that really doesn’t need to. The author of Hebrews holds in tension both the assurance of salvation by faith in Christ and the potential loss of salvation. But how can we be assured of a faith we can lose??

The author starts out Hebrews 3 clarifying for our discussion this morning exactly who his audience is. “Therefore, holy brothers, you who share in a heavenly calling, consider Jesus, the apostle and high priest of our confession…” This is not a letter written generically to a mixed community of believers and non-believers, but is specifically written to those who share in a heavenly calling based on their faith in Jesus.

So we are speaking to/about Christian believers in chapter 3, and yet, before we even get out of the first paragraph, the author says, “And we are his house if indeed we hold fast our confidence and our boasting in our hope.” Immediately we are introduced to the notion that our faith is conditional, but conditional on what? Conditional on continuing in the faith. The author does not say we are his house if we remain sinless, if we are baptized or take communion, or anything else functional. No, we are his house if we hold fast our confidence and our boasting in our hope; if we keep believing that our hope for salvation is in Christ.

But, to be clear, this is not an isolated verse that maybe we are just misunderstanding or failing to consider the context. As we keep going he immediately says, ”Therefore…” meaning he is picking up from that thought, and then quotes Old Testament passages about Israel failing to receive God’s promise because they hardened their hearts. And the author then says, “Take care, brothers, lest there be in any of you an evil, unbelieving heart, leading you to fall away from the living God.” Remember, he is speaking to Christian believers, and yet, after citing an Old Testament warning about hardening their hearts, he warns these Christian believers to be careful lest they follow the same pattern.

He then goes on in the next verse to tell us how to guard against this hardness of heart, “But exhort one another every day, as long as it is called ‘today,’ that none of you may be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin.” So sin gets brought up now in conjunction with believers falling away from God, but is it sin that costs them their salvation? Not at all! The warning against sin is not because sinning at all, or reaching some threshold of sin will cost you your salvation, but because sin is deceitful and has the effect of hardening our hearts as we indulge it. This is why we are to exhort one another away from sin, because sin has the effect of hardening our hearts to the grace of God, and can lead us to abandon the faith we once had. 

And again, lest you think this is maybe, somehow, not what the author had in mind, he follows that warning immediately with, “For we have come to share in Christ, if indeed we hold our original confidence firm to the end.” To the author of Hebrews, salvation is a matter of faith, but it is not some magic sinner’s prayer that you pray once in your life and you are suddenly guaranteed heaven even if you completely turn away from the faith. We start the Christian life by faith and we continue on in the Christian life by faith. At any given point in time, your salvation does no hinge on whether you prayed a sinners prayer as a child, or whether you really understood the gospel when you prayed that magic prayer and now maybe need to pray it again because you were 5 and probably didn’t understand it like you do now, or anything like that. At any given point in time, your salvation is based on whether or not the hope of your salvation is in Jesus.

This is why, despite these warnings about the loss of salvation, the same author, at the end of chapter 4, can say, “Let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace…” We have bold and confident access to the throne of grace because we are in Christ by faith. The idea that you can lose your salvation by walking away from the faith does not undermine the assurance we can have of our salvation because if your faith is in Jesus, you can be assured that you are going to heaven.

This is also why the New Testament authors give so many warnings about sin. Yes, sin will not cause us to lose our salvation, but indulging in sin has the effect of hardening our hearts to the grace we have been given, which may, ultimately, lead us away from that very faith.

This post is getting a little long, but I just want to say two more things before I wrap it up this morning because I know that for at least some readers, this will not have been an easy post to read (so legitimately thanks for sticking with me this long if that is you!).

The first thing I want to say is that for many Christians today, especially in evangelical circles, this might immediately grate against their understanding of the gospel, so I just want to be clear that a “once saved, always saved” theology of salvation is not the gospel, and it’s important that we make that distinction. The gospel is salvation by faith in Christ apart from works. That’s it. The idea that if we are saved, that can never be lost (or set aside), is tied back to the gospel in terms of how we are saved in the first place, but it is not, itself, the gospel. So the author of Hebrews is not giving us a new means or theology of salvation, but he might be calling into question some of our assumptions today that salvation can look or work like “fire insurance.”

The second thing I want to say is that this is far from the only place in the New Testament that this idea comes up. We aren’t talking about something obscure that only shows up in one passage that seems contrary to the rest of Scripture, but this is something we see throughout the New Testament. I am not going to double the length of this post by adding in a bunch of other references, but I am happy to continue the conversation and dig into more of those passages if anyone is interested.

That’s where I’m going to leave it for this morning, but this will come back up over and over in the book of Hebrews, so we will probably be touching on it again in the coming days.