Hebrews 6:4-6 Part 1
17 May 2026
For it is impossible, in the case of those who have once been enlightened, who have tasted the heavenly gift, and have shared in the Holy Spirit, and have tasted the goodness of the word of God and the powers of the age to come, and then have fallen away, to restore them again to repentance, since they are crucifying once again the Son of God to their own harm and holding Him up to contempt.
(Hebrews 6:4-6)
Please turn in your Bibles to Hebrews chapter 6. If you're using one of our church Bibles, that can be found on page 1003. We're continuing our series working through this weighty and rich book of the Bible, and we come this afternoon to not just one of the most difficult passages in the Book of Hebrews, one of the most difficult passages in all of the Bible. So, we're going to read Hebrews chapter 6 verses 4 to 6. This is the Word of God.
“For it is impossible, in the case of those who have once been enlightened, who have tasted the heavenly gift, and have shared in the Holy Spirit, and have tasted the goodness of the word of God and the powers of the age to come, and then have fallen away, to restore them again to repentance, since they are crucifying once again the Son of God to their own harm and holding Him up to contempt”. Amen.
Let's pray together. O Lord, as we come now to you in prayer, we ask may you minister to our hearts, that we would be quickened, by the truths and the realities of Scripture week by week as we work our way slowly, but we pray in a deep and enriching way through the Book of Hebrews that there would be a feeding of our souls, a going from spiritual milk to spiritual maturity, solid food. Father, we pray that there would be the challenge of Scripture, that there would be the comfort, the blessing, the assurance of the salvation that we have in Christ. And may you be magnified now. May your Word be proclaimed as we come before your Word. For we ask this in Jesus' name. Amen.
So, this passage that we're dealing with, just to first of all quickly summarize what we're dealing with. It's a passage speaking of those in relation to Hebrews 5:11 where it says that the hearers amongst the Hebrew Christians have become dull of hearing. It is speaking of a group of people who once they have experienced such spiritual blessings and enlightenment, that it is impossible for such a group of people, once they have fallen away, to be restored again to repentance. Now as we look at this passage, and as we consider and maybe wonder, question some of the ramifications about this with regards to salvation, the Christian faith, there are many things, many foundations that need to be established before we even get to working our way through the actual passage itself. So, on one level, you'll be feeling slightly shortchanged this afternoon in that we're only going to be giving literally an entire sermon worth of introduction to this passage. Now the reason why we're doing this, because this is part 1 of 3 dealing with this passage, is because we need to ensure that we have the right biblical building blocks in place to interpret this correctly. Because this will be of no surprise to possibly most all of you that this is a passage that is often used to peddle not just very bad theology but sometimes heretical theology and so we need to navigate our way through quite a bit of that so therefore there is quite a bit to introduce. Because we're dealing with a category here that is difficult to understand. As soon as we read language of it being impossible to be restored again to repentance, that in and of itself is a challenge because we would be thinking, well, who are these people? Who can be in such a state that they can't be restored to repentance again? Where it says in verse 6 that they are crucifying the Lord, the Son of God once more. But it gets even more complex, even more challenging when we see that this group of people have experienced so many rich, wondrous, spiritual blessings that we look at that and we think, crucially, is that speaking about Christian? Is that speaking about the born-again believer? Because that's the key question that we likely come to when we read this passage. Is this about a Christian, a professing Christian, a true born-again believer, and is this passage therefore saying that you can lose your salvation?
That's what we're dealing with here. That's what's at stake here with regards to this passage. So, introducing it in this manner will hopefully help you to see a little bit more of why we must spend so much time, basically introducing and establishing what this passage does not mean, what it's not saying, in order to clearly make sense of who exactly it's speaking about. So, these are some of the key things that we're going to be introducing and dealing with here this evening. And then when we pick it up again next time, we'll start to then work our way through the actual verses themselves.
Now one of the first things that needs to be said about this is that this has been a passage historically in recent centuries within church history that has been used and hotly debated as a means of arguing very different theological perspectives and points. And so, we're going to spend the first few minutes with an introductory church history lesson. Now you might be thinking at this point, well we need to stick to the Bible. Church history is not for the preaching of God's Word time, surely. But what we need to clarify when we're dealing with only settings such as this, when a passage of Scripture has been so hotly contended for and debated that it can be very helpful to see and discern what has been argued and what has been confirmed regarding what this passage means. This is why as a confessional Reformed Baptist church we see and we uphold the blessings and the merit of creeds and confessions of faith and catechisms. Now, if any of such documents were in any way to be elevated on a par with Scripture, to be likened to Scripture, treated as Scripture, then that would be instantly a significant danger and take us into heretical ground. But what we actually find from creeds, confessions, and catechisms is that historically they have been written to emphasize the centrality of the Bible. So, when creeds are put together in church history, why are they written? They're written because often a doctrinal error or a heresy has risen up. So, a key core doctrine of the Christian faith in the Bible has been disputed, a false teaching is being spread, and so a creed is put together to state clearly, no, this is what the Bible says and this is what we believe. Similarly, in the time of the Reformation, during that time, it was initially with a view to reform the Roman Catholic Church, but it very quickly became the beginning of the Protestant Church. And during that time, as churches were beginning to form, confessions of faith were being written. Catechisms were being put together, questions and answers, as a means of catechizing, teaching the basic foundations of biblical truth to adults and children.
And one of the key phrases that was coined during that time of the Protestant Reformation, a phrase that likely you've all heard in Latin, was Sola Scriptura, which means Scripture Alone. So, the key emphasis at that time in church history, as has consistently been the case, has been to emphasize the Bible alone. Not the Bible plus works, not the Bible plus the traditions of men, not the Bible plus what you think it should mean in this particular cultural climate, no, the Bible alone. Now this is important when we come to one of the most hotly debated subjects within church history and this text that we're dealing with this evening has been one of the key texts in the battleground and that is the debate amongst Calvinists and Armenians, because the Armenian theological argument has rested upon passages like this with the argument with the premise that you can lose your salvation.
So, let me just very quickly, and I'll try to be brief here, just run down the history between Calvinism and Arminianism. So, if you've been hearing these terms for years and you're still wondering, what is all this about? Hopefully this will be of some very brief introductory help. So, the terms Calvinism and Arminianism actually came about long after John Calvin had been alive and even Jacob Arminius. But the reason why this became an issue was because the accepted doctrinal Reformed position, which was believing and upholding that God alone is sovereign in the salvation of man, that He has an electing purpose for a chosen people, that was something that a man called Jacob Arminius took exception to. And with his teachings, his followers then began to challenge some of the key core tenets of the Christian faith during the time of the Reformation. So, they argued that as human beings on this earth, we're not totally, sinfully depraved and that we are in a position where we can choose whether to believe in Jesus Christ or not. And the argument of Arminians was that the Lord Jesus came to this earth and He died for everybody on the earth and it is down to the individual according to his own free will and volition to choose whether he accepts or whether he rejects salvation. And so therefore, Arminians argued that grace could be resisted and therefore there would be no guarantee of the perseverance of that faith and that your salvation could be lost.
And one of the scripture passages that they would cite, was Hebrews chapter 6, and they would reference this argument saying, it says it here in the Bible, look, you can fall away. And they would argue this means you can lose your salvation.
Now in response to these Arminian teachings, it became so heated that they had an entire council called the Synod of Dort and this was when, again decades after John Calvin had died, they penned the Five Points of Calvinism that are so commonly known. Responses to the teachings of the Arminians. And this teaching, which should be more familiar to us, was first of all that man is totally depraved in our fallen sinful condition. Like that Ezekiel 37, the valley of dry bones, we are spiritually dead in our fallen condition and we can do no thing, we can make no decision to become a Christian. And so therefore, there is an election, God's election of a chosen people. So, God has unconditionally elected a chosen people and so when Jesus came to this earth, He came for His people. This is a particular or sometimes called limited atonement for His chosen people and so therefore grace is not something that can be resisted. When someone is truly saved by the grace of God, this is because of God's irresistible grace calling and drawing that sinner to himself. And therefore, there is the perseverance of that believer, the perseverance of the saints. And this is the Five Points of Calvinism.
Now one thing that also needs to be established about this. This is not a 16th century man-made teaching, which is sometimes, believe it or not, called heresy by some professing Christians. No, this was a time in church history where the Reformed believers upholding Scripture alone sought to clarify not what John Calvin was saying, but what the Bible says, that men like John Calvin sought to teach with clarity. And the reason that these things are important and why we're stressing them even today is because as we come to text like this, we need to be able to make very clear biblical sense of what is being stated here. Because there needs to be clarity about the sovereignty of God. There needs to be clarity about the sinful condition of man. We need clarity about the biblical gospel of the Lord Jesus. What we're dealing with when we deal with these subjects is very much at the heart of the gospel. It is a gospel issue.
The Arminian argument and the usage of Hebrews chapter 6 is quite literally a fundamental attack on the doctrine of God, His sovereignty, a blatant attack on the Gospel, and it leaves the professing Christian in a state of constant confusion and fear. And when we read Hebrews chapter 6, we should not be leaving a passage like this in confusion and fear and thinking, I might lose my salvation next week. Because that's where you'd be left with. How can I be sure of anything? What if I lose my salvation? What do I then need to do in order to avoid losing my salvation? And then we wonder, well, is salvation based on Christ or is it based on man? If it's man's decision, how do we stay saved? There are so many doctrinal ramifications that can take you into so many, not just doctrinal errors, but outright heresies if we don't get this right.
This is a huge subject. And we need to establish that foundation, brothers and sisters, because when we read this passage, we are still left reading and wondering, well, who is this speaking of? Now, this is where at this point, we're going to go to passages of Scripture and to see this biblically, so that we can understand doctrinally that there is no losing of your salvation. This is something that needs to be crystal clear in our minds so that when it comes to Hebrews 6, that is not the question that we're asking. We need to be crystal clear that when we read Hebrews 6:4-6, this is not one of these where we're left humming and hawing and thinking, well, does that mean I lose my salvation or not? No, we're establishing today that is not the question to ask about this text.
So, let's turn to a key passage in the Gospel of John, chapter 10. So, if we turn to John chapter 10 and we'll read verses 14 to 17 first of all. So, John chapter 10 and beginning at verse 14 when it says, I am the good shepherd, this is Jesus speaking, I know my own and my own know me, just as the Father knows me and I know the Father; and I lay down my life for the sheep. And I have other sheep that are not of this fold. I must bring them also, and they will listen to my voice. So, there will be one flock, one shepherd. For this reason the Father loves me, because I lay down my life that I may take it up again.
Now what do we have here in this passage brothers and sisters? Well, we have God's electing purpose for His chosen people. Note what it says, there is a chosen sheep. They know the voice of the shepherd, verse 14. So, there are chosen sheep who know the voice of the shepherd. And we see verse 15, that the shepherd lays his life down for his sheep. This is very particular, it's very specific. And the sheep, who are they? Well, it's made up of the Jews and the Gentiles whom the Lord has called. This is the church who Christ lays down His life for (Ephesians 5:25). So, when we're beginning to establish this, is it an acceptable position, as many evangelicals would say today, to state, well, whether you're Calvinist or Arminian, as long as you love Jesus, that's all that matters.
Well, the whole point of this entire section in Hebrews is to go from spiritual milk to solid food. So even if we were to say that's an acceptable position, which it is not, that is already a concession that, well, we're just going to accept our doctrinal immaturity here. We're not going to get into any doctrinal meat. And we'll just leave it at that. Because that's effectively what is being said when we don't want to get into some of the more contentious, supposedly, doctrinal issues. But as we begin to delve into the Scriptures, there's not contention here. There is specificity with regards to what God has decreed. It's why in Ephesians 1:4 it says, even as He chose us in Him, us in Him, we're chosen before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before Him.
Now that's not saying God chose us based on the foreknowledge of what He knew we would do. No, it is saying before the foundation of the world. This is God's sovereign, electing, decreeing purpose. According to what? Ephesians 1:11, the counsel of His will. This is God's sovereign purpose according to the will of the triune God. This is in a scale and a realm that is way beyond anything that we can grasp and comprehend here on this earth. But we know it's revealed this is who God is, this is what he has decreed. And gloriously, it takes us to why Jesus came to the earth. This is the doctrine of redemption, that the living God, the triune God, has prepared a bride for the second person of the triune God, Jesus Christ. So, when Jesus comes to this earth, He's not coming to give the world a sort of plea bargain, and it's over to you whether you buy the ticket and jump on the bus. No, this is Jesus coming for His bride. He knows who he is shedding his blood for. It is very specific and deliberate.
And so therefore we're not contributing to that by our work. We're not making the decision as though it finally rests in us. No, we're dead in trespasses and sins (Ephesians 2:1). We must be born again (John 3), going from spiritually dead to spiritually alive. We can't make that happen. It must be. It must be a work of the Holy Spirit, breathing new life into that fallen sinner, giving life from death to life in Christ. John 1: 12-13, But to all who did receive Him, to all who received Him, who believed in His name, He gave the right to become children of God. And note this, who were born not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God.
It's a work by the Holy Spirit. That's how a person becomes a Christian. This is how and why you tonight sitting here, if you are a true Christian, it is because the Holy Spirit has brought about that change in you, that change of heart from heart of stone to heart of flesh, convicting you of that sin by which you repent and believe in Jesus Christ and profess faith in Jesus Christ. It's why the faith that is given to you as a gift is the means by which you are justified before God. That's how we can be declared justified before God. And it is because of Christ's blood and His righteousness. That's the legal verdict that God declares of you because Christ has met that standard and He met it for His chosen people. The ones who have new life, who are accepted before God, believing in Him because of Christ.
This is who you are, Christian. This is doctrine that we must know, rejoice in, and magnify. Because when we understand this is all of a work of God, we're already establishing a theological framework where if you're thinking, well, maybe on Tuesday I'm going to lose my salvation, what happens to all of this if that's the way we're living our Christian life?
Now let's just turn our attention back to John chapter 10 to see this in that text. So, John 10, a bit later in the passage in verses 27 to 28. Our Lord goes on to say in verse 27, My sheep, again specific, hear my voice and I know them and they follow me. And here we go, verse 28. I give them eternal life, and they will never perish and no one will snatch them out of my hand.
There it is in the Word of God, Jesus declaring, I am the one who gives you Christian eternal life. There is your security of salvation which is in Christ and there is the promise of Jesus' words when He was on this earth, you will never perish. No one, Satan, nobody on this earth will snatch you out of Jesus' hands. That's a great comfort. That's why, not that we're flying the I'm a Calvinist flag above the declaration that I'm a born-again believer, but if we're going to say, yeah, I uphold Calvinism and here's why, because this is what the Bible says about my salvation in Jesus Christ and I am rock solid secure in what Jesus has declared. We can say that with confidence because this is in the Word of God.
You have an assurance tonight, Christian. Be encouraged. Tonight you have an assurance based on Christ's completed work. That's why if we're needing to flesh this out, flesh out what Jesus says in John chapter 10, flesh it out by looking at Jesus did that work. The cross was a completed work. This is why sin, death, the devil, have been defeated, Jesus rises from the dead, He is victorious, He is the risen and exalted Lord, and as we see at the beginning of Hebrews, He is now exalted, seated at the right hand of the majesty on high. This is how we can be so sure, because Jesus has done it. He's victorious and He is exalted and lifted on high.
The devil will come in and he'll say, But you're a sinner. Look at you! Look at the way you've been speaking even today. Really? You in heaven? Yes, by the grace of God, you in heaven. And that's because of Jesus Christ. The devil will try and ensnare you. He will seek to tempt you. But Jesus is triumphant. Revelation 12:10-11. And I heard a loud voice in heaven, saying, now the salvation and the power and the kingdom of our God and the authority of his Christ have come, for the accuser of our brothers has been thrown down, who accuses them day and night before our God. And they have conquered Him By what? By the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony, for they loved not their lives even unto death.
The blood of the Lamb, Jesus Christ, that's what we know and stand upon and that's why we know and stand upon this glorious truth that nothing, nothing can separate you from this love of Christ. Romans 8 ends in verses 38 to 39, For I'm sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. That's the assurance of our salvation.
Now with all of these doctrinal foundations being laid before the ground of Hebrews chapter 6, as you come to a passage like this, it is certainly, undoubtedly a challenge to understand that we can be clear on. But we don't then scrap all of this that we've just been magnifying and suddenly think, “Oh, all of those other passages must be wrong because here it says that we can fall away”. Is that what we do?
I mean, how much of an immature reading of Scripture would there need to be for us to seek to exegete Exodus 6, sorry, Hebrews 6:4-6 in that manner? And so, as we come to this text, this is when we now stop and ask, are these people in this passage being spoken of, those who were once true Christians? And if you have a doctrine where God and salvation is conditioned upon man, man's decision, then you can certainly make a consistently wrong argument about the text. So, an Arminian framework will make a consistently wrong argument about this text. But as we've established, salvation is not conditioned upon what we decide or any work that we do, but because of what Christ has done, because Christ has said it, and therefore we can emphatically declare that a true born-again Christian cannot, does not, will not lose his or her salvation.
And so, we ask the question, well, who are the people mentioned in this passage? And the answer is, they are unbelievers. This is a passage which is speaking about unbelievers. They are people who have not been truly saved. That's what this boils down to. Now it's worth noting that this isn't a passage that speaks about a category of people who have been justified by faith or it doesn't mention those who've been spiritually reborn. There's no mention of salvation, being born again, or being a new creation. And just notice what verse 9 says in this chapter. In Hebrews 6:9, the author, given the warning about this danger, says he hopes for better things. We feel sure of better things, things that belong to salvation. So, the text shifts from verse 9 to now giving the hope those things that belong to salvation.
Now with that framework in mind, there's still a lot to do with this text because there are a lot of things, a lot of experiences, a lot of declarations that we do need to spend much time working through. What we're going to do in our closing minutes is to establish one more foundation which will be helpful just to have in mind as we prepare to work through verses 4 to 6 in the coming weeks. And that is to consider from Scripture the ways by which the Holy Spirit works in people's lives which is not salvific in their lives.
Now this shouldn't be a completely bizarre concept and as we go through some passages this will become increasingly clear in your minds. So, let's give a few and they're quite different just to start to enable our thinking to consider how the Holy Spirit works in different ways and different lives. First of all, He works to harden hearts. Now that's not what Hebrews 6 is about, but it's just to give you an example of one of the ways the Spirit works. We see this consistently in the life of Pharaoh, and the Lord declares in Exodus 14:17, And I will harden the hearts of the Egyptians so that they shall go in after them, and I will get glory over Pharaoh and all his host, his chariots, and his horsemen. So, the Lord hardens the heart that he gets the glory. So, there's a purpose revealed.
A similar principle is made clear at the beginning of John 9:1-3. It says, As he passed by, he saw a man blind from birth. And his disciples asked him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” Jesus answered, “It was not that this man sinned, or his parents, but that the works of God might be displayed in him".
We also see instances where the Lord works to restrain sin. For example, God restrains Abimelech, not someone who is a follower, a worshiper of God, but God restrains Abimelech from defiling Sarah. In Genesis 20:6 it says, Then God said to him in the dream, “Yes, I know that you have done this in the integrity of your heart, and it was I who kept you from sinning against me. Therefore I did not let you touch her”.
We see also the Spirit coming upon people who are not believers. King Saul, an obvious example in 1 Samuel 11:6. It says, And the Spirit of God rushed upon Saul. The Spirit of God rushed upon Saul when he heard these words, and his anger was greatly kindled.
We've got an even more striking one, one of the most striking in all of Scripture in Numbers 24:1-2 when it says, When Balaam saw that it pleased the LORD to bless Israel, he did not go, as at other times, to look for omens, but set his face towards the wilderness. And Balaam lifted up his eyes and saw Israel camping tribe by tribe. And the Spirit of God came upon him, and he took up his discourse. The Spirit of God is coming upon Balaam, who we can see in that section in Numbers, was a wicked man who sought his own interest, even against Israel in this passage. And yet the Spirit of God still works in the heart of a wicked man working through him in order to deliver truth. God has purposes in these ways.
Now this point must be established, just introduced as it is tonight, to help us to have the right framework for reading Hebrews chapter 6. To know, yes, the Spirit of God works in hearts and some significant spiritual things can and do happen even in the hearts of people within the church. But it's not salvific. And we see this principle with how people can receive the Word and then fall. They've not been saved and lost their salvation. As Matthew 13:20-21 says, As for what was sown on rocky ground, this is the one who hears the word and immediately receives it with joy, yet he has no root in himself, but endures for a while, and when tribulation or persecution arises on account of the word, immediately he falls away.
There is also a natural faith, a seeing something, an experience of something, a believing of something. I believe Jesus performed that miracle. Even some could say, yes, I believe Jesus rose from the dead. But it's not a saving, transforming belief. And it may be that you know of some people who've been in church buildings, they've seen and tasted much of the truth, they've witnessed many things. They've made their commitment to the Lord, maybe backslidden, and then they've made their recommitment, and then they've fallen away from the Lord, but we are still saying they're Christians. But they're not saved.
This is the progression of this text. It is a warning against what we'll think of later of making shipwreck of the faith that you profess and why a true life-saving belief in the actual life-saving gospel is what holds you. Nothing else, no matter what spiritual experiences and the like that you have that we're going to be dealing with. It is that life transforming message of the gospel by the Spirit of God convicting and saving you that you are truly saved. Nothing else, nothing more, nothing added, nothing taken away. This is what saves you and what holds you. And people come, they profess faith, are baptized, they're added to churches, and they serve some for decades, but they're not saved.
And we're in a time in our generation where in respectable Christianity, we do not question that. Let's not get into Calvinism and Arminians and any of these things. No, no, no, no, no, no. But what are we standing on? What are we upholding, brothers and sisters? If we're saying we agree to disagree on the truths of what the Gospel is, if we're saying that, well, your church life and practice doesn't matter, what are we doing? Because this is the issue here. We've got a group of Hebrew Christians who have become dull of hearing, and now the challenge gets to the point where the writer is saying, “There is the danger for those who've been spiritually enlightened and had all these spiritual blessings that they're going to fall away and they won't come to repentance again. It will be impossible”. Those people who thought they were saved but they're not. Whether it's because they're relying on the system of Judaism, whether it's because they're relying on a works-based salvation, whether it's because they're relying on some charismatic experience, whatever it may be. That's why we need, all the more as we come to a text like this, the clarity of the Gospel. We need to have the specific understanding of what we believe. It's why there is such a focus in this text of going from spiritual milk, which we need, but we don't live on that, to solid food, to spiritual maturity. We should have a yearning, as we say again and again, to know more of God's truth, to know more of the Bible, to know more of the Gospel, because this is life-saving. This is what holds me. This is what sustains me. This is what comforts me. This is what assures me of my salvation. As I come to this building, if I am not hearing Christ and the life-saving message of the gospel and knowing the assurance of my salvation, then what am I listening to?
That's why we're here. That's why we're alive spiritually. God has done that. And the dangers of these categories, which is exposing the hearts of the unbeliever, that should all the more this evening bring us to what you need, and that's Christ. And to the cross I cling. I cling to the cross. I cleave to Christ. That's what I know, that's who I know. And in that, brothers and sisters, as we consider the dangers of those who have had all these spiritual blessings, and then there is that danger of falling away. We know who we look to, we know who we trust in, we know what we rejoice in, and that is Christ and this Gospel. Let's pray together.
Heavenly Father, we pray, may this introduction to this text be something, truths that we can savor. May it challenge the convictions and the joy and the hope that we have in the gospel. Lord, the call of the gospel and the life-saving message of what Christ has done is reliant entirely upon what you have sovereignly decreed. The change that is wrought in the heart of a sinner by your Spirit, convicting of sin, revealing the truth of what Christ has done on that cross. Father, we thank you that this is how and why we've been saved. Thank you that this is what we stand upon. This is what brings us together as the church, Christ's bride, for whom he came for, suffered, bled, and died for. Father, may we cherish the church and know what a sacred calling and a blessed union we have because of Christ, because of who we are and whose we now are. Lord, may this bring comfort and the assurance of our salvation. Jesus gives us eternal life, nothing, no one will snatch us out of His hands. Thank you, Father for this comfort, for this assurance, for the faith that we have in nothing other, none other than Jesus Christ our Lord in whose name we pray. Amen.