Let's look first at what they had become. How are the casualties of God's consuming fire described? There are at least five descriptions: Verse 26: they go on sinning willfully. Both the tense of the verb (present continuous action in Greek) - they go on sinning - and the word "willfully" show us that it is not any one particular sin in view here. It is the extent and willfulness that is in view here. The unpardonable sin is not a particular kind of sin, but a particular extent and willfulness of sinning against great grace - until one becomes like Esau and cannot repent (12:16-17). Verse 27: at the end of the verse they are called "adversaries." The fury of God's fire will consume the adversaries. This means that he is talking about people who have rejected God and are now his opponents. They are what we call apostates. Verse 29: they have trampled under foot the Son of God. The Son of God laid his life down for them to receive as their substitute, and instead of receiving him as their life and hope, they paused, got some religion, and then stepped on him and went on to other things. Verse 29b: they regarded as unclean the blood of the covenant. "Unclean" is not quite the right word. They regarded it as common, ordinary, nothing special, not sacred or precious. They drank the cup of the new covenant, said, "Nice juice," and went away to sin - as if it were not the most precious reality in the universe. Verse 29 at the end: They "insulted the Spirit of grace." They tasted the grace of God in their lives, were influenced by it in some measure, but then they began to turn it into license and used it to justify their love of sinning, and eventually threw it away as unnecessary. And for these people, the writer says, God is a consuming fire.

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   Lighthouse54 Reply

   2 years ago

   ReplyTo:   ChetBrock