What does Hebrews 6:4-6 teach about falling away?

Question 07008.

Hebrews 6:4-6 is the passage people reach for when they want to argue that a genuine believer can be lost, and the language about falling away is undeniably severe. I am not going to pretend otherwise, and I have no patience with treatments that wave the difficulty away. If you have been troubled by this text, you have been troubled by something the writer intended to be troubling.

What I want to do here is slow the passage right down. We will look at who is being addressed, at the five descriptions the writer piles up, at the grammar of the warning, and at the sentence that comes immediately afterwards, which almost nobody quotes and which changes the temperature of the whole paragraph.

What the Passage Actually Says

Hebrews 6:4-6 reads that 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.

Two things strike a careful reader at once. The impossibility is not that God cannot forgive; it is that such people cannot be restored again to repentance. And the reason given is not that God has withdrawn, but that they are crucifying the Son of God again and holding him up to contempt. The verbs describe a settled present activity, not a single lapse.

So whatever falling away means here, it is not the ordinary backsliding that every believer knows. If it were, the passage would prove far too much, because it would mean that any Christian who fell into sin could never be restored, and nobody actually believes that.

Who Is Being Addressed

Hebrews was written to Jewish believers under real pressure, tempted to slip back from the Christian assembly into the safety of the synagogue and the temple system. That is the whole burden of the letter. It explains why the writer spends chapter after chapter demonstrating that Jesus is better than the angels, better than Moses, better than Aaron, and that his one offering is better than a thousand years of animal sacrifice.

The audience of a first century congregation was mixed, exactly as ours are. Some were converted. Some were persuaded, involved, moved, and not converted. The warning passages of Hebrews are addressed to the gathering as a whole, and part of their function is to sort the two. Falling away, in this letter, meant something concrete and local: walking out of the Christian assembly and back into a system of shadows.

That is a point worth sitting with. A preacher addressing a congregation says you, and the you includes people at very different places. The writer of Hebrews does the same, and he does it deliberately.

The Five Descriptions

Much depends on whether the five phrases describe regenerate people. Enlightened is the first, and Hebrews 10:32 uses the same word of those who endured a hard struggle after being enlightened. Tasting the heavenly gift comes next, and taste is a word that can mean full participation, since Hebrews 2:9 says Jesus tasted death for everyone. Sharing in the Holy Spirit follows, then tasting the goodness of God’s word, then tasting the powers of the age to come.

Honest interpreters go both ways on this, and I want to be fair to those who differ from me. Read one way, these are the standard marks of a Christian and the passage is describing believers. Read another way, they describe close and genuine exposure to the Spirit’s work without the decisive commitment of trust, which is precisely the position of a person who has been in a lively church for years and never surrendered.

Judas is the obvious case study. He heard the teaching, saw the miracles, was sent out to preach, and cast out demons. Every one of the five descriptions could be applied to him, and Jesus still says in John 17:12 that none of them was lost except the son of destruction. Exposure is not the same as regeneration, and falling away from exposure is not the same as falling away from life.

The Grammar of Falling Away

The phrase translated fallen away renders parapipto, a word that appears only here in the New Testament and carries the sense of falling beside, deviating, defecting. It is not the ordinary word for stumbling into sin. The Septuagint uses related language for Israel’s covenant unfaithfulness.

The participles matter too. The writer says that such people are crucifying the Son of God again and holding him up to contempt, and Greek present participles describe continuing action. That is why I take the impossibility of restoration as applying while the defection continues. A person actively holding Jesus up to public contempt is not, in that condition, in any position to repent. The falling away described here is a stance being maintained, not an accident being regretted.

There is a further grammatical point that has been well made by careful commentators, including in the study notes available through the NET Bible. The construction is capable of a conditional force, describing a case rather than asserting that the case has occurred. Greek allows an argument to be built on a supposition, and the writer of Hebrews is nothing if not a builder of arguments. On that reading he is saying, consider what falling away would mean, rather than reporting that falling away has happened.

The Sentence Nobody Quotes

Read on three verses. Hebrews 6:9 says, though we speak in this way, yet in your case, beloved, we feel sure of better things, things that belong to salvation. The writer has just delivered the most severe warning in the letter and he immediately tells his readers that he does not believe it describes them.

That is the pastoral shape of the passage, and it is the shape I want you to notice. Warning, then reassurance. He is not trying to destabilise believers. He is trying to shake loose those who are hovering on the edge of falling away, while confirming those who are trusting.

You cannot read verses 4 to 6 as a threat hanging over the regenerate and also read verse 9 as it stands. The same writer wrote both, in the same breath, to the same people.

The Main Ways Christians Read It

Let me lay out the field honestly. Some hold that falling away here describes true believers who genuinely apostatise and are eternally lost. Some hold that it describes professing but unconverted people, whose falling away reveals what was always the case. Some hold that it is a real warning about a hypothetical case of falling away, given to produce perseverance in those who need it. And some hold that the loss in view is of reward and usefulness rather than of salvation.

I have little sympathy with the fourth reading, because the language is too strong for a discussion of rewards. I have a good deal of sympathy with the second and third, and I do not think they are rivals. A warning can be genuinely conditional in form and still function to expose those who were never truly in.

The first reading I cannot hold, and my reason is not sentiment. It is that John 10:28 has Jesus saying that he gives his sheep eternal life, that they will never perish, and that no one will snatch them out of his hand, and that Romans 8:38-39 excludes every created thing from separating us from God’s love. Scripture interprets Scripture, and a disputed passage does not overturn a clear one.

Why the Warning Is Still Real

Here is where I part company with treatments that neutralise the text. The warning is not decorative. God uses means, and one of the means by which he keeps his people is the sober warning of Scripture, taken seriously. A guardrail on a mountain road is not made pointless by the fact that nobody has gone over it, and a warning against falling away is not made empty by the security of those who heed it.

The person who reads Hebrews 6 and thinks, this cannot possibly concern me, has missed the point as badly as the person who reads it and despairs. The right response is the one the writer names in verse 11, a desire to show the same earnestness to the very end.

And there is a category of person for whom this warning is deadly serious. Somebody raised in the faith, thoroughly instructed, who has seen the Spirit at work and who is now drifting deliberately back towards a life that has no room for Jesus. That drift is what falling away looks like before it has a name. To that person the passage speaks directly, and I would not soften a syllable of it.

What Falling Away Costs

The picture the writer uses next is agricultural. Land that drinks in the rain and produces a useful crop receives a blessing from God; land that produces thorns and thistles is worthless and near to being cursed, and its end is to be burned. The metaphor is about fruit as evidence, which is the same logic Jesus used with the tree and its fruit.

Notice that both fields get the same rain. The difference is in what comes up. A long life of exposure to the gospel with nothing whatever to show for it is a serious matter, and the New Testament nowhere treats it as neutral.

I have taken up the wider question in what apostasy is and in whether a true Christian can commit apostasy, and the doctrine that stands behind all of it is set out in what eternal security is.

Falling Away and Ordinary Backsliding

A great deal of unnecessary distress comes from confusing two very different things. Backsliding is what happens when a believer goes cold, neglects prayer, drifts from fellowship and gets tangled up in something they know to be wrong. Falling away in the Hebrews 6 sense is a deliberate, public repudiation of Jesus by somebody who once identified with him. The first is common, painful and reversible. The second is what the writer says cannot be reversed while it lasts.

Scripture is full of restored backsliders, which is the plainest argument against reading Hebrews 6 as though it covered them. Peter denied Jesus with oaths and was restored over breakfast on a beach. David spent the best part of a year covering up adultery and murder before Nathan arrived, and Psalm 51 is what came out of it. The Corinthian man under discipline in 2 Corinthians 2:7 is to be forgiven and comforted. If falling away meant backsliding, none of those stories could have ended the way they did.

So if you have gone cold, do not label yourself with a word the Bible has reserved for something else. Come back. The way home is exactly the same way you came the first time, and I have never known it to be closed. There is more on this in whether a backslider can return to God.

What the Letter Does With the Warning

Hebrews does not leave its readers with the warning ringing in their ears. Straight after the passage about falling away, the writer reminds them that God is not unjust so as to overlook their work and the love they have shown in serving the saints. He points to Abraham, to the promise, to the oath, and then to the anchor. The movement of the argument is from threat to security, and it is very deliberate.

That pattern repeats throughout the letter. Every warning is followed by an encouragement, and every encouragement is grounded in what Jesus has done rather than in what the readers might yet achieve. By chapter 10 the writer can say that by a single offering he has perfected for all time those who are being sanctified, which is one of the most reassuring sentences in the New Testament and sits only four chapters away from the fiercest warning in it.

Holding both together is the mark of a healthy reading. Take the warnings without the promises and you get a church full of frightened people. Take the promises without the warnings and you get a church full of complacent ones. The writer of Hebrews wanted neither, and I would rather be shaped by his balance than by my preference.

If This Passage Is Frightening You

Let me apply the same test I use for the unforgivable sin, which I discuss in what the unforgivable sin is. A person genuinely falling away in the sense of Hebrews 6 is not worried about it. They are contemptuous. They are, in the writer’s vivid phrase, holding Jesus up to public shame, and people doing that do not lie awake anxious about their standing.

Your anxiety about falling away is therefore evidence against your fear. The desire to repent is the one thing the passage says such people cannot have. If you have it, the passage is not describing you.

Take the writer’s own remedy. He points immediately to God’s promise and God’s oath, two unchangeable things, and to hope as an anchor of the soul, firm and secure. That is what he wanted his frightened readers to hold on to, and it is what I want you to hold on to as well.

So, now what?

So do not read Hebrews 6 alone, at midnight, in a bad week. Read it where it stands, in a letter written to stop people going back to shadows when they had been given the substance. Read the warning, feel its weight, and then read verse 9 and let the writer tell you what he actually thought of his readers.

The believer who is troubled by falling away is showing the very earnestness the writer was asking for. Would it not be strange if the anxiety produced by the warning turned out to be the proof that the warning had done its work?

Though we speak in this way, yet in your case, beloved, we feel sure of better things, things that belong to salvation.

Hebrews 6:9 (ESV)

For Further Study

For a fuller treatment, Charles Ryrie’s Basic Theology sets the warning passages within a non-Calvinist doctrine of eternal security, and Lewis Sperry Chafer’s Systematic Theology works through the Hebrews material at length. Millard Erickson’s Christian Theology gives a fair survey of the competing readings for anyone who wants to see the arguments laid side by side. J. Dwight Pentecost’s expositions of Hebrews are pastorally warm and exegetically careful, John Walvoord is worth consulting on the relationship between warning and assurance, and Arnold Fruchtenbaum’s work on the Jewish background of the letter helps enormously with understanding what going back would actually have meant for the first readers.