This chapter is one of those Bible passages that suffers a lot from translation in English. It was bad enough translating Hebrew thoughts into Greek. It’s easy to miss what the writer is telling the Hebrew Christians in Rome.
The rise of the rabbinical Talmudic teaching had robbed the common Hebrew people of their deep cultural heritage. The previous chapter ends with the author warning that they had forgotten too much of the Old Testament oral lore, and should have by that time reawakened it and become instructors. Why must we wade back through the basic meaning of Messiah, leaving behind the Talmud in favor of personal submission to God? Do we need to rehash the symbolism of baptism (a ritual of allegiance to Christ), why we lay hands on each other in prayer (that’s how God works through us), that He promised to retrieve us from the grave when He returns, and all the promises regarding the Final Judgment?
The nature of a Christian is to grow, but the way his readers were talking, it would seem they were ready to back up and rehash, not just the teachings the way rabbis do, but to walk backward through the giddy first experience of the miraculous powers of the Holy Spirit. If you’ve actually tasted those divine powers, how can you back out now? Would you expect to someday, when the persecution dies down, to pick up where you left off?
The writer warns them that if their spiritual rebirth was genuine, to bail out on Christ’s domain means He bled and died for nothing. It’s a denial of the New Covenant. And if you could leave it behind, there’s no way in God’s Creation you could ever come back. To enforce that, he points to the parable of the soil that is sown. Once God rains on it, if that soil sprouts nothing but weeds, the whole pasture gets set ablaze at harvest time. It is defiled ground that is never sown again.
Surely the Hebrew Christians in Rome are better than that! He cites the example of Abraham. God’s promises did not fail, despite Abraham’s failures. Rather, God carried Abraham through those bad times, and faith remained alive. Abraham laid claim to promises he never saw come true; it was his feudal grant from God. The persecuted believers in Rome were going through tough times, no doubt, but if all they cared about was this world as it now is, they’ll never see the promises waiting for them in Heaven.
There is no higher authority by which God can make such a promise except Himself. The author quotes from the passage where Abraham was commanded to offer his son, Isaac. In that pagan world (including the Roman Empire), humans often swore on the names of deities to solemnify an oath. It was supposed to indicate they took the matter seriously, because atheism was unheard of. They might escape human detection, but gods were expected to punish those who blasphemed by lying in the name of the gods; they really believed that. But there’s no one above Jehovah on whose name He could swear. Indeed, if He gives His Word, reality will change to match it. That’s the power of His Word.
Our hope in Him is an eternal anchor that outlives our human existence. Our hope reaches into Eternity, to the very presence of God Himself, as symbolized by the High Priest entering the Holy of Holies on Atonement Day. Except, Christ is a priest of a far higher order, and He is the reality on which the ritual symbol is based. When He cried out that it was finished, the Temple veil was torn open forever.
