The Dangers of Letting Go
Hebrews 10:26-31
A 27-year-old Chinese student who had been studying in Japan decided to climb Jaman’s Mt. Fuji. Well, he tried twice. He didn’t succeed either time. He made his attempts during the off season, when the weather isn’t as safe or suitable for mountain climbing.
According to Japanese authorities, the first time he tried climbing, he had some difficulties and had to be rescued – airlifted from the mountain. The problem was that, after being rescued, he realized he had left smart phone and some other things up on the mountain. So he went back to get them. I guess it didn’t dawn on him that the mountain that had bested him earlier in the week hadn’t suddenly shrunk. Or changed at all for that matter. And yet, determined to get his things back, he went back to Mount Fuji just a few days later, despite the clear dangers of a second off-season climb.
On his return climb, his attempt to recover his lost things, another climber spotted him over 3,000 meters above sea level, struggling. That climber alerted rescue teams. The man was again brought down the mountain and taken to a hospital, reportedly suffering from symptoms of altitude sickness. He was rescued from the mountain twice in the same week.
You see, Mount Fuji is snow-covered for much of the year and officially open to hikers only between early July and early September. The risks of off-season climbing are well known, and local authorities have stressed the dangers repeatedly. The dual rescue has drawn attention not only for its rarity but also for the man’s decision to return so soon. Though he was not charged with any crime, local officials emphasized the seriousness of the situation and lamented the loss of resources required for such rescue operations.
Hopefully this young man will do a better job of learning from his mistakes in the future. But I kind of doubt it[i]
Today, as we continue our journey through the sermon in written form that is the New Testament book of Hebrews, we come to a difficult passage. It isn’t difficult because it’s hard to understand. It isn’t. It’s difficult because it’s hard to hear. It challenges the popular view of God as a divine version of a benevolent old grandfather type who ignores the mistakes we make.
Now, don’t worry. God doesn’t suddenly become a vindictive, fire breathing, out of control, hateful God. In fact, the judgment of God is actually an expression of the deep, deep love of God. Turn with me to Hebrews 10:26-31.
Remember, we don’t know who wrote Hebrews, but two leading theories are Apollos, Barnabas, and Priscilla, all three of whom were significant leaders in the early church. What our loving pastor describes here is the path toward what he, or she, has called either a hard heart or a false heart at earlier points in this sermon.
In Hebrews 3:8, quoting Psalm 95, they say “Do not harden your hearts as in the rebellion, on the day of testing in the wilderness, where your fathers put me to the test.” And then down in V. 12 it says, “Take care, brothers and sisters, lets there be in any of you an evil, unbelieving heart, leading you to fall away from the living God.”
And then in Hebrews 10:22, we read, “let us draw near [to God] with a true heart in full assurance of faith, with our hearts sprinkled clean …”
This sermon was written to encourage a tiny church somewhere in the Roman empire, probably in or near Rome. A church whose people are struggling. They’re struggling to stay faithful to Christ in the face of mounting pressure.
Not just peer pressure, although that was certainly there. Their friends and family members were turning their backs on them. But they were also starting to face financial hardship as people stopped doing business with them and they had property confiscated. And outright persecution in the form of imprisonment and threat of death for following Jesus was certainly ramping up. So they were tempted to quit. To go back to the less challenging, go with the flow lives they lived before they placed their faith in Jesus. And our pastor is writing to encourage them, and through them, us, not to do that. To persevere – to keep holding on to Jesus through life’s storms.
And remember that at the start of the sermon, our pastor reached back into Israel’s history to find an example of that false or hard heart in what we call Israel’s wilderness generation. The people who trusted God and followed Moses out of Egypt after God performed all of these incredible miracles in Egypt and on their way out. But they started grumbling pretty quickly, and when they reached the threshold of the promised land, they rebelled against God outright because they were afraid and they let their fear control them, rather than their faith.
Oh, they experienced forgiveness and some incredible blessings as they continued their journey, evidence of the grace of God. But they also wandered in the wilderness for 40 years, until every adult whose heart had grown hard toward God died without experiencing the fullness of God’s promise to them. They all died outside the promised land, and their children went in with Joshua as leader and possessed the land.
And the crux of the pastor’s message has been, “Don’t be like them. Don’t let go. Don’t quit. Because they only had the Old Covenant. The law and the sacrifices and the tabernacle. And those things could point out sin, and make you ceremonially clean, but they couldn’t cleanse from sin and transform the human heart. You have Jesus. The one the law and the sacrifices and the tabernacle foreshadowed, pointed to. He does cleanse from sin and transform human hearts. They had the lesser. You and I? We have the greater. Jesus is the all-sufficient sacrifice for our sin. No other way exists because no other way is needed. So don’t quit now!
The problem is that sin doesn’t go quietly into the night. Look at Vv. 26-27. Now, there’s something we have to be absolutely clear about here. Our pastor is not describing an individual moment of sin. Not even a moment of willful sin. And they aren’t describing someone who slips away from their faith for a while. What he or she is describing is an orientation of life that doesn’t really take sin seriously, and therefore doesn’t take the shed blood of Jesus seriously or the grace and mercy of God seriously.
And it is an ongoing hardening of heart that both willful and persistent. So persistent that the heart, overtime, hardens and becomes deadened to the impact of sin. To the point where we wind up dying having heard the truth but not holding on to the end.
- A. Carson was a professor at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, used to meet with a young man from French West Africa to practice the German language so that he could go on to further his education in Germany. He writes:
Once a week or so, we had had enough, so we went out for a meal together and retreated to French, a language we both knew well. In the course of those meals we got to know each other. I learned that his wife was in London, training to be a medical doctor. He was an engineer who needed fluency in German in order to pursue doctoral studies in engineering in Germany.
I soon discovered that once or twice a week he disappeared into the red-light district of town. Obviously he went to pay his money and have his woman.
Eventually I got to know him well enough that I asked him what he would do if he discovered that his wife was doing something similar in London.
“Oh,” he said, “I’d kill her.”
“That’s a bit of a double standard, isn’t it?” I asked.
“You don’t understand. Where I come from in Africa, the husband has the right to sleep with many women, but if a wife is unfaithful to her husband she must be killed.”
“But you told me you were raised in a mission school. You know that the God of the Bible does not have double standards like that.”
He gave me a bright smile and replied, “Ah, God is good. He’s bound to forgive us; that’s his job.[ii]
It’s an orientation of the heart that says, “How I live doesn’t matter, because God is full of forgiveness. YES! God’s heart is full of forgiveness. Yes, God is ready and waiting and willing to forgive. But our part is to repent. Not just once, and then we’re done. It’s not about a cheap prayer and 75 minutes a week in church.
That’s not life in Christ. That’s not why Jesus died on the cross. It’s about a relationship with God. It’s about life in Christ. And so as Christ continues his work IN ME, through the Holy Spirit, when God shines his light on something in my life he wants to transform now, I turn that over to him. That’s a heart that is soft, and ready to repent.
Now, we need to understand that there are two things God ISN’T doing here. First, God ISN’T giving us a magnifying glass to assess the quality of everyone else’s relationship with Christ. Yes, we are responsible to and for one another. We are responsible to encourage one another and to challenge one another and to discern God’s will with one another. But there is a difference between discernment and judgment, and we are not to judge one another. We are not to proclaim whether or not someone is in the Kingdom of God. That is between that person and God. It is not for us to make proclamations like that.
In John 21, we find Jesus restoring Peter. AFTER Peter had walked with Jesus and talked with Jesus and healed like Jesus, he fell away. He denied even knowing Jesus. For a time. And then he repented. He came back to Jesus. There is no person on this earth whose heart is beating, whose lungs are filling with air, whose brain is functioning whom God cannot reach.
But then, after being restored in his relationship with Jesus, Peter noticed John standing nearby and he said, “Lord, what about this man?” Jesus said to him, “If it is my will that he remain until I come, what is that to you? You follow me!” (Jn. 21:21-22). There are a lot of people in the kingdom of God today who are a lot more concerned about everyone else, wanting to make sure everyone else is following the rules, and they can’t see how their own words and actions are hurting people and driving them away from Jesus. God is NOT encouraging that kind of attitude here.
In Romans 14, St. Paul gets very explicit about not passing judgement on one another. He starts by saying, “Therefore let us not pass judgment on one another any longer, but rather decide never to put a stumbling block or hindrance in the way of a brother. I know and am persuaded in the Lord Jesus that nothing is unclean in itself, but it is unclean for anyone who thinks it unclean” (Rom. 14:13-14).
Now, this is going to be a good litmus test to see if you’ve got a little bit of a legalistic bent in you, because if you do, you’re about to get a little bit, or a lot, uncomfortable.
Because Paul goes on to say, “Do not, for the sake of food, destroy the work of God. Everything is indeed clean, but it is wrong for anyone to make another stumble by what he eats” (Rom. 14:20). It’s about one’s heart orientation toward God, and therefore others. Is it hard and false, or is it soft and true? Don’t in your freedom cause someone else to sin.
But then he says this. “The faith that you have, keep between yourself and God. Blessed is the one who has no reason to pass judgment on himself for what he approves. But whoever has doubts is condemned if he eats, because the eating is not from faith. For whatever does not proceed from faith is sin” (Rom. 14:22-23).
That’s where the legalist gets really uncomfortable. Because this is where God expects mature believers to start acting like mature believers. If you are walking with Christ and growing in him and you aren’t convicted by something that isn’t explicitly spoken about in scripture (and Paul limits that to knowingly eating food sacrificed to idols and sexual morality), then fine. But when you’re with someone who IS convicted by that same thing, then don’t lead them into sin because while it might be fine for you, it isn’t for them. So defer to them when you’re with them. This is the Word of God, folks.
Now, look at Vv. 28-29. This is the argument from lesser to greater. If the wilderness generation missed out on the good things God had for them and died in the wilderness without ever stepping into the Promised Land, and all they had was the old covenant, how much worse will it be for those who know the truth of Christ and then turn back?
Again, we have to understand that this is something that is both willful and persistent. In fact, the word “willful” is the first word in this passage in the original Greek. Persistent to the point that you eventually wind up turning your back on Christ and not ever caring to come back. This is the person who once walked with Christ but dies apart from Christ. That’s the level of persistence we’re talking about.
The thing is, they’ve willfully and intentionally walked away from Christ for so long, that even before they die, their heart is hardened and they have no desire to come back. It is the person for whom there is no hope. Don’t get anxious. If you’re worried that this might be you, don’t. If you’re worried about it, it isn’t you.
But why is this such a serious thing? Because you’ve tasted the goodness of God and then spit it out back at him. Permanently. Look at the language our pastor uses. You’ve trampled Jesus under foot. It’s like you’ve stomped on him and rubbed him into the dirt. You’ve walked all over him. It’s an act of utter derision. And you’ve profaned his shed blood. In other words, you’ve treated it as meaningless and unfit for the forgiveness of sins. You’ve called Christ’s death meaningless and worthless. And you’ve outraged, or insulted, the Spirit of God. You’ve encountered the blood of Jesus, the holiest thing in the cosmos, and treated it as if it were nothing.
Again, he isn’t talking about someone struggling with sin or dealing with an addiction or mental illness. He’s talking about someone who consciously and willingly walks away from Jesus because it’s easier, because it’s less dangerous, and who continues to walk that path to the point where they no longer desire to come back.
There are consequences to turning your back on Jesus. We aren’t talking about changing denominations. Some people treat those who go to a different kind of church as if that’s what they’ve done. That isn’t what we’re talking about here. And we’re not talking about those who have trouble going to church for a while because they’ve been hurt in the church. We’re talking about those who walk away from Jesus because they see the cost of following him as being too great and they no longer think they can pay that price.
Now, look at Vv. 30-31. This is where we all get a little bit uncomfortable. And that’s a good thing. That’s our pastor’s intent. The word translated as “judge” can mean two different things. It can mean to judge and condemn, and it can mean to judge and vindicate. God will judge and condemn his enemies and in doing that, will vindicate his people. That means he’ll show our faith in him to have been right all along.
And that is an expression of God’s great love. We don’t often think of love that way, as judging and pushing away, but there are times when to not do so is not loving. Think about it this way. If Ed here goes back and pushes Becky down and hurts her, am I loving Becky if I just brush it off and say, “Oh, don’t worry about it. It doesn’t really matter”? No, I’m not. The loving act would be to go and defend her. That’s the justice component of love, and that’s why God is a God who does judge in the end.
He is a God of grace and mercy, and as long as there is breath in your lungs there is hope. The Holy Spirit will never stop trying to reach someone, if they will allow themselves to be reached. But he will never overpower their own will. God wants us to choose him and has given us the dignity of that choice. That’s part of what it means to be created in the image of God.
But we aren’t being encouraged here to worry about someone else just now. We’re being encouraged to look at our own hearts. What our pastor wants us to do is jump up and say “That’s not gonna be me! I’m going to hang on to Jesus, regardless of the storms I face, because he is truly better than anything I might think I gain by turning back, and the cost of letting go is too great. May we not be like the wilderness generation, trusting God to a point and then turning back. May we not be like the young man on Mt. Fuji, going back to the place we’ve already been rescued from. Let us pray.
[i] Jack Guy & Junko Ogura, “Climber rescued from Mount Fuji twice in one week,” CNN (4-28-25)
[ii] D. A. Carson, “God’s Love and God’s Wrath,” Bibliotheca Sacra (October 1999), p. 387
