Hebrews 10_26 - A Major Split of Viewpoint in the Church on Salvation and Willful Sin
"Sinning willfully", a phrase from Hebrews 10:26, is exemplary of a major split of viewpoint in the Church. It's not the only major split, but this seems to me to be one of a handful of critical ones. If you keep reading in Hebrews there, you'll come to verse 36, "don't throw your confidence away", and 38 and 39, where drawing back to perdition is contrasted with faith and belief to salvation of the soul. And go up before the critical verse, which is fearful without a biblical context when it's given a fearful conclusion of the possibility of losing salvation by willful sin as its context, to verses 22 and 23, where "drawing near" contrasts with "drawing back" of the later verses. This drawing near has the full assurance of faith, where the conscience is clean, so that we know we can profess our faith to others without wavering, knowing that He who guarantees it is faithful!
It's a reference to sinning by denying the gospel. Anyone who denies the gospel is not saved by definition. The rest of the chapter should help, especially verses 22, 23, 27, 36, 38 and 39 (and the discussions of covenants and Christ's blood seen before verse 22), which shows the very general sounding "sin willfully" to refer to the very specific faith that Christ's death is for our sins.
So. The sin in verse 26 is not any and all sin, but it's the sin of unbelief. It's the sin of not believing the tenets of salvation that Paul learned and then enumerated in 1 Corinthians 15:3b-8. There are 4 of them, but only the first seems to be in focus here. If we learn the truth that Jesus is the sacrifice for sins, but then we sin by denying that, there is no other sacrifice for sin, so we damn ourselves through willfully throwing away our knowledge of the truth of Christ's action on the cross - that He died for our sins. The only thing left for one such as that is given in verse 27, where a certain looking forward toward fiery judgement is all that's left - not because of our general sin nature, but due to denying salvation doctrine.
When we do any sin, we become fearful, which fear interferes with our faith that God will care for us, but when we deny that Jesus' death is sufficient for our sins, we draw back from our first faith, and we are entirely hopeless!
Another evidence is the instructions on how to deal with an unrepentant Christian, who, after kicking out of the congregation for the destruction of the body by Satan, is still slated to have his spirit saved by Christ (1 Corinthians 5:5). And, similarly, consider the man who does not obey Paul's letter and is kicked out of fellowship in order to make him to be ashamed, but is not counted as an enemy but as a brother (2 Thessalonians 3:14-15). If willful sin removed salvation, these situations would not come up in this way, but the willful sinner would be counted as an enemy instead of a brother undergoing useful punishment.
Other parts of the Bible strongly discourage thinking that we can lose our salvation by willful sinning. The mere appearance of a phrase about willfully sinning does not immediately indicate the most general application. There is context in the whole chapter, and the author of Hebrews describes what he's talking about with a greater deal a specification than the more general phrasing that he uses in verse 26. You'd want to find another spot in the Church-Age part of the New Testament that teaches something about willful sin cancelling salvation in order to shore up that interpretation of Hebrews 10:26. I don't know of any, but I do know of many places that say that if your belief is empty or insincere or (like it says here) if you draw back from believing, then you will not have confidence in your salvation, and that, such a one as that, indeed, will not be saved, because they did not believe Jesus died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures.
Another part of the Church-age portion of the New Testament says that God calls, and whoever God calls, He saves to the end with glorification (and all the other assurances and transformations He does to His own). This is the major split in the Church - God saves us by His purposeful will, and no one can resist Him. We who come to Him have been compelled by Him to come. He has all the glory of our salvation! We don't do it by our cleverness or spirituality or sensitivity or feeling or willpower. Our will is just another part of a group of parts of the human soul, and our will is not the cause or the basis of the beginning, middle or end of our salvation any more than wisdom, intelligence or emotional sensitivity or spiritual aptitude is. God saves us. We do not save ourselves. There. I've said it multiple times. The intricacies of salvation do have descriptions known by us who are being saved (like the fact that the Kingdom of God won't contain sinners), but those descriptions do not drive the action and are not the basis or the cause of our salvation (as though stopping all sin brings one into the Kingdom of God), no matter what they look like (those kinds of thoughts are works-based, Pagan and pseudo-christian Satanism). It is true that the one who pulls back to willfully sinning by giving up their faith in Jesus' strength to save us from sin by His death, that those are not (and it's easy to take one more step and say that they never have been) Christians. Those who are being saved will continue to have faith that Christ's death IS "for our sins", even if we become unrepentant ax-murderers on purpose, because stopping our sin is not the biblical basis of salvation. We who have the new nature simply won't WANT to become unrepentant ax-murderers (even if our body does such a thing).
It's a reference to sinning by denying the gospel. Anyone who denies the gospel is not saved by definition. The rest of the chapter should help, especially verses 22, 23, 27, 36, 38 and 39 (and the discussions of covenants and Christ's blood seen before verse 22), which shows the very general sounding "sin willfully" to refer to the very specific faith that Christ's death is for our sins.
So. The sin in verse 26 is not any and all sin, but it's the sin of unbelief. It's the sin of not believing the tenets of salvation that Paul learned and then enumerated in 1 Corinthians 15:3b-8. There are 4 of them, but only the first seems to be in focus here. If we learn the truth that Jesus is the sacrifice for sins, but then we sin by denying that, there is no other sacrifice for sin, so we damn ourselves through willfully throwing away our knowledge of the truth of Christ's action on the cross - that He died for our sins. The only thing left for one such as that is given in verse 27, where a certain looking forward toward fiery judgement is all that's left - not because of our general sin nature, but due to denying salvation doctrine.
When we do any sin, we become fearful, which fear interferes with our faith that God will care for us, but when we deny that Jesus' death is sufficient for our sins, we draw back from our first faith, and we are entirely hopeless!
Another evidence is the instructions on how to deal with an unrepentant Christian, who, after kicking out of the congregation for the destruction of the body by Satan, is still slated to have his spirit saved by Christ (1 Corinthians 5:5). And, similarly, consider the man who does not obey Paul's letter and is kicked out of fellowship in order to make him to be ashamed, but is not counted as an enemy but as a brother (2 Thessalonians 3:14-15). If willful sin removed salvation, these situations would not come up in this way, but the willful sinner would be counted as an enemy instead of a brother undergoing useful punishment.
Other parts of the Bible strongly discourage thinking that we can lose our salvation by willful sinning. The mere appearance of a phrase about willfully sinning does not immediately indicate the most general application. There is context in the whole chapter, and the author of Hebrews describes what he's talking about with a greater deal a specification than the more general phrasing that he uses in verse 26. You'd want to find another spot in the Church-Age part of the New Testament that teaches something about willful sin cancelling salvation in order to shore up that interpretation of Hebrews 10:26. I don't know of any, but I do know of many places that say that if your belief is empty or insincere or (like it says here) if you draw back from believing, then you will not have confidence in your salvation, and that, such a one as that, indeed, will not be saved, because they did not believe Jesus died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures.
Another part of the Church-age portion of the New Testament says that God calls, and whoever God calls, He saves to the end with glorification (and all the other assurances and transformations He does to His own). This is the major split in the Church - God saves us by His purposeful will, and no one can resist Him. We who come to Him have been compelled by Him to come. He has all the glory of our salvation! We don't do it by our cleverness or spirituality or sensitivity or feeling or willpower. Our will is just another part of a group of parts of the human soul, and our will is not the cause or the basis of the beginning, middle or end of our salvation any more than wisdom, intelligence or emotional sensitivity or spiritual aptitude is. God saves us. We do not save ourselves. There. I've said it multiple times. The intricacies of salvation do have descriptions known by us who are being saved (like the fact that the Kingdom of God won't contain sinners), but those descriptions do not drive the action and are not the basis or the cause of our salvation (as though stopping all sin brings one into the Kingdom of God), no matter what they look like (those kinds of thoughts are works-based, Pagan and pseudo-christian Satanism). It is true that the one who pulls back to willfully sinning by giving up their faith in Jesus' strength to save us from sin by His death, that those are not (and it's easy to take one more step and say that they never have been) Christians. Those who are being saved will continue to have faith that Christ's death IS "for our sins", even if we become unrepentant ax-murderers on purpose, because stopping our sin is not the biblical basis of salvation. We who have the new nature simply won't WANT to become unrepentant ax-murderers (even if our body does such a thing).