A curious thing happened as our group read through Hebrews 10:19-39 Sunday night. While the passage offers themes of sacrifice and redemption and perseverance, one set of verses reached out and grabbed our group’s attention:
If we deliberately keep on sinning after we have received the knowledge of the truth, no sacrifice for sins is left, but only a fearful expectation of judgment and of raging fire that will consume the enemies of God. Anyone who rejected the law of Moses died without mercy on the testimony of two or three witnesses. How much more severely do you think someone deserves to be punished who has trampled the Son of God underfoot, who has treated as an unholy thing the blood of the covenant that sanctified them, and who has insulted the Spirit of grace? For we know him who said, “It is mine to avenge; I will repay,” and again, “The Lord will judge his people.” It is a dreadful thing to fall into the hands of the living God. (Hebrews 10:26-31)
With all the good news surrounding them, these verses about sin and death feel dissonant, and this seeming disconnect between forgiveness and consequence appears throughout scripture. While the Bible’s overarching message is God’s love, Christianity’s holy book also speaks frequently about judgment and Hell and wrath and punishment and all sorts of ideas which clash with how we understand a loving God. With all the weighty damnation stuff in there, we face a choice:
Should we obsess over these passages,
ignore these passages,
or seek a third way?
Having grown up hearing more about Hell than about the Kingdom, I always struggle with the judgment aspect of Christian belief. Many churches and denominations zero in on this concept, building their whole worldviews around the avoidance of Hell. So many of the Christian rock concerts and conferences I attended as a teenager focused entirely on scaring people into faith— as if this whole Jesus thing just boiled down to “getting saved” and nothing else. While it may spark people’s interests, this understanding of Christianity stunts its adherents more than it helps them. Throughout my time in ministry, I’ve encountered people of all ages who initially became Christians due to fear of Hell but then needed help seeing how faith in Jesus changes our lives on this side of eternity too (an idea absent from the fire-and-brimstone approach). When you build your whole understanding of the world around this one aspect of the Christian story, you get a shallow, fear-based religion that only pays lip service to God’s love. It makes the creator, sustainer, and redeemer of the universe feel more like one more boogieman we outgrow in our teens. Obsessing over judgment isn’t the answer.
At the same time, if we simply ignore these passages, we distort Christian history and belief. The concept of punishment for sin appears a little too frequently throughout the Bible to be tossed aside without hefty examination. Sure, our ideas of Hell are almost certainly off base (the pitchforks and goatees for instance), but there is real pain in separation from God, whatever that separation might look like. These verses are a reminder of the gravity of Jesus’s sacrifice and how God would not abide separation from us. Without sin and separation, how are we to understand any of this? Rejecting these passages isn’t the answer either.
And so we’re left with a passage of scripture that doesn’t necessarily make sense to us, and that’s okay. Why does God do things this way? Why let anyone be condemned at all? Why not just wipe away all punishment? When we rush the answers to such complex questions, our answers will inevitably fall short. True answers will take time (if they arrive on this side of eternity at all). In the meantime, Hebrews invites us to sit in the mystery— to reject the cult of certainty and admit when we have lingering questions. Hebrews demands we consider the possibility of some third way we can’t quite comprehend, as scary as this may sound.
Remember, it’s okay not to know.
It’s okay not to understand.
Our questions are sacred.
There’s holiness in the mystery.