Hebrews 6:6

Hebrews 6:6

I, Various as have been God's dealings with the world, there is, after all, a terrible impartiality in His dispensations to His rational creatures. He can hear us all in the same court, and judge us out of the same books. He can see through the intricacies of His own diversified government. He can estimate every district and age of the world by the standards appropriate to each. And while the human nature of the Church is uniform, its trials must be nearly so. If we are not nailed to a cross with one apostle, we are, with every disciple of Christ, bound to carry a cross daily. When Christ was about to die He instituted a memorial sacrament of His passion, to show forth His death until He come. It would seem that there is, as it were, a fearful and satanic sacrament too of that same dread hour, by which it is still in man's power to reiterate and prolong His death until He comes to judge the long succession of His crucifiers. St. Paul delivers unto us the tremendous truth that there is in man a continued capacity of crucifying afresh the Son of God; a power to act over again all the scene of His torture, to league with the malignant priests and the scoffing soldiers to buffet the unresisting cheek, to bind the crown of thorns.

II. It must indeed be conceded that the crime to which St. Paul specially ascribes this fearful character is a peculiar one, and, in its full extent, not ordinarily exemplified. He speaks of deliberate apostasy from the faith of Jesus. But there is no one characteristic of direct and utter apostasy which does not, in its own degree, belong to those daily desertions of the cause of Jesus which ally the miserable votaries of the God of this world with the avowed enemies of Christ in every age. There are the apostasies of the social table, of the fireside and the market place, the refined apostasies of our own modern and daily life, as real as the imperial treachery of a Julian, or the cold-blooded abandonment of a Demas. To every one of these the same impress belongs: it may be branded more or less deeply, but it is branded on all; they are all alike rife with the spirit of Caiaphas' council-chamber; they are all echoes of the voice that cried aloud, "Crucify Him, Crucify Him!" The tragedy of Golgotha has many actors: every generation, every land reiterates these multiplied crucifixions. Be assured that the man who rejects Christ now, when He is formally recognised by high and noble, would have been much more certain to have joined in crucifying Him in Judea.

W. Archer Butler, Sermons Doctrinal and Practical, 1st series, p. 49.

References: Hebrews 6:6 . J. Irons, Thursday Penny Pulpit, vol. ix., p. 163; C. J. Vaughan, Lessons of the Cross and Passion, p. 283.Hebrews 6:9 . Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. iii., No. 152.Hebrews 6:9 , Hebrews 6:10 . A. Rowland, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xxxii., p. 219. Hebrews 6:9-20 . Homiletic Quarterly, vol. ii., p. 555; R. W. Dale, The Jewish Temple and the Christian Church, p. 124.Hebrews 6:10 . R. S. Candlish, Sermons, p. 307; Christian World Pulpit, vol. xxxi., p. 392.Hebrews 6:11 . Clergyman's Magazine, vol. iii., p. 282.