We invite you this morning to take your Bible and to turn with me to Hebrews chapter 10. We're going to continue our Sunday morning sermon series through this letter to the Hebrews. And we're in chapter 10. We're going to be looking at verses 26 to 31. If you have not brought a Bible with you this morning, there are pew Bibles in the pew racks in front of you. And our passage this morning is on page 1007 in those pew Bibles. So Hebrews chapter 10. We have, as we saw last week, we have moved into a new section of the book of Hebrews, a section whose focus is on faith. And we're going to come soon to chapter 11, the great chapter on faith and people of faith. But we are getting a running start on that here at the end of chapter 10 on faith itself. We're going to see in chapter 11, verse 1, the writer here gives a definition of faith. Now, faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. The assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. Now we come this morning to what we call the fourth warning passage. We're going to see this morning that this is the strongest of the five warning passages in the book of Hebrews. But this warning section is here really for those who have lost that assurance. and who have lost that conviction of things not seen. And so let's look together at Hebrews chapter 10, verses 26 to 31. Hear the word of the Lord. For if we go on sinning deliberately, after receiving the knowledge of the truth, there no longer remains a sacrifice for sins. but a fearful expectation of judgment and a fury of fire that will consume the adversaries. Anyone who has set aside the law of Moses dies without mercy on the evidence of two or three witnesses. How much worse punishment do you think will be deserved by the one who has trampled underfoot the Son of God? and has profaned the blood of the covenant by which he was sanctified, and has outraged the spirit of grace. For we know him who said, vengeance is mine, I will repay. And again, the Lord will judge his people. It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God. And thus far, God's holy, inerrant, and inspired word, he write its truth on all of our hearts this morning. Let's pray together. God, we come to you this morning only in our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. And we thank you, oh God, that we are trusting in Christ and Christ alone. We are your beloved children, your beloved family. And yet, oh God, we pray that you would take away from us fearful and unbelieving hearts. We pray that you would use even this very strong warning in your word today to draw us closer to you. We pray this in Jesus' name, amen. Mark Dever, in his book, Nine Marks of a Healthy Church, begins one of his chapters, chapter two, with this story. I made a statement, he writes, in a doctoral seminar about God. Bill responded, unfortunately the name of this person is Bill, I did have, actually went to seminary with Mark Dever and we did have some classes together but I don't think this was me. Bill responded politely but firmly that he liked to think of God rather differently. For several minutes Bill painted a picture for us of a friendly deity. He liked to think of God as being wise, but not meddling, compassionate, but not overpowering, ever so resourceful, but never interrupting. This, said Bill in conclusion, is how I like to think of God. Mark goes on, my reply was perhaps somewhat sharper than it should have been. Thank you, Bill, I said, for telling us so much about yourself. But we are concerned to know what God is really like, not simply about our own desires. He said the seminar was silent for a moment as they took in this potential breach of politeness on my part. but they were also taking in the point. I made some appreciative noises toward Bill, and we got on with our discussion about the nature and character of God as revealed in the Bible. And what we see this morning is one important aspect of the nature and the character of God. We see before us a holy God presented in this passage, a holy God who because of his holiness must punish sin and must punish wickedness. This is a strong warning. As I said at the beginning, the strongest of all the five warnings in this passage is in fact explicit about hell, hell itself. And a warning about clinging to Christ, otherwise suffering the consequences of hell. The context, again, to remind us, is written to Jewish Christians, to the Hebrews, Hebrew Christians, who, for a variety of reasons, perhaps because of persecution, perhaps because of apathy or laziness, were falling away from Christ, moving away from Christ, and probably reverting back to Judaism itself. Last week, we saw exhortations to hold fast in verses 19 to 25. And then next week, we're going to go on and see another exhortation in which the writer recalls their former faithfulness. So an exhortation to hold fast, an exhortation that recalls their former conversion, their former faithfulness, but in the midst of this encouragement, he basically puts, what we can say, he puts the fear of God into them in our passage this morning. So let's get into this. We're gonna look this morning at the sin that the writer addresses here, the punishment that it calls for, and the purpose of this exhortation. The sin, the punishment, and the purpose of this exhortation. First of all, the sin, the sin. Look with me at verse 26. He writes this, for if we go on sinning deliberately after receiving the knowledge of the truth, there no longer remains a sacrifice for sins. If we go on sinning deliberately after receiving the knowledge of the truth, there no longer remains a sacrifice for sins but a fearful expectation of judgment. sinning deliberately. All right, what does he mean here? Well, first of all, if you have your Bible and you want to go back with me to the Old Testament book of Numbers, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, fourth book of the Old Testament, or just listen as I read, we read here of what we call sinning deliberately, or what the text calls sinning with a high hand. And we read this in Numbers 15 verse 30, but the person who does anything with a high hand, and now I should say this is in the context of sins that are committed unintentionally. Unintentional sins, that begins in verse 22, but here it's a person with a high hand. Whether he is a native or a sojourner, reviles the Lord, and that person shall be cut off from among his people. Because he has despised the word of the Lord and has broken his commandment, that person shall be utterly cut off, his iniquity shall be on him. And then actually that's followed up by the story, the narrative in verses 32 to 36 of a man that was found gathering sticks on the Sabbath day. Verse 33, those who found him gathering sticks brought him to Moses and Aaron and to all the congregation. They put him in custody because it had not been made clear what should be done to him. And then the Lord said to Moses, that man shall be put to death. All the congregation shall stone him with stones outside the camp." And indeed, that is what happened. This is a sin with a high hand, a sin knowingly, a sin intentionally, contrary to the very law of God. Deliberately means willingly. It's the opposite of not being under compulsion. It means freely. It means eagerly. One Greek-English dictionary describes the Greek word used here in this way, a positive expression of willingness may be indicated idiomatically by a phrase such as, my heart approves. My heart approves even though God does not. This is what I will do. Rick Phillips, in his commentary, puts it this way. What this verse describes is not believers who are struggling with sin, or even those who have besetting sins, which plague their spiritual life and displease the Lord. It's not dealing with those. Rather, this refers to those who reject God's authority to tell them what to do. Reject God's authority to tell them what to do and who flagrantly continue in their sin. It's those who say, I don't care what God says. I reject his authority over me. And that's what we see here. Notice the way verse 29 describes this sin. He says, how much worse punishment do you think will be deserved by the one who has trampled underfoot the Son of God, and has profaned the blood of the covenant by which he was sanctified, and has outraged the Spirit of grace? How much worse punishment, it says here, for these things. God the Son we read here, or the Son of God, sorry, profaned, trampled the Son of God underfoot, profaned the blood of the covenant, outraged the Spirit of grace. These are really the three things that we need for our salvation. We need the Son of God, or we could say rather, God the Son, to die for our sins. Why? Because we need God to save us. We cannot save ourselves. God, and God alone saves us, and God did that in God the Son. We read here that it has to do with profaning the blood of the covenant, the blood of Jesus was shed for our forgiveness and for our salvation. His death was taking the penalty that we deserve for our sin. And he says here, has outraged the spirit of grace. The spirit is the one who applies these truths to our hearts and to our lives. So here we see in verse 29, the three essential ingredients of our salvation, God, the son, the death of the son, the Holy spirit, applying that to our, our lives. This, in other words, we see here in this passage, the sin as being what we oftentimes call the unpardonable sin. The unpardonable sin. And what is that? It means to know with certainty who Christ is, and yet, and what he has done, and yet to reject him. with certainty who Christ is and what He has done, and yet to reject Him. It's also called the blasphemy against the Holy Spirit. Why is that? Again, it's because the Spirit is the one who brings that knowledge to us. Blasphemy against the Holy Spirit. This is the sin of demons and sin of many others like demons. who know who Christ is and yet reject Him. I sometimes have heard over the years, when I was a college professor in particular, students would come and say to me, I think I might have committed the unpardonable sin. And oftentimes what I would say to them is, well, if you think you might have and you're sorry for it, you haven't. you haven't. If you're repentant, you haven't. And yet this is a grave sin. We need to constantly be examining our hearts for signs of unbelief. And when we see them, get rid of them. Work to put them away by by the grace of God, by being in the word of God, by being in prayer, by gathering with the saints. When we're uncertain, we oftentimes want to run from God and we want to run from the church, but no, the thing to do is to run to God and to run to the church of Jesus Christ when we struggle with unbelief in our lives. So we need to take this first warning, or this warning here, seriously. Why? This leads us to the punishment, number two. The punishment. Again, back to verse 26. If we go on sinning deliberately after receiving the knowledge of the truth, There no longer remains a sacrifice for sins. Why does there no longer remain a sacrifice for sins? Because Christ's sacrifice is the only sacrifice that actually covers all of the sins of all of his people. If we reject that one, there is no other one out there. Of course, the temple in Jerusalem is still standing at the time the writer is writing this, and so there were ongoing sacrifices there, even though Jesus, when he rose at his death, the curtain was torn in two in the temple. And as I've said in this series a few times in the past, all they did was go and sew it up and continue on with their animal sacrifices. Christ is the only one that truly saves. But more than this, verse 27 says, but a fearful expectation of judgment and a fury of fire that will consume the adversaries. A fearful expectation of judgment and a fury of fire that will consume the adversaries. Yes, this is a reference to hell. Hell. There is no getting around in the Bible the reality of hell. The reality of the teaching about hell in scripture, no getting around it. Jesus, as I've sometimes said in the past, Jesus talked much, much more about hell than he did about heaven. If you compare how much Jesus taught and preached in his ministry on hell and compare that to what he taught about heaven, there's a big disparity. Why? Because Jesus wanted to warn his hearers about the judgment of God and the reality of hell. Now, hell is not a popular topic today. In fact, many pastors just avoid it in our day. They avoid it. And even some scholars, some respected ones, biblical scholars, theologians, reject this concept. Clark Pinnock, would have identified himself as an evangelical, we for many reasons would not have, but he actually wrote this several years ago, I consider the concept of hell as endless torment in body and mind, an outrageous doctrine, a theological and moral enormity, a bad doctrine of the tradition that needs to be changed. Everlasting torment is intolerable from a moral point of view because it makes God into a bloodthirsty monster who maintains an everlasting Auschwitz for victims who he does not even allow to die. Strong words. Even someone like John Stott, whose commentaries I have and enjoy and think him solid, and have learned much from him. He wrote this, I find the concept of eternal conscious punishment in hell intolerable and do not understand how people can live with it without either cauterizing their feelings or cracking under the strain. But he also does allow for the fact that we can't allow our emotions and our human thinking to determine what we believe. And he goes on to say this, as a committed evangelical, my question must be and is not what does my heart tell me, but what does God's word say? And essentially how he interprets God's word is using the word or the concept of annihilation, not conscious torment. but God annihilates those who are not believers. When we allow our personal preferences, personal emotional desires to overrule the clear teaching of the word of God, we make ourselves God. We make ourselves God, not God himself. How do we reconcile the fact that God is love, for instance, with the reality of the biblical teaching on hell? Let me read a little bit, lots of quotes here. Let me read a little bit from G.I. Packer. in his wonderful work, Knowing God. Packer writes, God's wrath in the Bible is never the capricious, self-indulgent, irritable, morally ignoble thing that human anger often is. It is instead a right and necessary reaction to objective moral evil. God is only angry where anger is called for. Would a God who did not react adversely to evil in his word be morally perfect? Surely not. But it is precisely this adverse reaction to evil which is a necessary part of moral perfection that the Bible has in view when it speaks of God's wrath. This is righteous anger, the right reaction of moral perfection in the creator toward moral perversity in the creature. So far from the manifestation of God's wrath in punishing sin being morally doubtful, the thing that would be morally doubtful would be for him not to show his wrath in this way. If we reject eternal punishment, essentially what we are doing is rejecting the eternal God. Third and finally, we see the purpose. The purpose, the sin, the punishment, the purpose. The purpose is here to encourage his readers to cling to Christ. Encourage us to cling to Christ. Verse 28, he says, anyone who has set aside the law of Moses dies without mercy on the evidence of two or three witnesses. That is straight out of the Law of Moses, Deuteronomy 17.6, Deuteronomy 19.5. We actually see it in that passage we looked at earlier from Numbers chapter 15, 32 to 36. There were multiple witnesses that led to the conviction of this man gathering wood on the Sabbath day. To set aside the law of God reminds us that God's word must be taken seriously. We must listen to what God says, the word, the teaching of the Almighty God. And he goes on to say in verse 26, how much worse punishment do you think will be deserved by the one who has trampled underfoot the Son of God and profaned the blood of the covenant and outraged the spirit of grace? How much worse punishment? Remember back in Numbers chapter 15, there was physical death, stoning of this man who broke the law of God. What we're talking about in rejecting Jesus Christ is is eternal spiritual death. How much more? He says here. How much more? And then the passage ends in verses 30 and 31 with these staggering words. We know him who said, vengeance is mine. I will repay. And again, the Lord will judge his people. It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God. A fearful thing ends with a dire warning. Sometimes here, parents make idle threats to their children. Idle threats, they make threats, but they don't carry through. God never makes an idle threat. God never makes an idle threat. A. W. Tozer wrote this once, there will be only one biblical text in hell, and it may be cut against the great walls of that terrible place. True and righteous are your judgments, O Lord. True and righteous are your judgments, O Lord. There's a sobriety to this passage. It's a call to take these words, these warnings, seriously. Hell is real. Hell is eternal. The flip side, the positive side, is it's a call to cling to Christ. With all the strength that God has given to us, to cling to the Lord Jesus Christ, to follow him with all of our heart, Why? Because Christ died, taking on the punishment that we deserve for our sins. We have life in him. It also in many ways calls us to a holy fear, not a holy fear that draws us away from God or drives us away from God, but one that draws us to God. We need to develop this kind of holy fear of God. As the writer to the Hebrews is gonna later tell us, we are to come into his presence in worship with reverence and awe for our God is a consuming fire, he tells us. Charles Spurgeon said this in One of his sermons, the great Baptist preacher in the 1800s. Believers, he said, adore and worship the living God with a joyful, tender fear, which both lays us low and lifts us very high. For never do we seem to be nearer to heaven's golden throne than when our spirit gives itself to worship him whom it does not see, but in whose realized presence trembles with sacred delight. May that be us, us who fear the Lord and who tremble in sacred delight. Let's pray together. Oh God, we praise you as holy and as majestic. We praise you, O God, as a God who is without sin, whose eyes are too pure to look on human sin, who must punish sin. And yet, O God, how we praise you that in the Lord Jesus Christ, you poured out your wrath. You poured out your judgment on him so that we could find newness of life in Christ. So God, give us great joy, but give us a holy and proper fear of you. We pray this in Jesus name. Amen.