The Two Years I Was Gone

He can say it without looking now. That is how many times he has read it.

It is impossible, for those who have once been enlightened, who have tasted the heavenly gift and shared in the Holy Spirit, and then have fallen away, to restore them again to repentance. He has the whole of it. He has the Greek word for fallen away, which he looked up on a phone at two in the morning in a kitchen, and he has three different explanations from three different men on the internet, and he has believed the worst one for four years.

Because there were two years. Everybody in his family knows there were two years, and nobody talks about it, and the not talking about it has been kind and has also been the worst thing they could have done.

He came back. That is the part that should make this simple and does not. He came back and he has been back for four years and he serves and he prays and he is at everything. And every single one of those four years he has been quietly certain that he came back into a building he no longer has a seat in. That the door was a one way door. That whatever is happening in him now is the shape of faith without the thing in the middle of it.

He has told nobody. Not his wife, not his brother, not the man who sat with him during the two years and never once said a word about it. He has read the passage instead. He has read it in four translations. He has read it late, which is the worst time to read anything.

Maybe you have that passage. It may not be Hebrews 6. It might be a different set of verses that found you at the wrong hour and has been sitting on your chest ever since. And you have read it so many times that you now know it in the voice of a prosecutor rather than a Father.

Sit down. I am not going to hand you a verdict tonight, in either direction, and I am not going to tell you the fear is silly.

I will not tell you it is nothing

First, the honest thing, and then we will go to the text.

This fear is not stupidity and it is not weak faith. It is what happens when a serious man reads a serious warning seriously. The passage is in the Bible. It says what it says. Anybody who waves it away is not helping you, they are just refusing to sit in the room with you, and after four years you can smell that from across a courtyard.

So no waving. But hear this, because it is a fact and not a comfort: you are afraid of losing something that you would not be afraid of losing if it were not still yours, and Scripture calls that longing the work of the Holy Spirit in a person and not the evidence against one. Nobody grieves a house they never lived in.

You have four years of evidence in your own hands and you have been reading it as the crime, and Romans 8 says all who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God, and the Spirit is the one who has been dragging you back to that passage because He will not let you settle for a wrong answer about yourself.

What the passage is holding, and what it is not

Now the text, carefully, because a careful reader deserves careful handling.

Read who the writer is talking about. He is describing people who have gone out and taken up a position against what they once held, publicly and deliberately, and who are re-crucifying the Son of God, as the passage itself says, and holding Him up to contempt. That is a settled posture of the whole person. It is not a season, it is not a collapse, and it is not two years in which a man was in bad shape and came home.

And then read what the writer does immediately after, in the very next breath, because this is the part nobody quotes at two in the morning:

Though we speak in this way, yet in your case, beloved, we feel sure of better things, things that belong to salvation. For God is not unjust so as to overlook your work and the love that you have shown for His name.Hebrews 6:9-10

Beloved. That is the same author, the same paragraph, to the same readers he has just warned. The warning and that sentence live four inches apart on the page and the warning was never written to be read alone. You have been reading half a paragraph for four years, and the second half of it is written down and has been the entire time, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has kept you circling back until somebody showed you the rest of it.

I am not going to tell you the passage does not apply to you as if I could see inside you. Nobody can do that from a page, and any man who claims to is selling something. What I will say is what the text says, and the text is not written to frighten a man who is afraid. It is written to shake a man who is comfortable.

The anchor is not attached to your grip

There is one more thing in that same chapter, and it is the image the whole letter is built around.

We have this as a sure and steadfast anchor of the soul, a hope that enters into the inner place behind the curtain, where Jesus has gone as a forerunner on our behalf.Hebrews 6:19-20

Look at where the anchor is set. Not in the boat. Not in the strength of the man holding the rope. It is set behind the curtain, in the holiest place, in the hands of the One who went in first. You were held for the whole two years by an anchor that was never fastened to your own grip, and that is what is written in the chapter that has been frightening you, and it is the Spirit and not your consistency who keeps it fast.

The same chapter. The one you have been reading in the dark. It has the warning and the anchor in it, and you have been carrying one of them.