Hebrews 6:6

6. If they shall fall away A sad mistranslation. There is no if in the original, and no future tense, and no contingent supposition. It is the “historic tense,” and describes a fall that has already taken place, as our translation above indicates.

Fall away Of course they could not fall if they did not once stand. And that stand was a state of salvation in which, did they stand and not fall, they would have been safe. “Let him that thinketh he standeth take heed lest he fall.” Away, means from the previous state of renewal in which the warning requires them to stand. It was not a fall from a state of condemnation, but from a state of salvation. And this fall away is the central thought of the whole epistle. To warn his readers by the fatal example of others is its entire purpose. See notes on Hebrews 3:7 to Hebrews 4:13.

Renew them Bring them back to their once renewed, unfallen state.

Again Correlative with once, in Hebrews 6:4. They were once renewed, but it is impossible to renew them again. There was a blessed once to which they can never be reclaimed again. And this very word again means they were once renewed.

Repentance The great, sure condition of salvation.

Seeing they Words not in the Greek, and which should not be in the English. See our translation on p. 78.

Crucify afresh Re-crucify, repeat the crucifixion. Their apostasy, as we have repeatedly intimated, arose from a disgust at the humiliation of the Messiah. Hence, “the hanged man” was the Jewish epithet for Jesus. Hence the apostatizing He brews were induced to represent Jesus to themselves in conception as a real impostor and malefactor. They approved his crucifixion, and thereby, in thought, recrucified him. The phrase to themselves, is, then, by no means, pleonastic, as it is often, as in the phrase “away with yourself.” The conceptual re-crucifixion within the imagination and heart has its outward antithesis in the open shame, the public exhibition. The Greek single word translated, put him to an open shame, παραδειγματιζω , is used in the Septuagint, Numbers 25:4: “Take all the heads of the people, and hang them up before the Lord against the sun.” As counterpart to the subjective conceptual, crucifying to themselves, this word here seems to indicate some public exposure. This probability is strikingly illustrated in a chalked caricature belonging to the first century, lately discovered at Rome, in which the figure of a man with the head of an ass is suspended on a cross, with a reverent worshipper before him, and an inscription underneath, “Alexamenos worshipping his god.” Perhaps the public exhibition by these apostates consisted in offering a public temple sacrifice, with open profession that it was an act of rejection of the true Sacrifice. It is true, the Pentecostal Church continued to attend the ordinary sacrifices in the temple, but there seems full indication (xiii, 10) that before this epistle was written a separation between the temple and the Church had now taken place. And such open self-commitment, with the attendant temper, self-interest, and exclusive association likely to follow, may account for the impossible of their being renewed unto repentance.

Those, however, who take the extreme view of this impossibility of recovery do not thereby weaken the argument of the possibility of apostasy. They only maintain a very fearful view of the nature of this apostasy. Note on Hebrews 10:26. And even if this particular set of apostates had apostatized irrecoverably, that irrecoverabillty is predicated of that set alone. Irrecoverability is not laid down as a universal law of apostasy.