For it is impossible for those who were once enlightened, and have tasted of the heavenly gift, and were made partakers of the Holy Ghost, And have tasted the good word of God, and the powers of the world to come,If they shall fall away, to renew them again unto repentance; seeing they crucify to themselves the Son of God afresh, and put him to an open shame. (Hebrews 6:4-6 KJV)
These verses, along with Hebrews 10:26-27 and the story of Esau selling his birthright, were dreadful verses for John Bunyan. Bunyan once endured a flood of intense temptation where he had incredibly blasphemous thoughts. He was tempted to “sell and part with Christ.” He fought this strong impression for a good time but eventually “felt this thought pass through my heart, ‘Let him go, if He will”. From this Bunyan was afraid that he had committed the unpardonable sin.
Almost immediately after this thought came upon his mind he was reminded of Hebrews 12 and Esau selling his birthright. From this point on, for two years, with only brief moments of reprieve, Bunyan was overcome with a deep inner turmoil:
Now was I as one bound, I felt myself shut up into the judgment to come; nothing now, for two years together, would abide with me, but damnation, and an expectation of damnation…These words were to my soul, like fetters or brass to my legs, in the continual sound of which I went for several months together.
Whenever Bunyan would gain a little bit of comfort his mind and heart would always draw him back to those “dreadful verses” in Hebrews. He could not gain lasting comfort from praying or from reading the Bible. He almost threw these disciplines off altogether but thankfully he continued.
But there is a valuable lesson about Bunyan’s experience that we can learn from. He was so afraid to read these verses in Hebrews that he never actually read them in their context. After receiving a measure of comfort from the Lord, Bunyan was finally emboldened to “come close to [those dreadful Scriptures] to read them, and consider them, and to weight their scope and tendency.”
It took him two years to actually dig into the Scriptures and see if Hebrews was actually saying what the tempter told him it was saying. Once he dug into the text in it’s context he found that it didn’t actually say what he thought it said. It did not apply to his case at all and he had not committed the unpardonable sin.
There is a way we can handle the Word which actually hands over the sword of God’s Word to the enemy. And the enemy wields the Word, in bits and pieces, for his destructive ends. The Word, meant to give us comfort, is now used to absolutely crush us. But the Word brought into its proper context is much more difficult for the enemy to use in such a fashion.
It was only moments after the word was brought out into the full light that Bunyan received his lasting comfort:
One day as I was passing into the field, this sentence fell upon my soul: ‘Thy righteousness is in heaven.’ And with the eyes of my soul I saw Jesus at the Father’s right hand. ‘There,’ I said, ‘is my righteousness!’ So that wherever I was or whatever I was doing, God could not say to me, ‘Where is your righteousness?’ For it is always right before him.
I saw that it is not my good frame of heart that made my righteousness better, nor yet my bad frame that made my righteousness worse, for my righteousness is Christ. Now my chains fell off indeed. My temptations fled away, and I lived sweetly at peace with God.
Now I could look from myself to him and could reckon that all my character was like the coins a rich man carries in his pocket when all his gold is safe in a trunk at home. Oh I saw that my gold was indeed in a trunk at home, in Christ my Lord. Now Christ was all: my righteousness, sanctification, redemption.
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All selections from Grace Abounding
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