This practical and readable exposition elucidates Hebrews’ searching questions about the progress we are making in our own pilgrimage of faith. It is an invaluable help for understanding that both its beauties and its difficulties are intended to strengthen that faith. For, as the letter’s original readers discovered, faith finds its only secure resting place in the true and coming King whose kingdom will stand even when everything else is shaken to pieces.
“Unbelief, refusal to believe, is of course the cardinal sin, so much so that sometimes in Scripture the term ‘sin’ is used in the sense of failure or refusal to believe the gospel. So, for instance, our Lord says in John 16:8–9 that when the Holy Spirit comes ‘he will convict the world of sin5 … of sin because they do not believe in me’. In other words he is speaking not of individual sins which true believers commit from time to time (and for which there is forgiveness when the believer confesses his sin), but of the basic, cardinal sin of not believing the Saviour.” (Page 109)
“The gospel was that God had come down to redeem them; and redemption meant being delivered from the wrath of God through the blood of the Passover Lamb, being set free from the power of Pharaoh, being accepted as God’s own people, leaving Egypt, crossing the desert and entering their inheritance in the land of promise. It was all one indivisible package. They could not believe and accept the first part but reject the rest. It was all or nothing; and this was made clear to them from the very start (see Exod 6:6–8).” (Pages 102–103)
“A belief that had stayed put and not come, would not have been true faith at all. In Luke 8, the woman with the haemorrhage believed the Saviour, and because she believed, she elbowed her way through the crowd and touched the hem of his garment. A faith that claimed to believe but did not come, would not be faith at all. It is so even in the act of conversion: true faith is ever active and comes to the Saviour, and deliberately puts out the hand and takes what the Saviour promises.” (Pages 201–202)