Canter Bridge

One of the New Testament’s most haunting lines is a simple affirmation about what is worthy of our fear:

It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God. (Hebrews 10.31)

For the careful reader, all manner of presumption falls victim to such clarity. Grace, we are told in the magisterial tractate that is the ‘letter to the Hebrews’, is no pretext for the kind of falling back that betrays a rescuing, empowering God whose purposes for his followers lean forward.

Ezekiel has a predilection for speaking of such falling back with a potent and condemning term: abomination. The exilic prophet shares with the writer to the Hebrews an unflinching penchant for bringing to light the darkest realities of grace betrayed. Both authors refused to measure out a carefully calibrated divine response to what they consider to be rank apostasy. Ezekiel expresses the stormy response of YHWH unsparingly:

The guilt of the house of Israel and Judah is exceedingly great; the land is full of bloodshed and the city full of perversity; for they say, ‘The LORD has forsaken the land, and the LORD does not see.’ As for me, my eye will not spare, nor will I have pity, but I will bring down their deeds upon their heads.

Neither text, when engaged in the full fury of such rhetoric, makes for pleasant reading. Yet it would be foolish to marginalize the description of the divine storm in the biblical literature, as though it were the literary equivalent of an embarrassingly uncouth cousin who insisted upon turning up at polite family gatherings where the music was strings and the cheese an acquired taste.

Indeed, it is plausible to discern that the wide biblical anthology, viewed as a canonical collection, reserves its starkest depictions of divine rage for those moments when it is YHWH’s own people who are under the lens. Betrayal of grace received is in the biblical classification a more severe failing that the ones into which unknowing pagans stumble. The element of premeditation in such falling back is the trigger point for the divine storm.

This truth, not one of life’s complexities, can be articulated with disturbing clarity:

For if we willfully persist in sin after having received the knowledge of the truth, there no longer remains a sacrifice for sins, but a fearful prospect of judgment, and a fury of fire that will consume the adversaries.

It is just as true that the writer to the Hebrews sets out to encourage and orient his readers, not to depress them.

Yet one must not hurry to that relief. It is better to sit for a moment and fear the storm.