Hebrews 10:32 Commentary and Bible Study

It is a very good thing and it is full of blessing for us as believers in Christ to recall, the former days, the days of our conversion, the days when our eyes were opened; to challenge ourselves by what we found and what our attitude and reaction to it was.What a tremendous thing to be illuminated by the Holy Spirit. It is wonderful to hear a testimony, and it may be somebody who has grown up in the church or in a Christian home. At first, nothing seemed to touch them, and then maybe in late teens or in early 20s, suddenly the penny dropped. It was as if no one had ever told them these things before, and suddenly the realisation of personal sinfulness, and of Christ’s amazing love and the significance of his substitutionary death on Calvary; all these things dawned and took shape and they were shaken and amazed and their eyes were opened. Such people cannot say, ‘Why did nobody tell me this before?’ because they heard it time and time again, but illumination makes all the difference. Not only does our need and Christ's provision for our need become suddenly clear in our minds but illumination brings with it conviction, not conviction of sin but conviction of the truth. ‘How do you know’, somebody asks, ‘that the gospel is true? How do you know that the Bible is true?’ You are certain of it. Illumination suddenly takes that cynical outlook of yours with all the barricades you throw up and the difficult questions and the resistance, and as you read the Bible your every instinct says, this is truth. Subsequently, you may enjoy reading apologetic matters, which would give various human reasonings to support the truthfulness of God's revelation, but you don't actually need that. Illumination gave you an inner realisation and certainty.‘Call to remembrance, the former days’ – the writer is perhaps taking them all the way back to the beginning, to the time when many of the Jews were put out of their homes and the persecutions described in Acts 8 came, and the dispersal of the people. People were thrown out of the home by loved ones, cut off by intensely resistant Jewish families.