Hebrews 6:5 Commentary - Dr Peter Masters

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Hebrews 6:5

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And have tasted the good word of God, and the powers of the world to come,There are people who have for a time thought, ‘This is true; this is real’ – the way it describes humanity and behaviour – and they have been impressed as things have been unfolded to them, and the startling reality of the fulfilling of its prophecy. ‘This is supernatural; this is different.’ They have tasted the good word of God, and they have read Psalm 23 and 1 Corinthians 13, and they have been moved deeply by them, even if only as one might be moved by powerful literature. They have tasted the good word of God, ‘and the powers of the world to come’, sensed the reality. As human beings we have instincts to this effect: of heaven and hell, and of a life hereafter. So those verses list the great advantages of understanding, that even many unsaved people have had without yielding up their lives and repenting of their sin and coming to the Lord. They get an intellectual conviction and awareness that this book is unique. When they were young they wanted to study the Bible, because they were so taken by it. ‘I can see it is a consistent book. I can see how it fits together, I can see its depths, its doctrines’, they have said. They appreciated the worldview of the Bible, which explains human nature and why the world is as it is, and they said, ‘This is vastly superior to any human philosophy.’ They have gone through a phase in their lives when they listened to exulted preaching, and have taken some delight in the word of God. But they have never personally been saved, and they came to a point in their lives when they threw it all away and cast it aside. It is amazing. You can even be deeply impressed by the word of God to the point that you believe in it without actually coming to Christ.

Application

They ‘have tasted the good word of God, and the powers of the world to come.’ That can happen. People can come under the sound of the gospel and move among Christians, and perhaps they go to a funeral and they think to themselves, ‘Yes, there must be life beyond the grave. There is no point or purpose in life, if there is not life beyond the grave.’ They are sure of it, they sense it deeply. ‘I could not possibly be an atheist’, somebody will say as an unbeliever, but they are never personally converted. They felt something of the power of eternal things, perhaps as they heard preaching and were moved. What was missing? How is it that according to this passage it is evidently possible for somebody to get some light, to taste the grace of God, if not personally to sense the kindness of God in Christ and his atoning death, to witness the power of the Spirit at work in lives, to realise and appreciate the depths of the word of God, to be at times certain of eternity, and yet to reject all? How can it happen? Why was the person not saved? The answer is found in the next verse.

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Hebrews 6:5 Commentary and Bible Study