“Anyone who has rejected Moses’ law dies without mercy on the testimony of two or three witnesses. Of how much worse punishment, do you suppose, will he be thought worthy who has trampled the Son of God underfoot, counted the blood of the covenant by which he was sanctified a common thing, and insulted the Spirit of grace?” (Hebrews 10:28-29).
Heinous crimes involve offenses that are odious, shockingly cruel, and abhorrent. When committed against humanity, they typically involve some form of extraordinary personal injury, cruel torture, and/or vicious death.
Before God, heinous spiritual crimes include presumption (Numbers 15:30-31), irreverence (Leviticus 10:1-3), calling evil good and good evil (Isaiah 5:20), profaning the sacred (Exodus 31:14), and promoting apostasy via idolatry (Deuteronomy 13:6-18; 17:2-7). These offenses are so vile in nature that the Law of Moses commanded immediate execution after the perpetrator’s guilt was established by the testimony of two or three reliable witnesses.
The guilt of a New Testament apostate is greater than an Old Testament apostate’s. This spiritual criminal is guilty of three heinous, capital offenses:
-
He has trampled the Son of God underfoot. Like a hog with no capacity to value anything but what feeds his belly (Matthew 7:6), a New Testament apostate has shown flagrant contempt for the only remedy there is for his spiritual debt and disease. A complete and brutal rejection of the Son of God is a heinous spiritual crime worse than any capital offense committed under the Law of Moses.
-
He has profaned the pure and holy blood of Christ which inaugurated the new and better covenant. It is possible to profane the sacred without having impure motives. This is not that. This heinous spiritual crime is a deliberate choice which came after weighing the facts and then deciding to deny and defy them. It is one hundred percent premeditated. It is a heinous spiritual crime worse than any capital offense committed under the Law of Moses.
-
He has insulted the Spirit of grace. God’s Spirit is not easily insulted. He does not wear His feelings on His sleeve. Yet, just as there were evil men who declared that Jesus’ miraculous healing of a blind and mute demoniac was the work of Satan, not the Holy Spirit (Matthew 12:22-37), there can also be apostates who contemptuously insult the perfect work of the Holy Spirit in revealing and confirming the New Testament and equipping New Testament Christians for service. Such perverse deviancy is a heinous spiritual crime worse than any capital offense committed under the Law of Moses.
“Of how much worse punishment, do you suppose, will he be thought worthy who has trampled the Son of God underfoot, counted the blood of the covenant by which he was sanctified a common thing, and insulted the Spirit of grace?”
What a sobering and haunting question.
