Hebrews 5:11-6:3 – Exhortation #3 – Move On to Maturity Part 1

A stern rebuke: you need to move beyond the elementary teachings

Session 13 – August 19, 2020 – Men’s Morning Hebrews Haverim

Our Men’s Haverim group is reading through and discussing the book of Hebrews during the months of August and September. For more information, see this blog post.

Therefore let us move beyond the elementary teachings about Christ and be taken forward to maturity…

Hebrews 6:1a New International Version

Summary:

• The author of Hebrews now rebukes his audience: they should have moved on by now and be teaching the truths of God rather than needing to be taught over again!
• He compares maturing in our understanding of spiritual truth to an infant moving from milk to solid food. A spiritual infant can’t distinguish good from evil since he or she hasn’t understood righteousness, but the mature, though constant use of the Word, have learned discernment between what is good and what is evil.
• He tells them to move on beyond the elementary teachings, and provides an interesting list of six foundational teachings (6:1b-2): “repentance from acts that lead to death, and of faith in God, 2 instruction about cleansing rites, the laying on of hands, the resurrection of the dead, and eternal judgment.”

Other Thoughts:

• In the last section, the author had begun to talk about Melchizedek, and will explain more about this interesting priest later in Chapter 7, but felt he needed to warn them now to move on to maturity. His arguments so far were relatively easy to understand: Jesus is superior to the prophets, angels, Moses and the High Priest. He backed all this up with scriptures that he seemed to indicate were well known to the Hebrew audience. Now he was about to go deeper and wanted them to be prepared.
• The rebuke is a warning that it’s not acceptable to stay spiritually immature. We all need to grow in our knowledge of God and our obedience to his Word or we will not be able to distinguish good from evil, which can lead us to fall away.
• While he mentions six “elementary teachings”, he doesn’t explain them here. We can only infer that these were teachings that all early Christians were taught and should have understood well. They in fact map well to stories of conversions in the book of Acts and cover the main points of God’s plan for salvation through the gospel message.
• Are you moving on to spiritual maturity, with a deeper understanding and obedience of the word of God?