Hebrews Chapter Five, Regression

 

Hebrews 5:13 For everyone who partakes only of milk is unskilled in the word of righteousness, for he is a babe.

 

Every teacher is always a student, too. We never stop learning, or maturing. In light of that statement we want to focus on the word, “only.” All of us begin with just milk, like a newborn babe. As we are physically born as helpless children, entirely dependent upon or mothers to feed us, so too is the newborn Christian dependent on other saints to help him on his walk.

He needs to be fed, despite the indwelling presence of the Holy Spirit. Why is this? God doesn’t perfect the saint when the new birth occurs, or else we would immediately be incapable of sin, and incapable of dying for that matter. We need to learn how to rightly divide the word, and to that end fellow believers living in healthy fellowship with the Holy Spirit and one another is vital. A body of believers gathered together has much to offer a newly born saint.

 

But there comes a time when the baby grows and we do not need mother’s milk any longer. We are weaned from it, and learn how to eat without a handicap, as it were. In short, we physically mature. Continuing this comparison, imagine a grown man regressing to the point where he needs to be bottle fed by someone coddling him. It is not a pretty mental image, is it? Spiritually, our lethargy can make us the equivalent of this picture, should we have no interest in learning the truth of God, even the fundamentals. Yes, our proclivity for misunderstanding or not grasping quickly is patent; but there comes a time when we have squandered our time and become no better for it, and it passes from morally neutral to simply sinful. James reminds us that it is sin for a man to know to do good and not do it, James 4:18. If we only partake in being bottle-fed the word of God, we will not mature. We have become a churchian. This is a term I use to describe someone who attends church, listens to whatever sermon is preached, and returns to the world without heeding anything they’ve heard. They paid their dues. They sat in a building listening to something they may or may not have understood or agreed with, and they do not practice it or learn from it in the days following. Christianity has become antiseptic and esoteric. It is antiseptic because it’s kept harmless in the church building, never to infect real life. It becomes esoteric because many professing Christians hardly understand, much less begin to obey, what they hear

 

The author refers to Scripture as, “the word of righteousness.” It is earlier referred to as a two-edged sword, Hebrews 4:12. What fool would commit a deadly weapon to an infant? The word mishandled and misquoted certainly cuts both ways, and ill equipped and uninformed saints with much more zeal than understanding have done much to discredit the gospel message. Partaking only of milk renders one “unskilled” in handling the word, or wielding this sword. Someone entirely dependent on being fed by another has no hope of handling the word correctly. When we partake of solid food, that is, we are capable of feeding ourselves, it is implied that we can likewise feed others. This is the hope the writer had for the Hebrew Christians. Yet patiently and with great care he is about to reeducate them in the first principles of the faith they have confessed and espoused, because he does not want them to remain in such a state of helpless ignorance. When Paul was writing the Corinthian church regarding spiritual gifts, he told them, “I do not want you to be ignorant,” 1 Corinthians 12:1. It is a good teacher’s goal to bring his disciples out of their ignorance into a place where they are equipped to exercise their understanding in the subject they were formerly a babe in. We want people to graduate, to coin that word one more time. Paul knew that sound doctrine was the cure-all for error and apostasy. The writer of Hebrews, in attempting to curtail backsliding into Judaism, wishes to strengthen his charges with knowledge. “For me to write the same things to you is not tedious, but for you it is safe,” Philippians 3:1. Teaching requires patience; learning necessitates the same.

 

“Whom will he teach knowledge? And whom will he make to understand the message? Those just weaned from milk? Those just drawn from the breasts? For precept must be upon precept, precept upon precept, line upon line, line upon line, here a little, there a little,” Isaiah 28:9, 10