“Therefore we must give the more earnest heed to the things we have heard, lest we drift away…” Heb 2:1
When I was a teenager, our family rented a camp on a lake for a week. I took the rowboat out fishing one afternoon and when I came back I nonchalantly tied a knot, mooring it to the dock. A violent storm ensued that night while we slept, and in the morning the boat was gone. We circled the lake only to find it on the distant shore. I’ve never tied a casual knot since!
The book of Hebrews was addressed to Christians of Jewish heritage. The circumstances that swept them into the Kingdom were spectacular. There were powerful outpourings of the Holy Spirit, thousands saved in a single day, extraordinary miracles, even occasional sightings of the Risen Christ. They were hot for God! When troubles came, even “great struggles with sufferings” (10:32), they were undaunted, even to the point of “joyfully accept[ing] the plundering” of their possessions (v. 10:34).
Over time, these same disciples discovered they could avoid the hassles by hiding behind their Jewish cloaks. Although they still “believed” in Jesus as their Messiah, their submission to Him as Lord teetered on the waves of near-constant storms of opposition. They forsook regular gatherings together and no longer exhorted each other daily as they once had.
The writer warns them of floating away from Christ, using a Greek word used to describe situations just like my rowboat. The constant rocking exposed the weakness of my willy-nilly knot, just like the relentless pressures unmoored these Jewish believers from their once sure attachment to Jesus, leaving them adrift, and vulnerable. In response, the writer employs yet another nautical term which can roughly be translated to batten down the hatch, i.e. make sure the sails are roped securely in order to stay the course. Hebrews translates it as “hold fast, or steady”, used in Heb 3:6,14; 4:14, and most famously in 10:23, “let us hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering.”
We’ve all witnessed this tragic spiritual decline. Former small group or cell members, people who once stood on the stage, friends who had encouraged us to press in to God, somewhere along the way, zeal flagged, lethargy set in, and over time they became shipwrecked. It’s painful.
If we are honest, we will also see this same tendency in us. No wonder David cried out, “don’t let me wander from your commands!” (Ps 119:10). Or how about these words from the classic hymn, Come Thou Fount?
O to grace how great a debtor
daily I’m constrained to be!
Let thy goodness, like a fetter,
bind my wandering heart to thee.
Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it,
prone to leave the God I love;
here’s my heart, O take and seal it,
seal it for thy courts above.
We are all prone to wander. Not all of us feel it, or are willing to admit it. Check and double check your moorings, brothers and sisters! Make sure you are tied tightly to Jesus, that even hurricane force winds and billowing whitecaps of trials and pressures cannot separate you from the Dock of His love or the shore of your destiny as a child of God. Earnestly heed the things you have been taught, and hold fast, without wavering, lest one day you find your boat aimlessly adrift on some distant and godforsaken shore.