On Practicing Sin and Falling Away

Joseph D. Klotz

August 10, 2024

"Therefore let us leave the elementary teachings about Christ and go on to maturity, not laying again the foundation of repentance from acts that lead to death, and of faith in God, instruction about baptisms, the laying on of hands, the resurrection of the dead, and eternal judgment. And God permitting, we will do so. It is impossible for those who have once been enlightened, who have tasted the heavenly gift, who have shared in the Holy Spirit, who have tasted the goodness of the word of God and the powers of the coming age, if they fall away, to be brought back to repentance, because to their loss they are crucifying the Son of God all over again and subjecting him to public disgrace" (Hebrews 6:1-6).

This portion of the book of Hebrews can be disconcerting. It certainly was to me. It sounds an awful lot like the author is saying once someone falls away from the faith, they can never come back. But I don't think that is what he is teaching, God be praised. We have Jesus' own example of the Prodigal Son which teaches us that even those who wander away from their father's house will be graciously welcomed back into it. God our Father wants all men to be saved and come to a knowledge of the truth (1 Timothy 2:4). Sadly, as Jesus also said:

"O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing" (Matthew 23:37).

So, what is he saying?

This isn't intended to be a discourse on the doctrine of Election. Suffice it to say for now that God wants, and is responsible for the saving faith within us. We, on the other hand, may take all the credit when we are, as Jesus describes Israel in Matthew 23, "not willing." Hebrews 6, according to the plain reading of the text, describes apostasy. The author is writing about a person who believed and then rejected God's promise. The author explains that this person has no hope of being restored because he is unrepentant, not because God is unwilling to receive him. Quite to the contrary. This hypothetical man makes a practice of sinning. John describes something similar in his first epistle:

"Everyone who sins breaks the law; in fact, sin is lawlessness. But you know that he appeared so that he might take away our sins. And in him is no sin. No one who lives in him keeps on sinning. No one who continues to sin has either seen him or known him. Dear children, do not let anyone lead you astray. He who does what is sinful is of the devil, because the devil has been sinning from the beginning. The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the devil's work. No one who is born of God will continue to sin, because God's seed remains in him; he cannot go on sinning, because he has been born of God. This is how we know who the children of God are and who the children of the devil are: Anyone who does not do what is right is not a child of God; nor is anyone who does not love his brother" (1 John 3:4-10).

The author of Hebrews spends a lot of time encouraging his audience not to fall away, and to persevere in the faith. He says that if we who have heard and believed the gospel continue to practice sin as our way of life, if we refuse to confess our sin and turn away from it, there is no more sacrifice for it. This is the same thing that John describes. It is the difference between sinning because we have a sinful nature vs. sinning willingly in pursuit of gratifying the desires of our sinful flesh. There is forgiveness in Christ for the former, but condemnation for the latter.

We know that we belong to Christ because we are baptized into his death and resurrection (Romans 6:3-5). The daily struggle of the Christian, thus washed by water and the word, is to love our neighbor as ourself as Jesus calls us to do, and to no longer make a practice of sinning, something which is impossible to do by our own power. Paul explains our rather bleak situation to the Romans:

"So I find this law at work: When I want to do good, evil is right there with me. For in my inner being I delight in God's law; but I see another law at work in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within my members. What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God -- through Jesus Christ our Lord!" (Romans 7:21-25).

Our sinful flesh seeks to gratify its sinful desires. Our inner man animated by the indwelling of the Holy Spirit fights against the flesh constantly. This is the simul justus et peccator. We are simultaneously sinner according to the flesh and saint according to the Spirit, though we remain one person composed of a rational soul and human flesh, both of which were created in the beginning by God and declared "very good," but corrupted by sin and subjected to death by the disobedience of the first Adam.

Not surprisingly, this teaching of Scripture is taught in the Lutheran Confessions. The Lutheran Confessions indeed assert that justifying faith and mortal sin cannot exist within the same breast (Stephenson, 1993). This may at first sound as though the Christian can never return to the faith if he sins, or that he must exist in a state of flux, like alternating electric current oscillating between Spiritfilled/ Spirit-abandoned. Here is Luther in the Smalcald Articles:

"So it is necessary to know and to teach this: When holy people -- still having and feeling original sin and daily repenting and striving against it -- happen to fall into manifest sins (as David did into adultery, murder, and blasphemy [2 Samuel 11]), then faith and the Holy Spirit have left them. The Holy Spirit does not permit sin to have dominion, to gain the upper hand so it can be carried out, but represses and restrains it from doing what it wants (Psalm 51:11; Romans 6:14). If sin does what it wants, the Holy Spirit and faith are not present. For St. John says, "No one born of God makes a practice of sinning...and he cannot keep on sinning" (1 John 3:9). And yet it is also true when St. John says, "If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us" (1:8) (SA III iii 43-45).

What can he possibly mean by a "holy people still having and feeling original sin daily?" What does he mean by manifest sin? Sins which are outward and obvious? That makes sense. It is easy to grasp when we are thinking of sins like theft, murder, slander, and adultery. But coveting is also a sin. Wasn't this what David did from his palace window looking at Bathsheba before he ever committed the outward act of adultery?

Certainly violating the First or Second Commandments is a sin. But those things don't always "manifest" themselves. One can outwardly look like a Christian and even go to church while inwardly he despises preaching and God's Word, misuses God's name, and sets up his own idols without outwardly bowing down to a graven image.

Are not our sinful desires also sin that damns? We do confess that we have sinned in thought, word, and deed. If our thoughts and desires can be sinful, which Scripture clearly shows they can be, how then would the Holy Spirit be able to exist within the breast of any man? Would not desiring something sinful, such as an illicit sexual relationship (the coveting of one's neighbor's wife), be allowing sin to have dominion, as much as actually engaging in such a sinful relationship physically? Jesus seems to think so:

"You have heard that it was said, 'Do not commit adultery.' But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart. If your right eye causes you to sin, gouge it out and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into hell. And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to go into hell" (Matthew 5:27-30).

Of course, Jesus' point is clear. It isn't your eye or your hand that causes you to sin. It is your heart. Moreover, merely abstaining from the outward act of adultery isn't good enough. We have broken the Sixth Commandment by our thoughts.

What does Luther mean when he says that faith cannot dwell with mortal sin? Is he saying that sin "carried out" is the sin that drives away the Holy Spirit and destroys faith, but sinful thoughts and desires do not? The answer to this is going to have something to do with the paradox of being simul justus et peccator as described above. It seems that passages like those cited from the Confessions would undermine that concept of being simultaneously sinner and saint. Either that, or sinful desires are venial sins (sins capable of being forgiven), if there were such categories as "mortal" and "venial" sins.

In the Large Catechism, Luther explains that the Law shows us what God wants us to do. Luther then directs our attention to the Creed so that we might know what to expect from God (Gospel):

"Now we have the Ten Commandments, a summary of divine teaching about what we are to do in order that our whole life may be pleasing to God...The miserable blind people do not see that no person can go far enough to keep one of the Ten Commandments as it should be kept. Both the Apostles' Creed and the Lord's Prayer must come to our aid (as we shall hear). By them power and strength to keep the commandments is sought and prayed for and received continually...Just occupy yourself with them. Try your best. Apply all power and ability. You will find so much to do that you will neither seek nor value any other work or holiness" (LC I 311, 316, 318).

By our own power, Luther says, we cannot keep the Law. Thanks be to God that we keep the Commandments by the power of the Holy Spirit working in us.

Luther connects the Creed to the First Commandment. He describes the Creed as "nothing other than the answer and confession of Christians arranged with respect to the First Commandment" (LC II 10-11). The Creed teaches us to know God as the Creator, and that we have nothing that we have of ourselves; it all comes from the only God, our creator. With all of these gifts God gives us, Luther says, it is our duty to love, praise, thank, and serve God without ceasing. (LC II 20-23). At the same time, however, Luther also treats the First Article of the Creed as Law. He says that if we really believed it, we would act according to it.

"This article ought to humble and terrify us all, if we believed it. For we sin daily (Hebrews 3:12-13) with eyes, ears, hands, body and soul, money and possessions, and with everything we have. This is especially true of those who fight against God's Word. Yet Christians have this advantage: they acknowledge that they are duty bound to serve God for all these things and to be obedient to Him. We ought, therefore, daily to recite this article. We ought to impress it upon our mind and remember that it is God who gives and does all these things. In these escapes we sense and see His fatherly heart and His surpassing love toward us (Exodus 34:6). In this way the heart would be warmed and kindled to be thankful, and to use all such good things to honor and praise God" (LC II 22- 23).

His implication is that we, at least according to our Flesh, neither believe it nor do what it suggests. This should, as he says, terrify us. The Creed should also give us comfort that God gives us His gifts freely in Christ, out of His own goodness. The Holy Spirit will then work in us thankfulness.

But the real important part of all this for our present discussion is Luther's treatment of sanctification. He says that even though we have sins, the Holy Spirit does not allow them to harm us. We are in Christ's Church:

"...the Holy Spirit causes our sanctification by the following: the communion of saints or the Christian Church, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting. That means He leads us first into His holy congregation and places us in the bosom of the Church. Through the Church He preaches to us and brings us to Christ" (LC II 37).

We receive uninterrupted forgiveness by faith in Christ. It is by this enlivening work of the Holy Spirit within us that we begin to keep the Law and do works pleasing to God.

Luther also calls sanctification the growth of faith, citing 2 Thessalonians 1 (LC II 57):

"We ought always to thank God for you, brothers, and rightly so, because your faith is growing more and more, and the love every one of you has for each other is increasing" (2 Thessalonians 1:3).

To Luther, this is how we get better able to do good works and keep the Law: it is the result of increasing faith in us who make use of the Word and signs in Christ's Church, by which the Holy Spirit works in and through us. (LC II 57-58).

In the Creed, Luther says, we learn that God gives us "all that He has and is able to do." This is the Gospel. Luther goes on to say that the purpose of this giving is to "aid and direct us in keeping the 10 Commandments." We are aided in keeping them; we get better and better as faith increases, as good works are the fruit of faith (James 2:14-19). This is what is called in the Formula of Concord the Third Use of the Law.

To be a Lutheran is to acknowledge paradox in Scripture and, rather than to explain it away rationally as Reformed theologians try to do, allow it to stand and embrace its tension. Luther acknowledges this briefly at the end of section III of the Smalcald Articles when he writes:

"For St. John says, 'No one born of God makes a practice of sinning...And yet it is also true when St. John says, 'If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us'" (SA III iii 45).

Christians, who are born of God by their baptism into Christ no longer make a practice of sinning, yet they have sin. So, it seems Luther is saying that to deny our thoughts, words, and deeds are sinful, (to say that we have no sin that needs forgiving) is to practice sin. To confess our sin in penitent faith in Christ is to be cleansed from all unrighteousness through faith, and that faith is itself a gift of God. We are not alternating current, constantly changing states, falling in and out of faith all the time. It is much more like theoretical physics trying to explain how light simultaneously acts like both a wave and a particle; how the cat in Schroedinger's box is both dead and alive until we open the box and collapse all the other wave functions. We seem to live in both states at the same time. If we think about that for too long, we must, like Paul, exclaim, "Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God -- through Jesus Christ our Lord!" (Romans 7:25).

There is a difference between the Christian who "stumbles", i.e. acts according to the desires of the Flesh and commits sin, and is then rebuked by the Holy Spirit through the Law, and finally comforted by the preaching of the Gospel, and the man whom Luther describes in the Smalcald Articles as having fallen into "manifest sin." The first man is an example of the one whom St. John describes in his first epistle when he writes that the one born of God does not continue to make a practice of sinning. The second man is one who has fallen away; who says that he has no sin and the truth is not in him.

In keeping with the theme of sexual sin, we can apply this concept to homosexuality as well: There is a difference between someone struggling with same-sex attraction who confesses and renounces that sin, and a socalled practicing homosexual who does not acknowledge that his perverse sexual acts and desires are sin. The first is a penitent sinner who needs the comfort of the Gospel. The latter is unrepentant and needs the conviction of the Law. (Bombaro, 2023). This, however, applies to any sin which burdens us, and against which we struggle, not just sexual sins, on which we seem to be fixated as a society today. No one is exempt.

Those who belong to Christ are called to treat others as we want to be treated, and not to make a practice of sinning. Not that the Christians can become perfect and sinless in this life. Rather, we are to struggle daily with our sinful flesh and it's desires instead of pursuing them. The Christian has been baptized into Christ's death and resurrection. Since we have thus died to sin, how can we practice it any longer?

This struggle to live according to the Spirit rather than according to the flesh will last as long as we live in this fallen creation. Until the Last Day, when Christ returns in judgment, casts sin, death, and the devil into the lake of fire, and raises us to life everlasting in incorruptible, immortal bodies like His own.

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