Let us go on to maturity

This has taken quite a while to write.  It's been a very busy two months or so.  It was tough to get this out by Christmas.  I apologize for content that's not exactly relevant to the Advent. –mem

We are in Hebrews in church, and we came upon chapter six today (ed. now a long time ago).  It proved a fertile ground for questions, which is hardly surprising:  it comes up in eternal security debates all the time.  It's practically de rigueur for anyone opposing eternity security, and so most of the conversation about the passage seems to revolve around the subject—especially on the Internet.

If we take a bit of a step back, though, it seems that there's more here than we might usually think.  Establishing any sort of detailed context is really beyond the scope of my blog, but I think we can successfully argue that the warnings here are directed primarily to Christian Jews who were tempted to return to their Judaism.

The elementary principles enumerated in chapter six really continue from the rebuke of chapter five ("For though by this time you should be teachers, you need someone to teach you again the basic principles of the oracles of God," 5:12).

I think we can find parallels to  the principles in chapter 6 in the Old Testament.  So for example (non-exhaustive list):

Why did Jesus have to cleanse the tabernacle?

There is an interesting passage in Hebrews:

Thus it was necessary for the copies of the heavenly things to be purified with these rites, but the heavenly things themselves with better sacrifices than these (9.23).

As we read in Exodus, the earthly tabernacle that was created was really a copy of a heavenly pattern.  Hebrews tells us that the pattern wasn't just blueprints, but a real tabernacle.

Setting aside for the moment some of the difficulties of "real" here, one has to ask how a heavenly tabernacle came to need purifying.  How was it that it was corrupted?

I don't really have any definite conclusions on the subject, but I can offer a couple different ideas.  Some thoughts from my two or four readers would be appreciated.