Hebrews 5

Much to say about Melchizedek’s order—hard to explain because they have become dull of hearing. Wesley: the hardness is not chiefly in the subject but in their slothfulness in considering and dullness in apprehending the things of God. The digression reproves, admonishes, and exhorts.

Application: dullness is a decline from earlier attentiveness—“have become” names a change. Grace that once opened ears can be neglected; the rebuke assumes responsibility to wake up and hear again before deeper truth is wasted.

Calvin: difficulty is stated to stimulate attention, not to repel; the cause is in themselves, not in the subject. The Lord’s word is light, but its brightness is dimmed through our darkness—dullness, sloth, vanity, worldly cares, and fleshly lusts.

God still speaks clearly; darkened reception is the crisis. The warning is a means to pierce sluggishness. Melchizedek remains the type of Christ—worth every sharpened ear the Spirit restores.

By this time they ought to be teachers; instead they need the ABCs of God’s oracles again—milk, not solid food. Wesley: first principles of religion (enumerated in 6:1); milk is the first and plainest doctrines.

Time allotted for growth makes prolonged infancy culpable. Prevenient and cooperating grace enable progress toward teaching others; remaining on milk when solid food is due is resistible neglect, not a fixed decree that some must stay babes.

Calvin: unreasonable and disgraceful to linger in elements when they ought to instruct others—not even disciples of ordinary truth, as if they did not know the alphabet. We must learn through life, yet so as not to remain always in first principles; every one ought to impart what he knows.

Progress corresponding to time is what God requires and, in His people, produces. Milk and solid food are both sound doctrine; prolonged childhood under much light exposes sloth God rebukes as He presses the elect toward maturity.

Living on milk means unskilled in the word of righteousness—still a child. Wesley: one who neither desires nor can digest anything else; unexperienced in the sublimer truths of the gospel. He warns those who desire and digest nothing but justification and imputed righteousness as if that were the whole diet.

Childhood here is not precious simplicity but arrested development. The word of righteousness invites skill; refusing solid truth while clinging only to first comforts leaves the hearer fragile when harder Melchizedek teaching—and the warning of chapter 6—arrives.

Calvin: babes who from weakness refuse solid doctrine; God is constrained even to prattle with them. He takes “word of righteousness” as completeness of knowledge leading to perfection, not the narrow question of justification alone—those who indulge ignorance preclude themselves from a knowledge of Christ.

Infancy of understanding is culpable when time was given to grow. The gospel itself supplies milk and meat; remaining only on milk is a willful tenderness God names so that hearers will seek the skill His word gives.

Solid food for the mature—powers of discernment trained by constant practice. Wesley: strong meat belongs to those of full age; habit means strength of spiritual understanding from maturity of spiritual age, so they exercise themselves with ease, readiness, cheerfulness, and profit.

Maturity is practiced, not merely possessed. Grace enables the training; the believer must use senses repeatedly to tell good from evil. Dull hearing is reversed along the same path—attentive, habitual obedience that can still be neglected or pursued.

Calvin: perfect means adults in Christ, spiritual men who by continual practice attain habit to discern good and evil. Faith that doubts, suspended between truth and falsehood, is near to nothing; all senses must be furnished by God’s word against Satan’s fallacies.

Discernment is the Spirit’s fruit through constant use of the word. God arms His people for battle; maturity is not a human ladder into favor but the trained steadiness He works in those who are no longer tossed by every wind. Practice is commanded because grace makes it fruitful.