Hebrews 6

“Therefore” picks up the rebuke of milk-drinkers: leave the elementary doctrine let’s press on to perfection. Wesley: saying no more of these for the present—not forgetting them, but refusing to stall forever on first things. Repentance from dead works and faith toward God remain the foundation; the call is to build.

Growth is grace-enabled and sincerely required. Believers who linger in rudiments risk the dullness already named. Maturity is not optional polish; it is the path along which steadfastness is kept—or lost.

Calvin: leave first principles not by forgetting them, but by refusing to remain always engaged in laying the foundation. The house must rise. Elementary doctrine is for catechumens; the goal is progress God Himself permits and produces.

Going on to maturity grows from a living faith God has planted. The foundation stands; the elect are pressed forward by the same grace that began them. Stagnation is dangerous precisely because warnings are means in the path of perseverance.

Washings, laying on of hands, resurrection, eternal judgment—the catechetical cluster. These are not discarded; they are foundations already laid. Wesley ties them to baptism, the gift of the Spirit, and irreversible judgment.

Knowing first things is distinct from living in their power. Instruction without progress leaves the hearer vulnerable when the hard word of verses 4–6 arrives.

Calvin reads this as the Church’s common catechism—repentance, faith, baptismal doctrine, resurrection, judgment—taught once to the newly consecrated. To turn back to them as if starting over is to retrograde.

Application: the basics remain true forever; circling them without building is spiritual childhood prolonged. God means His people to move from milk to solid food under the same gospel.

Progress depends on God’s permitting. Wesley: we will go on to perfection, and so much the more diligently because of what follows. Human resolve is not imaginary; divine leave is decisive.

The “if” is not fatalism. It summons earnest going-on while confessing that advance is gift. Neglect of diligence under this mercy is the danger the warning will name.

Calvin: a dreadful denunciation follows; the Apostle fulminates lest they indulge supineness. Progress in the course is the special gift of God—not something a man bounds into whenever he pleases.

Reformed comfort and fear together: God permits the advance He commands. The elect are not self-made mature; yet the warning that follows is aimed to shake security and keep the flock watchful.

Enlightened, tasted the heavenly gift, shared in the Holy Spirit—Wesley hears light of God’s love in Christ, remission sweeter than honey, and the witness and fruit of the Spirit. These are not empty labels for almost-Christians; they describe those who had truly tasted grace.

Classical Arminian fork: a participant in these blessings can still fall away totally. The warning is pastoral precisely because the privileges were true. Softening “were made partakers of the Holy Spirit” into mere external contact undercuts Wesley’s reading and the force of the text.

Calvin grants strong language: illumination, taste of the heavenly gift, participation of the Spirit. Yet he will not concede that the reprobate received the Spirit of regeneration proper to the elect. God may give sparks of light and some taste of goodness that later vanish—temporal faith without deep root.

The warning is serious as a means; those who finally fall show they were never sealed as sons. The elect are kept; temporary professors may be deeply moved and still not born of God. Do not soften the terror—use it to drive self-examination and diligence.

Wesley: relish and delight in the word; every one tastes these who has a hope full of immortality. The comparison is birth: seeing light, tasting nourishment, partaking of the world to come.

This is experiential Christianity, not bare profession. Those who have known the word’s sweetness and eschatological power are the very ones warned—because apostasy after such taste is the tragedy in view.

Calvin: the Gospel is a sweet testimony of God’s love; by faith we are admitted as it were into the kingdom of heaven and see blessed immortality. The names signalize true knowledge of the Gospel—yet still, for some, a knowledge that can vanish.

Tasting is not the same as being kept by the Father’s gift to the Son. The verse heightens the warning’s severity without granting that every taster was elect. Privilege intensifies guilt when the fall is final.

Fallen away—Wesley: not a mere supposition but a plain relation of fact. Wilful total apostates who cast away faith, hope, and love cannot be renewed again to repentance, though they were renewed once. They crucify the Son afresh and put Him to open shame.

Classical Arminian insistence: the impossibility is true. This is not hypothetical theater for people who never believed. After enlightenment and sharing the Spirit, final apostasy leaves no path back to the foundation. The warning must stay sharp: a true believer can finally fall away.

Calvin: total defection from the Gospel—not ordinary sins. Such apostates never truly feel repentance again; deprived of the Spirit and given to a reprobate mind, they rush headlong. If someone rises after a grievous fall, that itself shows they had not committed this whole falling away.

Impossible renewal describes the hardened apostate, typically the non-elect who only tasted. The elect cannot finally fall; God uses this thunderbolt as a means so that they fear, watch, and endure.

Rain often falls; useful crop; blessing from God. The image assumes irrigation—gospel privilege repeatedly given. Fruit answers cultivation.

Those who drink the rain must bring forth. Grace received is meant to produce a crop; the same rain that blesses can, in the next verse, leave land near cursing if thorns answer instead.

Calvin: as earth must germinate seed promptly for harvest, so hearers must let the word strike root without delay. Those who receive the seed into the heart and bring genuine shoots will progress to ripe fruit by God’s blessing.

Blessing on fruitful land is God’s work in soil He makes fertile. The simile exhorts glad embrace of the word and distinguishes reprobate ground by what grows—without denying that rain was truly poured.

Wesley: no more labor bestowed; whose end is to be burned—as Jerusalem was shortly after. Privilege without fruit ends in judgment.

The warning of 4–6 is not abstract. Land that drank rain and bore only thorns images apostasy’s outcome. Take the burning seriously; go on to maturity while the rain still falls.

Calvin: earth that after culture and irrigation brings only thorns affords no hope of harvest; the husbandman’s remedy is to burn the weeds. Those who destroy the gospel seed by indifference or corrupt affection show themselves reprobates from whom no harvest can be expected.

The burn is not in doubt; so is the distinction of soils. Warnings separate and preserve. Fruitless professors under much rain are near curse—yet the beloved addressed next are not written off as already ash.