Hebrews 2:2: A Word That Holds

For since the message spoken through angels was binding, and every violation and disobedience received its just punishment,

Hebrews 2:2 (NIV)

A Word That Holds

The bucket takes both of his arms. He gets it out to the pen before school in his sister’s boots, because his own are still wet, and the ducks come up the bank at him hard enough that he has to plant his feet and hold the thing over his head. He has three minutes for this and he takes six.

For since the message spoken through angels was binding, and every violation and disobedience received its just punishment. God had spoken before, and what he said then held. It was binding, and breaking it cost the man who broke it.

If that word carried that much, the one that came later carries more. This one came from the Lord himself, and the people who heard him say it confirmed it to us.

So the weight is real, and the warning that goes with it deserves reading plainly rather than around. Here it is plainly: the writer asks how we will escape if we ignore a salvation this size, and he never answers the question. Nobody in that letter is told there’s no penalty. The danger he names is drifting, and drifting takes no decision at all. A week goes by, then a month, and a man finds himself a long way downstream from where he meant to be.

I can be told something on a Monday by a person I love and be surprised by it on Thursday. There’s no villain in that. It went in and it didn’t stay.

God has gone to considerable trouble to speak to people, and what he said is good news worth the attention it asks for. The attention is ordinary. Mostly it looks like slowing down over the same few lines until they’re yours.

He comes back up to the house with the empty bucket knocking against his knee, and his mother has his backpack waiting by the door. Six minutes, and the rest of the morning gets arranged around them.