Why Drifting from Jesus is Easy (Hebrews 2)

A Few Thoughts to Consider

Why is it so easy to drift from Jesus?

If you’ve been a Christian for any length of time, you’ve probably gone through a series of evolutions. When you’re a new believer, you often enter a high grace period. This might involve sudden deliverance from an addiction or an added sense of God’s presence in the mundane activities of life. But the longer you’re a child of God, the more this sense of intimacy might start to wane.

Some of this is natural because God is helping you understand what it means to walk by faith. But there is also a danger of drifting and abandoning your first love (Rev. 2.4). You start to take what Christ has done for granted and are in danger of shipwrecking your faith (1 Tim. 1:19). If this is where you’re at, Hebrews 2:1-4 offers this word of warning,

¹ For this reason, we must pay attention all the more to what we have heard, so that we will not drift away. ² For if the message spoken through angels was legally binding and every transgression and disobedience received a just punishment, ³ how will we escape if we neglect such a great salvation? This salvation had its beginning when it was spoken of by the Lord, and it was confirmed to us by those who heard him. ⁴ At the same time, God also testified by signs and wonders, various miracles, and distributions of gifts from the Holy Spirit according to his will.

A few points to note. First, as Gareth Cockerill writes, “We refers to the readers but also to all of us who have received God’s blessings in Christ.”[1] The Hebrews author is saying to his or her Jewish audience that drifting is natural even after understanding who Jesus is and what he has done. 

Another key point to note: If you read Hebrews, you’ll notice there is a lot of talk about angels. Paul Ellingworth writes, “A clue to the place of angels in the structure of the argument is provided in Heb. 2:2, which, like Acts 7:53 and Gal. 3:19, refers to the tradition that angels acted as mediators when the Law was given to Moses.”^[2]

According to Adam Clarke,

“The Jews had the highest opinion of the transcendent excellence of angels, they even associate them with God in the creation of the world, and suppose them to be of the privy council of the Most High; and thus they understand [Genesis 1:26]: ‘Let us make man in our own image, in our own likeness.’”[3]

This is a significant statement to understand as we go back to Genesis 12 and go through the rest of the First Testament. From Genesis through Malachi, we will notice a recurring theme. God calls his people out, shows them his power, and then they drift. And what the Hebrews author wants us to know is that we face this same danger today. Just as the children of Israel rejected God time after time, it’s possible for us to do the same. Apart from God’s grace, drifting is our natural default.