“For the earth which drinketh in the rain that cometh oft upon it, and bringeth forth herbs meet for them by whom it is dressed, receiveth blessing from God: But that which beareth thorns and briers is rejected, and is nigh unto cursing; whose end is to be burned.” (Hebrews 6:7–8, KJV 1900)
If there is any doubt as to whether the previous verses refer to believers in Jesus or those who have a mere intellectual assent to the facts of the gospel, the author resolves it with this metaphor.
I was never a farmer, but I did work on farms as a young boy. One of the things I learned was that farming was hard work. The other thing I learned was that the farmer desired that his field would yield produce good for consumption. However, a field could also yield weeds, thorns and thistles. The farmer rejoiced over the good produce, but not for the weeds. The weeds were only for burning in a fire.
The author’s metaphor presents only two categories of things that come from the field. There are the herbs and the thorns and briers. The farmer’s system requires rains that come from the heavens. Without the rain, there will be no produce. So here, the field drinks up the refreshing water of the gospel and produces both valuable herbs and worthless weeds. The author’s warning to his Jewish audience is that their watering with the gospel will either produce that which the farmer wants or the weeds that he does not. There are only two categories of people, the saved and the unsaved.
The Hebrews to whom the author is writing, have been blessed with the rains from Heaven. They had the ABCs of the gospel in the Old Testament writings, every one of which foreshadowed the blessings to come in Jesus. They now have been showered with the blessings of the fulfillment in Christ. With all this nourishing, they would either genuinely believe in Christ or they would not. Those that would walk away from their knowledge of the truth, would be lost. Those who remained until the end would be saved.
Renewing the Heart 