Heb 10:28-29 Anyone who has set aside the law of Moses dies without mercy on the evidence of two or three witnesses. (29) How much worse punishment, do you think, will be deserved by the one who has trampled underfoot the Son of God, and has profaned the blood of the covenant by which he was sanctified, and has outraged the Spirit of grace?
Under the Old Covenant, if an Israelite spurned the Mosaic Law and at least two or three witnesses verified his actions, he was put to death. This being true, the author then argued from the lesser to the greater. If defiance of an inferior covenant could bring such retribution, what about defiance of the New Covenant which, as he had made clear, is far superior? The answer can only be that the punishment would be substantially greater in such a case.
In order to show that this is so, the writer then placed defection from the faith in the harshest possible light. An apostate from the New Covenant has trampled the Son of God underfoot and has treated as an unholy thing the blood of the covenant that sanctified him. The words “sanctified him” refer to true Christians. Already the writer to the Hebrews has described them as “made holy” through the sacrifice of the body of Jesus Christ once for all” and as “made perfect forever” through this sanctifying work. Some seek to evade this conclusion by suggesting that Christ is the One referred to here as “sanctified” or that the person only claims to be sanctified. But these efforts are foreign to the writer’s thought and are so forced that they carry their own refutation. The author’s whole point lies in the seriousness of the act. To treat “the blood of the covenant” as though it were an “unholy” (or “common”) thing and to renounce its efficacy, is to commit a sin so heinous as to dwarf the fatal infractions of the Old Covenant. To this, an apostate adds the offense of insulting the Spirit of grace who originally wooed him to faith in Christ. This kind of spiritual rebellion clearly calls for a much worse punishment than the capital penalty that was inflicted under the Mosaic setup.
But again the writer was not thinking of hell. Many forms of divine retribution can fall on a human life which are worse than immediate death. In fact, Jeremiah made just such a complaint about the punishment inflicted on Jerusalem. One might think also of King Saul, whose last days were burdened with such mental and emotional turmoil that death itself was a kind of release.
