This is a quote from Perfection of Perdition by Charles Welch. Buy the book here.
Perdition, or the saving of the soul (Heb. 10:19-39). Doctrine has held sway over the reader of this epistle for a long period, but however involved the argument may be, and however multiplied the proofs, it must certainly somewhere before the close, give place to practical teaching and exhortation. To that we have arrived, and it is introduced by the words of verses 19-22, ‘Having therefore…Let us’. The exhortation ‘let us’ is valueless without the ‘having therefore’, but so also is the ‘having’ without the practical issue. What does the apostle say these believers have? Boldness to enter into the holiest. Under the law this was restricted to the high priest, and to the day of atonement. ‘The high priest alone once’ (9:7). ‘With the blood of others’ (9:25). The case is now different. Boldness to enter is the privilege of all believers by the blood of Jesus. By a new and living way, which He hath consecrated for us. The legal way was old. ‘Now that which decayeth and waxeth old is ready to vanish away’ (8:13). This way is new. Prosphatos means primarily ‘newly slain’; the legal way was dead. ‘Priests … were not suffered to continue by reason of death’ (7:23). The entrance is ‘by the blood of Jesus’ (10:19) and ‘His flesh’ (10:20). The New Covenant demands a new way. The Lord’s flesh is likened to the veil. Of all the many and wonderful suggestions that have been made by commentators as to the meaning here of the veil, none seem worth a second thought that have no place for that historic fact that ‘the veil of the temple was rent in twain from the top to the bottom’ (Matt. 27:51) when the Lord Jesus died. The second veil barred the entrance to the holiest of all, ‘the Holy Ghost thus signifying that the way into the holiest of all was not yet made manifest’. The newly-slain and living way means a rent veil. And having an High Priest over the house of God. As chapter 8 puts it, New Covenant believers have a seated Priest in a heavenly sanctuary. So, far the summary of the doctrine, what they ‘have’. Now follows the summary of the practice ‘let us’. Let us draw near with a true heart. To draw near expresses the full privilege of those who are sanctified. It is a word used nowhere else in the epistles of Paul except 1 Timothy 6:3 where ‘consent’ translates the word and shows an entirely different usage. So, special a word we would expect to be stamped with the hallmark ‘seven’, for that is the number of its occurrences in Hebrews. The true heart means the heart of the New Covenant realities in contrast with the old Covenant shadows (8:10). So we read of the ‘true’ Tabernacle (8:2), and of the antitypes of the ‘true’ (9:24). In full assurance of faith. Hebrews 6:11 speaks of a full assurance of hope, and both hope and faith find anchor ‘within the veil’ (Heb. 6:19; 10:20).
Having our hearts sprinkled from an evil conscience, and our bodies washed with pure water. The sprinkling here refers to the ‘ashes of the heifer sprinkling the unclean’, which set forth in type that cleansing of the conscience from dead works, which was only possible through the blood of Christ (9:13,14). The washing of the bodies with pure water refers to the spiritual reality set forth in the typical ‘divers washings’ of the law (9:10). Let us … let us … let us. Three times over comes the beseeching command, let us draw near, let us hold fast, let us consider one another.
The first is God-ward, the second is personal, the third is for others. Let us hold fast the profession of our hope without wavering. The word here (elpis) is hope, not faith, and refers to ‘that better hope whereby we draw near to God’ (7:19). This must be held at all costs ‘without wavering’. This firm hold of the hope and its profession is in view in Hebrews 3:6 and 14, and to this all the exhortations to endure are directed. Without wavering (aklimes) may be translated ‘without bending’. It is the exact opposite of klino ‘turned to flight’ (Heb. 11:34).
For He is faithful that promised. Much is made of the promises in this epistle, indeed epaggelia occurs therein fourteen times. Much is made too of the faithfulness of the Promiser, especially in Hebrews 6:13-19. Let us consider one another. There is a false piety that believes that God is well pleased with a monastic isolation, that God only wrote four commandments and not ten, and that has no room for the love of neighbour, as a corollary to the love of God. This is a travesty of truth. ‘He that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God Whom he hath not seen?’ (1 John 4:20). The special ‘provoking’ here is to ‘love and to good works’. The word ‘good’ here is not agathos, but kalos as in Hebrews 5:14; 6:5.
Not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together, as the manner of some is. The usual interpretation of this passage associates it with attendance at a Christian place of worship. The word ‘assembling’ (episunagoge), and its cognate (episunago), are never used of an ‘assembling’ in the sense of attending service at church. Epislmago is used in Matthew 23:37 and its parallel passage for the Lord’s desire to gather the children of Jerusalem to Himself as a hen does her chickens. It is used in Matthew 24:31 and its parallel passage of the gathering together of the elect by the angels. It is used in Mark 1:33 and Luke 12:1, for the crowd who gathered for healing or interest. The only other place where episunagoge occurs is 2 Thessalonians 2:1, ‘The coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, and our gathering together unto Him’. The apostle by the use of the word ‘forsaking’ evidently glances back to such passages as 2 Chronicles 24:18, where the ‘forsaking’ of the house of the Lord meant apostasy, and was visited with wrath, and also to Nehemiah 10:39 and 13:11, where adherence to the house of God indicated loyalty. The ‘gathering together of ourselves’ has value only as it foreshadows the hope of ‘our gathering together unto Him’. At the present time faithfulness to truth and to the blessed hope sometimes cuts us off from Christian assemblies, and this passage must never be used to justify compromise. The present dispensation knows no ‘place of worship’ except where Christ sitteth at the right hand of God, for God dwelleth not in temples made with hands. Churches and chapels are conveniences, not essentials.