Apostasy in Ephesus

 That Ephesus was plagued by gnostic influences within the church is clear from the Book of Revelation, where Jesus commends the church for rejecting false apostles and the teachings of the Nicolaitans, which seems to be a gnostic group arguing for their own standards of morality.

In 1 Timothy, Paul writes to Timothy in Ephesus and tells him to urge people not to teach false doctrines, myths that are man-made, and practices that stem from a warped worldview that sees the created world around them as the problem.

In Chapter 4, a famously quoted passage, Paul writes that the Spirit of God has declared that some will even reject the faith to turn aside to this false worldview, and teach things that are actually the teachings of demons and deceptive spirits.

One would think his examples of this teaching would be that these demonically-influenced teachers would be telling people to reject holiness and go worship a goat's head as they sacrifice virgins to Satan; or, one would think, at the very least, they would be telling people to deny that Jesus is God or that He is the Christ or has come in the flesh, as they do according to John in his first epistle.

However, these followers of demonic teachings actually just tell people to avoid things that would tempt them to be too hinged to the world, specifically, the eating of certain foods and marriage. Here we are reminded of the gnostic ascetics in Collosae, a letter with similar instructions to those given to the Ephesians. "Do not taste," "Do not touch" is the mantra. "Taste" is a synecdoche for eating certain foods here. "Touch" is Paul's word for having sex with someone. Obviously, Paul advocates for the right use of food and sex. Hence, eating certain foods and marriage are those things that are being prohibited with these commands.

As discussed before, the gnostic method of dealing with sin stems from their worldview that the real problem is the presence of temptations that created things or people. In other words, the environment is the problem. Hence, salvation for the gnostic is to escape from the created world of tempting things rather than the orthodox, biblical view that sees salvation as the restoration of and to all created things through transformation of ourselves in Christ. We are transformed in biblical theology through the Spirit and the Word placed within us as we meet the created world that our fallen nature tempts us to distort for our own fleshly purposes with a renewed heart that wishes to use all creation in worship of God. This transformation and right use of all created things and people cannot be accomplished if they are removed because we wish to avoid temptation. Instead, worship only takes place when they are addressed head-on in the righteousness that Christ has given to us and to which we are being conformed through this process.

In essence, remove the possible temptation of the created thing by removing the created thing and you remove the possibility of worshiping God through the created thing. Remove that possibility and you remove any display of God's transforming work, i,e, the work of the gospel of Christ itself. God gets no glory so that the self-righteous gnostic can give some to himself.

And that is why Paul calls this apostasy. It is why the Holy Spirit explicitly says that these people withdraw from the faith, the true faith that Paul is teaching, by believing this. It isn't merely pettiness about peripherals or disagreements between Christians. It is a gospel issue.

The common American methodology of dealing with sin by removing temptation is not just a variant opinion that Christians can hold and still be in good standing. The Spirit of God Himself has called it an apostasy, a teaching of demons, a denial of the faith by those who profess to be Christian teachers but are, in fact, "speakers of falsehoods" who live in a mask ("in the outward presentation of an actor").

Paul will talk about apostasy throughout the letter, and warns that rejecting the faith does not always look like one might think. Apostasy is subtle. It sometimes is the way one deals with temptations and sin. Sometimes it is having nice feelings toward a person outside the faith who you desire to marry. Sometimes it's just being focused too hard on making money and not enough on helping people. Sometimes it's just talking bad about Christian teachers who are teaching the truth. All of these are examples of apostasy Paul gives in 1 Timothy (1:6, 19;  4:1; 5:8, 11-12, 15; 6:10; 6:20-21).

Hence, it is not always some explicit denial that is apparent in the church, but the implicit practices of those who claim Jesus as Lord, but deny Him by their deeds.