The Road to Apostasy Is Apostasy

I've known many apostates in my life. So many people who once proclaimed to be Christians now proclaim they are not. It's often with some sort of stimulus to being a better person now, and always has roots in some emotional decision. What's most interesting to me is that without a single exception, they all have the same thing in common: they were apostates long before they claimed to be.

These people, again, without exception, are people who believed all sorts of false doctrine and refused to be teachable when shown it was false. They refused to submit to Christ by submitting to the church and Christ's authority through it (What is more apostate than that?). There is simply nothing more obvious when watching a nature show that the member of the flock who goes off on his own is going to be the one that is devoured by the lion (not to mention that forsaking the assembly and not submitting to its teachers is a sin from which these people never repent). Almost all of them, if not all, were living in even more explicit sins. Yet, they seem to have maintained the idea that they were Christians throughout all of this.

Perhaps, it is due to evangelicals reduction of Christianity to just believing in a jesus in some way. The label "Christian" is so nebulous in our church culture that it becomes a label anyone can apply to themselves.

However, it should be understood that the road to apostasy is apostasy. These people were never Christians. I don't mean that in the typical Calvinist sense that they were never elect. I think that is true, but my point is that they were never visible Christians in the visible church. It was always the case that the person was not living under the Lordship of Christ, but their own lordship.

I personally have refuted a lot of what these people have believed, but they were always unteachable--the primary sign that one is void of the Spirit of God and not regenerate.

From a practical, and maybe psychological, standpoint, however, the reason why holding false doctrine and being unteachable leads to a more solidified apostasy is that when that false doctrine that was viewed as Christianity itself is proven false, the person thinks Christianity has been proven false. The person becomes disillusioned, as thought all that he believed was a lie (indeed, it was, but what he believed wasn't Christianity). The baby is thrown out with the bathwater because the apostate cannot distinguish between the baby and the bathwater.

From a spiritual standpoint, however, the person has been given over to his unbelief and sin because of his unbelief and sin. His rebellion now just takes a more obvious form.

I've seen this most often with moderns who are taught the inclusivism of Americanity, find out Christianity is exclusive, and then think that they are just now rejecting Christianity. Actually, they've never received it. If Christian love was always exclusive then what love did they accept but the wicked love of the world that accepts and tolerates the murderers of all things good. How long can such conflicting views of love be held in contexts where the Bible is preached anyway?

Many of them evidence false gospels in that they are gnostics in their understanding of Christianity. When the Bible destroys that Gnosticism, they no longer think Christianity is true.

We see, then, that false teaching is not a tolerable state of preaching in the church. It's actually feeding false, apostate christianities that aren't Christianity at all.

In other avenues of apostasy, the prosperity teaching in Americanity has led even people who reject it to question God's goodness when the world, specifically their own life, is not how it should be. They assume that God has promised them a world that He did not deliver and so must be false.

We see, then, however, that the true problem is arrogance. These people think that whatever they believe defines what Christianity is or isn't. When discovering that it may be something they don't like or believe, they reject it rather than rejecting their false beliefs. They are unwilling to admit that what they believed was never the truth, the life they lived was never that of a Christian, and the state of their apostasy was never something new. All that to say, that if you're going to be in rebellion against Christ by not believing His truth, not submitting to Him by submitting to church authority, partaking in church fellowship and discipleship in a teachable manner, etc., and then eventually say that you are not a Christian anymore, you may want to cross out the "anymore" part.


"Wherefore a lion out of the wood hath slain them, a wolf in the evening hath spoiled them, a leopard watcheth for their cities: every one that shall go out thence shall be taken, because their transgressions are multiplied, their rebellions strengthened" (Jeremiah 5:6).