What does it mean to backslide?

Backsliding is failure in testimony and practical Christian living, resulting in a believer walking in a way dishonouring to the Lord. For such, sad as it is to backslide, there is a road open to restoration by true repentance and confession. We read,

Sad to say, many new-but-true believers needlessly worry about being lost. They sometimes use the sin of Judas and his tragic end as an example. Many believers have followed in the steps of Peter in denying that they know Christ. But no true child of God has ever gone, nor can go, in the way of Judas, the apostate, and give up Christ. Backsliding is not renouncing Christianity, but failing in that holy separated walk which God desires of His children for their blessing.

Peter was a backslider for whom the Lord prayed and on whom the Lord looked (Luke 22:32, 61). That touching look of grieved and injured love broke the heart of the poor backslider: “Peter went out and wept bitterly” (v. 62). Soon he was restored to fellowship with the Lord. His true repentance showed that he was a real believer and follower of Christ. Provision is made in the advocacy of Christ with the Father for the restoration of backsliders (1 John 2:1). But of apostates it is written: “For it is impossible … if they fall away, to renew them again to repentance” (Heb. 6:4-6). A true believer is one who has not only “tasted,” but in a spiritual sense has gone on to eat the flesh and drink the blood of the Son of Man in real appropriating faith (John 6:53). One may taste and perish (Heb. 6), but to eat is to live forever (John 6:51, 58).

The term is a scriptural one, as you will see if you turn to Proverbs 14:14. We have an example of what is meant in the case of the saints at Ephesus. They were what many would doubtless have regarded as a model company. Their zealous labours, their faithfulness in repudiating false teachers, their endurance for Christ's sake, were well-known. Nevertheless, He who reads the heart had something against them: they had left their first love (see Rev. 2:2-4). Outwardly they were all that could be desired, but their love to Christ had ceased to burn with its former brightness, the ardour of their first affection for Himself had cooled; they were backsliders in heart.

Backsliding is losing a good conscience.

A clear distinction must be made between apostasy, and backsliding. Backsliding is a word which only occurs in the Old Testament, but, alas! we see many, backsliding, believers in the Christian profession today. Such are invariably dissatisfied and wretched in the secret of their own hearts. They deplore their folly and weakness, and cling tenaciously to the fact of their conversion.

A backslider is one who has belied the truth which he once professed, and in which he found pleasure—one who has denied the Lord.

What is it that leads to backsliding? Idolatry of some kind or other. Something has been allowed to usurp Christ’s proper place in the heart—the love of money, pleasure, worldly friends and associations; or it may be neglect of prayer, reading the Word of God in private, or any conscious unfaithfulness to Him. It may be through a yielding to infidel tendencies and a desire to appear “brainy” before others. The causes may be many, but the disease is fearfully common today.

The backslider of verse 9 is evidently a true believer. It does not say that he never was purged from his old sins; much less does it say that having been once saved he is now no longer purged from his sins; but that he has forgotten the purging of his former sins. Purged he was, but he has forgotten it. We must distinguish, therefore, between the backsliding of this verse and the backsliding referred to in Hebrews 6, and in the parable of the sower (See, Luke 8:13).

In Hebrews, the backslider is an apostate who falls away from the Christian faith into such a repudiation of it as involves the crucifying to himself the Son of God afresh, and his case is altogether hopeless.

An apostate is one who professes to believe and receives all the outward privileges of Christianity, yet with no divine work in his soul, and so later he gives up Christ. Thus Judas, an apostate, sold his Master, but Peter, a backslider, temporarily denied his Master.

In order to answer this question, I must point out that backsliders are of two kinds. There are those who have never got beyond a mere profession of Christianity. Brought under religious influences, they have taken the place of believers in Christ, and in all sincerity imagine that they are on the way to heaven. But there has been no divinely wrought conviction of sin in their souls; their consciences have never been ploughed up by the power of God's Word; to true repentance and saving faith in the Lord Jesus Christ they are entire strangers. In spite of their profession they are what they always were, unregenerate sinners. Sooner or later, perhaps, the religious life upon which they have entered becomes irksome to them. They feel that they cannot live up to the profession that they have made. Old tastes and desires reassert themselves, and little by little they slide back into their former manner of life and are looked upon, by those who once believed them to be real Christians, as backsliders. Like the sow of which we read in 2 Peter 2:22, their washing did not go deeper than the surface; outwardly reformed, they had never been transformed into Christ's sheep, and their turning again to the mire of sin is only what might be expected.

Rev. 2:4. — “But I have against thee that thou hast left thy first love.” Here is disclosed the root of Church and individual failure: heart departure from Christ. The fine gold had become dim. The flower was fading. The first-named fruit of the Spirit is love (Gal. 5:22), and that was but faintly seen, yet in Paul’s day the Church in Ephesus was noted for its “love unto all the saints,” a love begotten by love. When love, the very kernel of Christianity (1 Cor. 13), its crown too, and distinguishing glory is wanting, the moral power of Church and individual life is gone. Things may appear outwardly fair and promising, and none but an Omniscient eye may see the lack inwardly, coldness of heart to Christ. “Thou hast left thy first love” was the first step in the Church’s downward career (compare with Matt. 24:48). The loss of virgin love is a serious matter, and not to be regarded as a mere “somewhat,” as in the Authorised Version. “But I have against thee” — first love given up. “But I have a few things against thee” (v. 14) — persons allowed in the midst holding the doctrine of Balaam, and others holding the doctrine of the Nicolaitanes. “But I have against thee” (v. 20) — Jezebel permitted to corrupt with her loathsome doctrines. Observe that in each instance the “But I have against thee” is in marked contrast with approval ungrudgingly bestowed.