What is apostasy and how can I recognize it?

It is apostasy that is contemplated in these verses, not just ordinary back-sliding — not the true believer growing cold and falling into sin; not persons, who have once professed conversion without reality, dropping their false profession and going back into the world — but that total falling away from, and repudiation of Christianity root and branch, which is APOSTASY.

No true child of God ever apostatizes, though not a few professors of the Christian religion have done so. If an Hebrew threw up his Christian profession and wished to get reinstated in the synagogue and amongst his own people, what would happen? He would find that as the price of re-admission he would have to call down a curse upon Jesus as an impostor. He would have in effect to crucify to himself "the Son of God afresh, and put Him to an open shame." Now to go to such lengths as that is to bring oneself under the governmental judgment of God, just as Pharaoh did in the days of old when God hardened his heart, so that it is impossible to be renewed to repentance.

Let us be clear as to what apostasy means. It is not just a course of backsliding, a growing cold on the part of Christians, as a result of which the world invades the church, dragging into its bosom a whole train of attendant evils. It is rather a complete forsaking of the truth of God, a total abandonment of the ancient foundations of the faith. There have been all too often in the history of the church distortions and perversions of truth, which might be compared to the transplanting of shrubs and the lopping of trees which largely spoil the effect of an otherwise beautiful and symmetrical garden. Apostasy is not like that. It is rather like a landslide of such dimensions that the whole garden is obliterated.

But apostasy is a vastly different matter. For this there is no recovery. It is a fatal act. Apostasy is the total rejection of God, of Christ, of the Holy Scriptures, of Christian association and fellowship in every shape and form on the part of those who profess to believe in the Christian faith. It is the deliberate stepping outside the circle of Christian profession into more than the darkness of rank heathendom. In the case of the heathen, there may be many who are groping after the light, but in the case of the apostate, it is the deliberate turning away from and refusal of the light once professed.

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.

Giving up profession of faith is apostasy.

The word apostasy implies a departure or a falling away from what is true and from what was formerly held to be true. It is an abandonment of truth, giving it up to take another standing, or make another confession instead of the former one. Apostasy was found in the children of Israel according to Old Testament history and it was found in the church of God even in New Testament times. Both Israel and the church departed from their first standing given them of God in the earth. They departed so very seriously and so very quickly from the truth that they exposed themselves to the immediate judgment of God. But we learn from scripture that God was pleased to withhold the execution of His judgment.

The word apostacy has frightened some; it occurs in Scripture, however. As in Acts 21:21, to forsake Moses, lit. apostacy from; 2 Thess. 2:3, a falling away. And a word almost itself occurs for divorcement, Matt. 5:31, Matt. 19:7; and Mark 10:4. Apostacy supposes the falling away from an original position in which that which is spoken of stood.

(V. 3). Behind this apostasy there is the direct influence of seducing spirits leading to the doctrines of demons in contrast with the truth. The apostate is not simply one who neglects the truth, nor rejects the truth. He is one who, having made a profession of the faith, deliberately gives up the truth and takes up some other religious creed as being superior to Christianity. The demons speak lies while professing to maintain the truth. The devil we know “is a liar” (John 8:44) and beguiled our first parents by speaking lies in hypocrisy. The fact that the truth has no power over their souls and that they give heed to doctrines of demons clearly proves that their consciences are so seared that they are no longer able to distinguish between good and evil. Apostasy, then, involves not only the giving up the truth but also the adoption of error — the doctrine of demons.

Such being the case, how urgent is the warning of verse 12: "Take heed, brethren, lest there be in any of you an evil heart of unbelief, in departing from the living God," (or "in falling away from the living God"). He is not speaking of weakness of faith or of failure in details of conduct, but of an evil heart of unbelief, faith not being present at all. This is the cause of falling away, a fall into a state of cold rejection of One previously acknowledged as the Son of God. Only faith can maintain this position of firm confidence in the blessed Son of God; so that a mere lip profession that lacks this vital root of the matter, may very soon give place to a callous reaction of deliberate apostasy, from which there is no recovery: the living God is rejected, and the only alternative is the cold, cheerless state of death.

(Vv. 4-6). Having sought to meet the difficulties occasioned by their dull spiritual condition, the Apostle passes on to warn these believers of the serious danger to which they were exposed. The fact that they were clinging to the forms and ceremonies of Judaism might indicate that some who were enlightened by the truths of Christianity, and had tasted its privileges, had given up their profession and had returned to Judaism. For such there would be no recovery. This “falling away”, of which the Apostle speaks, is not the backsliding of a true believer, but the apostasy of a mere professor.