What is the falling away in the Bible?

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.

(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.

Our Authorised translators have utterly weakened the sense by rendering ἡ ἀπ. "a" falling away. Beyond doubt it is "the apostacy," and there is no ground whatever for depriving the phrase of its intentionally definite force. Nobody can pretend that it is abstract; and a quality would not have the article in Greek more than in English, so that Archbishop Newcome was as wrong in the principle as in the particular case. In the New Testament the word occurs only in Acts 21:21, and there is anarthrous, which testifies to the emphasis here expressed. There however it means "apostacy" though not "the apostacy" as here. This is better than softening it to falling away or forsaking. A verbal form occurs in 1 Tim. 4:1, where "apostatise" should have been preserved both for the sake of consistency, and to maintain the definite expression of religious defection. For this it means, not corruption but abandonment, as politically it expresses revolt from authority. See the Septuagint for its use in both these ways.

(V. 3) With the Word of God in our hands the saints have no excuse for being deceived. Honorable self-judgment and honest exercise of soul to do the will of God will, with the Word of God open, preserve the soul from falsehood. Let us approach it, therefore, both in thorough distrust of ourselves and in fullest confidence in Him who has given us of His Spirit, for this passage tells us of Satan's masterpiece of deception, to be manifested publicly only after the Church is taken to glory, yet whose doctrine of falsehood has preceded him in the world. "The day of the Lord" will not be until "the apostasy" has come. This is of course a revulsion against the truth of Christianity, the rejection of Scripture as being from God, the rejection of Christ as being Himself the revelation of the glory of God. This will be seen in the very realm in which Christianity was once professed, for it is the abandonment of what was once acknowledged. It is this that opens the way to the grossest deception of Satan. In any complete way this will not be true until the Church is taken to heaven, though we may even now be deeply alarmed at the large-scale giving up of the truth of God in many so-called Christian denominations of our day. These are signs of the nearness of the apostasy and therefore indicate that the rapture of His own is most near.

Here then we have in this brief but expressive phrase the Holy Spirit's expression of that state of things which must precede the day of the Lord. (1) The apostacy must come first; and (2) the man of sin must be revealed, the son of perdition.

(1) In 1 Tim. 4 it is only "some in later times" who apostatise from the faith, giving heed to seducing spirits and doctrines of demons, through the hypocrisy of men that speak lies, branded in their own conscience, etc. It is an ascetic departure from the faith in the pretension to superior sanctity, but real denial of God's rights as Creator and grace as Saviour. In 2 Thess. 2 it is no such partial turning away, but the extreme and general defection from the gospel which will boldly issue in the abandonment of all revealed truth and of what may be called natural religion, the testimony to the Godhead in creation and man's conscience. It is the revolt which the prophetic word declares shall characterise the end of this age, as is so largely and variedly revealed in the Law, the Psalms, and the Prophets, in the Gospels, the Epistles, and the Revelation. Deut. 31, Deut. 32, Psalms 10 - 14, Isa. 65, Isa. 66, Dan. 7:8, 11, 25, Dan. 9:27, may suffice for the Old Testament. In the New one may cite Matt. 12:31-32, 43-45, Luke 17:26-30, Luke 18:8, 2 Tim. 4:4, besides 2 Thess. 2, 2 Peter 3, Jude, and Revelation throughout. These Scriptures warrant the awful expectation that both Jews and Christians will abandon their profession of the truth for which they are respectively responsible, and God be left publicly and in general without a witness of His truth and glory here below, save in the confession of a persecuted remnant and in the execution of His solemn and ever deepening strokes of judgment.

First Thessalonians was the first written by the apostle; the second epistle was written shortly after. Thus, from the beginning of revealed Christianity, from the first communications of the Spirit of God to the churches, such is the solemn warning. Those who profess the gospel will abandon it before the end comes, for that day will not come “except there come the falling away first.” It is not merely a falling away here and a falling away there, but the falling away, the apostasy in the fullest sense.

The Day of the Lord cannot come while the Assembly is still upon earth. Before it does come the Lord Himself shall have come for His own and they all shall have been "gathered together unto Him" (2 Thess. 2:1). Then, and only then, can the apostasy — the general and public renunciation of the faith of the Son of God — take place. There shall no longer be any element of faith in apostate christendom, for all that is held forth in the claims of the man of sin shall only be presented to the senses of men. Note 2 Thess, 2:9: "whose coming is after the working of Satan with all power and signs and lying wonders."

The mystery of godliness having been mentioned, the apostle speaks of Satan's power in opposition to the faith and truth of God (the mystery of godliness here, and the mystery of iniquity in 2 Thessalonians). "But the Spirit speaketh expressly that in the latter times some shall depart from the faith, giving heed to seducing spirits and doctrines of demons." It is a prophetic warning. Paul had given a similar warning to the Ephesian elders gathered at Miletus a number of years before, and elsewhere in the New Testament the Holy Spirit gives the same warning concerning an apostasy in the future days. Inasmuch as the faith is the foundation upon which everything rests, Satan aims to destroy this first, knowing if faith is given up and the truth of God denied, that he, the master-mind, can easily introduce his seducing spirits and substitute for the faith, demon doctrines.

The solemn warning here is in startling contrast to the preciousness of what we have considered as to God manifest in flesh. How cold is the heart of man that he will turn deliberately from a faith so vital and valuable! Not that this verse 1 speaks of a general apostasy, as will be true in the last days, for the apostle speaks only of "some" apostatizing. Yet it is a determined effort of Satan to corrupt the truth of the sacred Word of God and to obscure the glory of the manifestation of God in the Person of the Lord Jesus Christ. Let us observe the unusual expression here, "The Spirit speaks expressly." He speaks certainly in all the Word: but this matter is one of specially serious import, a prophecy to be taken deeply to heart, for it indicates the subtle way in which the truth of God would be glossed over by the introduction of proud human merit, self-abnegation, etc., not an outright denial of the truth, but a cunning displacing of it. Some are greatly attracted by this kind of thing, but the Spirit of God calls it no less than apostasy, that is, an actual giving up of true Christianity. It is direct entertaining of the suggestions of seducing spirits and teachings of demons-that which is spoken of in Colossians 2:23 as "will worship, and humility, and neglecting of the body."

In the preceding Epistle (1 Tim. 4:1-3) a prophetic warning had been given, but of evil quite distinct in time, character, and extent, from what we have here. Instead of "last days", the Spirit spoke expressly of later, or after, times, i.e., times subsequent to the apostle's writing. Instead of a widespread condition of "men" in Christendom, he there spoke of "some" only. The language suits and supposes but few comparatively; which only controversial zeal could have overlooked or converted into a prediction of the vast if not worse inroad of Romanism. It is a description of certain ones to depart from the faith into fleshly asceticism, paying heed to seducing spirits, and doctrines of demons, in the hypocrisy of liars branded in their own conscience, forbidding to marry, [bidding] to abstain from meats which God created to be received thankfully. This was a high-flown abuse of grace to deny the creature, and to dislocate the God of grace from the God of creation and law; but the followers are carefully discriminated from the more daring and corrupt misleaders. Gnosticism is the real evil aimed at, even then beginning to work, as we may gather from 1 Timothy 6:20 in the same communication to Timothy. But limited as it stands in the word, and as it became in fact, it discloses how the Spirit of God guards us, if we heed scripture, from anticipating victory for the gospel, and how He rather prepares us for defection to God's dishonour.