Apostasy
QUESTION
What are your thoughts on the following quote?
"An apostate is someone who has received the light but not the life, the seed but not the fruit, the written Word but not the living Word, the truth but not a love for the truth (2 Thess. 2:10).”
What is apostasy? Who can apostatize?
ANSWER
I’m not sanguine about restricting apostasy to the unregenerate, though I’m aware that this is a common opinion on the matter that is popular among Lordship Salvationists and others. God’s people can turn away from the truth. It is for this reason that we are warned against such (I John 5:21). There is such a thing as remaining sin and God’s regenerate sheep still deal with the influence of their own carnal inclinations. It is not difficult to imagine a child of God becoming an apostate by turning away from serving God. One need not look any further than Solomon (I Kings 11:1-8) and Lot (Genesis 13:12) to find examples of God’s people who fell away and in that sense apostatized from the faith.
“This just proves they were never one of God’s sheep to begin with,” is a common explanation for some, but it ignores the possibility that God’s people can commit this error. It insists that the regenerate are guaranteed to maintain some requisite degree of spiritual consistency for the remainder of their natural lives. Per the aforementioned examples, I do not believe this is the case. This is also why I reject the notion of “perseverance of the saints” as it is so commonly taught among the reformed.
I won’t belabor this with an in-depth study of the word “apostasy”, as that requires diving into Greek and translation considerations that are too involved for this brief response, but I’ll state that apostasy is a falling away from the truth, and that it most certainly can be committed by God’s regenerate sheep. Indeed, one could make the case that ONLY the regenerate can apostatize, because an unregenerate person who forsakes the faith is not really apostatizing, since he never possessed any sincere spiritual conviction to turn away from.
- Elder Daniel Samons