APOSTASY
APOSTASY
As to your question about Hebrews 6, it does not refer to a believer, but to one who, though professedly in the church, has not the wedding garment. There is not an allusion to his conversion, but all the privileges of the house of God are enumerated. Just as Noah might have recounted to his sons all the advantages they had in the ark, and yet how they would be lost if they despised them, as apostates, which is the force of the word “falling away”.
Indifference or worldliness is not apostasy. Apostasy is the deliberate abandonment of the Christian doctrine for Judaism or paganism. A man cannot be converted if he deliberately refuses or abandons the doctrine of grace. He may not listen to it, or he may have been a backslider; but he has not “fallen away”, he has not apostatised, if he has not renounced the Christian doctrine of grace [p. 94] for the law or infidelity. A man may have been at one time under the impression of the truth, and have imagined that there was a work in his soul, but the impression may have died away like the seed on the rock. Yet all the time he is not an apostate, and his very desire to avoid being one, proves that he is not one in the scriptural sense of the word.
I trust the Lord will lead your soul, now possibly only sensible of the serpent’s bite, to see the Son of man lifted up. Do not dwell on what you are. Do as the prodigal did. He thought only of his father. Think only how God can receive you; not how you can get to Him, but how He can receive you. Think of the love that is in His heart, how He delights to receive you, and when you are received it will be time enough for you to bewail your unfitness and condemn yourself as entirely unworthy of His grace.
The Lord vouchsafe to you full deliverance.