Apostasy

Carry your Bibles with you. Turn with me, if you would, to the sixth chapter of Hebrews. We're going to look at verses one through eight.

in the case of those who have once been enlightened who have tasted the heavenly gift and have shared in the Holy Spirit and have tasted the goodness of the Word of God and the powers of the age to come and then have fallen away again to restore them again to repentance since they are crucifying once again the Son of God to their own harm and holding him up to contempt for land that has drunk the rain that often falls on it produces a crop useful to those for whose sake it is cultivated receives a blessing from God but if it bears thorns and thistles it is worthless and near to being cursed and its end is to be burned. Bow with me as we go to the Lord in prayer. Heavenly Father, I lift up our sick to you today. We thank you for the success Thank you for the successful surgeries last week on Madison Latvin and Bernie Lowes.

Help them to recuperate quickly. We pray for Lisa Menzel who will have brain surgery at the end of this month. We pray for Jim Palmer who has shoulder replacement surgery coming up on this Thursday. I continue to pray for Jeremy Karriker and Jim Belk and Brenda Torrance and Kim Udi. Lord, help them all to heal. Heavenly Father, perhaps nowhere in scripture do we see such a powerful warning to wake up, to get serious, to quit waffling and playing games.

The writer of Hebrews is telling us about people who knew Christ in their head but not in their heart. We pray for our lost loved ones that they would refuse to apostatize and would repent and come to Christ. May we learn from the era of the apostates and may we hold on to Christ through the power of your Holy Spirit.

Please keep my lips from error. May Christ be exalted. May this congregation be edified for it is in the precious and holy name of Jesus that I pray. Amen.

You may be seated. Last week we finished chapter five with the writer of Hebrews is admonishing the church for its immaturity. It's almost like the writer of Hebrews is just shaking his head in frustration and saying grow up church.

By this time you ought to be teachers. As I was working on this message over the last couple of weeks, the Lord brought my mind back 45 years ago when I was pastoring my first church in Creedmoor, North Carolina. And there was a young lady in our church who worked over in nearby Butner, North Carolina at a huge hospital for the mentally handicapped. And she invited me to come for a tour of the hospital and I went. We walked into this room, huge room.

It's called a nursery room. And I looked and there were all these men and women there from probably 30 to 50 years of age. And many of those men had beards and the women were physically mature women. And they were laying sitting on the floor. Some of them were playing with jack in the boxes.

Other of them were rolling beach balls across the floor. Some of them were laying on blankets and gone to sleep. And we watched and several nurses came in and they brought with them trays of food.

And they would sit down with each one of these people that were on the floor and they would spoon feed them just like you would spoon feed a 10-month-old baby. I was saddened when I saw that. Physically mature men and women who were so mentally handicapped and mentally immature that they would always be treated like babies. Folks, as I was riding home that day from that hospital back to back to our home, the Lord brought to my mind Hebrews chapter 11, I mean chapter 5 verses 11 through 12. And what did he say?

He said, you are dull of hearing. By this time you ought to be teachers. You have to to eat spiritual milk because you're not mature enough to handle the spiritual meat.

Folks, this is one of the great challenges of the Bible. By this time you ought to be teachers. I shared with you last week that he's not talking here about the gift of teaching. He's not saying that every Christian ought to be able to get in a pulpit and preach a sermon or get behind a lectern and teach a Sunday school class.

This is not the gift of teaching. He's talking about the grace of teaching. He's saying you ought to have discernment that you ought to be able to know the heart of God and the will of God because you know the Word of God.

You enter into chapter 6. We see an even more frightening prospect and that is the possibility of apostasy. The passage that we are dealing with is a passage that is very misinterpreted by Armenian theologians. And what they say is that this passage is dealing with Christians who walked away from the truth, who recanted their faith, and they lost their salvation.

Folks, that is a horrendous error. These people that we're talking about here are not true Christians. They are maybe professing Christians, but they are not people who lost their salvation.

They are people who never had it to begin with. I heard about a drunken man that was walking down the streets of Chicago and he saw D.L. Moody and he went stumbling over to D.L. Moody. He put his hand up in his shoulder and he said, Reverend Moody, I'm one of your converts. And Moody looked at him and said, you might be one of my converts, but you're not one of the Lord's.

Folks, some of us older folks might remember the gangster that lived back in the 50s, 60s. His name was Mickey Cohen. And someone at the height of his gangster activity asked him if he would go with them to an evangelistic crusade and he went. And he showed some interest in Christianity. And boy, after that, some of the evangelists got excited and they thought, wow, if Mickey Cohen comes to Christ, what a powerful testimony that will be. And so they began to witness to Mickey Cohen and they begin to try to put pressure on him to convert to Christ.

They would share with him verses like Revelation chapter 3 verse 20 where Jesus said, Behold, I stand at the door and knock and if any man hear my voice and open the door and come into him, I will sup with him and he with me. And they said, Just pray the prayer, Mickey. Just pray the prayer. And Mickey said, My goodness, if that's all it is to it, then I'll be glad to do that.

I'll just say the magic words. Jesus, forgive me of my sins and take me to heaven when I die. And that's the prayer that he prayed. But there was no repentance. There was no submission. There was no surrender to the Lord. Just words.

That was it. Well, there was great hope for Mickey Cohen and everybody was all excited. But over about six months, people began to realize there's been no change in this man at all. He was still very much active in his gangster activity. And so these evangelists went back to him and said, Mickey, where's the commitment? If you're a Christian, you've got to turn away from this gang stuff.

You've got to turn away and repent from the stealing and the corruption. And Mickey Cohen said to them, Wait a minute. He said, they're Christian football players, and they're Christian politicians, and they're Christian gang members. He said, if they're Christian cowboys and Christian football players, why can't there be Christian gangsters? Folks, he thought that all he had to do to go to heaven was to say the words, to say the magic words, Jesus forgive me, and that's it. He thought that's what faith was. That is not what faith is.

Folks, he was dead wrong. I want to share with you what Kent Hughes said. I want you to listen to this carefully. Every Christian knows that the authenticity of a conversion will be revealed in time and life. As a pastor, I may witness a moving conversion, but the convert's life will reveal the ultimate reality. I've seen spectacular, spectacular conversions fizzle and even produce enemies of the gospel, apostates. I've seen other conversions, both dramatic and quiet, mature into deep Christian commitment. The same phenomenon was present in the early Hebrew church, and so the church did its best to avoid bogus conversions by catechizing converts in the basic truths, much as a responsible church does today. In last week's sermon, we looked at the challenge of moving from milk to meat, from spiritual milk to spiritual meat, and I shared with you that that spiritual milk is defined for us in the chapter 6, verses 1 through 3.

I've got three points that I want to share with you today, and the first point is the milk of the Word. Look with me, if you will, at Hebrews 6, and we'll go through 1 through 3. Therefore, let us leave the elementary doctrine of Christ and go on to maturity, not lay in again a foundation of repentance from dead works and a faith toward God and of instruction about washings, the laying on of hands, the resurrection of the dead, and eternal judgment, and this we will do if God permits.

So we have six instructions here, six instructions that are basic fundamentals of the Christian faith, and I think they can be broken up into three groups, two instructions in the three groups. Group one is faith and repentance, and what is that? We're talking about justification here. What kind of faith? It is faith that trust that Jesus Christ went to the cross, that He shed His precious blood, that our sins might be forgiven. It was a substitutionary atonement where the Lord would take our sins because of the shed blood of Christ, and He would give us His righteousness, and then there must be repentance, and that is a turning from sin and a turning to Christ. Faith and repentance are two sides of the same coin.

You don't have faith without repentance, and you can't repent without true faith. That is justification, where God declares us righteous before God because of what Jesus Christ did for us on the cross of Calvary. That is initiated by regeneration, where the Spirit of God gives us new birth, and then it's finalized when we respond in that regeneration with faith and repentance.

Folks, justification is a one-time act. The second group that he mentions speaks of washings and laying on of hands. That has to do first with your physical baptism, your water baptism, which is a picture of your union with Christ, and then the washings and the laying on of hands has to do with the work of the Holy Spirit in your life, day by day through your Christian life, as He's given you the power to become like Christ, to be conformed into Jesus' image. Now what is that? That is sanctification, but sanctification is not a one-time event. It is a process, a process that starts on the day that you're born again and will continue on until the day that you die. Then thirdly is the resurrection from the dead and eternal judgment. Now what is that?

That is glorification. When will it take place? It will take place when Christ returns to this earth, and there'll be a resurrection of the dead. If you're a Christian, if you were to die today, the Scripture says absent from the body for the Christian is to be present with the Lord. You go immediately to the Lord's presence in your spirit, but your body would not be a glorified body yet, and what's going to happen there is the Lord's going to do a mighty work of resurrection. We're going to receive a new glorified body, and Philippians 3 21 tells us that it will be a body like the body of Jesus, and then we will stand before Almighty God in the final judgment, and we will be rewarded for our service in Christ. So this is what the writer of Hebrews calls spiritual milk. In the early Jewish church, they catechized this because it was of utmost importance that they understood what justification, sanctification, and the coming glorification was all about. The writer of Hebrews is telling these baby Christians, get this under your belt. He is saying you're not going to go any further with the Lord until you stand on that strong foundation.

Here was the problem. There were people in the early church who had made professions of faith, but they were not standing on that firm foundation, and then when persecution hit, they began to waver, and they said we don't want to be criticized or ostracized or persecuted. We don't want to lose our jobs.

We don't want to lose our property. We don't want to lose our friends. We don't want that, and so we're going to back away from this Christianity stuff. We're going to walk away from it so that the persecution and the rejection will end.

The next five verses may be the most frightening passage of Scripture that we have in the entire Bible. These verses explain to us the danger and the horror of apostasy. Now, what is apostasy? Apostasy is the abandonment and renunciation of the Christian faith. It is not a true believer who wavers for a time and temporarily backslides. That happens to believers. This is a professing Christian who has never truly been saved, who walks away from the faith never to come back again.

The writer of Hebrews says this, for it is impossible for those who have fallen away to be restored again to repentance. How many people I know who've been in a church service who have heard the gospel preached. They have felt the conviction of the Holy Spirit. They know in their heart, in their mind, that Jesus Christ is the only hope of salvation. They have felt the pull of God on their heart, and they have said, well, I know that's right. I know that's what I need, but I'm not ready for that yet.

I've got mountains to cross, and I've got rivers to cross, and mountains to climb. I don't want to do that yet because I've got sin in my life that I still want to enjoy. So I'm going to put this off, and then when I get older, I'll ask Jesus to save me.

Little do they know what very well may happen, and that is that over time their hearts get harder and harder and harder until they reach the point where they just don't care anymore, and they die with no conviction, with no concern, and with no caring. Folks, what a dangerous, dangerous thing it is to say no as the Holy Spirit speaks to the heart. Well, that's apostasy, and we cannot take it lightly. Point two, who are these apostates? I want you to look with me at verses four and five. For it is impossible in the case of those who have once been enlightened, who have tasted the heavenly gift, who have shared in the Holy Spirit, and have tasted the goodness of the Word of God and the powers of the age to come. Who are the apostates?

They are described this way, those who have once been enlightened. I want you to notice the difference in the pronouns here. When he's talking to Christians, he uses the pronouns we, us, and you, but now he's changed that.

He's not using those anymore. He's using these pronouns they, them, and those. He's talking not about true Christians. He's talking about others. He's describing apostates.

Also notice that he doesn't use the word if here. He doesn't say if they fall away. He is saying that they have fallen away. This passage can be confusing, can't it? And I think the reason is because he uses words here that sound like words that we would use in our Christian vocabulary.

John Wesley was the great Methodist leader who was an Armenian in his theology. He did not believe in eternal security. He did not believe once saved, always saved. I want you to listen to what he said about these verses, what he said about us who do believe that. Wesley said, must not every unprejudiced person see the expressions here? Used are so strong and clear that they cannot without gross and palpable wrestling be understood of any but true believers. Wesley said, on the authority of this passage, I believe that a true saint may fall away, that one who is holy and righteous in the judgment of God himself may nevertheless so fall from God as to perish everlastingly.

Well, that raises a problem, doesn't it? Because there are verses all over the Bible that absolutely contradict what Wesley has just said. And those verses are verses that promise the true believer that his eternity is secure and and just as solid as it could be. Let me just point a few of those verses out because the Word of God, and I want you to remember this, the Word of God can never contradict itself.

It can never contradict itself. John 6 37, Jesus said, all that the Father gives to me will come to me and he who comes to me I will in no wise cast out. John chapter 10 verse 28, and I give unto them eternal life and they shall never perish neither shall any man pluck them out of my hand. Romans chapter 8 starting at verse verse 35, who shall separate us from the love of of Christ? Shall tribulation or distress or persecution or famine or nakedness or peril or sword?

No, for in all these things we are more than conquerors through Christ who loved us. For I am persuaded that neither death nor life nor angels nor powers nor principalities nor things present nor things to come nor height nor depth nor any other creature shall separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord. On first John chapter 5 in verse 13 says, these things I have written unto you who believe on the name of the Son of God that you may know that you have eternal life. Philippians chapter 1 in verse 6, being confident of this very thing that he hath begun a good work in you will complete it to the day of Jesus Christ. What John Wesley says about Hebrew chapter 6 is an absolute contradiction to the verses that I have just shared with you. And folks, not only these verses but verses that we have all over the scripture. So how do we explain that the apostates that the writer of Hebrews is pointing us to were never true believers? Folks, they were professors of faith in Christ but they were not possessors of faith in Christ. He says what? He says first of all that they were once enlightened. Notice that he says nothing here about justification, sanctification or glorification.

Those terms are never even mentioned. He says that they were enlightened. What is that? That's the Greek word photizo and that word means it's a picture of you taking a picture with a camera and you know the flash goes off. It's that quick. It's enlightened for just a second. The word photizo actually means informed, taught or instructed.

He does not mention any response in faith. I went to a public high school, Harding High in Charlotte, and one particular Friday afternoon they called the whole school to go to the gym for an assembly. We had no idea what this was about. So we went, we all sat down, the whole school was there and the principal stood up. He says, I have a friend with me today. He's an evangelist and he wants to talk to you about Jesus.

And this is in public school now. I loved it. I love it now. But he got up and he preached Jesus. Man, he preached Jesus like I'd never heard Jesus preach before.

I've been to church all my life. I'd never heard Jesus preach like this. And it was very, very powerful.

Man, this guy was shucking the corn. And it was just amazing what he was saying. And I could not argue that I could not argue or deny that what this man was saying was truth. He came to the end of his sermon, he gave an invitation.

And there were a lot of people that got up and they walked down to where he was and they made their professions of faith. I did not do that. I was not ready to repent. I was not ready to turn from my sin. I was enlightened.

I was very convicted, but I walked away. Folks like me, these people that the writer of Hebrews is talking about here were enlightened, but they were not broken and repentant. Seeing God's light and accepting God's light are not the same thing. These people were enlightened, but they were not saved. And they were in great danger of losing all opportunity to be saved. All right, secondly, he says that they tasted of the heavenly gift.

I believe the heavenly gift that he's talking about here is Christ. And they tasted of it. They did not imbibe. They did not drink of it. They just got a taste. I don't know if you've ever seen the wine tasters.

Sometimes they show them on TV. They'll take a glass of wine. They'll put it in their mouth, and then they'll swish it all around in their mouth and spit it out.

That's kind of what's happening here. And that's what the apostates do. That's what the apostates do. They tasted of Christ, but they did not drink. They, so to speak, spit Christ out. But then he says that they were partakers of the Holy Spirit. The word partakers is the Greek word metakos, and it means associated with.

It does not mean possessing of. When I heard that evangelist preach Jesus in our high school assembly, I felt the Holy Spirit's conviction. I felt the tug on my heart. I knew that what he was sharing was the pure and correct gospel, but I didn't run to Jesus to be saved. I ran from Jesus to my sin.

Folks, I was a partaker. I was associated with the things of the Holy Spirit because of conviction, but I was not a possessor because I did not express faith and repent. Next, they had tasted the word of God. Once again, that word tasted. They tasted the word of God, but they didn't eat it.

They didn't ingest it. There's a great verse that teaches us about what's going on in the heart of the prophet Jeremiah. And Jeremiah was praying to the Lord, and listen to what he said.

He said, Lord, your words were found, and I ate them, and they became for me the joy of my heart. In contrast to that, I think back to King Herod. You remember the Scripture tells us that King Herod heard John the Baptist, and he heard him gladly, and he had John the Baptist in prison, and the prison was right up under where he lived, and he kept calling John up and saying, John, preach. What you're saying to me is very interesting.

It's challenging. I want to hear what you had to say. John would preach, and the Scripture tells us that Herod listened to him intently, but what did he do with the word of God? He didn't do anything with it, for he capitulated to his wife, and he had John the Baptist executed by decapitation. He had his head chopped off, because this is why Paul said what he did in 2 Corinthians 13, verse 5, when he said, examine yourself to see if you're in the faith.

Test yourself. All right, the next thing was this. They had tasted of the power of the age to come. Now, where were they living back during this time? We call this the apostolic age, and we're talking about miracles that took place here. A lot of the people that we're talking about in that early church were people who heard Peter preach on the day of Pentecost, and they not only heard Peter, they heard the disciples preach, and not only did they hear him preach, they heard him preach in languages that these disciples didn't even know. It was a great miracle, and yet some of them walked away from it. Many of these had seen the man at the beautiful gate that was lame, and Peter, by the power of Jesus Christ, had raised this man up, and this man who had not been able to walk for decades got up leaping and jumping and praising God.

They saw this, and it had little effect on them. Some of them knew Dorcas, who was Dorcas. Dorcas was a wonderful, sweet lady who died, and Peter, by the power of the Holy Spirit, helped her to be resurrected through the name of Jesus, and she was fully well, yet people saw that, and some of them just walked away. There were many of these people that were there who saw what happened in Bethany when Jesus came to the tomb of Lazarus. Lazarus had been dead at that point in time for four days, and Jesus said, take the stone and roll it away from the tomb. They said, no, no, Jesus, he's been in the tomb for four days.

It'll be a terrible stench. Jesus said, move it. They moved it. Jesus looked into the darkness of that tomb, and he cried out, Lazarus, come forth, and Lazarus came forth resurrected, and he walked out of that tomb in grave clothes from his head to his feet. Jesus said, loose him and let him go. There were many people that saw that.

What a miracle! A resurrection of a man who'd been dead for four days, and yet they walked away from Christ. So what's in store for those apostates? That takes us to my point three, and that is the fatal warning. Look at verses four through eight. I think we need to read that all together to make sense, so I'm going to repeat a few verses here. For it is impossible in the case of those who've once been enlightened, who have tasted the heavenly gift and have shared in the Holy Spirit, and have tasted the goodness of the Word of God and the powers of the age to come, and then have fallen away to restore them again to repentance, since they are crucifying once again the Son of God to their own harm, and holding him up to contempt. For land that has drunk the rain that often falls on it, and produces a crop useful to those for whose sake it is cultivated, receives a blessing from God.

But if it bears thorns and thistles, it is worthless and near to being cursed, and its end is to be burned. So, he's still speaking to the Jews who knew the gospel, who understood the gospel, but were hesitant to put their faith in Christ. This is what it says to them, and I want to share with you what John MacArthur said here.

He said it better than I can say it, and I want you just to listen carefully to this. He said, you had better come to Christ now, for if you fall away it will be impossible for you to come again to the point of repentance. They were at the best point for repentance, full knowledge.

To fall back from that would be fatal. When one rejects Christ at the peak experience of knowledge and conviction, he will not accept it at a lesser level. So, salvation becomes impossible. They could not return because they had crucified to themselves the Son of God and put him to open shame. To themselves simply means that as far as they were concerned, the Son of God deserved to be crucified. Regardless of what they may still have been professing openly in open hearts, they said, that's the same verdict we give. They had made trial of Jesus Christ, and with all the evidence possible, they decided he was not the true Messiah.

They had turned away and turned around and gone back to Judaism. To them, Jesus was an imposter and deceiver and got exactly what was coming to him. They agreed with those who killed Jesus and they put him to an open shame again.

Shame here connotes guilt. They declared openly that Jesus was guilty as charged. When anyone has heard the gospel and then turns away, he has done exactly what these Jews did. Though he would never take up a hammer and spikes and physically nail Jesus to a cross, he nevertheless agrees to Jesus' crucifixion. He takes his place with the crucifiers. If this happens with full light, such a person has become such a person has become an apostate, and for him salvation is forever out of reach. He has rejected Jesus Christ against the full light and power of the gospel.

He is incurably anti-God and for him to receive the hottest hell. He takes his place with Judas, who walked and talked and ate and fellowshiped with God incarnate, yet finally rejected him. Before I pray, I want you to ask yourself a question. What will you do with Jesus?

Let's pray. Lord Jesus, this was a frightening passage. It warns us not to play with the gospel. The writer of Hebrews thought he was speaking to just the apostates in the first century, but no, no. This apostasy has gone on for 20 centuries. Lord, open our eyes, open our hearts, and open our wheels, and may our confession be true and honoring to you. For it's in the precious and holy name of Jesus that we pray. Amen.