...subject of apostasy in the Church.
This certainly is a current problem, and a
current subject, and I trust that as we
open the Scriptures together and consider something of
what the Word of God has to say,
that God the Holy Spirit will bring blessing
and refreshment and encouragement to your heart as
you realize that what is happening in Christendom
around us was foreknown, foreseen by God, and
that things are moving according to the revelation
of the Word of God to their ultimate
consummation in the appearing of the Lord Jesus
Christ and his coming in power and great
glory.
When we speak of apostasy, I believe we
need to be very clear in a biblical
concept of what we mean by apostasy.
The word apostasy means to depart, to leave
a mooring, to leave anchor.
As the Greeks used the word apostasy, they
used it of a ship that hauled anchor
and set sail from the haven in which
the ship had been anchored.
The word then means to cast off moorings
and to launch out away from the safety
and the refuge of the harbor or the
anchorage.
When in the Word of God we refer
to apostasy or departure, it has to do
with a departure from that which is the
anchor that God has given to believers.
We find from the Word of God that
the anchor of our faith, of our hope,
of our knowledge is the Word of God
itself, so that that which determines an apostate
is his attitude and his relationship to the
Word of God.
The Word of God is the anchor, and
when a man departs from the Word of
God, he has departed from the haven, from
the refuge, from the anchorage.
He has cast off the anchor and is
now adrift.
The place that the Word of God holds
is emphasized in many passages.
In Peter's epistle, you'll recall, in 1 Peter
chapter 1 and verse 23, Peter tells us
that we were born again not of corruptible
seed but of incorruptible by the Word of
God which liveth and abideth forever.
The Word of God is the agent that
the Spirit of God uses to bring a
man to the new birth, and a man
will never be born again until some truth
of the Word of God is brought home
to that sinner's heart.
A man is not regenerated by another man's
experiences.
He is not regenerated by another man's interpretations.
A man is regenerated because he believes the
Word of God, and Peter tells us that
it is the Word of God, the incorruptible
seed that the Spirit of God uses to
bring a man to new birth.
We find in Romans chapter 10 and verse
17 that the Word of God is the
basis of the believer's faith.
Faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the
Word of God.
The proposition is very simple.
A man cannot believe something of which he
is totally ignorant.
There is no such thing as blind faith.
A man has to have some fact in
mind before he can believe that fact.
Everything that a man knows about God, he
knows from the Word of God.
It is the Word of God that reveals
the Father to us.
Jesus Christ came to reveal the Father, and
all that Christ has revealed about the Father
is in the Word.
There is no such thing as a subjective
experience in which a man seeks God and
finds out God for himself.
A man can find God only through the
Word of God.
And when a man has come to a
knowledge of Jesus Christ through the Word of
God, he grows in grace and in knowledge
solely through the Word of God.
You have to give a man something to
believe before he can believe.
And so, if a man is to grow
in grace and knowledge, he has to grow
in the Word of God.
Then again, we find from a passage such
as Hebrews chapter 6, verses 17 to 20,
that the Word of God is the anchor
for the believer in his daily life and
in his Christian life.
I'm afraid that so many of you have
gotten bogged down in the problems in the
earlier part of Hebrews chapter 6 that you
skipped the last part and jumped over into
chapter 7 and have missed this vital truth
that the Apostle presents.
He says in verse 16 that God sware
an oath for confirmation, wherein God, willing more
abundantly to show unto the heirs of promise
the immutability of his counsel, confirmed it by
an oath, that by two immutable things in
which it was impossible for God to lie,
we might have strong consolation, who have fled
for refuge to lay hold upon the hope
set before us.
What the Apostle tells us is that when
God inaugurated a program that was to involve
not only the nation Israel, but all the
nations of the earth as well, that was
to provide a savior for all men.
God gave a promise and then he confirmed
that promise with a covenant.
That promise is given in chapter 12 of
Genesis, and the covenant that ratified the promise
was given in Genesis chapter 15.
Now the believer who goes through the experiences
of life has an anchor.
The anchor that he has is the word
of God, the promise of God, the covenant
of God.
And no matter how troubled may be the
seas over which his boat sails, he has
a haven of refuge.
He has an anchor that keeps him from
straying and drifting.
What is it?
What God has said, what God has promised,
what God has covenanted.
And so the Apostle concludes the sixth chapter
of Hebrews by saying, Which hope we have
as an anchor of the soul, both sure
and steadfast, in which entereth into that within
the veil, whither the forerunner is for us
entered, even Jesus, made in high priest forever
after the order of Melchizedek.
These to whom the Apostle was writing were
undergoing intense persecution.
Religious, political, social, economic pressure was theirs because
they had named the name of Christ and
had been cut off from all the old
relationships that they had previously sustained.
But the Apostle says, You have something that
will keep you firm.
You have an anchor that is steadfast and
sure.
What is that anchor?
It is the promise, the word of God.
And so the Apostles emphasize over and over
and over again the centrality of the word
of God in the new birth, in spiritual
growth and development, in sustaining the child of
God through all the vicissitudes of life.
The child of God has the word of
God as his foundation and as his anchor.
But even though God has provided such a
foundation, the word of God tells us there
are men who will depart from that foundation,
who will cut the anchor ropes and set
their ships adrift.
And those who abandon the word of God
as the foundation of faith, the foundation of
salvation, the foundation for faith, the foundation for
daily life, are apostates.
Selah, loosely translated, means pause and let that
sink in.
And a believer can become a practical apostate
when they substitute the reasoning of men, the
wisdom of men, the philosophies of men, the
goals, the aims, methods of men for the
word of God.
They are practicing apostates.
Now let's look at several passages in which
the Apostles warn and describe the apostasy that
will characterize the last days.
I ask you to turn your Bibles with
me, first of all, to 2 Timothy 3,
verses 1-6.
The Apostle in this passage describes not so
much conditions within professing Christendom or conditions within
the Church, but conditions in the world in
general in which believers will find themselves in
the end times.
You will notice in 3.1 the Apostle
is saying, "...in the last days perilous times
shall come."
Let me pause and say a word about
that phrase, last day.
The last days, as it is used in
Scripture, or a companion phrase, latter day, or
last day, or the day, refer to a
brief period of time before the consummation of
a prophesied program.
In the Old Testament, the term latter days
or last days refers to that period of
time of seven years duration, we believe, immediately
preceding the second advent of Jesus Christ to
the earth, the tribulation period.
That prophetically refers to latter times, last days,
or the day, sometimes the day of the
Lord.
When in the New Testament epistles the phrase
last days or latter days or last times
occurs, it refers to that period immediately preceding
the rapture of the Church.
But the phrase always looks at the end
of a prophesied program.
When the Apostle Paul, in 2 Timothy 3
.1, describes conditions in the last days, he
is describing the general tenor of the times
in which believers will live before the rapture
of the Church.
As we read these, we must concur, I
believe, in the observation that were the Apostle
Paul living today and reading our daily newspapers
and news magazines, he could not more adequately
or completely describe the days in which we
live.
Will you follow in your text as I
read these verses?
I'm going to read from the translation of
Kenneth Weiss, which I believe makes this passage
very graphic.
In the last days difficult times will set
in, for men shall be fond of themselves,
fond of money, swaggerers, haughty, revilers, disobedient to
parents, unthankful, unholy, without natural affection, implacable, slanderers,
lacking self-control, savage, haters of that which
is good, betrayers, headstrong, besotted with pride, fond
of pleasure rather than having an affection for
God, having a mere outward semblance of piety
toward God, but denying the power of the
same.
Those words the Apostle describes for us condition
in which believers will have to live in
the last day, and truly times like those
demand an anchor, demand a foundation.
But the Apostle says that society as a
whole will have a form of godliness, verse
5, but deny the power unto godliness.
What is the power unto godliness?
The word of God energized by the Spirit
of God in the life of the child
of God.
And so the society, while it cries out
for lawlessness and for godliness, will deny the
very foundation of lawlessness and godliness that is
the word of God itself.
Now, in days like those, the Apostle tells
us, Hebrews chapter 6, that we have an
anchor.
We need not be cast adrift.
We need not fashion our thinking and our
living according to the tenor of the days
in which we live.
But the tragedy in the lives of many
Christians and in the lives of many churches
is that they pattern their program and their
conduct according to the standards of the world
in which they live, and abandon the word
of God, and consequently are sat adrift in
a sea of confusion.
And so the Apostle reminds us again that
conformity to the world by a believer is
a departure from the anchor, from the foundation,
and makes one a practicing apostate.
He has departed from the anchorage.
Now, after this general description, the Apostle in
1 Timothy chapter 4, verses 1 to 3,
describes the origin of the apostasy.
The origin of the apostasy.
1 Timothy 4.1. The Spirit speaketh expressly
that in the latter time.
There is that same expression again.
The Apostle is looking at conditions as they
will prevail prior to the return of Christ
to gather believers to himself.
In the latter time, some shall depart from
the faith.
The departure from the faith involved a departure
from the word of God, because the faith,
the body of truth that believers hold, is
derived solely from the word of God.
For the word of God is the source
of our doctrine, the source of our body
of truth that we call the faith.
And the Apostle is not so much saying
that men will depart from the faith principle
to substitute a works principle for salvation, although
that certainly is true.
He is saying that men will abandon the
word of God, and consequently will depart, set
their ship adrift from the harbor, depart from
the faith.
I scarcely need to remind you that this
is that which characterizes so much of professing
Christianity in our generation.
Men can publicly repudiate the fundamental and cardinal
doctrines of the word of God with impunity.
They scoff at the biblical revelation that the
Bible is the word of God, verbally inspired,
inspired in its entirety, authoritative, absolutely without error,
totally trustworthy.
Such is the claim that the Bible makes
for itself that you would not have to
think long to think of public figures in
the religious world who openly scoff at the
doctrine of a verbally, plenarily inspired, infallible, and
authoritative scripture.
Men in high places in the religious world
have openly and publicly repudiated the deity of
Christ, the virgin birth of Christ, the bodily
resurrection of Christ on the third day, and
still hold high office.
Men repudiate the doctrine that man is under
condemnation because of sin, totally lost and separated
from God and can be redeemed only by
a substitutionary sacrifice.
I need not this morning document these statements
that apostasy is widespread and rampant.
Now, the Apostle Paul in 1 Timothy chapter
4 tells us the origin of this apostasy.
Men depart from the faith, giving heed to
seducing spirits and doctrines of demons.
Two phrases I want you to look at,
seducing spirits and doctrines of demons.
The seducing spirits refers to the false teachers.
You remember the Apostle John, in writing to
his little bairns, warns them in chapter 4
of his first epistle in the first verse,
Beloved, believe not every spirit, but try the
spirits, whether they are of God, because many
false prophets are gone out into the world.
The spirits of 1 John 4 are teachers
who claim to be teachers of truth.
Teachers come from God.
But Paul says these spirits, these teachers, are
false prophets.
And because of the prevalence of false prophets,
John says the believer has a responsibility of
testing the teaching of any man who calls
himself a teacher.
Now, what is the standard by which he
tests the teacher?
It is the word of God.
Does he preach, thus saith the Lord, or
does he preach, it seems to me?
Now, the Apostle says that there will be
spirits whom Paul says are seducing spirits.
They come with polish, with poise, with beautiful
language that is pleasant to the ear, and
when men follow these personalities and are swayed
by their oratory, they may be moved away
from the word of God because these false
teachers are seductive.
But then he shows the power behind these
false teachers.
These false teachers are promulgating doctrines of demons,
or of devils.
Now, the Apostle is not saying they will
preach about the devil.
He is not referring here to this modern
cult that substitutes the devil for Jesus Christ
to make Satan the object of worship.
He is saying that these false teachers, mild
doctrines that were whispered into their ear by
Satan, they pose as ministers of light, but
they are ministers of darkness, for they are
preaching not the truth of God, but the
error of the liar and the deceiver.
I note that one of my colleagues this
week is to speak on Satanic activity in
the end times, and the activity of demons,
and I will just anticipate something of what
I'm sure he will be pointing out, that
some of the greatest Satanic activity in the
end times will take place in the pulpit,
in the Sunday school class, where teachers who
claim to be teachers of the truths of
God will, because they have departed from the
word of God, mouth the lies of the
devil.
Paul is warning us of that fact.
You, therefore, have a responsibility, lest you be
led into apostasy, to test every teacher's teaching,
not by his prominence or prestige or his
so-called authority or education, but test his
teaching by the word of God itself.
Because, in the last times, men shall depart
from the faith, giving heed to seducing teachers
who mouth the doctrines of demons.
Now I ask you next to go to
Peter's second letter, 2 Peter 2, verses
1-4.
While Paul in 2 Timothy gave us the
atmosphere in which apostasy would flourish, and in
1 Timothy 4 spoke of the Satanic origin
of this apostasy, in 2 Peter 2, verses
1-4, Peter speaks of the content of
the teaching of the apostate.
Peter says, there were false prophets also among
the people, even as there shall be false
teachers among you.
The false teachers of 2 Peter 2-1
are the same as the seductive spirits of
1 Timothy 4, 1 and 2.
And so Peter is warning them again of
the rise of this apostasy.
They privily shall bring in damnable heresies.
Look at the word privily.
It means secretly, stealthily, undercover, surreptitiously, bringing
in teaching so cleverly that those who are
taught will not realize that they are being
taught truth unless they test that teaching by
the word of God.
How much of modern scholarship as it relates
to the word of God is this subtle
kind of teaching where a teacher would say,
we used to believe, but now in the
light of this or that or the other,
archaeology or scholarship or the Dead Sea Scrolls
or something else, will say, we now know
that we were wrong and we today understand.
What is it?
Under the guise of scholarship, it is a
subtle attempt to undermine the faith in the
word of God and the part of those
who have been born by the Spirit of
God.
They will bring in damnable heresies, and they
are called damnable heresies, not only because God
condemns them, but because people following these departures
from the faith will be condemned because of
their unbelief in the word of God.
Now let me, at the risk of my
neck perhaps, illustrate how these false teachers operate
from 2 Timothy, chapter 3.
We stop short of the conclusion of his
paragraph on apostasy, and I'm glad that there
are a few, a goodly number of men
here.
If you see me surrounded at the end
of the hour, men, will you come to
my rescue?
The Apostle tells us the method by which
these false teachers will insinuate themselves into a
group so as to propagate their false doctrines.
Verse 6, 2 Timothy 3, "...of this sort
are they which creep into houses, lead captive
silly women, laden with sins, led away with
divers lusts, ever learning, and never able to
come to the knowledge of the truth."
The Apostle is very frank as to the
method that false teachers will use to propagate
their false doctrines.
They won't look for a group of businessmen
whom they can persuade their error.
They will look for a group of women.
Why?
Once again, the word of God tells us
that the women were liable to deception.
In 1 Timothy 2, verses 13-14, Adam
was first formed, then Eve, and Adam was
not deceived, but the woman being deceived was
in transgression.
Paul recognized that man by creation is essentially
a creature ruled by his mind.
The woman by creation is essentially a creature
ruled by her emotions or her heart, and
because she is ruled by her emotions, she
is more subject to deception than man, a
creature ruled by his mind.
And Paul says that, recognizing this principal trait,
and thank God for it, that the false
teachers will seek out a group of women,
and they will insinuate or ingratiate themselves with
these gatherings of women.
These women gather together because of an acknowledged
guilt about sin.
He's not dealing with a moral problem here,
and these silly women are not prostitutes or
some such thing as that.
These are women under a burden of guilt
who meet together to discuss the solution to
their problem.
They are laden with sin.
They are led away by a desire to
relieve the burden of sin, but they do
not come to the word of God to
find a solution to the sin problem.
They open up their doors to false teachers
and give ear to false teachers.
And when these false teachers, with their syrupy,
smooth approach, persuade these women that they have
the truth, then these women begin to propagate
the truth to their husbands, to lead their
husbands into their same error.
Now the apostle here in 2 Timothy 3
says that when apostasy begins and departure from
the word of God becomes prominent, it will
be as false teachers persuade gullible women that
they have the truth and cause the women
to depart from the word of God, and
error or apostasy will propagate that way.
Because of this liability to deception, the apostle
gives instruction that the women are to be
in subjection to their husbands and learn from
their husbands the word of God, lest they
be deceived and a part of the apostasy.
I only need remind you as to the
practicality of this observation that almost without exception,
every false cult and religion that exists in
the United States today was begun by a
member of the female persuasion.
You just look at the history of cults
sometimes and observe that fact.
Now getting back to the passage from which
we departed in 2 Peter chapter 2, Peter
says that these false teachers will secretly or
stealthily bring in these damnable heresies, and you
can expect them to work by persuading women
of the truth of their error and then
watching the truth spread from there.
What constitutes their denial?
They will deny, first of all, the Lord
that bought them.
This has to do with a denial of
the person and work of Jesus Christ.
The person and work of Jesus Christ.
I need not remind you that there is
none other name under heaven given among men
whereby we can be saved but the name
of Jesus Christ.
I need not remind you that there is
no other foundation that has been laid than
that which God has laid, Jesus Christ.
I need not remind you of the words
of our Lord who said, I and no
other am the way, I and no other
am the truth, I and no other am
the life.
To an audience such as this, I need
not defend the doctrine of the centrality of
the person and work of Jesus Christ, but
that which is cardinal, central, pivotal to our
faith will be that which is denied by
the apostate.
The second great area of denial is found
in 2 Peter 2.
Many shall follow their pernicious ways by reason
of whom the way of truth shall be
evil spoken of.
I direct your attention to that phrase, the
way of truth.
My understanding of that phrase is that this
is a reference to the word of God
which reveals the truth of God to us,
so that those who deny the truth of
God deny the person and work of Christ
and deny the authority, integrity, infallibility of the
word of God.
I will suggest to you that Satan will
let a man believe as much of the
doctrine of the word of God as that
man insists on believing up to these two
cardinal points, the person and work of Christ
and the authority and integrity and trustworthiness of
the word of God.
Satan will not concede those points.
He will concede anything else.
But when a man accepts the fact that
Jesus Christ is the Son of God who
came into this world to shed his blood
as a substitutionary sacrifice for his sin, that
man is saved.
Satan cannot concede that doctrine.
When a man confesses that the word of
God is infallible and our only rule and
guide to faith and practice, when he commits
himself to that doctrine, then he believes what
the word of God says.
And Satan cannot permit a man to accept
the doctrine of the authority and infallibility and
integrity of the scriptures.
Anything else, Satan will let him believe.
Paul points out that apostasy will be primarily
evident in these two areas, the person and
work of Christ and the doctrine of scripture,
and that apostate can be detected by their
views of these two doctrines.
To me it is intensely significant that in
the theological world today the two major issues
facing theologians, about which volumes of words are
being poured out, are the areas of the
person and work of Christ and the doctrine
of the word of God.
When I turn to the book of the
Revelation, in chapter 2, I find the Apostle
writing letters to the seven churches.
In the first church he addresses the church
in Ephesus.
In verse 2 he commends the church.
He says, I know thy works and thy
labor and thy patience, how thou canst not
bear them which are evil.
Thou hast tried them that say they are
apostles and are not, and hast found them
liars.
You see, the Ephesian church began by doing
what Paul and Peter exhorted them to do.
They had tested the teachers by the word
of God.
They had found some to be false teachers,
and they had repudiated them.
You remember in Acts 20, verses 28 to
31, in his farewell address to the Ephesian
elders, Paul had warned those elders that after
his departure false prophets would arise, false shepherds
who would destroy the flock.
And the church at Ephesus was committed to
preserving the truth that the Apostle had delivered
to them, and they were on guard against
any false teacher.
They tested every teacher who came to Ephesus
by the word of God.
But after that commendation, because of the way
they had begun, John goes on in verse
4 and says, I have somewhat against thee,
because thou hast lost thy first love.
Now, I'm suggesting that the problem in the
Ephesian church was not a loss of love
for Jesus Christ.
Not a loss of love for Jesus Christ.
Their lost love was a lost love for
the word of God.
Dissolution and disruption began in the Ephesian church
because they no longer tested the teachers by
the word of God.
The word of God was taken from its
place of preeminence and prominence.
And the dissolution that John saw, and about
which the Lord warned, was a dissolution because
they did not heed the admonition cast every
spirit.
I find in Revelation 2 and verse 20
the ultimate consequence of this departure from the
centrality of the word of God in preaching
and teaching.
In his condemnation to the church of Thyatira,
John writes, I have a few things against
thee, because thou sufferest that woman Jezebel, which
calleth herself a prophetess, to teach and to
seduce my servants to commit fornication.
Here was a false teacher who seductively came
in to propagate false teaching that was contrary
to the word of God.
And the people in the church of Thyatira
had accepted the false teacher and the false
teaching.
There was no test of the teacher by
the word of God, and apostasy set in.
And in verse 22, John says, I will
cast her into a bed, and them that
commit adultery with her into great tribulation, except
they repent of their deeds, and looking to
the consummation of the age.
John warns that those who depart from the
faith and repudiate the centrality of the person
and work of Christ and the authority and
integrity and trustworthiness of the word of God
will be unregenerate, and when the believers are
raptured, those false propagators of doctrines of devils
will be judged in the tribulation period.
God has delivered a body of truth through
Jesus Christ, and that truth is recorded for
us by inspiration in the word of God.
That word is given as our anchor.
It's the basis of a sinner's salvation, the
basis for a believer's growth.
It's an anchor for the believers in a
time of testing, but there is a constant
danger that Satan will snatch away the word
of God so that one is cast adrift
from his anchor and make shipwrecked of his
life.
Therefore, the Apostle's exhortation is most applicable to
us because of the doctrines of demons, or
Satan's lies, that the word of God is
not true, and that Jesus Christ is not
the Savior.
Test every teacher by the word of God
to see if he be in the faith
and to see if you be in the
faith.
We thank thee, our Father, for the integrity
and the authority of the word of God
that has revealed the course of the age
and has revealed the danger that confronts believers
lest they conform to this age.
Give us such an unshakable conviction as to
the authority and integrity of the scripture that
we shall receive with joy all that is
revealed in the scriptures concerning the person and
work of Jesus Christ.
May we be grounded in the truth of
God, that we can stand in dark and
troublous days with a foundation of God standing
sure as a hope, as an anchor of
the soul.
In Jesus' name we pray, amen.