"If They Shall Fall Away"    

Hebrews 6:6

 

     What is this falling away? Without question, the end result of this apostacy is eternal death. Those who fall away in the sense of this text can never be renewed to repentance. Let me know what it is, so that I may carefully and deligently avoid it!

     To fall away is not to fall into sin. The righteous fall seven times a day. But the Lord always raises them up. God's children in this world all sin. But God will not impute sin to his own. To fall away is not to fall into spiritual languishing. We often faint. But fainting is not death. It looks like it. We feel nothing, sense nothing,and can do nothing. But life remains, even when we faint. To fall away is not even to deny Christ. Peter did that. But the Lord raised him up. What is it then? Is this merely a frightening supposition, calling for us to consider what might happen if people could fall away? No. The apostacy is real. And the warning is as serious as it is alarming. Many do fall away. And this apostate fall, from which there is no recovery takes two forms.

1. TO FALL AWAY IS TO FORSAKE THE FAITH OF THE GOSPEL (Gal. 5:1-4). Those who turn away from the gospel of God's pure, free, sovereign grace in Christ and revert to free-will, Arminian, works religion have gone back to Babylon. They have fallen from grace! They have fallen from the doctrine of the grace of God. They have given up the hope of eternal life based upon Christ's righteousness and blood atonement alone. And Christ shall profit them nothing.

2. TO FALL AWAY IS TO FORSAKE THE ASSEMBLY OF GOD'S SAINTS IN PUBLIC WORSHIP (Heb. 10:25-31). Many tenaciously adhere to the doctrine of the gospel, who have utterly forsaken Christ. They will not tolerate Arminianism. But satan has, by his subtlety, taken them in another snare. By some trial, some earthly care, or some childish peevishness, he has persuaded them to forsake the body of Christ, the worship of God, and the ministry of the gospel. And any who wilfully, deliberately, and permanently turn from God's gospel and God's people are forever lost. They never truly knew our God. And they cannot be recovered.

     See to it that you hold fast the gospel of God's free grace firm unto the end, and that you forsake not the assembly of God's saints in worship.

 

Don Fortner