The Nature And Causes Of Apostasy – Part 5

When Repentance Is Impossible

By John Fast

For in the case of those who have once been enlightened and have tasted of the heavenly gift and have been made partakers of the Holy Spirit, and have tasted the good word of God and the powers of the age to come, and then have fallen away, it is impossible to renew them again to repentance, since they again crucify to themselves the Son of God, and put Him to open shame. – Hebrews 6:4-6 (NASB)

 In the previous study I concluded an examination of the five spiritual privileges mentioned by the author of Hebrews; privileges which were personally experienced by these apostates, the greatness of which only served to aggravate and intensify the guilt and severity of their apostasy, making their last state worse than their first (2 Pt 2:21, 22). Prior to their experiencing these spiritual privileges the possibility remained of their being saved by grace through faith in Jesus Christ from the snares of the devil and from the wrath of God, but the fact that they had “fallen away” (Hb 6:6) after having experienced and benefited from these spiritual blessings, made it “impossible to renew them again to repentance” (Hb 6:6). In another New Testament epistle, the apostle Paul instructed Timothy how to deal with people who were opposed and hostile to the truths and doctrines of the gospel, “with gentleness correcting those who are in opposition, if perhaps God may grant them repentance leading to the knowledge of the truth,” (2 Tim 2:25). The word translated “if perhaps” (mepote), in this context denotes a high degree of uncertainty; something that is within the realm of possibility, but not probability. In other words, there is more grounds for hope that God will grant repentance to someone who is, out of ignorance, hostile to the gospel (cf. 1 Tim 1:13) than there is for someone who has fallen away from the true gospel, corrupted the true gospel, and renounced its truths and doctrines. Those who in any way purposefully distort, change, or alter the true gospel of Jesus Christ – its doctrines, truths, principles, and commands – fall under the anathema and condemnation of God (Gal 1:7-9). There is more hope in God’s “if perhaps” than there is in His “impossible”. There is more hope for God granting repentance to a pagan or atheist than to an apostate.

This statement concerning the apostate, “it is impossible to renew them again to repentance”, is one of the most sobering and chilling truths of the Bible. It is possible for a person, a church, or even an entire nation to sin away all opportunity for repentance, and all hope and possibility of recovery. The Ninevites repented at the preaching of Jonah, and were given the privilege of knowing and acknowledging the one true God, but a hundred years later the Assyrians had forgotten God’s grace and returned to their old habits of idolatry, immorality, arrogance, and violence, so that the prophet Nahum in pronouncing God’s judgment on the nation of Assyria, declared, “There is no relief for your breakdown, your wound is incurable” (Nah 3:19). There was no hope for repentance. Their doom was sealed. Because of the “continual apostasy” (Jer 8:5) of the southern kingdom of Judah, God instructed the prophet Jeremiah three times not to pray for the people (Jer 7:16; 11:14; 14:11). There was no hope for their repentance. Their doom was sealed, “For thus says the Lord, ‘Your wound is incurable, and your injury is serious. There is no one to plead your cause; no healing for your sore, no recovery for you … Your pain is incurable, because your iniquity is great and your sins are numerous, I have done these things to you” (Jer 30:12, 13, 15). Esau “found no place for repentance, though he sought for it with tears” (Hb 12:17). He had no hope for repentance. His doom was sealed. Even though Jesus “had performed so many signs before them, yet they” (i.e, the Jews) “were not believing in Him” (Jn 12:37). And why did they not believe? “For this cause they could not believe, for Isaiah said again, “He has blinded their eyes, and He hardened their heart; lest they see with their eyes, and perceive with their heart, and be converted, and I heal them” (Jn 12:39, 40). All but a small remnant had obstinately sinned away their opportunity for repentance, so that Jesus declared, “how shall you escape the sentence of hell?” (Mt 23:33). Their doom was sealed.

Worse than an Unbeliever

In 1 Timothy 5:3-16 the apostle Paul instructed Timothy in how the church is to treat widows, as well as issuing a sober warning to some within the church at Ephesus who were failing “to provide for his own, especially those of his household,” (1 Tim 5:8). Such a person is living in violation of God’s clear commands and in doing so, “he has denied the faith, and is worse than an unbeliever” (1 Tim 5:8). Paul accused those who were shirking and abdicating God’s ordained roles and responsibilities of committing two offences. First, these professing Christians in the church in Ephesus had “denied the faith”. The verb is in the perfect tense indicating an action that had occurred in the past with the results of that action continuing to the present. In other words, this was their settled, permanent condition. What did they deny in the past? THE faith; the faith taught by Jesus, the apostles, and Scripture. In other words, their habitual disobedience to God’s Word was not the cause of their denying the faith, but the effect of their already having denied the faith. Their disobedience was not the effect of an ignorance of gospel truths, but of their denial of gospel truths. No effect can be greater than its cause. The action is simply a symptom of the larger issue of having already denied the faith. A person can “profess to know God, but by their deeds they deny Him,” (Tit 1:16). Denial need not take the form of a verbal renunciation; rather it is by their sinful, disobedient, worldly, and self-centered lives and actions that most professing Christians deny “the faith”. They may have a faith and a form of godliness, they may call themselves Christian, they may profess to believe certain facts about Christ and the gospel, they may honor God with their lips, they may use all the right words and go through all the motions of religion, but their faith is not “the faith”. This denial manifests itself three ways in the New Testament.

First, people deny the faith by denying the person of Jesus Christ. The Jews rejected the claims of Jesus to be the Son of God. The Apostle John had to warn of those who were preaching a different Jesus (1 Jn 2:18-23). There is nothing concerning the person of Jesus Christ – His deity, His eternality, His virgin birth, His natures, His Lordship, His substitutionary atonement, His imputed righteousness, His commands, His power, His authority, His sovereignty, His judgment – that has not been to many a stone of stumbling and rock of offence (1 Pt 2:8), and the reason they stumble is “because they are disobedient to the word,” (1 Pt 2:8). They refuse to submit their heart, mind, and life to the authority of Scripture; therefore, they invent and imagine a Jesus other than the Jesus who has revealed Himself in Scripture. Today we have the Jehovah’s Witness Jesus, the Mormon Jesus, the Unitarian Jesus, the modalistic Oneness Pentecostal Jesus, the Roman Catholic Jesus who is still on the cross, the ‘Jesus Calling’ Jesus, the Contemporary Christian Music Jesus, the Open Theism Jesus, the New Perspective Jesus, the health, wealth, and prosperity Jesus, the self-esteem Jesus, the Muslim Jesus, the Jesus of Liberal Theology, the non-Lordship Jesus, the ‘social gospel’ Jesus, the ‘woke’ Jesus, the Jesus of Progressive ‘Christianity’, and the endless Jesus’ of people’s own imaginations. According to one recent survey, almost three-quarters of professing evangelicals believe Jesus is the highest of God’s created beings. This is not the Jesus of Scripture, but a different Jesus, and those who believe in this Jesus are not Christian. All of these in one way or another deny the person of Jesus Christ revealed in Scripture. Nevertheless, the prevailing opinion today is that they are all the same, or at least close enough, so just pick the one that best suits you. All are passable; all that is, except the Jesus revealed in Scripture.

Second, people deny the faith by their actions and lifestyles (Is 48:1; Ezk 33:31; Rm 2:21-23; Tit 1:16). This was the case with those in the church in Ephesus. They professed “the faith” but led a life inconsistent with their profession. They were guilty of practicing sin and lawlessness (Mt 7:23; 1 Jn 3:8, 9). How many professing Christians, even pastors, have scandalized themselves and their church by their immoral and worldly lives? How many make a false repentance when their sin is discovered? How many pursue a materialistic, worldly, and self-indulgent lifestyle? How many consistently entertain themselves with the grossest sorts of immorality and blasphemy? How many have professed “the faith” for years but can’t even articulate an accurate gospel message? How many, by word or action, deny the authority, inerrancy, inspiration, and sufficiency of Scripture? How many are just plain apathetic, indifferent, and even hostile to spiritual truths? How many have a vocabulary that is as profane, or more profane, than that of the world? How many church’s doctrinal statements profess to believe the Bible that also have women pastors, programs that pander to the flesh, that corrupt the Word and worship of God, and that strive to be friends with the world, thereby denying in practice what they profess to believe in principle? How many put their trust in man and human wisdom? How many only believe parts of the Bible? It is this form of denial which characterizes not only this nation – a nation that prints ‘In God We Trust’ on its money but rejects and rebels against the Word and will of God in its laws and practices, and that habitually and repeatedly elects politicians who enact and vigorously defend such laws  – but also the mass of contemporary evangelicalism that honors God with their lips, but by their deeds deny Him..

Third, people deny the faith by teaching, propagating, and believing false doctrines and rejecting true doctrine (Gal 1:6-9; 1 Tim 1:18,19; 6:3; 2 Tim 2:17,18). It was for this purpose that Paul left Timothy in Ephesus, to confront and silence false teachers (1 Tm 1:3,4). There is nothing in the world that men and women more willingly and passionately dedicate the best of their abilities and intellects than in their efforts to promote the deceptions of their own minds in opposition to the truths and ways of God. It is an obvious and almost daily occurrence that if anyone offers some novel opinion that deviates from and contradicts the faith once for all delivered to the saints, instantly it is given more credibility, and more energy, effort, and zeal is exerted for its defense, propagation, and dissemination than for all the plainest and essential truths and doctrines of Christianity. Their religion consists of nothing but their error; it is their God, their Christ, their worship. It is what preoccupies their thoughts and what they labor to replicate, proliferate, and disseminate.

Modern evangelicalism is inundated with incompetent, unqualified, unregenerate, worldly, false and deceptive teachers and wolves in sheep’s clothing who are continually distorting the Scriptures, spreading their errors and deceitful doctrines, and masquerading as servants of righteousness. Churches abound with them, seminaries are filled with them, ‘Christian’ radio is peppered with them, ‘Christian’ television is dominated by them, the internet is awash in them, and ‘Christian’ bookstores are a minefield of false doctrine with virtually no attempt made to distinguish between the true and the false. People deny “the faith” in one or all of these ways. One is seldom found alone. Whatever faith they claim to have, it is not “the faith”. They may employ much of the same terminology as true Christianity, but they give it different meanings. They may call what they teach and believe ‘the gospel’, ‘Christianity’, and, ‘evangelical’, but it is not. Calling their various forms of godliness ‘Christian’ and ‘evangelical’, does not make them Christian and evangelical any more than a man calling himself a woman makes him a woman. It is a different gospel, a different Jesus, a different religion altogether. Such people would be much more honest if they would just renounce verbally what they already deny by their actions.

Not only had these people in the church of Ephesus denied the faith, Paul said they are “worse than an unbeliever.” The verb is present tense, indicating a settled, characteristic, and habitual condition. How could someone be worse than an unbeliever? They are worse in several ways. The unbeliever, because they have the Law of God “written on their hearts, their conscience bearing witness,” (Rm 2:14,15), they instinctively do the things of the Law; they have a God-given innate sense of right and wrong; they instinctively care for their own household and provide everything necessary for their ultimate wellbeing. So, when a professing Christian – a person who claims to have a new nature, the Law of God written on their heart, and the Holy Spirit to lead them into all truth – fails to do what an unbeliever does by instinct, they are morally worse than an unbeliever. Through the prophet Ezekiel, God accused the people of Jerusalem of having “rebelled against My ordinances more wickedly than the nations and against My statutes more than the lands which surrounded her;” (Ezk 5:6), and, “Yet you have not merely walked in their ways and done according to their abominations; but, as if that were too little, you acted more corruptly in your conduct than they” (Ezk 16:47). By rebelling against and forsaking God’s known will and Word, the Jews became worse than the pagan nations that surrounded them, so that by the time the Babylonians destroyed Jerusalem in 586 B.C., any distinction between the people of God and the pagan nations that surrounded them was at best only superficial.

They are worse because they have a false sense of security and a counterfeit faith on which they rely. They are blinded by the god of this world by a false confidence. Even though their life and beliefs deny their profession, they are still confident they are Christians and are going to heaven. Like the professing church in Laodicea they think they are rich and have need of nothing, never realizing or imagining they are wretched and miserable and poor and blind and naked (Rv 3:17). What more effective way for Satan to blind the mind of someone to the light of the gospel than to convince them they see (Jn 9:41)?

They are worse because there is little hope of true conversion for someone who has denied the faith (2 Tim 2:25; Hb 6:4-8; 2 Pt 2:20-22). True conversion is rare, but for those who are deceived into thinking they are Christians, and have lived under this delusion for a period of time, true conversion is even more rare. They are worse because those who deny the faith will suffer a severer judgment (Hb 2:3; 10:26-29; 12:25). They are worse because they bring reproach on the name of Christ and His church and become a stumbling block to the unbelieving by presenting a false representation of Christianity (Mt 13:41;18:7; Rv 2:14). Let me ask you dear reader, does the Bible not warn of a false repentance, a false faith, a false holiness, a false love and kindness, a false humility, a false unity, a false praying, a false worship, a false zeal, a false gospel, and a false religion? Does not the Bible present authentic faith as a rarity, and false profession as commonplace? Is it not but few that enter in by the narrow gate (Mt 7:14)? Is it not many who, despite saying “Lord, Lord” and going through all the motions of religion, will be cast into utter darkness (Mt 7:21-23)?

Shamelessness

Today multitudes have been horribly deceived into believing that the God of the Old Testament who judged and destroyed people and nations is a myth, or has been discredited, reformed, and replaced by the New Testament God of only love, peace, acceptance, and forgiveness. They do not believe there is any wrath of God from which to flee; therefore they feel no guilt and shame for sin, are never made poor in spirit, and never enter the kingdom of God (Mt 5:3). They are like the church in Sardis, dead while they are still alive (Rev 3:1) – dead in trespasses and sins (Eph 2:1). Instead of true repentance, they have “turned away in continual apostasy … They hold fast to deceit, they refuse to return … They have spoken what is not right; no man repented of his wickedness, saying, ‘What have I done?’ Everyone turned to his course,” (Jer 8:5, 6). God directed these words not to some pagan nation, but to the nation of Israel; not to a people who had never heard of the one true God, but to a people who had been given God’s laws, His commands, His covenants, His promises and warnings, His worship, His prophets, and who had experienced His blessings and witnessed His mighty acts of power. They had much sin for which to be ashamed, but they were not; rather, they “refused to be ashamed” (Jer 3:3). An indispensable part of true repentance is guilt and shame for actual sin. The prodigal son was so ashamed of his sin that he thought himself no longer worthy to be called his father’s son (Lk 15:21). Without shame and guilt for sin true repentance is impossible, “Were they ashamed because of the abomination they had done? They were not even ashamed at all; they do not even know how to blush” (Jer 6:15).

This describes not only our culture today, but the bulk of modern evangelicalism; both are shamelessly engrossed and entangled in sin. Just like Old Testament Israel they refuse to be ashamed. They have sinned away shame to the extent they no longer make any attempt to conceal their sin, “they display their sin like Sodom; they do not even conceal it” (Is 3:9), and like apostate Israel they “devoted themselves to shame, and they became as detestable as that which they loved” (Hos 9:10). There is a shame, grief, and embarrassment which people feel when they are caught in sin, “As the thief is shamed when he is discovered, so the house of Israel is shamed;” (Jer 2:26). This, however, is not the shame, guilt, and grief of a conscience weighed down with sin. Their guilt and shame are the result of being discovered, not the result of their sin. They are grieved that their sin was exposed, not by their sin. Some people’s consciences are so hardened to the sinfulness of sin that even when their sin is exposed they feel no guilt or shame, but instead justify their sin, give it respectable names, blame others, or chalk up their sin to their being ‘broken’. Some are so far from being ashamed of their sin that they glory in their sins, “whose glory is in their shame” (Phil 3:19). They take pride in their sin, consider it a virtue, and post it on social media for all the world to see. Others are ashamed of what should be their glory, namely, they are ashamed of Christ and His words, His gospel, His truths, His commands, His holiness, and His doctrines (Mk 8:38). Others are so far from being ashamed of sin that they view their sin as heroic and courageous (Is 5:22). They think it is a brave thing to openly declare their sin and perversion and to reject and despise the authority of God’s Word only because it has no hold on their conscience; they do not tremble at God’s Word (Is 66:2). Others are so far from being ashamed of sin that they work to make and keep the most horrid sins legal, granted protection as a ‘right’, and even to make them consistent with being a Christian. Others are so far from being ashamed of sin that they go to great lengths to corrupt and overturn those convictions and principles which expose the error and evil of their own ways, and to make others drink the same cup of God’s wrath which they drink. Today the only thing for which someone is made to feel ashamed is for attempting to make someone feel the guilt and shame of their sin and error, and when anyone is made to feel the guilt and shame of their sin, they complain that they have been made to feel ‘unsafe’, and are the victim of a ‘hate crime’. Yet, to feel no guilt and shame for sin and have no sense of danger or fear of being the object of God’s wrath is the most unsafe place anyone can possibly be.

No trial, no affliction, no hardship can compare with the agony of a conscience under the weight and guilt of sin. All pains and sorrows are nothing in comparison to the pains of a conscience under the conviction of sin and the wrath of God. It is a pain and sorrow that all the prosperity, health, pleasures, and freedom from all outward troubles and afflictions can never alleviate or cure, as David discovered, “My eye is wasted away from grief, my soul and body also. For my life is spent with sorrow, and my years with sighing; my strength has failed because of my iniquity, and my body has wasted away” (Ps 31:9, 10); “When I kept silent about my sin, may body wasted away through my groaning all day long. For day and night Your hand was heavy upon me; my vitality was drained away as with the fever heat of summer” (Ps 32:3, 4). Many people know no other misery than what they experience from outward trials and afflictions. They make their lack of fears, worries, troubles, trials, and afflictions the measure of a miserable condition. They think the happiest people are the ones who have the least worries, troubles, and sorrows, and the most miserable people the ones who have the most problems, trials, and afflictions. It is not outward afflictions that make us miserable, but only sin. Where there is the most sin, there is the most misery. It is a sin-calloused and sin-seared conscience that feels no shame and guilt for sin, that turns sin into a virtue, gives it respectable names, is proud of sin, vigorously defends sin, and that wants no one else to feel the painful guilt and shame of sin. Conscience can be desensitized, benumbed, seared, and silenced, but it cannot be eradicated. It will speak again and produce unspeakable pain and anguish of mind. A conscience uncleansed by the blood of Christ is an indescribable burden.

The thoughts which people have concerning the causes of a conscience weighed down with shame and guilt will determine the cures they seek to alleviate and pacify their conscience. If they attribute the cause to anything but sin, they will never seek the one and only cure. As long as men and women blame something other than their own corrupt and sinful nature, it is impossible they will ever see their need for a new nature. As long as men and women blame something other than their own sin, they will never flee to, prize, and love Jesus Christ. If your conscience, dear reader, suffers no shame and guilt for sin, or if your shame and guilt is easily pacified by superficial remedies, or if you think forcing people and society to accept, condone, protect, and celebrate your sin will eliminate your guilt, or if you can medicate your shame and guilt away, or if you do not feel the weight and evil of sin now, it is a dangerous indication that you are doomed to know and experience the wages of sin and wrath of God for eternity.

Oh, the horrible condition of those whose hearts are hardened and whose eyes and minds are irrecoverably, irrevocably, and judicially blinded and whose destruction is sealed while they are yet alive, with no hope of repentance. God’s judicial judgments for sin, for falling away after experiencing His gracious spiritual and temporal blessings, for turning away from the truth and turning aside to myths, for denying the faith, for corrupting His Word and worship, for calling evil good and good evil, for trampling underfoot the Son of God and insulting the Spirit of grace, are certain. God is immutable; He does not change. What He judged and punished people and nations for in the past, He will punish today, but even more so, because it is a rejection, corruption, forsaking, and sinning against greater light, “For if the word spoken through angels proved unalterable, and every transgression and disobedience received a just recompense, how shall we escape if we neglect so great a salvation?” (Hb 2:2, 3). The most hopeless apostates are those who have experienced the powerful operations of the Holy Spirit, but not savingly. From such people have come the most subtle, slippery, deceptive, and destructive false teachings and teachers, and the most dangerous enemies of the gospel and true Christianity (Ac 20:30; 2 Pt 2:1; Jude 4).

Disobedience to and rejection of Scripture is disobedience to, rebellion from, and rejection of God. People and churches stand or fall by faith and obedience or by unbelief and rebellion. The people, church, denomination, institution, or movement which questions or denies the authority, sufficiency, inerrancy, and historicity of Scripture will reap a harvest of spiritual and moral disaster. God’s Word, His will, and His providences cannot be denied, rejected, and opposed without catastrophic consequences to those who despise what God has declared and established. They only injure and destroy themselves (Pv 8:36). They dash themselves against this solid rock called God. All Satan accomplished by his inciting Judas to betray Jesus and by provoking the Jewish leader’s hatred for Jesus and their demand for His crucifixion was the crushing of his own head, the destruction of his works, and the ruin of his kingdom. When a people, church, institution, or government turn all their power against the truths, doctrines, and law of God, they only destroy themselves as they rage and throw themselves against God’s truth, “Who has defied Him without harm?” (Job 9:4); “Know therefore and see that it is evil and bitter for you to forsake the Lord your God,” (Jer 2:19); “Do they spite Me?” declares the Lord, “Is it not themselves they spite to their own harm” (Jer 7:19); “Why are you doing great harm to yourselves,” (Jer 44:7). Such is the state of not only this nation in general, but of the mass of modern evangelicalism in particular.

God patiently and graciously gives people time to repent, but they can sin away that time, “And I gave her time to repent; and she does not want to repent of her immorality” (Rev 2:21). They can refuse to be ashamed. They do not want to repent; they have no desire to repent; they are unwilling to repent, they refuse to repent, and instead, they are determined to rebel against and reject God and His Word, and to obstinately plunge themselves and others deeper and deeper into depravity, “The revolters have gone deep in depravity,” (Hos 5:2), and “they were eager to corrupt all their deeds” (Zeph 3:7), thereby inviting God’s destroying judgments. The first sermon Jesus preached was “Repent,” (Mt 4:17). The final instructions Jesus gave to His disciples was, “that repentance for forgiveness of sins should be proclaimed in His name to all the nations” (Lk 24:47). Peter’s first sermon on the day of Pentecost concluded with a command to repent (Ac 2:38). The message of Jesus to five of the seven churches of Asia was “repent” (Rev 2:5, 16, 22; 3:3, 19). Repentance is commanded by God in the gospel, “God is now declaring to men that all everywhere should repent” (Ac 17:30). Any Christianity that is not built upon the foundation of the doctrine of repentance is a false Christianity.

Today many false and apostate teachers and leaders are trying to tell us what is wrong with modern evangelicalism while at the same time ignoring the fact that they, their teaching, their practices, their approach to and view of Scripture, sin, the nature of man, and of salvation are what have contributed to its apostasy, “they have taught their tongue to speak lies; (Jer 9:5), and, “they hold fast to deceit” (Jer 8:5). Today people who profess to be Christians are calling our nation to repentance in a futile attempt to avoid the judgments of God, not realizing that all of the evil with which we are inundated, including the abundance of false and apostate teachers and churches, are the judgments of God. God’s general judgments often produce a general spiritual hardening. It is the worst judgment which God can inflict in this life on any person or nation to allow them to continue in sin without any restraint, or control, or shame. This is a sure mark of God’s judgment, that God permits people to continue uninhibited in sin without any restraint from society, government, or conscience. We are told, “those whom the Lord loves He disciplines,” (Hb 12:6), while the rest He allows to continue in their sin unabated, “I will not punish your daughters when they play the harlot or your brides when they commit adultery, … Ephraim is joined to idols; let him alone” (Hos 4:14, 17). It is a horrible judgment of God when He does not punish sin, “Because the sentence against an evil deed is not executed quickly, therefore the hearts of the sons of men among them are given fully to do evil” (Eccl 8:11). It is by God’s judgment of sin that sinners learn righteousness, “For when the earth experiences Your judgments the inhabitants of the world learn righteousness” (Is 26:9), but it is the worst judgment of God in this life to allow people to suffer no shame, guilt, or sorrow for sin, nor to feel any conviction of conscience, “Though the wicked is shown favor, he does not learn righteousness” (Is 26:10); “Of whom were you worried and fearful, when you lied, and did not remember Me, nor give Me a thought? Was I not silent even for a long time so you do not fear Me?” (Is 57:11).

Sometimes God is pleased, in His merciful grace, and by the plowshare of trials, afflictions, hardships, sufferings, and judgment, to prepare the soil to receive the precious seed of salvation, and make afflictions concerning our earthly lives and treasures to kindle a longing for enduring riches and righteousness. The pain of loss, the emptiness of earthly things, and the barrenness of a false hope and religion may be the means used of God to set people to thinking about their souls and to seek the things that are above. Nevertheless, no person, church, or nation that turns its back on God after experiencing His gracious spiritual and temporal blessings, especially when they have a history of acknowledged God as the author of those blessings, can avoid His judgments. God would first have to cease being God. When a person or nation ignores God’s corrective and warning judgments, it is inevitable they will experience His destroying judgments. God’s judgments can take many forms, as the great nineteenth century pastor and author J.C. Ryle once wrote concerning England’s growing secularism and rejection of Christianity,

“Scripture teaches plainly that God rules everything in this world, – that He deals with nations as they deal with Him, – that national prosperity and national decline are ordered by Him, … and that without His blessing no nation can prosper …. The Government which ignores religion, and coolly declares that it does not care whether its subjects are Christians or not, is guilty of an act of suicidal folly. Irreligion, even in a temporal point of view, is the worst enemy of a nation … In what manner God would punish England, if English Governments cast off all connection with religion, I cannot tell. Whether He would punish us by some sudden blow, such as defeat in war, and the occupation of our territory by a foreign power, – whether He would waste us away gradually and slowly by placing a worm at the roots of our commercial prosperity, – whether He would break us to pieces by letting fools rule over us and allowing Parliaments to obey them, and permitting us, like the Midianites, to destroy one another, – whether He would ruin us by sending a dearth of wise statesmen in the upper ranks, and giving the reins of power to communists, socialists, and mob-leaders, – all these are points which I have no prophetical eye to see, and I do not pretend to determine. God’s sorest judgments, the ancients said, ‘are like millstones, they grind very slowly, but they grind very fine’. The thing that I fear most for my country is gradual, insensible dry-rot and decay. But of one thing I am very sure, – the State that begins by sowing the seed of national neglect of God, will sooner or later reap a harvest of national disaster and national ruin.”[1]

We are now reaping that harvest. When the law of God is despised rather than acknowledged by government and society, and when God’s moral law ceases to be the standard and the means for training and sensitizing the conscience to right and wrong and good and evil, “for through the Law comes the knowledge of sin” (Rm 3:20), then eventually society reaches a point where they call evil good and good evil, where every man does what is right in his own eyes, and shame for sin is taboo and nonexistent. They, not God’s Word, becomes the ultimate standard and authority, and they are “determined to follow man’s command” (Hos 5:11). When a nation proudly boasts of laws and practices that are solely from the mind of man and that are in direct violation to God’s known moral law and will, men and women will have little concern or fear for God as Lawgiver and Judge. They descend deeper and deeper into lawlessness and depravity, and eventually sin away all opportunity and possibility of repentance. Governments, churches, denominations, and people who strictly adhere to God’s moral law are both righteous and just in all their ways, and those who reject and forsake God’s moral law are both unrighteous and unjust. They know no shame, “But the unjust knows no shame” (Zeph 3:5). When governments or churches and their administrators shamelessly defend the ‘rights’ of the wicked while showing contempt for the moral law of God and for those who refuse to forsake it, repentance for them will be impossible. I do not wish to be misunderstood, I am not a theonomist, nor am I advocating some form of theocracy, national church, or religious intolerance; rather I am simply stating the obvious fact that God judges people, churches, and nations that turn their backs on Him; that they can sin away all shame for sin and all possibility of repentance, and one of the surest marks that they have done so is when they obstinately refuse to repent of their sin, and instead go deeper and deeper into decadence, deceit, depravity, and shamelessness. They are dead even while they live. Their doom is sealed.

In these calls for repentance today there is little or no mention of exactly what we are to repent of, or we are told to repent of sins which we have not actually and personally committed, such as ‘injustice’, ‘systemic racism’, and of belonging to a group deemed by others as ‘oppressors’ – sins for which very few today are actually guilty. Some are trying to shame us into repenting for our unwillingness to interpret Scripture through the lens of some ‘oppressed’ group in society, thereby proving, at least to their way of thinking, that we must belong to the ‘oppressors’. Such selective ‘repentance’ is in reality false repentance and is worse than meaningless; it is a mocking of God. Some are calling for people to fast and pray to the god of their choice, thereby incurring for themselves greater guilt and condemnation. Today we are told we must repent of upholding and declaring the clear commands and warnings of Scripture, of calling sin by its right names, of making a distinction between what is and is not Christian, and for being ‘too narrow’ and ‘judgmental’, in other words, for being Christian. Today many are repenting of speaking the truth in love and exposing the unfruitful deeds of darkness, especially when the backlash for doing so threatens their worldly self-interests. What are conspicuous by their absence, however, are the calls for repentance from the actual sins against God, His Word, and His glory.

Where are the calls to repent of claims of extra-biblical revelation, of the corruption of God’s Word, His gospel, and His worship, of rejecting His clear prohibition against women preachers and pastors, of pragmatism, worldliness, materialism, idolatry, love of money, of false teachings, doctrines, and prophecies, of making no distinction between the clean and the unclean and between truth and error, of siding with the world, of calling evil good and good evil, of justifying the wicked and condemning the righteous, of rejecting the authority, inerrancy, sufficiency, historicity, and inspiration of Scripture, of integrating feminist, evolutionary, Marxist, and other flawed human ideologies and systems with infallible Scripture, of willful disobedience to God’s clear commands, of participating in, either actually or vicariously, the unfruitful deeds of darkness rather than exposing them, of misrepresenting the nature and denying the attributes of God? In other words, where are the calls to repent not just of certain unpopular sins, but of sin, namely, of all the sin which modern evangelicalism has come to depend upon for its temporal and earthly success, and which has always provoked God’s destroying judgments on people and nations in the past? It is for all the sin for which God has judged people and nations in the past that modern evangelicalism refuses to be ashamed and from which it refuses to repent (Jer 3:3; 5:3). Such calls for repentance are conspicuous by their absence, because, “Their deeds will not allow them to return to their God,” (Hos 5:4), because their earthly success and self-interest are too intertwined with their sin. Like apostate Israel, they return to God out of a concern for their earthly self-interests, not out of any sense of shame and guilt for sin, not from a conscience weighed down with sin, not with a willingness to renounce and forsake their sin, not for the glory and honor of God, and not with all their heart, “but rather in deception,” (Jer 3:10). “If you will return, O Israel,” declares the Lord, “then you should return to Me” (Jer 4:1).

When people refuse to be ashamed of sin and have no intention of repenting of the sin upon which their own self-interests depend, they will pretend to repent of sins which the culture defines and finds offensive, so as to win the favor of the culture, not to be reconciled to a holy and offended God, and to appear righteous in the sight of men, not be humbled before a holy God. Self-will, not the will of God, is the motive for their repentance. True repentance turns from and forsakes every false, sinful, and disobedient way, belief, and practice, even when doing so is as harmful to our self-interest as plucking out our right eye and cutting off our right hand (Mt 5:29, 30). It yields to the commands, truths, and doctrines of Scripture. A heart of stone, however, is impervious to conviction; it is known by its inflexibility. A stone will not conform to a mold, and so it is with a stony heart, it will not conform to the Word of God, it is unwilling to comply with God’s commands and truths, it cannot be softened by shame and guilt for sin; rather it shamelessly and tirelessly works to conform God’s Word and gospel to its own mold. A heart of stone would rather break than submit to God’s Word; instead, it is always resisting the Holy Spirit (Ac 7:51). The unrepentant sinner deceives themselves that a joyous and pleasant life awaits everyone like them after death. The true Christian cannot comfort themselves with such false hopes and delusions without denying the true gospel and the essence of their faith. There is no such hope for any man or woman who dies in their sin. It is still impossible to renew the apostate to repentance, namely, those who have fallen away from, denied, corrupted, and repudiated the truths, doctrines, and commands of the gospel of Jesus Christ. Sadly, this describes not just this nation, but the mass of contemporary evangelicalism.

Fallen Away

Concerning the ‘falling away’ of these apostates, the author of Hebrews makes two statements. First, he affirms the impossibility of their repentance, and second, he states the reasons for such an affirmation. The author first affirmed, “that it is impossible to renew them again to repentance,” (6:6). The very idea is denied, “it is impossible”. Our author does not state that such a thing is rare, or difficult, or improbable, or seldom seen and therefore not to be expected, but that it is an absolute impossibility. To hope that an apostate will repent of their apostasy is a false and futile hope. It is the same as hoping God’s Word is not true, and that God is not God. It is an impossibility because apostasy is irreversible. As I wrote in the first study, the author of Hebrews uses the same word three other times in his epistle to declare that certain things are impossible, namely, “it is impossible for God to lie” (6:18); “it is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sin” (10:4); “And without faith it is impossible to please Him” (11:6). Our author clearly intended to convey the idea that something cannot possibly happen. It is as impossible to renew the apostate to repentance as it is for God to lie, for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sin, and to please God without faith. It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than it is to make what God has declared impossible even remotely possible. It is not that God does not have the power to restore the apostate to repentance, but He utterly refuses to do so. God has declared and absolutely determined in the counsel of His own unchangeable will that such a thing shall never be; therefore, it is impossible to renew an apostate to repentance. God would not have us expect that He would grant repentance to an apostate, nor has He given us any command to attempt such a thing or appointed any means by which we might attempt it. Our responsibility towards such people is altogether at an end; in fact, they put themselves completely out of our reach. We are not to hope, expect, or pray for, or attempt to renew such persons to repentance. Any truth which we might give them is casting our pearls before swine and only aggravates their guilt and leaves them without any excuse for their apostasy and unbelief. Any show of repentance which they might make will be as sincere as was Pharaoh’s for refusing to let Israel leave Egypt (Ex 9:27), and as was Saul’s for his repeated attempts to murder David (1 Sm 26:21). They can say all the right words, but they will never bring forth fruit in keeping with genuine repentance (Mt 3:8).

What is stated to be impossible with respect to the apostate is, “to renew them again to repentance,” (Hb 6:6). Repentance, like true saving faith, is a gift of God and the fruit of regeneration (Eph 2:8). It is God and God alone who grants repentance (2 Tim 2:25). Innumerable poor souls have been hardened in sin to their eternal ruin by the wretched notion that they have the power within themselves to turn from sin to God whenever they get good and ready. Repentance (metanoian) refers to a complete change of mind in how a person thinks about sin. It is the work of the Holy Spirit working through the Word of God that produces a radical change in a person’s life so that they turn away from sin in all its forms and turn to God. In the case of the apostate, it is impossible “to renew them again”. Any attempts to do so will be in vain. To better understand the meaning of our author, we need to determine what it is to be “renewed” and what it is to be “renewed again”. The simple word “new” (kainizo) means “to make new; to create something new”, “Therefore if any man is in Christ, he is a new (kainos) creature” (2 Cor 5:17). The word “renew” (anakainizo), refers to our regeneration whereby we are given a new nature, “which in the likeness of God has been created in righteousness and holiness of the truth” (Eph 4:24). Just as we have lost the image of God by sin and were separated from God and were by nature children of wrath, this “renewing” is both the restoration of our nature and our reconciliation to God. This “renewing” is two-fold.

First, it is a genuine inward renewal of our fallen nature by which we are born again and conformed to the image of Christ, “He saved us, not on the basis of deeds which we have done in righteousness, but according to His mercy, by the washing of regeneration and renewing by the Holy Spirit,” (Tit 3:5); “and have put on the new self who is being renewed to a true knowledge according to the image of the One who created him” (Col 3:10). But this is not the “renewing” intended by our author because this is something these nor any other apostates ever had. No one can be renewed to something they never had.

Second, this renewal is merely an outward renovation that consisted primarily of a profession of faith, a false repentance, a spurious conversion to the gospel, and a temporary turning from Judaism. By their profession of repentance from sin, turning to Christ by ‘faith’, and tasting of the works of the Holy Spirit, they were received into the church as those who had been given a new nature and undergone a radical inward transformation, even though they had never really been born again. Such was the renewal of Judas, of Demas, and of all false teachers and apostates. Their repentance was a false repentance which perhaps consisted of a legal conviction of conscience that produced a terror, anguish, and remorse from which the Law of Moses could not set them free (Ac 13:38, 39). A sense of shame and guilt is enough to breed anguish, remorse, and terror, but this is not repentance. A stony heart may be broken into a thousand pieces and remain a heart of stone. Only those who have suffered guilt and shame for sin can truly repent, but guilt and shame alone are not repentance, nor do they by themselves produce repentance. Judas felt guilt and remorse for betraying Jesus but he never repented. Conviction is not conversion, and remorse is not repentance. Perhaps they had made some resolutions against committing certain sins, not because they are sinful, but because the consequences are too painful. Resolutions are not repentance. These resolutions will soon disappear, and like a dog that returns to its vomit they will return to their sin because their nature remains unchanged. Perhaps they just traded obvious and self-destructive sins for less obvious and more respectable sins. Sins can be exchanged and the heart remain unchanged. Sins may be renounced without repentance. Repentance involves a change of heart and mind, not a change of sins. A person can change their sins but they cannot change their nature. Outwardly they may appear regenerate, but inwardly they remain unchanged. This was the extent of their renovation. It was from this outward renovation from which they totally fell away, renounced their profession of faith in Christ, and returned to Judaism.

It now becomes evident what our author meant by “to renew them again”. It is to bring these apostates again to a second repentance, a second beginning, a second renovation, that will lead to true conversion. This our author declares to be absolutely impossible and utterly futile to attempt. In the case of these apostates in particular, they returned to Judaism “after receiving the knowledge of the truth” (Hb 10:26) in order to pursue a righteousness of their own derived from the law, and in so doing they trampled underfoot the Son of God and insulted the Spirit of grace (Hb 10:29). In other words, they rejected the truth for a lie and a true salvation for a false salvation – a lie and false salvation that they were convinced were true, otherwise they never could have rejected the true for the false. Their belief and conviction that they were right rendered their repentance impossible. They obstinately clung to their false beliefs, false hopes, and false views of God, of Jesus Christ, and of salvation, thereby refusing to repent, “a deceived heart has turned him aside. And he cannot deliver himself, nor say, ‘Is there not a lie in my right hand?’” (Is 44:20). Apostasy is not the result of an absence of truth or ignorance of truth or misunderstanding of truth, but of the rejection of and falling away from known truth. Weak and apostate churches and denominations are full of people who have never been taught the truth; rather they have been taught, generation after generation, lies, false doctrines, traditions of men, and almost truth instead of truth. They are sheep without a shepherd. They have never been taught any truth to reject. It is not ignorance of or the inability to understand gospel truths and doctrines, but an intolerance for and hatred of those plain truths and doctrines which are understood that causes people to turn away from the truth and turn aside to myths, to prefer error to truth, and apostasy to submission to the authority of Scripture.

Such apostates, for the most part, fall into such obvious distortions, corruptions, oppositions, and even persecutions of the truth and sound doctrine, and into utterly worldly, sinful, and profane lifestyles, that they make it evident that they were never truly Christian, “They went out from us, but they were not really of us; for if they had been of us, they would have remained with us; but they went out, in order that it might be shown that they all are not of us” (1 Jn 2:19); “They are from the world; therefore they speak as from the world, and the world listens to them” (1 Jn 4:5). They make it abundantly plain how the true believer is to behave toward them, namely, we are to “avoid such men as these” (2 Tim 3:5), and we are “not even to eat with such a one” (1 Cor 5:11). This is the sum of what our author affirms concerning these apostates, namely, that “it is impossible to renew them again to repentance”; that is, it is impossible to bring them again to a repentance by which they may be restored to a right relationship with God and fellowship with the church. They may, like many apostates and false teachers today who after having their sinful lives exposed, reinstate themselves back into positions within the church after an obligatory series of modified and token repentances on social media and a few months of self-imposed exile, only to reemerge to lead more people astray. The sad reality is that in modern evangelicalism every effort is made to restore to places of influence in ministry people whom the Bible declares are impossible to renew to repentance. Virtually no effort is made to renew the apostate to repentance, not because the Bible declares it to be impossible, but for the simple reason that no repentance, other than what is required for appearances sake, is required or expected. Repentance implies sin for which someone must repent, but when people reject all attempts to convict them of sin, and even seek to shame and punish anyone who would call their sin by its right names, and when they refuse to admit their sin as sin and refuse to be ashamed, then true repentance is impossible.

To avoid any misunderstandings regarding our author’s intent in affirming the impossibility of renewing an apostate to repentance, several things need to be observed. First, our author is silent concerning the acceptance or rejection of any one who, upon a profession of repentance after any sin, is either restored or not to fellowship within the church. Such a determination is to be made based on other rules and circumstances. It is not stated that men and women who ever fell away can never, upon their repentance, be restored to their former condition within the church, but that the severity of God against apostasy from the truths of the gospel is such that He will not again grant them repentance leading to a knowledge of the truth unto eternal life. Secondly, nothing is said that might exclude anyone from repentance who may have fallen into any great sin, or course of sinning, who after conviction, shame, guilt, sorrow, and confession of sin, sincerely desires to repent of and forsake their sin. Such a desire exempts and absolves anyone from the judgment affirmed by our author.

A Closed Door Which None Can Open

The door of repentance is only closed to those who refuse to see their sin, to acknowledge their sin, to be ashamed of their sin, to confess their sin as sin, and to turn from and forsake their sin in repentance, “If we say that we have no sin, we are deceiving ourselves, and the truth is not in us…If we say that we have not sinned, we make Him a liar, and His word is not in us” (1 Jn 1:8, 10). Such people may come under the conviction of their sin, feel remorse for their sin, and experience despair from the consequences of their sin, but as far as having the least desire to repent of and forsake their sin according to the terms of the gospel, this is something they have no desire or ability to do. The impossibility affirmed by our author refers to the severity of God, not in refusing to grant repentance to the greatest sinners who see their need for a new nature and who seek forgiveness of their sin by turning to Christ in faith and from sin in repentance, but in giving over such people as are described by our author to their own stubborn and obstinate course of sinning, and to their own hardness of heart and blindness of mind, and to their own hostility to the law of God and to the truths and doctrines of the gospel, so that they never will nor can sincerely seek after repentance, nor can any means be used to bring them to repentance. Instead, they sink deeper and deeper into rebellion against the known will and Word of God and into the grossest, most detestable, self-destructive, and irrational forms of depravity. The righteousness of this judgment is commensurate with the nature of this sin, which our author describes in Hebrews 10:26-29.

It is by His spiritual judgments that God in His righteous severity places apostates under the impossibility affirmed by our author. Once God closes the door of opportunity for repentance, none can open it, “Once the head of the house gets up and shuts the door, and you begin to stand outside and knock on the door, saying, ‘Lord, open up to us!’ then He will answer and say to you, ‘I do not know where you are from’” (Lk 13:25). The door of repentance has never been locked against any but those who are obstinately determined to persist in their sin and rebellion against the known Word and will of God, “As for the message that you have spoken to us in the name of the Lord, we are not going to listen to you! But rather we will certainly carry out every word that has proceeded from our mouths,” (Jer 44:16, 17). This is the most severe of all of God’s judgments. It has in it the sentence of eternal torment pronounced upon the apostate while they are still living in this world, “The sins of some men are quite evident, going before them to judgment;” (1 Tim 5:24). God passes judgment upon them in this world to the effect that there will be no change in their nature and spiritual and moral condition for all eternity. They will die in their sins (Jn 8:24). They cannot escape the sentence of hell (Mt 23:33). They do not go to ‘a better place’ when they die. “Behold then the kindness and severity of God; to those who fell, severity,” (Rm 11:22). This severity of God towards obstinate sinners and rebels under the gospel who are bound and determined to corrupt, distort, and reject the commands, doctrines, and truths of the gospel, who have sinned away all opportunity for repentance, and who refuse to be ashamed and repent, consists of four things.

First, God brings to an end all His dealings with them; He leaves them without His corrective discipline, and instead treats them as illegitimate children and not sons (Hb 12:8). He exercises no more care over them, but leaves them to their own devises, “So I gave them over to the stubbornness of their heart, to walk in their own devices” (Ps 81:12). As long as God is pleased to provide the means of conversion and repentance, namely, His Word preached and empowered by the Holy Spirit (1 Cor 1:21), He expects to find fruit in keeping with repentance and true faith. Likewise, when God all but takes away His means of conversion and repentance, and instead sends a famine on the land, “not a famine for bread or a thirst for water, but rather for hearing the words of the Lord” (Am 8:11), and gives people over to blind guides, false teachers, and worldly and apostate churches and leaders, it is a sure sign He has ceased expecting any fruit. When a man stops tilling and removing the weeds from his garden, and instead lets them sprout, grow, and take it over, it is a sure sign he no longer expects any significant fruit from his garden, and so it is with God, “So now let Me tell you what I am going to do to My vineyard: I will remove its hedge and it will be consumed; I will break down its wall and it will become trampled ground. And I will lay it waste; it will not be pruned or hoed, but briars and thorns will come up.” (Is 5:5, 6); “Yes, woe to them indeed when I depart from them” (Hos 9:12). It is a terrible judgment of God when He departs and hides Himself from any person, church, or nation, “But your iniquities have made a separation between you and your God, and your sins have hidden His face from you, so that He does not hear” (Is 59:2).

Second, God will give them and punish them with hardness of heart and blindness of mind so that they never will repent and believe the true gospel, “For this cause they could not believe, for Isaiah said again, ‘He has blinded their eyes, and hardened their heart; lest they see with their eyes, and perceive with their heart, and be converted, and I heal them’” (Jn 12:39, 40). God, by one means or another, will judicially blind and harden them in their sin, and everything that happens to them will only serve to increase their hardness. So it was with the Jews; the exposing of their sin, rebellion, and hypocrisy filled them with rage (Ac 7:54), the doctrine of Christ and Him crucified elicited their scorn, ridicule, and blasphemy (Ac 13:45, 46), and His miracles they attributed to the work of the devil (Mt 12:24). That which should have been for their good instead worked for their harm, and that which should have convicted them of sin and produced in them guilt, shame, and repentance only made them more determined to continue in sin and rebellion, “with the result that they always fill up the measure of their sins. But wrath has come upon them to the utmost” (1 Thes 2:16). And so it is with all whom God judicially hardens and blinds, “they refused to pay attention, and turned a stubborn shoulder and stopped their ears from hearing. And they made their hearts like flint so that they could not hear the law and the words which the Lord of hosts sent by His Spirit through the former prophets;” (Zech 7:11, 12); “but the tax-gathers and harlots did believe him; and you, seeing this, did not even feel remorse afterward so as to believe him” (Mt 21:32). Whether God’s outward means of conversion and repentance are still provided for them or not makes no difference, everything drives them further and further from God and deeper and deeper into rebellion, falsehood, and depravity, and increases their hatred of God and His Word and their obstinacy in sin. So it was with those who persecuted and killed the Reformers and the Puritans. They become scoffers and persecutors, hating and corrupting the truth, all while pretending to be living in obedience to God, “Those who hate the Lord would pretend obedience to Him” (Ps 81:15). They will continue to please themselves and be motivated by their own self-interests until they are swallowed up in guilt and despair or by hell.

Third, in His severity God will usually and progressively give such people and nations up to sensual, fleshly, worldly, carnal, and degrading lusts. He does not give them up all at once, but progressively so that their conscience gradually becomes desensitized and benumbed to the evil of sin. This is what Paul describes in Romans 1:24, 26, and 28, “Therefore God gave them over in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, that their bodies might be dishonored among them” (Rm 1:24). First, God gives them up to heterosexual immorality. Then, once people’s consciences are hardened to this and they consider it the norm, and moral purity and holiness are reckoned by them as strange, God gives them up to homosexual immorality, “God gave them over to degrading passions; for their women exchange the natural function for that which is unnatural, and in the same way also the men abandoned the natural function of the woman and burned in their desire toward one another, men with men committing indecent acts and receiving in their own persons the due penalty of their error” (Rm 1:26, 27). Once people’s consciences have adjusted to this, and homosexuality is no longer countercultural and ‘cool’, and such wickedness is accepted, celebrated, and institutionalized, God then gives them over to a depraved mind, “God gave them over to a depraved mind, to do those things which are not proper” (Rm 1:28). They are given over to a mind that is incapable of making any right moral judgments, therefore, they “do those things which are not proper”, that is, those things that even natural, unregenerate human conscience and judgment regards as wicked, demented, degenerate, and wrong, and that even a healthy pagan mind and conscience utterly abhors and rejects – things such as transgenderism and giving puberty blocking drugs to children. They become devoid of all vestiges of being a moral rational creature and of the humanity that even a healthy pagan mind and conscience will respect. Jude’s description of apostates applies to them, “But these men revile the things which they do not understand; and the things which they know by instinct, like unreasoning animals, by these things they are destroyed” (Jude 10). In other words, they are worse than an unbeliever, and worse than people who live under the darkness of paganism. In this way God frequently deals with apostates from the gospel, or from its principle truths and doctrines, who turn away their ears from the truth and turn aside to myths. When they are determined to pursue their lusts, and especially when God has judicially given them over to their lusts, they are enslaved and chained to them until they are forever punished for them, “His own iniquities will capture the wicked, and he will be held with the cords of his sin” (Pv 5:22); “the wicked will fall by his own wickedness” (Pv 11:5); “suffering wrong as the wages of doing wrong” (2 Pt 2:13).

Fourth, God gives such people over to Satan to be blinded by him and led into irrational, self-destructive, and wicked delusions, “Even if our gospel is veiled, it is veiled to those who are perishing, in whose case the god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelieving, that they might not see the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God” (2 Cor 4:3, 4). Hymenaeus and Alexander “suffered shipwreck in regard to their faith”, for which Paul delivered them over to Satan (1 Tim 1:19, 20). This will be the condition of all those who follow the antichrist, “because they did not receive the love of the truth so as to be saved. And for this reason God will send upon them a deluding influence so that they might believe what is false, in order that they all may be judged who did not believe the truth, but took pleasure in wickedness” (2 Thes 2:10-12). This was the condition of the apostates described by the author of Hebrews. The truth of the gospel was preached to them, and for a time was professed by them. They received the truth and tasted of its spiritual privileges, but they did not receive the love of the truth so as to be saved, so as to obey the truth, and so as to be transformed by the truth. This made them barren and unfruitful under their profession of faith, because where the truth is not loved, even though it may be professed, believed, and assented to, it will, like the barren fig tree cursed by Jesus, yield only leaves, but no fruit. But these were worse than fruitless; instead of fruit, they yielded thorns and thistles (Hb 6:8); they took pleasure in their lusts, sin, and wickedness, and were determined not to part with them on any terms. Instead they began to vigorously defend their sin, to redefine their sin, to turn their sin into a virtue, and to dislike and hate the truth. Yet, they still desired to have a religion of some sort or another, or at least the pretense of a religion and a form of godliness, to divert attention away from the truths they rejected and the sin they loved. God gives such people over to the power of Satan who blinds, deludes, and deceives them so completely that they not only willingly and readily embrace the lies, errors, and falsehoods that he suggests to them, no matter how irrational, unnatural, depraved, self-contradictory, and self-destructive they may be, but to obstinately believe, defend, and cling to them. Satan is able to so blind, delude, and bewilder the mind of men and women that they believe themselves to be the exact opposite of what they really are, “Because you say, ‘I am rich, and have become wealthy, and have need of nothing,’ and you do not know that you are wretched and miserable and poor and blind and naked” (Rev 3:17). He is able to so deceive a person’s mind that they think and believe that they are doing good, when they are committing and condoning the most heinous and demented forms of evil, “but an hour is coming for everyone who kills you to think that he is offering service to God” (Jn 16:2). This is the way by which so many carnal, worldly, and apostate professors are seduced into following, adhering to, and defending false doctrines, false teachers, and false churches. It becomes impossible to renew them again to repentance. What hope is there for those from whom God has departed and left them to walk in their own devices? What hope is there for those whom God has blinded and hardened, whom God has given over to their own lusts and a depraved mind, and delivered up to Satan to be deluded and led captive to do his will? It is vain to hope for the repentance of such people, nor is it to be expected, pursued, or attempted.

There is a tendency for unrepentant religious men and women to “think lightly of the riches of His kindness and forbearance and patience, not knowing that the kindness of God leads you to repentance”; therefore “because of your stubbornness and unrepentant heart you are storing up wrath for yourself in the day of wrath and revelation of the righteous judgment of God,” (Rm 2:4, 5). Believing nothing to be in God but mercy, kindness, and patience, and nothing in the gospel but grace, forgiveness, and acceptance, they are ready and willing to corrupt them and turn them into licentiousness, or to deny both God and the gospel if by doing so they can justify themselves in their sin. In this way, and by means of innumerable errors, distortions, and mistaken understandings perfectly suited to their own lusts and worldly inclinations, and intensified by the cunning of Satan, multitudes who hear the gospel preached harden themselves against it to their own destruction.

Modern evangelicalism recoils from, is indignant against, and totally rejects such a conception of God who would deal so severely with any sinner so as to render their repentance impossible. And the reason most professing Christians reject such a conception of God is because the god which they worship and which is preached in thousands of churches every Sunday, would never act with such severity. Their reaction to the truth of God’s severity is the same as was that of Old Testament Israel, “The way of the Lord is not right” (Ezk 18:25). Shall we be afraid to speak the truth in love and say that God will not renew such apostates as those described in Scripture to repentance, or to declare that no one can be saved without repentance? Shall we tell men and women that whatever truth they have known, whatever gifts they have, whatever privileges they have been made partakers of, whatever profession of faith they may have made for however long a time, however much religious activity and good deeds they have performed, that if they fall away from the gospel and its principle truths and doctrines into a life that is opposite and opposed to its truths, obedience, and holiness, that they may still without a doubt repent again and be saved; or even worse, tell them that their life of sin, rebellion, rejection, and corruption of God’s Word is consistent with being Christian? May God forbid that such false, deceptive, unmerciful, and wicked teaching would ever come from our mouths! Such evil can only come from the father of lies.

We are commanded to warn all those who are in danger of such apostasies that, “if he shrinks back, My soul has no pleasure in him” (Hb 10:38), and that, “It is a terrifying thing to fall into the hands of the living God” (Hb 10:31), and that God will judicially blind and harden such apostates “so that they might believe what is false, in order that they all may be judged who did not believe the truth, but took pleasure in wickedness” (2 Thes 2:11, 12), and that God has not obligated Himself by any promise to grant them repentance, but instead He has given them many severe warnings to the contrary. He has told us that such people are “autumn trees without fruit, doubly dead, uprooted;” (Jude 12), for which there is no hope, and that “it would be better for them not to have known the way of righteousness, than having known it, to turn away from the holy commandment delivered to them” (2 Pt 2:21). It is still impossible to renew apostates from the truths, doctrines, commands, and principles of the gospel to repentance. Their doom is sealed. The implications of this truth for modern evangelicalism are terrifying and should serve as a motivation for serious self-examination on the part of everyone who loves their own soul (2 Cor 13:5). O dear reader, be serious. Feel your own pulse, examine your own ways, search your own hearts. The way that leads to life is narrow, and few there are who find it, while the road that leads to destruction is traveled by multitudes who were and still are convinced in their own minds that they are on the right road.

The Reason

Two reasons are given by our author for why it is impossible to renew the apostate to repentance, first, “since they again crucify to themselves the Son of God”, and second, “and put Him to open shame” (Hb 6:6). Given the length to which this study has already grown, I will only deal with the first reason and reserve the second for the next study. It is impossible that anyone by any means should renew the apostate again to repentance, because this cannot be done without their again crucifying to themselves the Son of God, since they have rejected all interest in and benefit from the substitutionary death which Christ died once for all, “nor was it that He should offer Himself often, as the high priest enters the holy place year by year with blood not his own. Otherwise He would have needed to suffer often since the foundation of the world; but now once at the consummation of the ages He has been manifested to put away sin by the sacrifice of Himself” (Hb 9:25, 26). Both the grammar and context make it clear that this act of ‘crucifying again’ is committed by the apostates, and is a great part of their sin. They do not do it actually, for that would be impossible, but they do it to themselves morally. This is what comprises part of their sin of falling away, and which makes it irreversible and unpardonable; “they again crucify to themselves the Son of God”, not literally and actually, but in and to themselves. No one can crucify Christ again just so the apostate might be renewed and saved. In rejecting the truths, commands, doctrines, principles, obedience, and holiness of the gospel, they reject Jesus Christ and show their utter contempt for Him and His atoning sacrifice of Himself, thereby becoming one “who has trampled underfoot the Son of God, and has regarded as unclean the blood of the covenant by which he was sanctified, and has insulted the Spirit of grace” (Hb 10:29). The author of Hebrews plainly restates this truth when he wrote, “For if we go on sinning willfully after receiving the knowledge of the truth, there no longer remains a sacrifice for sins, but a certain terrifying expectation of judgment, and fury of a fire that will consume the adversaries” (Hb 10:26, 27). Jesus cannot be offered again, and therefore crucified again, so that the apostate’s sins might be forgiven. Since Christ suffered once for sin, whoever rejects and forfeits the benefit of that one sacrifice, there remains for them no more sacrifice for sin.

In what way or sense did these apostates “again crucify to themselves the Son of God”? They did so in a two-fold way. First, by identifying with and approving of those who had actually crucified Jesus. By returning to Judaism they justified and approved of His being crucified by the Jews as a blasphemer, deceiver, troublemaker, and criminal, because there is no neutral position to the person of Jesus Christ. The Lord Jesus must be believed to be the divine and eternal Son of God and promised Messiah, and therefore honored, trusted, worshiped, and obeyed as the Son of God, or He must be regarded as having been justly accused and crucified as a seducer, deceiver, and blasphemer. Having declared Himself to be the Son of God and equal with God (Jn 1:1, 2; 5:18, 23; 8:58; 10:30), and bearing witness to this fact up until the moment of His death, and after His death He “was declared the Son of God with power by the resurrection from the dead,” (Rm 1:4), He must be received as the one and only Lord, God, and Savior (Ac 4:12), or rejected as a deceiver and evildoer. This is what was done by these apostates in their return to Judaism; they agreed with what Jesus was accused of, and approved of what was done to Him. This is what all do morally and spiritually who turn their ears away from the truth and turn aside to myths (2 Tim 4:4).

The apostate may object and say, “I believe the Bible. I love Jesus. I pray and worship. I am persuaded that I will go to heaven when I die. I believe that nothing shall separate me from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus.” But the meaning of all these pious-sounding good words may be no more than this, that they have an emotional and cultural attachment to some church or denomination, that the Jesus they love is the one they invented, which is why they love him, that they will cling to their own opinions and subjective experiences over and against the plainest and strongest evidences, truths, and doctrines of Scripture, that they believe only parts of the Bible, that they believe not the text of Scripture, but the meaning that they have imposed on the text. What they call the internal witness of the Holy Spirit is nothing but some emotional experience, a strong deception of their own mind, or their own opinion that they are a child of God. Because they have some interest in religion, some desires to go to heaven when they die, some need to be regarded as Christian, they take this to be evidence that they are Christian, even though their life and beliefs are in direct contradiction to the Word of God. So they cling to their false confidence and own opinions and experiences, notwithstanding all that the Bible says to the contrary. They turn their ears away from the truth and turn aside to myths, and accumulate for themselves teachers who will affirm them in their erroneous opinions and false confidence.

Second, they “again crucify to themselves the Son of God” by declaring either by word or deed, that they have heard, read, and examined the Bible’s revelation of Jesus Christ and the truths and doctrines of the gospel, and have found nothing of any substance, truth, or reason in them to warrant their continuing to believe and profess them. They have, like apostates in all ages, rejected and maligned the truths and doctrines concerning the person of Jesus Christ and His gospel once they come to know them, and find them opposed to the way they want to live and what they want to believe. In the early church these were the “false brethren who had sneaked in to spy out our liberty which we have in Christ Jesus” (Gal 2:4), and false teachers who “secretly introduce destructive heresies, (2 Pt 2:1), and “who turn the grace of our God into licentiousness and deny our only Master and Lord, Jesus Christ” (Jude 4). Not content with expressing their distaste, condemnation, unbelief, and rejection of what was really taught, believed, and practiced by the apostles and Christians, in order to further justify their apostasy, they not only spitefully misrepresented and maliciously disparaged what was taught and believed, but they invented lies, slanders, and accusations concerning conspiracies, treason, and danger to the public welfare and interest, “and we have found this man a real pest and a fellow who stirs up dissension among all the Jews throughout the world, and a ringleader of the sect of the Nazarenes. And he even tried to desecrate the temple;” (Ac 24:5, 6). Early Christians were slandered and maligned by Jew and Gentile alike as evildoers (1 Pt 2:12; 4:4) in an effort, if at all possible, to utterly destroy the body of Christ. The same was done by the apostate church of Rome to the Reformers, and by false and apostate religion to the English Reformers and Puritans, and such is the method of apostates to this day.

In their attempts to ‘correct’, ‘modify’, ‘rethink’, explain away, or contribute to the meaning, doctrines, and truths delivered by the Biblical writers, they in effect discredit those writers as teachers of doctrine, and deny those doctrines which they taught. The attempt to correct, modify, or add new meanings to Scripture is to proclaim Scripture untrustworthy as a witness to doctrine and to the revelation of the person and gospel of Jesus Christ, and this is done because the Bible and the doctrines it teaches are already distrusted and already disbelieved. When men and women fall from and renounce the doctrines, truths, commands, principles, inerrancy, and authority of Scripture, they often attempt to malign them by slanderous misrepresentations or by false additions of things ridiculous and perverse to them, in order to make them and those who teach and believe them seem monstrous and expose them both to ridicule and open scorn. Their boast is that, “We have known, tried, and believed these things, and now reject them,” hoping that their supposed experience of them and subsequent renunciation of them is sufficient to discredit the truthfulness of them. No living man or woman can commit a greater dishonor against the person of Jesus Christ, His gospel, His commands, and His doctrines than to openly profess, either by word or action, that after having tasted of them they find nothing in them to be loved and desired. Of such people it can only be said, “it would be better for them not to have known the way of righteousness, than having known it, to turn away from the holy commandment delivered to them” (2 Pt 2:21).

This is the first reason given by our author for why it is impossible to renew the apostate to repentance, “they again crucify to themselves the Son of God”; they do it as much as it is in their power to do it, and they declare by their words and actions that they actually would do it if they could. Our author emphasizes who it is the apostate would again crucify; it is none other than “the Son of God”. Not Jesus of Nazareth who “emptied Himself, taking the form of a slave, and being made in the likeness of men” (Phil 2:7, 8), but the Lord Jesus Christ who “was declared the Son of God with power by the resurrection from the dead” (Rm 1:4), and whose resurrection was attested to by eye-witnesses (Ac 2:32), and confirmed to these apostates “both by signs and wonders and various miracles and by gifts of the Holy Spirit according to His own will” (Hb 2:4). This is what intensifies sin against the gospel, namely, the sin of unbelief that is directly and immediately against “the Son of God”. His person is despised, both absolutely, and in the discharge of His offices of Prophet, Priest, King, Lord, and Judge. In despising His Word, doctrines, commands, and gospel, He is despised in His person, and so is God the Father, “He who hates Me hates My Father also” (Jn 15:23), because God has nothing to do with us except by and through His Son, “For there is one God, and one mediator also between God and men, the man Christ Jesus,” (1 Tim 2:5).

In the next study I will consider the second reason why it is impossible to renew the apostate to repentance, namely, because they “put Him to open shame”, and how this, on many accounts, is a far greater sin than that committed by those who first crucified Jesus Christ and exposed Him to open shame on Golgotha.

[1] Quoted in Iain H. Murray, J.C. Ryle: Prepared to Stand Alone (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 2016), 230, 231.