Question: Why do some believers fall away?

January 1, 2025

TBC Staff

Question: I have a question which simply asks, “In view of all the Lord has done for believers, why do some fall away or go into apostasy?”

Response: First, as Scripture tells us, there are those who claim to be believers, who have never been saved (See—https://bit.ly/41D6NWQ). Apostasy has been a part of every generation since the beginning and fall of mankind. Scripture tells us that it will culminate in the last days when the Antichrist is revealed. His religion will be an apostate Christianity—it will accommodate all religions. Although the apostasy will not be fully realized until after the Rapture of the church, its development has been ongoing from the time when sin entered the human race. Furthermore, down through biblical and church history, many true believers, either in ignorance or because of the weaknesses of their flesh, have contributed to apostasy. Solomon seems to exemplify this, he also married pagan women, which was contrary to Scripture. These women turned him to idolatry and he built temples for them to worship their false gods.

In church history, men such as Augustine and Martin Luther are regarded as true believers, especially by those who hold to Reformation theology. Yet Augustine conceptualized many of the dogmas that are foundational to the false theology and false gospel of the largest apostate institution in Christendom—the Roman Catholic Church. Luther is to be commended for his heroic stance against the Church of Rome but certainly not for his replacement theology and his anti-biblical hatred of the Jews. Later church history is replete with professing and confessing Christians who (knowingly or unknowingly) participated in the development of apostasy.

As Dave Hunt noted, “those who believe in falling away would say of a professing Christian who has denied the faith and is living in unrepentant sin that he has ‘fallen from grace’ and has ‘lost his salvation.’ In contrast, those who believe there is security for believers, while no more tolerant of such conduct, would say of the same person that probably Christ ‘never knew him’—he was never a Christian. We must give the comfort and assurance of Scripture to those who are saved; but at the same time we must not give false and unbiblical comfort to those who merely say they are saved but deny with their lives what they profess with their lips.

“Are we not then saved by our works? Indeed not! In 1 Corinthians:3:13-15 every Christian’s works are tried by fire at the ‘judgment seat of Christ’ before which ‘we must all appear’ (2 Cor:5:10). Good works bring rewards; a lack of them does not cause loss of salvation. The person who hasn’t even one good work (all of his works are burned up) is still ‘saved; yet so as by fire’ (1 Cor:3:15). We would not think such a person was saved at all. Yet one who may seem outwardly not to be a Christian, who has no good works as evidence—if he has truly received the Lord Jesus Christ as his Savior, is then ‘saved as by fire’ and shall never perish in spite of his lack of works.”