Apostasy

By Jordan Standridge. Reposted from The Cripplegate.

Rhett and Link, former CRU missionaries who have become famous through YouTube, have recently joined the chorus of “former Christians” who feel the need to share their “faith deconstruction” stories for all to hear. They are now agnostic.

As part of their healing process, they are all told to declare to the world their reasons for why being a Christian is wrong. As a result, they are surprised and hurt by Christians who promptly said that they never truly were of us (1 John 2:19).

Their response has been very interesting; they have lamented this by retorting something like “if there ever was a Christian, I was”. Some describe the hurt that it has caused them and they then, in Philippians 3:4-6 style, describe, like a pre-converted pharisaical Paul, all the reasons why they were actually Christians. They described their Christian lives like, “I prayed, I shared the Gospel, I went to church, I read my Bible, I believed the Bible, but then as I met LGBT folks and as I studied evolution, I discovered that the Bible could not possibly be true and therefore Christianity is false.”

This grieves my heart. And perhaps the main reason for this is the fact that most of these “former Christians” love declaring that they were true Christians. This leads thousands of young people questioning their faith and wondering if their heroes could be right. Can I simply stop being a Christian?

It happened again recently, twice actually. Two prominent Christians renounced their faith publicly. Whenever this occurs, and it seems to be happening with greater frequency, many Christians are affected adversely. Reactions range from simple discouragement and sorrow, to self-questioning, and doubts. “If such well-known Christian leaders no longer believe the gospel, how can I be certain it’s true?”

First it was Joshua Harris, author of the best seller, “I Kissed Dating Goodbye,” and more recently, lead pastor from 2004 to 2015 of Covenant Life Church, the megachurch founded by C. J. MaHaney in Gaithersburg, Maryland. In July, 2019, Josh announced that he and his wife, Shannon, were separating due to “significant changes that have taken place in both of us,” and shortly afterward, he publicly announced that he no longer considered himself a Christian. Since then, Harris has marched in several Gay Pride parades. It is all very sad, but unfortunately, true.

(From Maranatha Baptist Seminary Journal; used by permission. Read the entire series.)

Nature of Judgment

There are two basic views of the nature of the judgment mentioned in Hebrews 6:6–8. Some suggest that the judgment is that of eternal damnation.¹ McKnight collates all the information concerning judgment from the entire books of Hebrews and concludes the following: “In light of the final sense of several of these expressions (cf. especially the harsh realities of 10:30–31, 39) and the use of imagery in Hebrews that elsewhere is used predominantly of eternal damnation, it becomes quite clear that the author has in mind an eternal sense of destruction.”² The second possible interpretation of the judgment in Hebrews 6:6–8 is that it entails loss of God’s blessing and the onset of cursing (up to and including physical death).³ Gleason summarizes, “In light of the Old Testament blessing-curse motif, the judgment in view in Hebrews 6:7–8 is best understood as the forfeiture of blessing and the experience of temporal discipline rather than eternal destruction.”⁴