House Rule #10 Beware Apostasy (1 Timothy 4:1-5) | Adult Sunday School

They have a ring in the monitor. There's a ring in the monitor. They might be condenser-like, I'm guessing. You know what? It tripped the guitar. Is the guitar muted?

It cranked me up so far that...

Well, I'm, um... How's your volume on the guitar?

Yeah. Yeah. Okay.

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Keep it right up to me.

We'll get that.

Thank you. Yes, sir. Thank you.

Preserve me, O God, For in you I take refuge. I say to the Lord,.

You are my Lord.

I have no good apart from you.

Opening Prayer and Introduction to 1 Timothy 4

Good morning, everyone.

Good to see each one this morning. Welcome to Kootenai Community Church Adult Sunday School. We're going to open our Bibles back this morning to 1 Timothy, and we're going to go through the first five verses of chapter 4 this morning.

We just introduced it last time, and there are some notes. If you were here last time, you've got a set of notes. But if you need a set of notes, if you were not here, there are some being passed around, and there were a few back there on the countertop back there at the back of the church.

So we'll be finishing off page 16, house rule number 10, beware of apostasy. Not a very cheerful subject, but a very, very important one, as we're going to see as we look last time. So let's commit our time to our Lord and ask His blessing on our study this morning.

Our Father, we do thank You for this opportunity to be together, to gather in the name of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. And now to be able to open Your Word and study Your Word, we know we are dependent upon You to be our teacher by Your Spirit.

And so we just ask Your guidance this morning. Show us what You would have us learn. Help us to apply it to our lives. And we will praise You in Jesus' name. Amen. Well, last time we just began and went through a very brief study of this issue of apostasy, because Paul is very concerned about it as he writes to Timothy.

And Timothy is going to have to deal with this issue in the churches that he's ministering to in the city of Ephesus. And we saw in chapter 4, verse 1, that Paul opens up by simply saying, Now the Spirit expressly says that in later times some will depart from the faith.

And we spend a little bit of time talking about the basic definition in the Bible of apostasy and how important it is to sort of develop a biblical definition, because we are living in a time, obviously, that is just, we're swimming in a sea of apostasy, basically.

And it's important for us to be able to have a working definition of what it is so that we are not swinging between extremes. One extreme, of course, would be just not acknowledging it, not knowing that it's there, not knowing what it looks like.

And the other extreme would be to be chasing it around all over the place when maybe it's not really there. So we saw from 2 Peter 2 and also from Jude that both of those writers deal with this issue of apostasy.

And we saw that if we take the biblical data and walk through some of the examples of apostasy in Scripture, we can form a bit of a template so we can see that these all have something in common. We saw that they all work through a basic set of criteria.

They start out with some revelation from God. And we looked at Paul's letter to the Romans, the first chapter, verse 18 and following. They started out knowing God, even though they knew God, it says.

And Peter, of course, and Paul both are in full agreement with this. He talks about how they had the knowledge of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. There's some revelation that they receive. And we also saw Paul's argument is in Romans chapter 1 that every single human being has revelation because of creation.

And here, once again, he goes right back to creation, the basic fundamental truth of Scripture, where it all starts. And that Judas was really the prototypical example of a New Testament apostate. He's a classic example.

You could take him and walk right through every single one of these issues. He had revelation. He had some knowledge of God. In fact, he had a tremendous amount of knowledge of God. He had the presence of Christ right there with him for three years.

And then it moves to rescue. There's some movement toward the things of God. Maybe people join up. They sign up. They might join a church or indicate that there is some acceptance of the truth of God.

Judas certainly did. He changed his life enough to walk with the disciples of Jesus Christ for three years, did he not? And then there is some rejection. This is the part that we can't really see. It's not visible.

You don't know when exactly this takes place within a person. But there is a decision to turn from the truth. And when that happens, what you can see is their return to their sin. That's the visible part.

And, of course, Peter is being very graphic using that illustration of a dog returning to its vomit. That's pretty graphic, especially if you have a weak stomach like me. Jude also talks about this. People who turn away from the truth and they return back to their sensuality, as he says.

They go back to where they were. Peter says they are again entangled in that. Judas certainly did that. The disciples that night didn't recognize it, right? They were all sort of unaware of what was going on.

We have insight because we have Scripture that tells us what was happening. But he returned to his sin. Then we saw the last step is the rejection by God. Every time this is mentioned, every time these people are talked about in Scripture, whether it's the Israelites as Jude walks you through, he uses the example of the Israelites, the people of Sodom and Gomorrah, and then, very interestingly, angels.

Angels apostatizing. We're going to be talking about that a little bit later on. But Judas is the classic example. Of course, in John's Gospel, John so graphically presents what happened there, and it's so sad and tragic.

In the upper room, the issue of Judas getting ready to betray the Lord. John is very fond of using words that are contrastive. He sounds like simple terms. That which is born of the flesh is flesh. That which is born of the Spirit is spirit.

But when you take these and look at them and define them, you realize these are very complex things. He also uses the metaphor of darkness and light. So you could walk Judas right through this very same progression using the issue of light.

He had light. He had the revelation of Jesus Christ. John talks a lot about light in the first chapter and on through his Gospel account. He followed the light, did he not? He was one of the disciples.

And then some decision took place within him. We don't know exactly when. We have some indications in a few places in Scripture. One of them was when he made an issue out of Mary anointing the Lord with the expensive perfume.

You remember that? And Judas objected to that. He said, well, we should sell that and give the money to the poor. I think he might have been one of the first social warriors, social justice warriors. He was displaying his supposed concern and care for poor people.

But really he was a thief and he just wanted more money to be able to pilfer out of the money bag, as we know. But then he turned against the Lord. He betrayed him. That was the visible part. He got up and left that night.

And it is so sad and graphic, that statement that is made in the Gospels, about how he was there with the Lord. They were in the upper room. They were all together. And nobody knew that he was going to betray him.

They didn't recognize it. This is another characteristic of apostates, right? You don't know. They're sheep in wolf's clothing. And when the Lord gave him the morsel or the bread as the host, he would have given the first bite to the guest of honor.

How Judas ever wound up on the left side of him as the guest of honor, it's hard to tell. I'm not sure how he got there other than he put himself there. And you remember when he announced that one of you will betray me, they didn't look at Judas and say, well, yeah, it's going to be him.

They didn't know. And Peter tells John, John was probably sitting on his right, ask him who it was. And John then was able to lean over and say, Lord, who is it? And he says, be the one that I give the bread to.

And he dipped the bread and he fed it. He would have put it in his mouth to Judas. That is a horrific thing. And then scripture says that Satan entered into him. And then Jesus said, what you do, do quickly.

He dismissed him out of there. And when he left, the disciples didn't recognize it. No one at the table, John says in John 13. No one at the table knew why he said this to him. Some thought that because Judas had the money bag, Jesus was telling him buy what we need for the feast or that he should give something to the poor because Judas was so concerned about poor people.

So he had that reputation even up to that late point in time. So after receiving the morsel of bread, he immediately went out. And then John says, and it was night. There again using that metaphor of the light and the darkness.

And as John later on writes in his letters at the end of the first century, talking about people who went out from us because they were not of us. I can't help but think that he certainly had Judas in mind there.

And that night must have just been, just burned into his thinking and his memory. But all apostates follow this pattern. They have some light and they make some movement toward the light, toward the Word of God, toward the truth, toward Christ, maybe even professing faith in Jesus Christ.

And then they depart from it. That's the whole point where he says, some will depart from the faith. And so the faith there, and that's page 6 in your notes, that list of the references to the faith and how the faith is what Paul is really concerned about here.

It's not the subjective faith that we have in Christ. It's the objective revelation, the Word of God, that which we can see, we can read it, we can teach it, we can also depart from it. So I wanted to just review that very quickly and to see if you have any questions or thoughts about this basic definition of apostasy before we move on.

Julie? Right.

That is such a good question. I'm not sure who asked the question last week. Do they know they're apostates? I can't remember who asked that. Was that you? But that's an excellent question because it gets down to what makes the difference in them.

Jude says they are devoid of the Spirit. So they're not saved. The Spirit is not there. And how do we know that they are apostates? We have the witness of the Spirit through the Word of God. So I believe they know they're rejecting something, but I don't believe they fully spiritually understand what they're rejecting.

Now they would say, yes, I'm done with Christianity, I reject Christianity. I was looking and reading, and I have an article here even today about someone, a pretty famous person, a well-known individual.

I am done with Christianity. They come out and say it. I am not a Christian anymore. They declare that. Now those are pretty easy to spot, right? I mean, you don't have to guess. But then the question comes up, do they know what they're rejecting?

So I'm of the opinion they know they're rejecting something. They're rejecting Jesus Christ. But they're spiritually blind. And so then I have a hard trouble believing that they actually understand the full spiritual ramifications of what they're doing, but they still receive the consequences in judgment because they are rejecting God and His light and His revelation.

But that is a real important question.

Peter.

And there's probably a pretty high level of hostility toward that person, like there was Judas with the Lord. But, yeah, so it's a very interesting question. It's also difficult. But I personally don't believe, and I think that's what you're saying, if I get you right.

They're spiritually blind. They think they've grabbed hold of something. And this is why it's so dangerous if you alter the gospel to appeal to the flesh. You promise them something that the Bible doesn't promise them, and at some point in time, they're going to be disappointed.

And so the danger starts way back upstream in proclaiming a gospel that's not really truly the gospel of the Bible. The gospel of the Bible offers absolutely nothing that is attractive to an unregenerate person.

You say, well, wait a minute. When I heard it, it sounded like good news. Okay, but why?

Why?

Something is different about the person who hears the gospel, and that is the work of the Spirit of God in their lives. So we have to be careful to share the gospel as the Bible presents it and not offer them something that the Bible doesn't.

They'll grab ahold of it. Remember 1 Corinthians, Paul said the Jews want signs. He could have done that. But the Gentiles, the Greeks, they like wisdom. He could have done that. He could have built a massive church of Jewish people or Gentiles.

But he preached the gospel because the elect will hear the gospel and come out of both of those groups. Was there any other questions or thoughts? This issue of apostasy? He had up to that point. It's a little bit difficult with the way the gospel accounts are because sometimes, like in Luke's account, they're not in chronological order.

We tend to want to see things in chronological order and present things that way. Oftentimes in Scripture, they're more in a logical order, a sequential order. So it's kind of hard to fit in everything.

But prior to that, he had approached the Pharisees and said, what would you give me to betray him?

Sure.

Oh, he did, yeah.

But I don't think you need to go back and find a point. Judas was never saved, ever. So you can't go back and say, well, here's a point where he became lost. He always was. Now, he always was not an apostate.

He became an apostate when he rejected the light that he had and abandoned it. And just like here in this first verse, depart from the faith. Anybody else?

Yeah, Rick.

Well, he called him and called him to follow him. I don't think you can see in Scripture at any point in time that a decision was made by Judas. I think he never was saved at any point in time. And so it was not like he, you know, there was a fulfillment of prophecy in the sovereignty of God.

But at the same time, he reached out to him all the way up to the end, washed his feet, you know. He gave him that morsel, you know, and called him friend. He loved his disciples. He experienced every bit of that and then abandoned it.

So, tragic story, sad. And that's why this is grim stuff. But we have to be prepared and be aware of it to be able to recognize it and deal with it in our own environment here, but also to be able to understand how to minister to these people.

There's an example of how to minister to an apostate.

Yeah, Peter.

I think we reach out to them as much as we can for as long as we can. And God is the one who's going to decide. I mean, we also have to bear in mind Hebrews chapter 6. That's a chronology of apostasy right there.

They're enlightened. They tasted. Maybe Jim could comment on this. But then it says, So, we don't know when that line is crossed by that person. We can't tell. But we know there is a line from Scripture.

We know that a person has to get to a point. That's why it's so dangerous to be around the Gospel or the Word of God and hear it preached and taught, and especially in an environment where you hear the Gospel regularly, you hear the Word of God taught regularly.

We also need to then encourage people, if you haven't trusted Christ, don't wait. Because the continuous rejection of the Gospel creates a hardening of your heart. And as we're going to see this morning, a possible callousing or searing of the conscience.

And when that happens, that person is lost, I believe, forever. It's impossible to renew them in repentance. It doesn't mean we don't continue to try. We don't know exactly when that line is crossed. So, Jude, if you read through Jude, that was part of your homework assignment.

Oh, I should have had a sign-up list or something so I could... Well, we won't do that. We won't do that. Jude, a little 25-verse letter. And he gets down to the bottom and he says, Okay, now here's how you deal with this kind of person.

Here's how you deal with this kind of person. This kind of person. And there's variations on it. But all of it has to do with mercy. We continue to offer the mercy of God, the forgiveness of God, plead with them, trust Christ.

Even back to Hebrews, as Jim has shown us through there, part of the fellowship in the church is to encourage people, if they're wavering or if they're doubting, to encourage them back into the Word of God, back into fellowship, so that you can trust in Christ and be built up in your faith.

The warning passages in Hebrews are there for a very good reason. And he's writing to Christians. He's writing to a believing group of people. And yet, they're there because God uses means to move his people and draw his people to himself.

Okay?

Was there any other questions or thoughts?

Cornell?

Paul is not...

Yeah.

And again, we don't know. There's a lot we can't see, but we take what we do see and we do know from Scripture and we work to apply it. And that's why it's fully legitimate in a church setting that is a relatively sound church to continue to share the gospel, preach the gospel, encourage anyone, and let God determine by his Spirit who is or isn't and how he applies it.

Our task is to teach and preach the Word of God, right? We let God apply it to people's hearts and minds and lives.

Steve? Yeah.

Sure.

Oh, yeah.

We have to assume that it can. And if nothing else, most of us probably know someone who this would apply to. And again, the ones that announce, well, I'm abandoning, I'm leaving Christianity, that's pretty easy, right?

But you can also walk back and track this right through that person's life. You had the light. And many of these people are elevated up in the big, broad evangelical system. They're elevated up very quickly.

And everybody's looking at them. And then all of a sudden, boom. And like Paul says, and others say elsewhere, the gospel is then blasphemed. Because, well, see? Just like 2 Peter 3. The scoffers. Well, you stupid Christians.

What do you believe in something like that for? It didn't help him. Hasn't helped me. Well, what did you want? What kind of help did you want? Did you want your soul to be saved from eternal judgment because of your sins?

Or did you want something else? This is why this issue of sensuality. If you appeal to the senses, you're going to get a big crowd of people, right?

Okay?

It is critical, and it's really important. And we have to be prepared to deal with it.

Okay?

Anything else?

Okay.

Well, let's work our way through this little chapter here. This is such an important thing to talk about and deal with. I'm glad we're able to do that. Good discussion. And I'm also aware that we can never handle all the issues in a class like this.

It is important to maybe sometime we should do like a brown bag after church and just have a great big discussion time here. It would be fun to do. We should do that. Be happy to do that sometime. Well, back to what Paul is talking to Timothy about here in this letter, and what he says.

And I'm just going to read through these five verses. But this is House Rule Number 10. Beware of apostasy. Now, the Spirit expressly says that in later times, some will depart from the faith by devoting themselves to deceitful spirits and teachings of demons, through the insincerity of liars whose consciences are seared, who forbid marriage and require abstinence from foods that God created to be received with thanksgiving by those who believe and know the truth.

For everything created by God is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving, for it is made holy by the word of God and prayer. Now, this is one of those passages in Scripture that when you read it, it's so stark and so sharp-edged.

Paul's not one to sort of want to file off any sharp edges here, kind of like John in 1 John. It's black and white, either or kind of deal. And I personally like that. I like the clarity of it. But it's also very grim.

What he's doing, he's just drilling down and showing us the underlying forces in these types of things. And so it almost does not require a whole lot of exposition, although we're going to do that. You just read through a passage like that, and it's pretty self-explanatory.

But we're going to work through it. We're going to see, first of all, the certainty of apostasy. Remember when this was written 22 centuries ago, and he's saying it's going to happen. He says, now, or but, I think maybe but would be a better translation of that, simply because it implies a sharper contrast to what he has just said.

Back up in 14 through 16, the confession that we have is that Christ Jesus manifested in the flesh, vindicated by the Spirit, seen by angels, proclaimed among the nations, believed in the world, taken up in glory.

This would have been a creed that these people memorized, possibly put to music and sung in their fellowships. But the Spirit expressly says that in later times, some will depart from the faith. They depart from the faith.

Paul, as we've seen so far, he's real big on the faith, the Word of God, and that the Word of God be taught and preached and preserved and protected in the churches. And so this is a warning that there's certainly going to come apostasy.

When he says the Spirit expressly says, some of your translations may say explicitly, this is a single occurrence of this word in the New Testament, which tells you something. It tells you it's really important right here in this context.

And it's the Spirit saying this. Now we know that all scriptures God breathed are profitable, but when the Apostle Paul says the Spirit expressly or explicitly says, that should get our attention even more because of the topic here.

And it really explicitly, and it actually means to express in words. Well, we know the Spirit inspires Paul to write what he's writing, and yet it's like this is some other level of inspiration, even though there really is no other level.

But it's just really critically important. And he says in later times, some will depart from the faith. We know that later times, we're in later times. Writer of Hebrews said long ago at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets.

But in these last days, he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, through whom also he created the world. By the way, creation there, fundamental to the writer of Hebrews theology there.

They're in the last days at the coming of Christ, and most scholars believe that it is talking about the church age between the first coming of Christ and the second coming of Christ. So the latter times, we are in the latter times right now.

And he says some will depart from the faith. And so their departure is from the truth, the Word of God. And it means, as we saw last time, to abandon, to leave, forsake, and the faith. And again, not the subjective faith to believe.

That's part of it, obviously. They never had that. They never did that. They never exercised faith in the truth, in the person of Jesus Christ. But what they abandon is the truth, the objective content of the Word of God.

And it's going to happen. It's not maybe, it could be, it's certainly going to happen. And of course, it has been happening all through the history of God's redemptive program, as we have seen. They will depart from the faith, and then we see the source of it.

Where does this come from? How is that part of this? And that's the rest of verse 1. By devoting themselves to deceitful spirits and teachings of demons. Now you know where it comes from. They devote themselves.

The way this word is presented here, it means they're actively, on purpose, devoting themselves. It has to do with what occupies their mind, what occupies their time and their thinking. To be willfully committed to something.

Remember, one of the requirements of a deacon, back up in the context, was that he not be devoted to wine. Well, clearly there, that's talking about a person who is addicted to wine. It's the very same word.

It's what occupies their thinking, it occupies their time and all of their efforts. And what are they devoted to? Deceitful spirits, clearly. Demons, who are deceptive, deceitful, they seduce people. These are fallen angels.

They are angels who have apostatized. This is what's so fascinating. Jude uses the angels as an example of apostasy in his little letter. They had light, did they not? I mean, they had the presence of God.

And they had eternally, since their existence, understood who God was. But what happened? Satan fell and they followed him. So they became demons. And the people who are devoting themselves to them do that because, as Jude says in Jude 19, they are devoid of the spirit.

They are devoid of the spirit. They have no defense in any way, shape, or form against this.

Peter?

Do you have examples?

Yeah.

Any false teaching, any cult, right? If you just want to go with the kind of big graphic examples. Any cult is a cult by definition. They have abandoned the faith. So you can look at two parts of this that we saw.

And Paul's going to deal with it later on too. There's two things that are very important here. He tells Timothy later on, pay attention to your life and doctrine. So you can look at the doctrine and clearly say this is cultic and it's demonically energized.

Any false teaching is demonically energized like that. You could also look at their life. How is their life in compliance with the Word of God? And so the examples are everywhere. The history of liberalism started out, basically they deny all major doctrines of Scripture.

And that has different forms through history. Even right now, the whole issue of churches that want to change the methodology of Scripture. God has called us to preach and teach the Word of God. There's evangelical movements and has been for about 45 years now that say no, we shouldn't do that.

We should do these other things. Well, that doesn't come from Scripture. Then where does it come from? It comes from the doctrines of demons that want to change and alter what the church does. And if you alter what the church does, if you alter the methodology, your altering of the truth will shortly follow after.

It always has. Spurgeon dealt with this in the downgrade controversy at the end of the 19th century. Does that answer the question? That would qualify. Yeah, that would definitely qualify.

Okay.

But the source, they devote themselves to deceitful spirits and, and here's the key, it's not just that they focus in on demons, it's the teachings or the doctrines of the demons. And so there we are that the teachings get changed, they get altered.

Paul talks about people who don't teach healthy doctrine. And this is all through the pastoral letters. Or they teach some other doctrine. He dealt with that right at the very beginning. These people who teach heterodoxy, he uses this word, others, different teaching than apostolic doctrine.

And people say nowadays, in fact, it's almost a creed. Well, I'm not interested in doctrine. I want what's practical, right? I mean, I can't think of anything that's less practical for your spiritual life than something that's devoid of scripture or doctrine or teaching.

But these people are devoted to these spiritual deception. Underlying and energizing all false teachers and false religious systems are demonic forces. Fallen angels who followed Satan and his rebellion, left their divinely appointed place in God's created order.

There again, it's a violation of creation. And now do the bidding of their master, Satan, and seduce and influence people to do the same thing. They devote themselves to deceitful spirits and the doctrines of demons.

Paul uses the word doctrines 15 times in the pastoral letters. And often it's encouragement to teach sound doctrine, that type of thing. Well, here it's a warning against the false teachers who are demonically energized.

And this is part of the great deception. The very guy who's standing in a pulpit, ranting and raving and trying to teach people how to do spiritual warfare by chasing around a county, driving stakes in the ground, and staking out geographic areas because there's geographic demons and demons of this and demons of that.

That's a deception. That's a distraction. That's a sleight of hand. If they really want to find out where the demonic activity is, it's right there. That's demonically generated false teaching to distract people from the reality of the demonic deception that's standing right in front of them.

When I was studying this, I thought, I wonder if Kenneth Copeland ever reads this verse. Devoting themselves to deceitful spirits and the teachings of demons through the insincerity of liars whose consciences are seared.

And he'd have to say, if he was being truthful, you know, like me. Because there's an example right there. Clearly, demonic forces are involved, but many of those same people are teaching about demons and how to deal with them, supposedly, in so-called spiritual warfare.

But the real spiritual warfare, we're back to Ephesians chapter 6. The weapons of our warfare. What is it? What's our battle? It's against these fortresses. But it's ideas and concepts and thoughts. It's words and teachings that we battle against.

And the source is spirits and demons and that type of thing. False, deceitful spirits. And then that brings us to Roman numeral 3. The slavery of apostasy. These people are slaves. They are insincere, so they lie because they have seared consciences.

And that's that verse. This is verse 2. Through the insincerity of liars. So, in other words, the underlying forces are demonic, and yet they use people. The agents are people that they move and seduce with their teachings, and then they become the agents of the false lies.

They are insincere, so they lie. They have seared consciences. This is just so graphic. It's done through the insincerity of liars whose consciences are seared. It actually uses this word, insincerity.

It's the word hypocrisy. Hypocrisy, right? They're hypocritical liars. Demons use those who have abandoned the truth to propagate lies. And often, they're very, very nice people. This might have been your point, Peter.

You can see they're very nice people. And this is why it's so hard for a lot of people in evangelical circles to say, wait a minute, no, no, no, he's not demonically energized. He's a nice man. He's so kind and loving.

And you could just go right down the list, right? And yet, that's not the issue. You have to take that person's teaching and see if it is in line with the Word of God every time and try to get the emotional part out of it.

In 2 Corinthians 11, 13 and 14, Paul describes apostate false teachers. They're not people sitting there with their heads spinning around and puking out split pea soup. They're not dancing around in a clearing in a jungle someplace, chopping up a chicken in front of a bonfire, spraying chicken blood all over themselves.

They are very respectable, kind people who, in many ways, they minister to people, they feed people, they do all kinds of good works. And yet, if they are teaching false doctrine, they fit this category.

Paul says, for such men are false apostles, deceitful workmen, disguising themselves as apostles of Christ. And no wonder, for even Satan disguises himself as an angel of light. So it is no surprise if his servants also disguise themselves as servants of righteousness.