Can a true Christian fall away?

Question 07050

Few things trouble a tender conscience quite like the fear of falling away. I have sat with believers who could recite the promises of God perfectly well and still could not sleep, because somewhere at the back of the mind sat a suspicion that one cold enough season, one serious enough failure, and the whole thing might quietly come undone. So let me give you the answer before I give you the working: no, a genuinely born again believer cannot finally and ultimately be lost.

That is not a shrug and it is not a licence. Getting to it responsibly means handling the passages that have persuaded sincere Christians of the opposite, and it means being clear about what the New Testament writers actually mean when they use the language of falling away at all.

What falling away actually means in Scripture

The English phrase covers several different Greek words, and that is where a good deal of the confusion begins. In Hebrews 6:6 the verb is parapipto, to blunder off the path or fall beside it. In 2 Thessalonians 2:3 the noun is apostasia, a defection or a standing away from, and there it describes a corporate rebellion in the last days rather than one believer collapsing. In the parable of the soils, Luke 8:13 uses aphistemi of those who believe for a while and in a time of testing fall away.

These are not interchangeable technical terms with one fixed doctrinal meaning, and treating falling away as a single category flattens the texts into something the writers never intended. Some of these uses of falling away describe a believer stumbling badly. Some describe a person who was never converted revealing that fact under pressure. Some describe an entire movement turning its back on revealed truth. Reading them all as the loss of salvation is a decision made before the exegesis begins, not one that arises from it.

So the first discipline is to ask, in each passage, who is being addressed and what exactly is said to be lost. That question alone dissolves a surprising amount of the anxiety around falling away, because in a good many of these texts what is at stake is reward, fruitfulness, usefulness or fellowship, and not the eternal standing of a person who has trusted Jesus.

There is a second discipline as well, and it is to notice who the warnings are for. The letter to the Hebrews is addressed to a mixed congregation of Jewish people, some of them believers, some of them interested, some of them hovering at the edge and weighing up whether the cost of following Jesus was worth paying. Preach to a mixed congregation and you will warn the whole room, because you cannot see which hearts have been born again and which have only been impressed. That is precisely what any faithful preacher does on a Sunday morning, and it is what the writer of Hebrews is doing throughout.

Where the security of a believer really rests

If our security rested on our own faithfulness we would all have reason to be frightened, because none of us is reliable enough to carry that weight. The whole point of the New Testament witness is that the keeping is not ours. Jesus said of His sheep in John 10:28 that they “will never perish, and no one will snatch them out of my hand,” and then immediately doubled the guarantee by adding the Father’s hand to His own. Two hands, both of them divine, and the sheep in between.

Paul is confident in Philippians 1:6 that “he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ.” The finisher is the one who started. In Romans 8:38-39 he lists everything in creation that might conceivably separate a believer from the love of God and concludes that the list is empty. The sealing of the Spirit in Ephesians 1:13-14 is God’s own mark of ownership, and Ephesians 4:30 specifies that the believer is “sealed for the day of redemption.” Not sealed until the next crisis. Sealed until the end.

This is why I never ground assurance in a believer’s track record. I have written more fully about that in what eternal security actually is, but the short version is this: the reason falling away cannot finally happen is not that Christians are strong. It is that God is faithful, and He has committed Himself in the strongest terms available to Him.

I want to be careful here not to make this sound like a debating trick. The promises of God are not a technicality that gets us off a hook. They are the deliberate self commitment of a God who knew exactly what we would be like when He made them. He did not promise to keep the reliable. He promised to keep sinners who would go on needing keeping, and He built the guarantee to survive us.

Hebrews 6 and the language of tasting

Hebrews 6:4-6 is the passage most often produced as proof that a real Christian can be permanently lost. It describes people who “have been enlightened, who have tasted the heavenly gift, and have shared in the Holy Spirit, and have tasted the goodness of the word of God and the powers of the age to come,” and says that if they fall away it is impossible to restore them again to repentance.

Nobody should pretend that language is mild. The question is not whether it describes real spiritual experience, because plainly it does. The question is whether it describes regeneration. The words chosen are not the settled vocabulary the New Testament uses for saving faith. Enlightened, tasted and shared describe genuine exposure and real proximity to the work of God. Judas was enlightened. Judas shared in the ministry of the Twelve. Judas tasted a great deal. That is exactly the profile of a person who comes close enough to know precisely what he is turning away from, and I have looked at his case separately in the question of whether Judas was ever saved.

The wider argument of Hebrews also matters. The letter is written to Jewish believers under pressure to slide back into temple religion, and the writer’s repeated point is that there is nothing to go back to. If you abandon the finished work of Jesus for a sacrificial system that has been superseded, there is no third option waiting. That is the impossibility in view. My longer treatment of the passage is in what Hebrews 6:4-6 teaches about falling away.

Hebrews 10 and sinning deliberately

Hebrews 10:26-29 runs along the same track. “For if we go on sinning deliberately after receiving the knowledge of the truth, there no longer remains a sacrifice for sins.” Read in isolation that sounds like a believer sinning himself out of grace. Read in context it is the same warning to the same readers about the same temptation, which is walking away from the only sacrifice there is and going back to bulls and goats.

Notice what is not said. It does not say that the deliberate sinner loses a salvation he had. It says there is no other sacrifice available to the one falling away. That is a statement about the exclusivity of the cross, not about the fragility of grace. And the writer himself refuses to apply the warning to his readers, saying two verses later that he is convinced of better things concerning them.

Warnings in Scripture are one of the means God uses. A father who shouts a warning at a child near a cliff edge is not predicting the child will fall. He is one of the reasons the child does not. Taking the warnings seriously and resting in the promises are not competing instincts; they belong together in a healthy Christian.

There is also the plain grammar of the passage to consider. The participles in Hebrews 6:6 are usually rendered as a continuous action, “since they are crucifying once again the Son of God,” which points to a settled and ongoing repudiation rather than a lapse. This is not a believer having a bad year. It is a person publicly siding with those who put Jesus on the cross and staying there.

And then the writer does something we should not miss. Having issued the sternest warning in the letter, he turns in Hebrews 6:9-10 and says, “Yet in your case, beloved, we feel sure of better things, things that belong to salvation.” He would hardly say that if he thought the warning described the normal jeopardy of every Christian.

They went out from us

The clearest apostolic comment on people who abandon the faith is 1 John 2:19: “They went out from us, but they were not of us; for if they had been of us, they would have continued with us.” John had watched people leave. His explanation is not that they lost something real but that their departure revealed what had always been true. Their falling away was the diagnosis rather than the disease.

That verse is the interpretive key for a great deal of what troubles people. When someone we knew and loved walks away entirely, permanently, contentedly, with no ache and no backward glance, John does not tell us to conclude that salvation can be forfeited. He tells us that time reveals what profession alone could not.

I hold that with care, because it is not a verse for handing out verdicts on other people. Only God reads hearts. But it does mean that the existence of former professing Christians is not evidence against the security of the believer.

John is not writing coldly. Every pastor who has watched a friend walk away knows the grief in that verse. But grief and doctrine are not enemies, and what John gives us is a way of holding the loss without concluding that the promises of God have failed.

Falling away compared with falling down

Scripture is entirely realistic about believers who collapse spectacularly. David committed adultery and arranged a killing. Peter denied Jesus with oaths. The Corinthians were carnal, litigious and a scandal at the Lord’s Table. Not one of them is treated as falling away from their standing before God, and every one of them is treated as needing restoration.

The distinction that clears most of the fog is between standing and fellowship. Standing is the settled legal verdict of justification, declared once at the moment of faith and never revisited. Fellowship is the living warmth of the relationship, and that can be spoiled badly and restored through confession, as 1 John 1:9 promises. A believer who sins grievously has damaged fellowship, not standing, and the language of falling away in popular use usually confuses the two.

That is why a Christian can be genuinely miserable, genuinely disciplined and genuinely saved all at once. I have set out how that works for the person who has drifted a long way in what a backslider is and whether they can return.

The Corinthian church is the sharpest illustration. Paul calls them saints, sanctified in Christ Jesus, and then spends most of the letter dealing with drunkenness at the Lord’s Table, incest, lawsuits and factions. He never once suggests they have lost their salvation. He tells them who they already are and calls them to live like it, which is the standard apostolic pattern for dealing with sin in a believer.

The discipline of a Father who does not disown

Hebrews 12:6-8 says the Lord disciplines the son He receives, and that a child left entirely without discipline is no child of His. That is a strange thing to say if the correction of God is a step towards being cast off. Discipline in the New Testament is evidence of belonging rather than evidence that a son is in danger of falling away.

There is even a category in 1 Corinthians 11:30 and 1 John 5:16 of a believer whose life is cut short under the discipline of God. That is a sobering possibility, and it is not the loss of salvation. It is the Father removing a son from the field early. Sin has consequences that can be dreadful without touching the question of whether a person belongs to God.

None of this makes sin a small matter. A believer can waste a life, wreck a marriage, ruin a testimony and stand before the judgement seat of Jesus with very little to show for it. The Bema of 2 Corinthians 5:10 is a real assessment with real loss attached, and it is not the same thing as hell. Keeping those two categories apart is one of the most freeing things a Christian can learn.

Why the fear of falling away is often a good sign

Here is something I have noticed over years of pastoral conversation. The people who worry most about falling away are almost never the people who should. The person who has genuinely walked out on God does not lie awake about it. The ache itself is the work of the Spirit in a heart that belongs to Him, and a corpse does not complain about the cold.

If you are anxious about falling away, that anxiety is not the verdict you fear it is. It is a sign of life. Take the fear of falling away to God rather than letting it circle in the small hours. And if you want the fuller pastoral treatment of assurance, the article on assurance of salvation works through the evidences in more detail.

So, now what?

Stop auditing your own performance for permission to feel safe. You will always find something, and that is not where the answer lives. Look instead at the promise, the price and the Person. If Jesus paid in full and God has sealed you, then falling away in the final sense is not a live possibility for you, however badly this week has gone.

At the same time, do not use security as an excuse for drift. Confess quickly, come back fast, stay near the people of God and near the Word. Guarding you from falling away is God’s work. The nearness is yours to tend. Which of those two have you been neglecting?

My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me. I give them eternal life, and they will never perish, and no one will snatch them out of my hand. My Father, who has given them to me, is greater than all, and no one is able to snatch them out of the Father’s hand.

John 10:27-29, ESV

For Further Study

Charles Ryrie treats the security of the believer with characteristic clarity in his Basic Theology, and his short work So Great Salvation is worth having on the shelf. Lewis Sperry Chafer’s Systematic Theology gives the fuller dispensational treatment. Millard Erickson’s Christian Theology presents the competing positions fairly for anyone wanting to see the debate laid out. J. Dwight Pentecost and John Walvoord both handle the warning passages with care, and Arnold Fruchtenbaum is useful on the Jewish setting of Hebrews. Reading them alongside a good study text such as the NET Bible notes on Hebrews 6 will repay the effort.