What is backsliding?
Question 06035
The word “backsliding” has an old-fashioned ring to it in some quarters, but the reality it describes is anything but historical. It names something that believers in every generation have experienced and that the biblical writers addressed with both pastoral honesty and theological seriousness.
The Biblical Origins of the Term
The word comes primarily from the Old Testament prophets. The Hebrew word meshubah, translated as “backsliding” or “faithless,” appears most frequently in Jeremiah and Hosea. In both books it describes Israel’s habitual pattern of turning away from God toward idolatry, and it carries the sense of a repeated, familiar drift rather than a single catastrophic departure. Jeremiah 3:22 records God’s plea: “Return, O faithless sons; I will heal your faithlessness.” Hosea 11:7 speaks of God’s people “bent on turning away from me.”
This is the spiritual condition that the word captures: not an open, deliberate renunciation of God, but a gradual cooling of devotion, a slow turning of the face from the one who called you. It is not necessarily dramatic. It is often quiet and incremental, a series of small choices that collectively represent a significant movement away from God.
Backsliding in the New Testament
The specific term does not transfer directly into the New Testament’s vocabulary, but the reality it describes is addressed from multiple angles. Jesus’s words to the church at Ephesus in Revelation 2:4 are perhaps the clearest expression of it: “you have abandoned the love you had at first.” The Ephesian believers were not doctrinally apostate; they were working hard, persevering, and testing false apostles. But somewhere in all that activity, the love that drove it had grown cold. The relationship had been replaced by the performance of religion.
Hebrews 5:11-14 describes a congregation that should have matured into teachers but had returned to needing milk rather than solid food. The author does not condemn them as having abandoned the faith, but the regression he describes is real and concerning. They have drifted back to an earlier stage of development that should have been left behind.
How Backsliding Happens
It rarely begins with a decisive break. Backsliding typically operates through neglect: the gradual thinning of prayer, the displacement of Scripture by more immediately entertaining things, the progressive reduction of church attendance from a settled commitment to an occasional event, the quiet accommodation to the world’s values in small matters that eventually compromises large ones. Hebrews 2:1 issues a specific warning against this kind of drift: “we must pay much closer attention to what we have heard, lest we drift away from it.”
Unaddressed sin accelerates spiritual retreat. When a believer is living with unconfessed, unresolved sin, the guilt and the Spirit’s conviction create a dynamic that makes intimacy with God feel impossible. Rather than dealing with the sin, it becomes easier to withdraw from the relationship. The further the withdrawal, the more distant God feels, and the harder the return becomes.
Backsliding Is Not Apostasy
This distinction is important. Backsliding is a condition of a genuine believer who has drifted from intimacy with God and is living below the level of their calling. Apostasy is a public, deliberate rejection of the Christian faith itself. The backslider is often miserable, aware of the distance, and still fundamentally oriented toward God even in their failure. The apostate has made a settled decision to abandon Christ entirely.
Elijah under the juniper tree (1 Kings 19:4-5) is a picture of a backslidden prophet who had lost perspective and wanted to die. Peter, after his three-fold denial, went out and wept bitterly (Luke 22:62) but never stopped being a disciple. Their failures were severe; they were not apostasy. The prodigal son “came to himself” (Luke 15:17) and returned to the father. The capacity to return is exactly what distinguishes backsliding from its far more serious counterpart.
So, now what?
The good news about backsliding is that it has a remedy. God’s word to the backslidden in the Old Testament was consistently an invitation: “Return to me, and I will return to you” (Malachi 3:7). In the New Testament the remedy is equally direct. 1 John 1:9 was written to believers, not to those outside the faith: “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” The distance is real, but it is not permanent unless you choose to make it so. The return begins with honesty, with acknowledging where you actually are rather than where you think you should be, and with the simple act of turning back toward the one who has been waiting.
“Return, O faithless sons; I will heal your faithlessness.” Jeremiah 3:22