How Backsliding Happens, According to John Bunyan

In Hebrews 10:26–27, the unnamed writer of the book issues a solemn warning: “If we go on sinning deliberately after receiving the knowledge of the truth, there no longer remains a sacrifice for sins, but a fearful expectation of judgment, and a fury of fire that will consume the adversaries.” When we read these verses, we are reminded that clearly, in the writer’s context, there were those who had not simply neglected the gatherings of God’s people but also drifted from their moorings to the truth of God in Christ. They had become, in familiar church language, backsliders.

Reading such a warning, we should note that the writer is clearly not referring to genuine believers who had simply failed, stumbled, or temporarily lost interest in the things of Christ. As Calvin writes, “There is a great difference between individual lapses and a universal desertion of this kind.” This is not someone who had a temporary lapse. This is someone who was a total deserter—someone who took the Christian uniform, then trashed it, burned it, and essentially said, “I have nothing to do with this anymore. I’m done.”

At one point in his allegorical masterpiece The Pilgrim’s Progress, John Bunyan raises (through the character of Hopeful, the traveling companion of his protagonist, Christian) the question of how such backsliding occurs. After reviewing “the reason of … sudden backsliding,” Hopeful asks Christian, “Now I have shown you the reasons of their going back, do you show me the manner thereof.” For today’s believers, Christian’s explanation provides a helpful examination of the process by which the sorts of people mentioned in Hebrews come to fall away:

1. They draw off their thoughts, all that they may, from the remembrance of God, death, and judgment to come.
2. Then they cast off by degrees private duties, as closet prayer, curbing their lusts, watching sorrow for sin, and the like.
3. Then they shun the company of lively and warm Christians.
4. After that, they grow cold to public duty; as hearing, reading, godly conference, and the like.
5. They then begin to pick holes, as we say, in the coat of some of the godly, and that devilishly, that they may have a seeming color to throw religion (for the sake of some infirmities they have espied in them) behind their backs.
6. Then they begin to adhere to, and associate with themselves with carnal, loose, and wanton men.
7. Then they give way to carnal and wanton discourses in secret; and glad are they if they can see such things in any that are counted honest, that they may the more boldly do it through their example.
8. After this they begin to play with little sins openly.
9. And then, being hardened, they show themselves as they are. Thus being launched again into the gulf of misery, unless a miracle of grace prevent it, they everlastingly perish in their own deceivings.

As we read through this list, we may see the fallen inclination of our sinful hearts reflected in it. To the extent that we do, we should heed the warnings of Hebrews: “Take care, brothers, lest there be in any of you an evil, unbelieving heart, leading you to fall away from the living God” (3:12), for “it is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God” (10:31).

And yet those same hands, the writer reminds us, are also the ones that keep us so that we can say in truth, “But we are not of those who shrink back and are destroyed, but of those who have faith and preserve their souls” (10:39). May we examine ourselves, then, thoroughly, and also come to rest and trust thoroughly in the keeping power of the one who has given us His grace and mercy.

This article was adapted from the sermon “Keeping Near, Keeping On” by Alistair Begg.