Of course you’ve heard the story of the prodigal son, and the story of his older brother who was so angry when the father restored him. Less commonly known is the story of the third brother. Gather round, children, and let Uncle Tim spin you a yarn….
After the prodigal son made his scandalous request, took his inheritance, and left for a far country, the third brother went to work. Of course the whole town already knew what his brother had done; dad was rich, and you can’t move that kind of wealth around without everybody finding out about it. But the third brother wasn’t interested in spreading the tale; he was interested in what it meant. Obviously, no true son of his father could ever do such a thing, he would say to anybody that would listen. By the roadside, in the marketplace, down at the corner restaurant, he was spreading the word: his prodigal brother’s conduct just showed that he was never really a son to start with.
Some fools will listen to any salacious gossip, but of course the wiser neighbors just ignored him, because he was obviously an asshole.
What are we to do with an apostate? For 10 years, 20 years, sometimes more, the guy was one of us. Then he kinda disappeared a couple years back, and now he’s popped up again, ardently practicing black magic, of all things! Some people want to dismiss this kind of question as an extreme hypothetical case. Extreme? Yes. Hypothetical? Not so much. I’ve encountered these folks too — several years ago, I found myself working for a business whose owner was a former evangelical worship leader turned full-blown shaman (disciple of Alberto Villoldo, in fact). A Bible college buddy of mine is worshipping Thor these days. A couple other folks are trying to stay connected to Christianity while practicing witchcraft too.
Where do you start?
At square one (which is Creation, not the cross, but that’s another post.) It’s entirely possible that there was some crucial flaw in their grasp of Christianity to start with, so it makes sense to go back over all the basics. It’s not that strange of an idea; Hebrews speaks of people who “need someone to teach you again the first principles of the oracles of God,” who “have come to need milk and not solid food.” But we do not believe that understanding is all there is to it: following Jesus takes dedication and sacrifice. If that’s the case, then the problem may not have been with a lack of understanding at all. They may have defected because they were more attracted by something else, or because following Jesus got harder than they were willing to endure.
The point is, we often have no idea what actually went wrong, and such a person is an unreliable narrator of their own experience; everything they tell you will be riddled with blameshifting and lame rationalizations.
“But Tim,” people often ask me, “is this person going to heaven?”
Ya know, my New Birth Detect-o-Matic is on the fritz, so it’s hard to be sure. If I were just meeting the guy today, of course I’d be skeptical. But if I knew the guy back then and was firmly convinced that he was a believer back then, I don’t really see a reason to question it now. I thought he was born again back then because Scripture teaches me to think that way: people who believe in Jesus are born again. There simply is no biblical text that gives me grounds to turn around and doubt him based on his scandalous present behavior. Everywhere you might expect to see that, what you see instead (if you actually read in context) is assurance: a challenge to live up to the new birth you have, not a question about whether you really had it.
But honestly, I think that (like the problem of evil) this is not a hard question logically; it’s a hard question emotionally. We don’t want to believe that a genuine believer can really fall all the way into something as dark as straightforward demon-worship. It troubles us to think that someone found our faith so un-compelling that they left it for something else, and something so wicked. We want to believe that we would never apostatize, and seeing someone do it — someone we thought of as “just like me” — shakes our complacency. That sort of thing. So, to set all our minds at ease, here’s a list of the sins the Bible tells us that no genuine believer could ever fall into:
Yup. That’s it. Zip. Zilch. Nada.
Guard your hearts, folks. It absolutely can happen to you.
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