Amen to that, brother. But it seems that we've got two choices here. Either a few are apostasizing, or everyone is. It doesn't seem that no apostasy happens. The reason, I would think, would be so that we can know that when things are going wrong we can take steps toward correction for ourselves and for our church communities. Once people have it in their minds to adopt a new orthodoxy (which how it usually comes across at first), it's really hard to change their course. That too makes this passage difficult. It adds to the difficulty because the question pops up whether that particular church was ever really grafted in if it goes astray so quickly or so easily.

I don't think it's up to us to know or to judge that. We still have to accept all credible confessions as callings from Christ Himself, and accept people into the church community on that grounds. It's not like they have a bar code on them that we can scan to see if they're for real.

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JohnV

John Vandervliet
Ontario, Canada
member of: Canadian Reformed Church
"In coming to understand anything we are rejecting the facts as they are for us in favour of the facts as they are" C.S Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism