Apostasy can be defined as the renunciation or the abandonment of the
Christian faith and it's actually a word that we get from the Greek text that
underlies the King James Bible in 2 Thessalonians 2 verse 3 translated as
the falling away referring to an appointed time where the Antichrist will
unite all people under a one-world religion to worship himself and
essentially abandon the worshipping of God. Now the way this would look like in
practical terms today would be that if a person or a church claims to believe in
the essentials of the doctrines of Christ such as salvation by grace through
faith alone the deity of Jesus or even the infallibility of the Bible but then
later renunciates those beliefs the diagnosis would be that that person has
gone apostate they didn't lose their salvation they were never safe to begin
with. An example of this would be Judas Iscariot who John writes about
indirectly in 1 John 2 19 when he said they went out from us but they were not
of us for if they had been of us they would have no doubt continued with us
but they went out that they might be made manifest that they were not all of