The Apostate

“Demas hath forsaken me, having loved this present world”:” — 2 TIM. iv. 10.

TN old times our Nether Bow port and the gate of old London Bridge were often garnished with human heads; and on these, in days of tyranny and wrong, many a good, praying, and patriot head was spiked, alongside those of notorious criminals, to bake and wither in the sun. This, which we now consider a barbarous and offensive custom, was continued, after a fashion, down to our own age. Years ago, yet in our time, you could see, in sailing on the Thames, certain strange and fearful objects, close by the shore and standing up within tide-mark between you and the sky. They were gibbets, with dead men hung in chains. This spectacle, though repugnant to modern tastes and notions, had a good object in view; it accomplished something other and better than merely frightening those who, passing there by night, might hear the wind whistle through the holes of the empty skull, and the rusty chains creak as the body swayed round and round. Piracy, with its horrible atrocities on men and women, was then much more commonly practised by seamen than it is now, and as their ships dropped down the river, past these monuments of that crime and its punishment, the sailors carried away with them a salutary warning. They saw the abhorrence with which society regarded, and the vengeance with which justice pursued the perpetrators of so great a crime. Paul says, “Them that sin, rebuke before all, that others also may fear -” and these pirates were hung up before all for that good end. But the lesson, though striking, and well adapted, perhaps, to the rough men of rude times, was not perpetual. The work of decay went on, till bone dropping away from bone left only empty chains; and thus, mother earth hiding in her bosom the last relics of a guilty child, the criminal and his crime were both forgotten.

More enduring monuments than these of sin and of its punishment have perished amid the wrecks of time. For long ages, the stony form of a woman, dug from no quarry and cut by no sculptor’s chisel, stood with its cold gray eyes turned on the sea that entombed the sinners but not the sin of Sodom. Lonely and awful figure, on her the traveller who skirted the shores of the Dead Sea, and shepherds tending their flocks on the neighbouring mountains, gazed with wonder and terror and never did living preacher deliver such a sermon on the words, No man, having put his hand to the plough, and looking back, is fit for the kingdom of God, as that dumb statue. But time, the destroyer of all earthly things, has not spared even it; travellers have searched in vain for a relic more valuable and impressive far than the finest marbles of Greece and Rome. There is not a vestige of it to be found. She who, loving the present world too well, looked back on Sodom, has ceased to exist in stone, but she still lives in sacred story and amid this world’s temptations we would do well to think of and often to recall the words, “Remember Lot’s wife.”

The purpose which our ancestors had in view when they hung men in chains, and which God himself had in view when he turned Lot’s wife into a pillar of salt, was St Paul’s in his treatment of him whom he holds forth in this passage as a beacon to all future ages. He did not write these words to revenge himself on Demas, or to indulge any angry feeling against this poor and pitiable apostate. Nor was Demas the only man who had forsaken this champion of the truth. Stricken by such panic as has seized and scattered the bravest in battle, all Paul’s companions deserted him at an awful crisis of affairs; and, referring to the scene where, with form bent beneath the weight of years and cares and labours, but spirit elastic and erect as ever, he stood alone at Nero’s bar, he says, “At my first answer no man stood with me, but all men forsook me: I pray God that it may not be laid to their charge.” But between these and Demas there was an essential difference, and now, they in heaven and he in hell, there is an eternal one. Recovering their courage, they rallied; and washed out in their own blood the stain of this disgrace. They fled the field for a time, he for ever; they abandoned the fight, he the faith; their conduct was a weakness, his was apostasy; theirs the failing of the disciples, for whom their Master offered the kind apology, “The spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak,” but his the crime and guilt of Judas. So, singling him out from the crowd, Paul, if I may so say, hangs the apostate up in chains. Recording the man’s name and crime in these imperishable pages, he sets him before us to warn professing Christians against the love of the world; and teach all who, exposed to its influence and current, think they stand, to take heed lest they fall.

I. Let us consider the history and fall of Demas.

Men live after they are dead — some in their good deeds, others in their bad. Many a man would have been unheard of, but for his crimes; living but for these in happy obscurity, and going down to his grave unnoticed and unknown. But the case of Demas is not that of one who owes the world’s only knowledge of him to his crimes, like a felon whom a scaffold raises above the heads of the vulgar crowd who have come to see him die. This is not the first time we hear of Demas; and, indeed, had St Paul written no second letter to Timothy, or had God in his providence been pleased to allow this epistle to perish with other writings of the apostles, Demas might have given a name to Protestant churches; he might have been sainted in the Romish calendar, and had devotees soliciting his prayers, while they burned candles and offered gifts at his shrine.

In falling, this man fell from a height which few have reached, and that makes his fall the more impressive — he was a fallen star. If to be praised, not by the common crowd, but by those who themselves are praised, is fame, if to be held up by those who stand on others’ shoulders, is admitted to be the highest honour, such honour Demas had. Paul him self, the greatest of the apostles, once regarded him with warm affection, and awarded him the honour due to a fellow-labourer in the Lord. No common man at arms, he had stood in the front rank of the Christian host; and fighting in battle by the apostle’s side, he had shared his dangers, and stood high in his esteem. Nor had he a place in Paul’s heart only. He is made honourable mention of in his letters; in that to the Colossians, for instance, where the apostle joins Demas with one of the four Evangelists — “Luke,” says he, “the beloved physician, and Demas greet you.” We find him in no less honourable company also in that most touching letter to Philemon, where this lover of all freedom, and hater of all oppression, and denouncer of -all human. wrongs throws his arms around a. slave as. a brother beloved — breathing a spirit that, intolerant of slavery, would emancipate every bondman, and let the oppressed go free. “There salute thee,” he says, “Epaphras, my fellow-prisoner in Christ Jesus; Marcus, Aristarchus, Demas, Lucas, my fellow-prisoners.” What a galaxy of stars, and Demas shining among them! Names of renown, these sound in our ears like David’s roll of mighty men; and the time was when Demas held such place among the champions of the cross, as, according to Scripture, belonged to Benaiah, the son of Jehoiada, who slew the lion-like men of Moab, and with no more formidable weapon than a staff encountered and conquered the Egyptian giant — “He was more honourable than the thirty, but he attained not to the first three.”

Some men, as we might rashly say in our ignorance of the designs of Providence, die too soon; but some seem to live too long — outliving not their usefulness only, which, however undesirable, a good man may do, but their honour and principles. Happy for Demas had his sun gone down at noon! Over one who had been his friend, companion, fellow-labourer, with whom he had often taken sweet counsel, Paul lived to weep; and to write this epitaph for his unhonoured grave, Demas hath forsaken me, having loved this present world a sentence that, like the scorpion, carries its sting in its tail, — “having loved this present world.” Look at him! Ovid has fancied no metamorphosis more strange or horrible. The opposite of Paul, who fell a persecutor and rose an apostle, Demas, once an apostle, has changed into an apostate; once a martyr, now a renegade; a brave soldier once, now a base deserter; a traitor now his arms raised to pull down the pillars of a church they had helped to build. May we not cry with the prophet, How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! Scripture is silent on this man’s future course j the curtain falls where we see him as a dishonoured knight, with the spurs he had won hacked from his heels — as a deserter, with the facings plucked from his dress, and drummed out of the regiment. But if ancient tradition speaks truth, Demas, as might be expected, went from bad to worse, sank lower and lower, from one depth of wickedness to another till he closed his infamous career as the priest of a heathen temple — offering sacrifices to dead stocks and stones. What a fall was there? Unhappy man! whether he died amid the recollections of other and better days, stung by remorse and howling in despair; or died in sullen defiance of the Saviour, like Julian, when, overcome in battle by the Christians, he caught the blood from his fatal wound, and, tossing it up in the face of heaven, cried, expiring in the effort, The Nazarene has conquered!

Such is the story of Demas. As instructive as it is sad. Let no man wonder now that John Bradford, living in a street along which criminals in his time were led to execution, was wont to say, as from his windows he saw them passing on to the gallows, But for the grace of God, there goes John Bradford! The fall of such an one as Demas, like some tall cliff which, undermined by the waves, precipitates itself with the roar of thunder headlong into the boiling sea, must have startled the Church at the time, and wakened from their slumber those that slept in Sion; and still, as if its echoes were yet sounding round the world, let us listen to its warning. It teaches the highest of us, to take heed lest we fall; the happiest of us, to rejoice with trembling; and all of us, to watch and pray that, keeping our garments unspotted from the world, we enter not into temptation.

II. Consider the cause of Demas’ fall, — he loved this present world.

Sailing once along a Highland loch where the crag goes sheer down into the water, our attention was turned by the boatmen to an immense table of rock. Tilted up on its narrow edge, it stood there threatening destruction to any who ventured below it; appearing ready to topple over at the touch of an infant’s finger, and leap with a sudden plunge into the bosom of the lake. How came this gigantic stone to assume that upright attitude 1 No brawny arms of shepherd lads had raised and balanced it there. No earthquake, rolling along those mountains, and turning its stroke upwards, as earthquakes sometimes do, had started this mass from its bed and poised it so. Nor had the lightning, leaping from its cloud on the mountain summits, struck the crag, and, splitting it, raised this giant fragment from its bed. That was the task of a much more quiet, feeble, simple, and secret agent. When Jehovah revealed himself to the prophet, it was not in the earthquake, or in the roaring hurricane, or in the blazing fire, but in a still, small voice; and the power that rent that solid rock, and raised the mass tottering on its narrow base, was of a kind as quiet, gentle, and unobtrusive. Borne on the wings of the autumn wind, or dropped by a passing bird, a little seed had fallen into a crevice of the rock. Sleeping the winter through, but finding shelter and congenial soil, it sprang with the spring; and fed by dews and rains, the tender shoot grew. In time it lifted up its head, and spread its branches above and its roots below — worming them into fissures, wrapping them round and round that stony table, which, as they grew and thickened, it raised slowly from its bed. And then, one day when the seedling had grown into a tree, a storm, acting on leafy branches that caught the wind like sails, turned that tree into a lever, and, heaving on the rock that had received the seed into its heart and the fatal embraces of its roots, raised the massy table from its bed and poised it on the edge of the dizzy crag; and there it stood erect, waiting another storm to be hurled into the mossy waters of that wild, dark mountain lake.

As that shall fall, so fell Demas from his lofty o place so have many fallen; ay, and so, unless we are restrained and sustained by the grace of God, the best of us would fall. It is not the world, observe, nor its money, nor its honours, nor its enjoyments that the Bible condemns; but the love of them. Beware of that! At first it may seem little, small as a tiny seed, but let it get a lodgment within you, and, fed by indulgence, it grows there, so silently, perhaps, that while it is worming itself deeper in, and wrapping its strong roots round and round your heart, you may never suspect the hold it is getting of you. That appears when the hour of temptation comes, whatever form it may assume; and the man falls, to the astonishment of many, perhaps to his own. When persecution came upon the Church, how did it act on Demas? as the storm on the rock that had lodged the seed in its bosom, and which, but for the tree that sprang from it with wide-spread branches and embracing roots, had stood unmoved by tempests, let them blow their worst. Turning Demas into a beggar, casting him into prison, or bringing him to the scaffold, persecution might destroy what of wealth, pleasure, health, and life was his; but had he not loved them, allowed them to take root in his heart, and occupy the place that belonged to God, persecution had never destroyed him. Never; and when Paul the apostle stood with his gray head before the crowd that had assembled to see him die, Demas had been at his side; one chain of love, as of iron, binding them; as they had fought, they had fallen together; their blood had mingled in the same stream; their heads rolled on the same scaffold; one chariot had borne both martyrs to the skies; and over their mangled remains, carried by devout men to burial, a weeping church might have raised one monument to their memory — its inscription, these words of David, They “were lovely and pleasant in their lives, and in their death they were not divided.”

It is another part of that lament which best suits this case of Demas — “How are the mighty fallen, and the weapons of war perished!” He was laid in an apostate’s grave — not excepting a drunkard’s, the most hopeless of any; and, ere we close it over him, let us, like soldiers marched at a military execution by the dead body of a comrade who has been shot for treachery, take a last look of this unhappy, guilty man. He loved the world; and what has it brought him to? what is that world to him now, for which he denied his Saviour and forsook his servants’? what now profits him a world, for which he bartered his immortal soul1? He was a preacher; nor the last who has turned back in the day of battle, and abandoned his principles when they had to be suffered for. He had been a preacher, perhaps an eloquent one; but he never preached a sermon such as he preaches now — himself the sermon, and these words his text, Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him.

III. Learn the lessons this case teaches.

Put not your trust in princes, says David, nor in preachers, says Demas — by his example. The ornament of the pulpit may become its disgrace; and He, who will not give his glory to another, may rebuke the idolatry of the people by shattering their idol, or, rather, by allowing the idol to shatter itself. On the very throne where Herod sat, arrayed in royal apparel, making an oration at which the people shouted, It is the voice of a god, and not of a man, the angel of the Lord smote him. His flatterers saw their god eaten up of worms. And what more excellent studies than he and Demas for any who are in danger of being intoxicated with popular applause, and of turning giddy from the height of their position 1 An apostle once, an apostate now; the object once of good men’s affection, but now of bad men’s contempt; once beloved by the Church, despised now even by the world, and, worse still, by himself; a blazing star quenched in night, how does Demas warn those who are high placed, not to be high-minded, but to fear. It is safest to carry a low sail in a strong wind, even when it blows in our favour. Blessed are the poor in spirit; for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. The humble are to be exalted; those who lie at Jesus’ feet are those who shall lie on his bosom.

Then, again, what a lesson does Demas read such as, by their family circumstances, their pious friends, or otherwise, are placed in conditions the most favourable to their spiritual welfare? He associated with the holiest society out of heaven. The bosom friend of one in heart the purest, and in soul the loftiest, noblest man the world ever saw, and a fellow-labourer with him in the ministry of the gospel, Demas was in circumstances less likely than are any of us to get engrossed with the business, or burdened with the cares, or entangled with the pleasures of the world. Notwithstanding, he fell — drawn away by the love of the world from the love of Christ. And what need, then, have Christians much less favourably situated, to watch and pray, and guard their hearts? This story sounds in my ear like the voice of the old prophet, “Howl, fir-tree; for the cedar is fallen.”

Do you feel at ease, considering yourselves in small danger of suffering such persecutions as led to the fall of Demas 1 It may be so; but let me warn you that the world has trials more testing and severe than these. Its smiles are to be dreaded, perhaps, more than its frowns, its subtle sophistries more than its sharpest sword. Let its love but once get into a man’s heart, and it has a tongue to persuade him that vice is virtue, and virtue vice. Look at the sentiments of such as make a profession of religion, and yet love the world — fearing the Lord, and serving their own gods. According to them, a stern regard to duty, integrity, purity, is preciseness, and the holy observance of God’s day is Pharisaism; — on the other hand, conformity to the fashions and practices and gaieties of the world is not being “righteous overmuch;” a godless indifference to religious matters is charity and catholicity; looseness of principle is liberality, and freedom from the trammels of sectarianism; flattery and fawning are politeness, or, to profane the Scripture expression, are to be courteous; low cunning is caution; cowardice in the cause of God and truth is prudence; treachery to public principle is a wise regard to our own interests; dishonesty and fraud are cleverness in business; murder is an affair of honour, and seduction one of gallantry; hoarding money is carefulness; and the avarice that eats like a cancer into the heart, destroying alike the love of God and the love of man, is such frugality as Christ commended, and, indeed, commanded, when he said, Gather up the fragments that remain, that nothing be lost. And thus, when the love of the world has entered our hearts, the devil, clothed like an angel of light, walks in at its back.

In old times the sailors, a race given to superstition, told among other stories of the sea one of a strange island that lay in waters where no breakers beat, nor storms blew on its quiet shores. Yet they give it a wide berth whenever they, as they supposed, approached its neighbourhood, holding it in greater dread than the rugged coasts of our stormy climes. It rose from the deep a mass of magnetic ore, with powers of attraction fatal to the mariner. Once within their influence, the ship was drawn nearer and nearer; at first slowly, silently, gently, almost imperceptibly, but with ever-increasing speed; till, on a close approach, every iron bolt drawn from her timbers, without a crash, or sound, or any thing to alarm the waking, or to wake the sleeping, she fell into a thousand pieces and the whole fabric dissolved, crew and cargo sank together — down into that quiet sea. Fable as that was, so goes the religion, such as it is, of him who, drawn to the world, yields up his heart to its fatal attractions. It draws him on and on, further and faster on, till at length the catastrophe arrives — his principles give way before some great temptation, and he is lost. What a wreck it made of Demas!

Watch, therefore, and pray while you watch, against this insidious enemy. If you find yourself beginning to love any pleasure better than your prayers — any book better than your Bible — any house better than God’s — any table better than the Lord’s — any person better than your Saviour — any one better than your soul — a present indulgence better than the hopes of heaven — take alarm. The evil is begun, and it does not mend the matter that its beginning is small. It does not need a large hole to admit a serpent with poison in its fangs, nor a large leak to let in the water that sinks the ship and drowns her crew. Despise not the day of small things, be they for good or evil. Behold, how great a matter a little fire kindleth! Beware how you allow Satan, or any one else, to lodge the love of the world in the smallest cranny or crevice of your heart. Give your hands to the world, but keep your heart for God. It is a very good world if kept in its own place; like fire and water, a useful servant, but a bad and most tyrannous master. Love it not, and yet love it. Love it with the love of him who gave his Son to die for it. Love it with the love of him who shed his blood to save it. Love it with the love of angels, who rejoice in its conversion. Love it to do it good, giving your tears to its sufferings — your pity to its sorrows — your wealth to its wants — your prayers to its miseries — and to its fields of charity and philanthropy and Christian piety, your powers and hours of labour. You cannot live without affecting it, or being affected by it. You will make .the world better, or it will make you worse. God help you by his grace and Holy Spirit so to live in the world as to live above it, and look beyond it; and so to love it, that when you leave it, and the fluttering heart has beat its last stroke, and the bosom has heaved its last long sigh, and the last quiver has passed from your lips, and no breath dims the mirror, and all is over, you may leave the world better than you found it!