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From these words we are therefore to illustrate the natural tendency of unbelief, or its influence in producing a departure from the living God.

1. This expression implies a rejection of spiritual and eternal life, through Jesus Christ. This sin, as persisted in, issues in a total separation from the blissful enjoyment of God as reconciled, an eternal banishment "from the presence of the Lord, and from the glory of His Dower" (2. Thessalonians 1:9).

2. It often produces a secret apostasy from Christ. Many retain the form of godliness, while they practically deny the power thereof. They indulge sin in the chamber of imagery, or practise it so secretly that their characters are not blasted.

3. Unbelief induces to a departure from all purity and strictness of profession.

4. Unbelief drives others so far that they entirely renounce a religious profession.

5. Unbelief often issues in confirmed, or in judicial obduracy.

6. It tends to the commission of the unpardonable sin. This evil heart is a sluice which, if once opened, knows no restraint but what is imposed on it by the restraining, preventing, renewing, or preserving grace of God. It is a torrent that would soon burst through all the fences of reason, natural dictates of conscience, common light, and strong convictions — nay, of saving grace already received, were not believers kept by the power of God through faith as the mean, kept by continual supplies from the fulness of Christ, and thus preserved hem perishing. It is naturally a rejection of the living God, and of that life of God, which can alone preserve from total apostasy and eternal death.

7. It tends to the indulgence of all sin. As unbelief is itself the departure of the heart from God, it continually impels to an universal departure from Him in the life. He who is under the power of unbelief never views sin as sin. Unbelief, which rejects Christ and salvation through Him, must necessarily give a preference to sin, his enemy. Nay, that very preference which the unbeliever gives to sin is the immediate cause of his rejection of the Saviour. The character of evil here given to the heart seems, indeed, especially to refer to the great efficacy of positive or acquired unbelief; for it makes the heart a great deal more wicked than it was before. Nor is it merely called evil, but the word used denotes great activity in evil, a labour in increasing its own corruption and that of the life, in strengthening itself in its own wickedness.

8. It tends to eternal death. If, as hath been said, it be a rejection of spiritual and eternal life, this must be the inevitable consequence.

(John Jamieson, M. A.)

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KJV: Take heed, brethren, lest there be in any of you an evil heart of unbelief, in departing from the living God.

WEB: Beware, brothers, lest perhaps there be in any one of you an evil heart of unbelief, in falling away from the living God;