ostasy. Worldliness was at the root of their
Judaism. It is still the same. The self-righteous do not hate money.

Let them imitate the trustfulness of their great leaders in the past,
who had not given their time and thoughts to heaping up riches, but had
devoted themselves to the work of witnessing and of speaking the word of
God. Let them review with critical eye their manner of life, and observe
how it ended. They all died in faith. Some of them suffered martyrdom,
so complete and entirely unworldly was their self-surrender to Jesus
Christ! But Jesus Christ is still the same One. If He was worthy that
Stephen and James should die for His sake, He is worthy of our
allegiance too. Yea, He will be the same for ever. When the world has
passed away, with its fashion and its lust, when the earth and the works
that are therein are burned up and dissolved, Jesus Christ abides. What
He was yesterday to His martyr Stephen, that He is to all that follow
Him in earth's to-day, and that He will for ever be when He shall have
appeared unto them who expect Him unto salvation. The antithesis, it
will be seen, is not between the departed saints and the abiding Christ,
but between the world, which the Hebrew Christians loved too well, and
the Christ Whom the saints of their Church had loved better than the
world and served by faith unto death.

If Jesus Christ abides, He is our anchorage, and the exhortation first
given near the beginning of the Epistle once more suggests itself to the
Apostle. "Permit not yourselves to drift and be carried past[396] the
moorings by divers strange doctrines." The word "doctrines" is itself
emphatic, "Be not borne aside from the personal, abiding Jesus Christ by
propositions, whether in reference to practice or to belief." What these
"doctrines" were in this particular case we learn from the next verse.
They were the doubtful disputations about meats. The epithets "divers
and strange" restrict the allusion still more nearly. He speaks not of
the general and familiar injunctions of Jewish teachers respecting
meats, the subject rather contemptuously dismissed by St. Paul in the
Epistle to the Romans: "One man hath faith to eat all things; but he
that is weak eateth herbs."[397] Our author could not have regarded
these doctrines as "strange," and he could scarcely have spoken of
"strengthening the heart with meats" if he had meant abstinence from
meats. A recent English expositor[398] has pointed out the