Perseverance
A Part of Eternal
Security vs. Conditional Perseverance
by Ray Moore and Mike
Stine
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View
on Perseverance
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Arminianism- Believers
may turn from grace and lose their salvation.
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Calvinism- Believers will
persevere in the faith. Believers are secure in their
salvation, no one will be lost.
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Intro
Election
Grace
Perseverance
Conclusions
Bibliography
Discussing perseverance of saints requires looking at scholarly works
and being able to critique their statements and discern the truthfulness
in them. This is where our main our main emphasis lies, but the
prior sections were necessary to give a background for these
arguments.
Michael Horton, in his book Putting Amazing Back into Grace,
deals with the topic of perseverance in the introduction.
Threats of loss of salvation were used as a form of discipline by a
teacher in his Christian school. One day while reading Romans he
came across this passage, "But to the one who does not work, but
believes in him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is credited as righteousness
apart from works. 'Blessed are those whose lawless deeds have been
forgiven and whose sins have been covered. Blessed is the man
whose sin the Lord will not take into account.' (taken originally from
Psalm 132:1-2)" The Romans and Psalms passages are active
and are not based on future work of man. The word blessed is
definitive and sins that have been covered are hid behind Christ's
blood. We are not credited to righteousness by anything we say
or do, it is by our faith in Christ alone.
An also well known passage within the Bible contains the very same
active language. It is the verse practically everyone in America
has heard; John 3:16. For God so loved the world
that he gave his only son that whoever believes
in him shall not perish but have eternal life. Not only is there
an active voice within this passage, but we see that the tense
changes. Verbs referenced to God are in the past, his job is
done. Believes however is an active verb, referenced to the
believer (or non-believer) implying that it is something that must be
ongoing.
John is the apostle of love but the emphasis in John's writing is
not on love, it is on belief. This word occurs about 100 times
in his works, more than any other word. In the same passage as
above, verses 15 and 18 places the emphasis on believed, not love.
While verse 18 does definitely include the word believed, it also
includes the active tense, "believes", earlier in the verse. This I
must admit is confusing.
While reading DJ Kennedy's book Solving Bible
Mysteries
the lordship/salvation controversy came up. Kennedy tells the
story of a man who had passed away. He had lived a very sinful
life but the mother tells Kennedy that she knew her son was in
heaven. This was because the man had "accepted Christ"
when twelve years old, never returning to church afterwards.
While Kennedy did not wish to upset the mother, he mentions in his
book that he wouldn't want to be chained to this lady's son for
eternity. There is more to accepting Christ than just saying I
believe in him and want him in my life. One has to give their self
over to Lord and start being transformed. Various scripture
passages tell us that we are to allow our lives to be
transformed. This is an active thing that we are to do to the
point of our death.
Kennedy's book ,on page 5, states, "We see that genuine Christians
may temporarily and partially fall away but they will inevitably come
back. The great example of this is Peter." Kennedy
translates I John 3:9 as, "Whosoever is born of God does not
continue in the practice of sin for his seed is born is still in him
and he cannot continue in the habit of sin because he is born of
God." When we begin to allow our lives to be transformed,
we cannot continue to keep committing the same sin over and over
again. To do so shows that we have no desire to give up that
sin. Christ is in the business of not just saving lives, but transforming
lives. If he abides in us, then our fruit should show evidence
of him at work within us.
I fully agree that our lives should be fruitful. We're
obviously commanded to live fruitful lives. I strongly agree
with Kennedy that a profession at the age of twelve and never
returning to church does not save anyone. Where I must disagree
is really at the core of this issue anyway. I believe that we
can as Christians, bear fruit in our lives, and for some reason, choose
to give God's gift of salvation back.
I have a dear friend that I grew up with in church. She had a
tremendous zeal for God as we grew up together and she had, what I
personally believe, a genuine heart for the lost. As a teenager
she took the initiative to contact one of our missionaries in China and arranged to spend a month there as a short term missionary.
Unfortunately a few years after that point, she wouldn't
be recognizable as a Christian. She led a
promiscuous life for a couple of years and has been into other things that are
harmful to the body. She told me that didn't believe God existed
anymore. Fortunately she has hit rock bottom and has returned to
church. She now believes God exists, but I see no fruit in her
life. I don't see the difference that Christ makes in her life
except for the fact that she has two less hours on Sunday to do
things. Maybe she'll come back to the Lord, because maybe she
never gave up her salvation; crossed over that line in the sand God
has drawn somewhere. Or maybe she will stay as she is, a Sunday
morning Christian that has no zeal for God and shows no evidence of
His existence in her life. But it was there at one time. I
fully believe that, whatever someone wants to tell me.
No one can snatch our salvation from us. We have full
assurance of that from John 10:28. Even in the Arminian doctrine
it quotes this verse. We can also have assurance of our
salvation from our fruits. A bad tree cannot bear good fruit and
a good tree cannot bear bad fruit. Whatever is not of God is of
Satan. The nation of Israel is often represented as a fig tree
in the Bible. Christ cursed a fig tree because it did not bear
fruit and it died. Israel was God's chosen nation, but he
announced that it too, if it didn't produce fruit, would be cursed
(and die).
This young lady is still alive. The metaphor of pruning a
tree to make it bear fruit is a common theme in the Bible. When
a tree is pruned it is cut back to an extreme state. To the
casual observer, it even appears dead and the cut limbs are
burned. If God has to, he will prune us back the same way.
This young lady may never serve the Lord again in verbal testimony but
if her life is transformed, slowly people will start seeing the change
and eventually say, "This is not the sinner we once
knew." Bearing fruit does not make us all
evangelists. Some people work like Martha in the kitchen while
others go out and spread the word like the disciples.
I
certainly hope that this is true, for the sake of my friend.
Truthfully we will never know for sure on this side of eternity.
I can certainly not be the judge of whether she crossed over some
undefined line regarding the loss of her salvation. Nor can I be
certain whether she truly was saved to begin with if the beliefs of
some are true. And for those who believe that you can lose your
salvation and be saved once again I'm not capable to judge whether she
came back over that undefined line. So I can only hope that she
is being pruned and that the "carnal" side of her is being
cut off. Kennedy on page 16 states, "It is one thing to have occasional
sin in your life. It is another thing for sin to have dominion
over you. Sin does not rule over the life of a genuine
Christian." In our fallen state it is almost impossible not
to get through the day without committing sin. But as we mature
in regards to salvation the recurrence of sin should dwindle with time
until we reach a point of maturity (when Christ calls us home).
In
a TV broadcast by Kennedy 10/29/00 8:00 AM this statement was made:
"Christ paid the penalty for sins eternally when we put our faith
in him." John 6:37-40 "All the father gives to me will
come to me...All that he has given to me I lose nothing but raise it
up on the last day. I would obviously be a fool to deny the fact
that we sin everyday in our lives. The fact that Paul calls
himself the worst of sinners makes this evident and no one doubts
Paul's salvation. It is not an issue of our struggle with the
world, the flesh, and the devil, but really a lack thereof. When
we stop wrestling with these issues is when alarms need to be raised;
a searing of the conscience is what I'm alluding to. For my
point, many men that I've talked to struggle in the area of
lust. This is a problem that I don't believe anyone can
fully master and they will always be prone to fall to. What I am saying is that we
obviously will have sin in our lives and we will struggle with
it. (This is why we are called to perseverance numerous places
in the Bible after all.) While I don't know what the line is,
when we sear our conscience and begin to blatantly disobey God's
commands, I know that we run into trouble. For this reason I
suggest that we can lose our salvation, in accordance to the warnings
God gives us in scripture as well as the numerous calls to persevere.
Next Section -
Conclusions
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