JEANIE JURA | Eternally Alive in Christ |
There is an ongoing debate over how secure we really are in Christ. Mention “Once Saved Always Saved”, and suddenly one is met with a barrage of objections from those who insist that you can just “walk away” if you so choose. Calling it “eternal security” is not quite so controversial, but both terms actually mean the same thing.
As a former Adventist, I used to be on the side of personal choice without any real understanding of salvation, how it becomes ours, and God’s part in saving us.
I had been taught that we seek after God, and if we are sincere enough, He allows us to “find” Him. He gives us the chance to be saved, but salvation always came with conditions. (Remember that dreaded word “probation”?) We had to prove ourselves by being good enough, keeping the law well enough (with heavy emphasis on the fourth commandment) and show a continual upward trend in our lives. It was up to us to work at it, and if we succeeded, God would—maybe—save us.
The source of this misunderstanding comes from having an authority other than the Bible. Our highest “authority” wrote:
“Christ looks at the spirit, and when He sees us carrying our burden with faith, His perfect holiness atones for our shortcomings. When we do our best, He becomes our righteousness. It takes every ray of light that God sends to us to make us the light of the world”—Letter 22, 1889.
Do you see that? When we do our best, THEN He becomes our righteousness. This makes salvation our work, which, if we try hard enough, God will have to honor by saving us. No wonder we didn’t believe that salvation is eternally secure! We knew in our hearts how sinful we were and how hopeless it was to live up to the standard we raised for ourselves.
Ellen White openly believed that becoming saved depends on our efforts:
“Students, do your best. This is all that God asks of you. He who has given His life for you will aid you in your efforts to win eternal life…….”—Manuscript Releases 900.6, Sermons and Talks vol. 1, 333.1
But is that idea really biblically true? If you start with a faulty assumption about how to become saved, then it becomes increasingly difficult to understand how to keep that salvation. If it is your work to achieve it, then it follows that it must be your work to keep it.
No wonder so many of us were discouraged about salvation and thought of hope as a “cross your fingers” hope, not an assurance.
No wonder so many of us were discouraged about salvation and thought of hope as a “cross your fingers” hope, not an assurance.
Since leaving Adventism, I have been on a journey to find the biblical gospel, and along the way I have had the advantage of teaching by some very good teachers. It is from two of them that I have been forming my understanding of salvation with a biblical basis.
One of those teachers, John Rittenhouse, was a guest speaker at several of the Former Adventist Fellowship conferences around 2008 – 2014. One of his talks was about eternal security, and he explained how salvation happens.
He said: “We are saved by trusting in the right object for the right reason”.
Jesus is that “right object”, and trusting in Him is the only way to be saved. This is expressed in many ways and in may places in the Bible.
Romans 3:27, 28 and 11:6 tell us that we are saved by grace, not works:
Where then is boasting? It is excluded. By what kind of law? Of works? No, but by a law of faith. For we maintain that a man is justified by faith apart from works of the Law.—Romans 3:27, 28 LSB
But if it is by grace, it is no longer of works, otherwise grace is no longer grace.—Romans 11:6 LSB
Ephesians calls salvation a gift, not a work:
For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this not of yourselves, [it is] the gift of God; not of works, so that no one may boast.—Ephesians 2:8, 9 LSB
Paul was very serious about this idea in Galatians 2:16, where he explained how we are justified five times for emphasis: three times in the negative and two times in the positive:
[N]evertheless knowing that a man is not justified by the works of the Law but through faith in Jesus Christ, even we have believed in Christ Jesus, so that we may be justified by faith in Christ and not by the works of the Law; since by the works of the Law no flesh will be justified.—Galatians 2:16 LSB
So, what happens when a person is saved?
John Rittenhouse gave a list of 40 or more things the Bible says will happen. Here are just a few of them:
- Rescued from Satan’s kingdom and transferred into God’s kingdom—Colossians 1:13
- Made righteous—2 Corinthians 5:21
- No condemnation—Romans 8:1
- Made complete in Christ—Colossians 2:10 (This one is very interesting—the verb form is in the perfect tense which means: “a past action occuring in a point in time, totally complete, with results that continue through all time without cessation or duration.”)
- Baptized by the Holy Spirit—Romans 6:3; Colossians 2:12
- Sealed by the Holy Spirit—2 Corinthians 1:22; and 5:5
- Passed from death to life—again in the perfect tense
- Seated with Christ in the heavenly places—Ephesians 2:6
So, with all these assurances, why is there still a question of security? Why the insistence that we can just give it up and lose it?
I believe that idea comes from a total lack of understanding of God and of the nature of the spirit of man compounded by the Ellen White-instilled assumption that salvation is mostly our work, with eternal life being the reward for doing well.
Never Called a Reward
The Bible never calls salvation a reward! Never! Yes, we walk with God, and we are earning rewards, but that is after we are saved, not in order to become saved. In fact, pursuing good works after we are saved is not even part of KEEPING our salvation. This reality is explained in 1 Corinthians 3:10-15 where Paul is speaking to those who are already saved.
According to the grace of God which was given to me, like a wise master builder I laid a foundation, and another is building on it. But each man must be careful how he builds on it. For no man can lay a foundation other than the one which is laid, which is Jesus Christ.
Now if any man builds on the foundation with gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, straw, each man’s work will become evident; for the day will show it because it is to be revealed with fire, and the fire itself will test the quality of each man’s work.
If any man’s work which he has built on it remains, he will receive a reward.
If any man’s work is burned up, he will suffer loss; but he himself will be saved, yet so as through fire.
Verse 15 is the one that is usually overlooked: a person may lose rewards, but not salvation.
There are many contributing factors to the faulty conclusion that salvation is not secure. For example, there is the Adventist portrayal of a weak god who must defend himself against spurious claims from a created being. Or there’s the assumption that God is a gentleman who would never force anyone to stay saved. The real substance of our insecurity, though, is the fear that maybe, just maybe, if we aren’t careful enough, or good enough, we can do something that will make God kick us out or cause us to fall from grace.
These mistaken ideas are always bolstered by stories of people who, it is claimed, were saved but walked away to live a life of sin.
Clear Verses First
If we love Jesus and are grateful for His finished work on the cross, and if we accept His finished atonement by faith, why would we ever want to change our minds? Thinking that a person might want to change his or her mind is the biggest assumption people make; it seems as if they are trying to give themselves an “out” in case they want to change their minds later.
Consider this question: can you “unseal” something God has sealed? If you think that you can do that, you clearly don’t think much of God!
The other teacher that has helped me on this learning journey is the late Jack Kelley on the site gracethrufaith.com. I don’t agree with everything he wrote, but on the subject of eternal security, he was very biblical and correct. One of his most important teachings is that God cannot lie, so if He says one thing in one place, He cannot contradict Himself in another verse. If there seems to be a contradiction, the problem is that we are misunderstanding the intent of those verses, not that God changed.
He also makes an excellent point that when there are two statements in the Bible that seem to contradict each other, we should start with the most clear, straight-forward statement for the basis of our theology. Then, and only then, do we look at the statements that could be taken more than one way.
Too often, we do it backwards—we look at the statements that could be interpreted to say that we can “walk away” and use that as the basis for our belief; then and only then do we look at, and often discredit, the clear, emphatic statements that say the opposite.
There is a reason why we start with the clear verses first. As one Bible teacher stated, there are those statements which, if you show them to four different “experts”, you will get 5 different interpretations.
Jack Kelley starts by describing our salvation as being in two parts or aspects: one he calls Union and the other he calls Fellowship. I have also seen it stated as Positional and Relational.
He uses many clear Bible passages that show our position in Christ that comes from the moment we believe in Him. After that, in our walk with God, we see our relationship with God.
The Union side may be easier to explain as it is stated in many ways in the Bible. (Several of those statements are listed above.)
Puzzled By Doubters
What still puzzles me is what opponents of eternal security say about how unsure they are about salvation. These are the same people who insist that if we don’t try to live by the old covenant law, then obviously (to them, anyway) we are just longing to “kill, steal, and commit adultery”. Could it be that along with their inability to see the work of the Holy Spirit to guide us and to help us avoid those very sins, is also the inability to understand that that same Spirit is who seals us permanently when we believe?
There are quite a few verses in the Bible that promise that if we have faith in Jesus, we will have eternal life. God cannot lie, so if He said that, He means it.
But there are also several that say we HAVE eternal life. All of them were written by the disciple Jesus loved; and as John was apparently one of those closest to Jesus, he must have known what Jesus said. These verses, stated in the affirmative, present tense—“have eternal life”—are found in John 3:36 5:24 6:40, 47, 54 1 John 5:11, 13. We have more than just the promise of future life, we have it now.
So here is a question to consider: if salvation brings eternal life, if you could lose it or chose to give it up, was it ever eternal?
So here is a question to consider: if salvation brings eternal life, if you could lose it or chose to give it up, was it ever eternal?
After being raised in the culture of “maybe”, I find it wonderfully refreshing and reassuring to know that from the moment I believed in Jesus, He saved me, made my dead spirit live, and gave me eternal life that is eternally secure! And He did that before I even realized how secure I was in Him, before I had unlearned the harmful, incorrect theology I had been taught. He didn’t even wait for me to understand it all, He just gave me eternal life and then taught me to better understand it.
I am deeply and eternally grateful to God for the free gift of eternal life that I do not deserve and could never earn. From the moment I believed in Him by faith, He took responsibility for me, and He promises to never lose me .†
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