Bible Study Accepted in the Beloved: Why My Redemption and Adoption is Eternally Secure.

[JLB]

Ill take that as a no, that you dont understand that for a person to be lost they must first belong to the Lord.

I ask this question because you use the word "lost" several time in your posts.



JLB

 

[Tenchi]

Ill take that as a no, that you dont understand that for a person to be lost they must first belong to the Lord.

I ask this question because you use the word "lost" several time in your posts.



JLB

Uh huh.

Have you heard the expression "straining at a gnat"?

I use "lost" in the sense of a creature who cannot find their way into fellowship with their holy Creator, of a person in darkness who cannot find their way out of it on their own, not in the sense of, say, a lost sheep that's wandered from its shepherd.

 

[Jethro Bodine]

??? I've never said that sin cannot appear in a believer's life after their salvation. I just don't believe, for the reasons I spelled out from Scripture in my OP, that when it does, the saved person's salvation is in jeopardy.

Right. I agree.
It's unbelief that ends a person's born again relationship with God.

 

[Jethro Bodine]

??? No. As I explained, the removal of the tumor cannot be undone. Neither can one's salvation. Sin may crop up after one's spiritual regeneration but this no more dissolves one's salvation than the appearance of other tumors dissolves the surgery that successfully removed the brain tumor. The surgery happened successfully whatever future disease may occur and one's salvation happened whatever future sin may occur.

Unbelief would put the person who had once been spiritually healed by the Great Physician out of reach of any further care and treatment of subsequent spiritual disease.

The question isn't isn't if that is really true or not. The question is can a true believer once healed by God go back to unbelief?

 

[GodsGrace]

Unbelief would put the person who had once been spiritually healed by the Great Physician out of reach of any further care and treatment of subsequent spiritual disease.

The question isn't isn't if that is really true or not. The question is can a true believer once healed by God go back to unbelief?

I dislike analogies, but this one is great.

 

[Jethro Bodine]

Well, I don't believe this. What you're espousing here is, essentially, works-salvation: Your persistence in believing keeps you saved. This is "another Gospel" as far as I'm concerned. But you are entitled to your opinion.

No where in scripture will you see that the 'work' of believing is ever on the side of the works that can not justify. Never. It is always contrasted with the work that can not justify, never equated with it. Believing is the one thing you must do to be justified. It is the only thing you can do to be justified.

 

[Jethro Bodine]

False dichotomy. It's not necessary to be a Calvinist and hold to OSAS. I hold to the OSAS view but I am definitely not a Calvinist.

How does your doctrine of OSAS differ from the original teachings of Calvinism?

 

[Jethro Bodine]

What did God do when the Israelites adopted an "evil heart of unbelief," refusing to enter the Promised Land God had given to them? He put them out in the wilderness until the unbelieving generation expired. Did God abandon His Chosen People in the wilderness? Did their unbelief dissolve His relationship to them? No. Not at all. Even in the wilderness, God continued to provide for and protect the Israelites.

You do realize the Israelites who died in the desert are not the same one's who later entered into the Promised Land. There was no 'OSAS' for them. The nation as a whole was remembered by God and preserved in keeping with His covenant with Abraham, not individual members of the nation. Different people entered into the Promised Land, not the ones who rebelled.

Likewise, the unbelieving Christian wanders in a spiritual wilderness, kept from the spiritual abundance they possess in Christ by their unbelief, but their adoption into God's family remains unalterable.

"Unbelieving Christian" is an oxymoron. A Christian is literally defined as one who believes in and follows Christ, right? So for someone to go back to unbelief they cease to be a Christian, and they are cut off from the power of God in salvation that they once had through faith, because they don't have that faith any longer through which they were kept by the power of God (1 Peter 1:5).

This is all assuming it's possible for the genuinely saved, born again person to go back to unbelief. That is the question that is not definitively answered in the Bible. But we definitely know what will happen to them if they do. That has been made clear.

My opinion of the matter, based on the warnings to not fall back into unbelief, is that, yes, a saved person can wrestle with God and be allowed to go back to unbelief if that's what he truly wants to do. And God can choose to do that as a matter of his own sovereignty in regard to what he forms the clay in his hands into (Jeremiah 18:1-12). I think it's clear from the Parable of the Sower that the deeper and more firmly the word of God is planted in your heart the more likely you will not reject that word out of the soil of your heart and be condemned.

24As for you, let what you have heard from the beginning remain in you. If it does, you will also remain in the Son and in the Father. 1 John 2:24

It's all about letting the word of God remain in you in believing. OSAS says it will always remain in you (I mean the original teaching about OSAS). Non-OSAS says it can be uprooted if you let it.

What about the Prodigal Son? Did his profligate living dissolve his relationship to his father? No. Even if he'd died, he'd still have been his father's son. Their fellowship together died, yes, their intimate communion with one another halted, but their relationship endured, inviolable. Just so in the believer's relationship to their Heavenly Father.

Notice the Prodigal Son was lost. So no comparison can be made to a saved person leaving the Father's house. Unless you want to admit that when a saved person leaves the Father's house they become lost, just as the Prodigal son did. This is where your version of OSAS, whatever that is, comes into play. The original OSAS says that since he left he is showing that he was never saved to begin with. The new OSAS says he remains saved even though he has left the household of the Father.

But anyway, the Parable is about Israel. It's not an analogy about how believing people can decide to abandon the household of God but still be able, and allowed, to come back. Israel is, as a nation, lost at the time Jesus comes to them. He is calling a people who have never really been 'saved', as we understand that, to a salvation he is introducing to them and the world. So it really has little doctrinal application to the matter of whether or not a true believer remains in God's care if he shrinks back into unbelief and leaves the household of faith.

 

[Tenchi]

Right. I agree.
It's unbelief that ends a person's born again relationship with God.

No, only their fellowship with Him. As I said, one can no more undo the saving work of the Great Physician than they can undo a saving surgery performed upon them by a brain surgeon. The saving's been done and cannot be undone.

Unbelief would put the person who had once been spiritually healed by the Great Physician out of reach of any further care and treatment of subsequent spiritual disease.

Well, this is where the analogy starts to break down. God is more to us than our spiritual Physician (Romans 8:15-16). And just as He persisted with His unbelieving Chosen People in the wilderness beyond Canaan, He persists with His adopted, in-Christ children when they, too, fail to believe. The same situation is described in Christ's "Prodigal Son" story, as well (Luke 15:11-32). God does not renege on His adoption of His children because they act as the weak, faithless creatures they were when He first initiated His redemption of them (Titus 3:3-8; Ephesians 2:1-6). Such behavior didn't stop Him from drawing them (John 6:44), convicting them (John 16:8), and illuminating their minds and hearts to the Gospel (2 Timothy 2:25) and it doesn't make Him shrink back after they become one of His. He's faithful even when we are not.

The question isn't isn't if that is really true or not.

I disagree. See above. No one can pluck a born-again child of God out of Christ's hand and that includes the faithless born-again person him/herself (John 10:28-29).

The question is can a true believer once healed by God go back to unbelief?

Yes. But their unbelief halts only their fellowship with their Heavenly Father, not His redemption/adoption of them. And coming to such a place in any settled, persistent manner would entail enduring the loss of fellowship with God, the conviction of the Holy Spirit, divine discipline, and the suffering sin always produces. (Hebrews 12:5-11; Galatians 6:7-8)

There are, of course, "tares," "false brethren," that occupy the Church. (Matthew 13:37-42; 2 Corinthians 11:26; Galatians 2:4) To them and about them God speaks in His word in several places (Hebrews 6:1-8; 1 John 2:19, etc.) I think the "apostate" is usually one of these.

 

[Tenchi]

How does your doctrine of OSAS differ from the original teachings of Calvinism?

For one, it isn't anchored in a view of God's elect that entails sovereign ordination of their salvation.

You do realize the Israelites who died in the desert are not the same one's who later entered into the Promised Land.

Yes. But their time in the wilderness was not absent God's provision and protection.

There was no 'OSAS' for them. The nation as a whole was remembered by God and preserved in keeping with His covenant with Abraham, not individual members of the nation.

??? Of what, exactly, is a "nation as a whole" comprised? Individuals.

Different people entered into the Promised Land, not the ones who rebelled.

Right. But those who wandered the wilderness and died in it were not cut off from God.

"Unbelieving Christian" is an oxymoron. A Christian is literally defined as one who believes in and follows Christ, right?

I don't think "unbelieving Christian" is an oxymoron. Every person suppresses the truth of God in unrighteousness; there is no one, saved or unsaved, who does not have some innate sense of God's existence that they push down and out of sight, if they can (Romans 1:18-21). It doesn't strike me, then, as impossible that a Christian could do the same with Christ - though it would be strange. I know, for example, a born-again man whose eleven-year-old boy had died miserably of cancer. The death of his son so rocked the father's trust in God, his faith in God's goodness and love, that he "apostasized," throwing off all belief in God entirely. In light of what I believe about OSAS, I don't believe this man has been un-born-again, nor do I find, given the circumstances of his "apostasy", that his current state of unbelief is impossible or contradictory but, rather, entirely understandable. And I've observed God working to retrieve this grief-stricken man from the wilderness of anger and sorrow that he's in rather than abandon him to it forever - which is quite in keeping with the God of mercy, grace, patience, faithfulness and love revealed to me in the Bible.

So for someone to go back to unbelief they cease to be a Christian, and they are cut off from the power of God in salvation that they once had through faith, because they don't have that faith any longer through which they were kept by the power of God (1 Peter 1:5).

I don't believe this is what the Bible teaches. God responds to a person's trust in Christ and works an irreversible change upon them, giving them new life anchored in Christ, not in their faith. If anyone knows how vacillating and faithless we can be, it's God. Consider the figure of the New Testament believer that OT Israel was, regularly drifting from God into sin. Like OT Israel, the saved person under the New Covenant can become a spiritual "adulterer" (James 4:4), straying far from God, indeed, acting the Prodigal toward their Heavenly Father. And so, He is wise enough not to let our eternal destiny hang on our capacity to always trust Him, to trust in Christ, as we should. Thank God, He doesn't! We are, as the hymnist wrote, "prone to wandering," as all sheep are wont to do. What a catastrophe, then, to rest our relationship to Him, our spiritual adoption, on our faithfulness.

I think it's clear from the Parable of the Sower that the deeper and more firmly the word of God is planted in your heart the more likely you will not reject that word out of the soil of your heart and be condemned.

Which locates the foundation of a believer's relationship with God in the believer, in their willingness to "plant the word of God" deeply in their heart, not in God's unshakeable faithfulness, enduring patience, and unending grace. But if our relationship to God rests so much upon us, we are in deep trouble; for none of us has the capacity to properly pursue God but must be constantly shepherded by Him away from the wilderness into which we wander so easily.

24As for you, let what you have heard from the beginning remain in you. If it does, you will also remain in the Son and in the Father. 1 John 2:24

1 John 2:22-24 (NASB)
22 Who is the liar but the one who denies that Jesus is the Christ? This is the antichrist, the one who denies the Father and the Son.
23 Whoever denies the Son does not have the Father; the one who confesses the Son has the Father also.
24 As for you, let that abide in you which you heard from the beginning. If what you heard from the beginning abides in you, you also will abide in the Son and in the Father.

I very much like that John here emphasizes the need for a conscious act of remaining, or continuing, in the truth by faith in order to live in (that is, experience) it. The Christian life does not "just happen," developing in its fullness apart from the mind and will of the believer. If a born-again person wants to experience the "abundant life" that is theirs in Christ, they will have to actively, consciously, mindfully live - abide - in the Truth given to them in Scripture. (Matthew 4:4; 1 Peter 2:2; 2 Corinthians 5:7, Psalms 1, etc.) This is, I think, all that John is indicating here, not that salvation may be lost if the believer isn't careful always to abide in the Truth.

Notice the Prodigal Son was lost. So no comparison can be made to a saved person leaving the Father's house.

At no time in the parable is the son ever not a son to his father. Christ repeatedly describes the son as such throughout the parable, never once indicating that his son-status was dissolved by his profligacy. The father, too, says, not that his son's relationship to himself was lost, but that, like a lost sheep, he had wandered away from his father. The shepherd whose sheep has wandered off goes looking for that sheep because it is his sheep that has got lost. It is the very fact that the lost sheep belongs to the shepherd that prompts the shepherd to go out and find it. It's in this sense that the son was "lost" to his father, which is why his father rushes out to embrace him the moment the son appears.

The new OSAS says he remains saved even though he has left the household of the Father.

I don't think it's a "new" OSAS; to me, its simply what the Bible has always indicated.

But anyway, the Parable is about Israel. It's not an analogy about how believing people can decide to abandon the household of God but still be able, and allowed to come back.

False dichotomy, I think. The parable serves both ends.

Israel is, as a nation, lost at the time Jesus comes to them.

??? As you pointed out, like everyone else, the Jews needed to come into relationship with God through the "new and living way" accomplished in and through Jesus, but their special status as God's Chosen People was never rescinded which is, in part, why Christ was born a Jew and his teaching ministry was aimed, first and foremost, at the people of Israel.

Matthew 10:5-6 (NASB)
5 These twelve Jesus sent out after instructing them: "Do not go in the way of the Gentiles, and do not enter any city of the Samaritans;
6 but rather go to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.

Matthew 15:24-28 (NASB)
24 But He answered and said, "I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel."
25 But she came and began to bow down before Him, saying, "Lord, help me!"
26 And He answered and said, "It is not good to take the children's bread and throw it to the dogs."
27 But she said, "Yes, Lord; but even the dogs feed on the crumbs which fall from their masters' table."
28 Then Jesus said to her, "O woman, your faith is great; it shall be done for you as you wish." And her daughter was healed at once.

Hebrews 8:8 (NASB)
8 For finding fault with them, He says, "Behold, days are coming, says the Lord, when I will effect a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah;

 

[Tenchi]

nvm.

 

[hawkman]

A lot has been said in this thread , I will give you a verse to think about Tenchi .

Luke 9:62 And Jesus said unto him, No man, having put his hand to the plough, and looking back, is fit for the kingdom of God.

 

[Tenchi]

Luke 9:62 And Jesus said unto him, No man, having put his hand to the plough, and looking back, is fit for the kingdom of God.

I've many times considered this verse - and all the others that saved-and-lost folk like to cite. (I've been talking over the eternal security question for more than twenty years.) And so, I respond: Remember when Jesus said this (before the cross, or after) and to whom (Jews under the OT covenant, or born-again children of God). Both of these things, it seems to me, make a BIG difference to how such verses ought to be applied to those who are "in Christ."

 

[Butch5]

Right. But it sounds like you think the person who has believed in Christ must maintain that belief in order to remain saved. Who, then, is saving them? Christ, or themselves? It is, after all, their faith, their keeping it up, that keeps them saved. And what is the necessary level of faith, exactly, to maintain one's salvation? Seems to me that would be a key question to answer if one's faith is the linchpin of one's staying saved.

God is saving them. Requiring one to believe in Christ does not mean one is saving himself any more that saying one who takes his vehicle to a mechanic believes he fixed his own vwhicle. He took his vehicle to the mechanic I c because he believed the mechanic could fix it. One has faith in Christ because he believes God will save him. God gives man the opportunity to be saved. Man has to meet the requirement.

 

[Butch5]

No, I'm not a Calvinist on any spectrum of Calvinist thought.

I have always understood the Calvinist argument to be that faith precedes regeneration. This new idea that the elect are born again and then have faith is what I consider one of the weird twists Calvinism has taken. Even as overthought and complicated as the original Calvinist doctrines are, these new twists on it are even more overthought and complicated.

Not only is it overthought. It takes the Scripures completely out of context. It's a theology built on proof texts. It stems from early Gnostic fatalistic beliefs. The primary source for these beliefs in Christianity came from Augustine. He was a Manachean Gnostic before becoming a Christian. Luther was an Augustian monk and Calvin came out of Stoicism. One of the tennets of Stoicism is Fatalism. Fatalism is the idea that all things are fated and noting can change any of it. This too is one of the ideas behind Calvinism. After becoming a Christian Augustine simply substituted God for fate. Thus he mixed Fatalism with Christianity. This is the very thing the Gnostics did. They mixed Greek Philosophy with Christianity. When you get down to brass takes Calvinism has no Biblical support. As I said, it's a theology built on proof texts.

 

[Butch5]

This just seems like a longer version of what I wrote: God sovereignly ordains the saving faith of His children and so they cannot not believe

Can you support this with Scripture?

 

[JLB]

not in the sense of, say, a lost sheep that's wandered from its shepherd.

Ok.

Thanks for clarifying.

In either case, they both need salvation.

 

[Tenchi]

Can you support this with Scripture?

It seems you misunderstood the context of the comment. I wasn't espousing something I believe but the belief of the Calvinist (which I am not).

 

[Tenchi]

Requiring one to believe in Christ does not mean one is saving himself any more that saying one who takes his vehicle to a mechanic believes he fixed his own vwhicle.

Yes, I understand, and made a similar point in an analogy I offered to Jethro Bodine.

 

[Jethro Bodine]

Accepted in the Beloved: Why My Redemption and Adoption is Eternally Secure.​

Your redemption and adoption is eternally secure because Jesus' ministry and sacrifice can never fail like the Levitical ministry and sacrifice could, and did. It is not secure because you can not lose it. Assuming a true believer can stop believing, the salvation that is eternally secure will be lost by the (ex) believer who willingly goes back to his old life of unbelief and wanton sin.