Transcript

Welcome back to Shameless Popery.

I'm Joe Heschmeyer.

Is it possible for a Christian to lose their salvation?

Can a Christian forfeit their salvation, uh, by returning to a life of serious sin?

Can a Christian forfeit their salvation by deciding that they no longer believe in Jesus Christ?

This is an important question that has long divided even different groups of Protestants.

If it is possible that Christians can lose their eternal salvation through sin or unbelief, telling them that they can't would be like convincing someone standing on the ledge of a bridge that even if they throw themselves off, they'll survive because they're immortal.

So, you might be wondering, how do people who claim this handle the obvious objection that there are a lot of former Christians?

I mean, you can see people, whether in the public square or perhaps in your own life, who have gone from being seemingly devout Christians to rejecting Christianity entirely.

You know, the usual claim here is that these ex-Christians must never have really been Christians in the first place.

If you're familiar with the No True Scotsman fallacy, this seems like an obvious version of that.

So much so, that my Catholic Answers colleague, Trent Horn, calls it the No True Protzman objection.

But I want to propose four reasons to suggest that this idea of once saved, always saved, is a dangerous falsehood.

And the fourth one, in particular, is an argument that I suspect you may not have heard before.

And by the way, if this is the kind of project that you think is helpful in building up the body of Christ, I'd ask you to consider joining my Patreon over at shamelessjoe.com.

It's a lovely community of both Catholics and Protestants, and I'm loving the conversations over there.

I can't promise you eternal security, but I can promise you my sincere gratitude and my prayers, uh, for your direct support.

So, the idea that you can't lose your salvation is called different things by different groups of people.

Today, we're gonna be talking about eternal security, or the concept of once saved, always saved, perseverance of the saints.

There's many different ways in which we describe this particular doctrine.

But whether you call it perseverance of the saints, or once saved, always saved, or eternal security, the core idea is the same.

The Bible teaches that once you become a genuine follower of Jesus Christ, it is absolutely impossible for you to lose your salvation.

So, let's look now at the four reasons why this can't be true.

Number one, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

What's the appeal of once saved, always saved?

Frankly, we all want it to be true.

And the people promoting the idea that you can't lose your salvation often appeal to this, pointing out how psychologically comforting it is to imagine that this is true.

And I think, without question, this is the most comforting doctrine in the panoply of salvation doctrines.

It is most comforting to me and to you to know that our salvation is forever, that our salvation is a secure salvation.

This takes away the fear and brings joy.

The believer's joy, the believer's comfort, the believer's sense of wellbeing, certainly the believer's hope, is anchored to this great security of salvation.

Christians can know for sure if they are saved, and this will lead to a Godly peace that can look death in the eyes and smile because they know where they're going once they breathe their last breath.

This enables us to enjoy being saved.

If I thought that I could lose my salvation, I want to tell you, I'd be scared to come out of my closet each day.

I'd be scared to come out of my bedroom.

I would, I would live with such fear and terror that I would somehow, someway, do something that would forfeit the saving grace in my life.

I was hesitant about using that last clip once I realized that the speaker in question was the disgraced Steve Lawson, who was caught having a five-year-long adulterous relationship with a woman four and a half decades his junior, and who had been a student at the seminary where he was the dean.

But I think it's worth taking Lawson seriously when he says, of the idea of eternal security

But the fact that I'm eternally secure, you know what that does?

It does the very opposite.

That propels me out into the world.

Eternal security's absolutely a comforting thought, but the fact that it's nice to imagine something doesn't make it true, and it might even be a dangerous delusion that lowers your guard against sin.

In fact, our guard should be up precisely when a doctrine sounds too good to be true.

In 2 Timothy 4:3-4, Saint Paul warns that, The time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears, they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own likings and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander into myths.

Paul is telling us to watch out for doctrines that bear two features.

Number one, they're doctrines that, at least for Paul in the first century, lie sometime in the future.

And number two, they're doctrines that people really want to believe.

So, if you hear someone preaching how comforting a particular teaching is, how it'll cure your anxiety, and they can't show you that this is in fact the 2,000-year traditional understanding of Christianity going back to the time of Saint Paul, watch out.

Now, of course, the fact that a doctrine e- sounds too good to be true, while it's good reason to be skeptical, it doesn't automatically disprove it.

After all, it could have good Biblical support.

So, does it?

Number two, the Bible never teaches assurance of salvation.

If you ask people to show where assurance of salvation is in Scripture, there are largely two places.

I don't wanna claim there are only those two places.

I've actually got a much longer video going into much more of the weeds on this, and I'll link to that at the end of this video.

But there are two major areas that I find people going.

The first are passages that talk about how no external threat can separate us from the love of God.A classic one is Romans 8:38-39, where St. Paul says, I am sure that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus, our Lord.

But obviously, what Paul doesn't say is that we can't separate ourselves.

If you tell your beloved, Nobody's ever gonna come between me and you, you're hopefully not saying, You're never allowed to leave.

So if St. Paul meant to say that we can't separate ourselves from the love of God, it's kinda striking that he forgot to mention that or even give a clear hint of it.

But there's another place people often turn, and it's a verse that I think is badly misused.

Now, before I get to it, I want to propose a question to you.

It's an easy one.

In Matthew 13:3, Jesus says that a sower went out to sow.

Does this mean that if I learn that someone else went out, that they must also have gone out to sow?

Of course not, right?

Good, remember that, because the verse that gets badly proof-texted by the assurance of salvation crowd is 1 John 2:19, where St. John, describing some people he calls antichrists, meaning, in his terminology, people who deny the incarnation, and he says of them, They went out from us, but they were not of us.

For if they'd been of us, they would have continued with us, but they went out, and it might be plain that they all are not of us.

Now look, it is really clear that the reason these people, who are probably early Gnostics, left the Christian fold is because their beliefs were never orthodox Christianity in the first place.

But saying, They went out for that reason, therefore everybody who leaves goes out for that reason, is as obviously false as saying, Everyone who goes out, goes out to sow.

So it should be a red flag when people claim a doctrine is biblical, but when you ask them to support it, the most commonly cited passages seem not to actually be teaching the thing that they're claiming.

But in fact, the Bible does have a lot to say on the topic of eternal security, just not what these people want you to believe.

Number three, the Bible actively teaches against once saved, always saved.

There are actually several places in the New Testament that explicitly talk about people who get saved then wander from the path of salvation and end up worse off than before.

I'm gonna give you just a handful, but there are more.

To start with, you have Hebrews 6:4-6.

It warns about those who have once been enlightened, who have tasted the heavenly gift, and have become partakers of the Holy Spirit, but then reject Christ and commit apostasy.

So that thing that the eternal security crowd claims never happens, Hebrews 6 says that it does, in no uncertain terms.

Four chapters later, Hebrews 10 addresses the problem of a Christian who returns to a life of deliberate sin.

Now, according to Protestants in the eternal security crowd, people like Dr. Charles Stanley, Christians who do that will lose some of their heavenly reward, but they won't lose their salvation.

In Dr. Stanley's words

And so we're talking about a person, you say, who just goes back into a life of sin.

Do they lose their salvation for all eternity?

And the answer is no.

Now in contrast, let's hear how the Bible answers the same question.

Hebrews 10 says, For if we sin deliberately after receiving the knowledge of the truth, there no longer remains a sacrifice for sins, but a fearful prospect of judgment and a fury of fire which will consume the adversaries.

So, either Dr. Stanley is right, that a Christian who turns back to a life of sin is fine, they're guaranteed to go to heaven, just won't get quite as many heavenly rewards.

Or Hebrews 10 is right, that such a person is no longer saved by Christ's sacrifice and is now facing judgment and hellfire.

But I don't see how you can say it is both.

Let's turn now from Hebrews to 2 Peter.

In fact, the entire second chapter of 2 Peter is about those who, quote, Will secretly bring in destructive heresies, even denying the Master who bought them, bringing upon themselves swift destruction.

End quote.

Did you catch that?

These folks were ransomed by Christ, but then they deny him and they bring upon themselves swift destruction.

And in verse 4, Peter compares them to the fallen angels.

The angels were made to be God's messengers.

That's what the term angel means.

They were in the company of God, but they rebelled against Him and were sent to hell.

They didn't have eternal security.

And nobody says, They must never have been angels in the first place.

No, they lost their salvation.

And Peter's point is, that's also true of you if you follow heretics.

At the end of the chapter, Peter then says, quote, For if, after they have escaped the defilements of the world through the knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, they are again entangled in them and overpowered, the last state has become worse for them than the first.

For it would have been better for them never to have known the way of righteousness, than after knowing it, to turn back from the holy commandment delivered to them.

It has happened to them according to the true proverb.

The dog returns back to his own vomit and the sow is washed only to wallow in the mire.

End quote.

So these are people who were once saved, who really had escaped the defilement of the world, who really had been washed, who were on the way of righteousness, who then turned back, who go back to their old way of life of filth.

And Peter says they're actually worse off now than before they got saved.

Now, in case you think this is just a hypothetical of a thing that would never really happen, the Bible gives us concrete cases.

For instance, Simon Magus in Acts chapter 8. In verse 13, he believes and is baptized.

It doesn't say that he pretended to believe or pretended to get baptized.

He believes and is baptized.

This is the formula for how you get saved in Mark chapter 16.

But then he sins gravely by trying to buy the sacramental power of the laying on of hands in verse 18.And St. Peter rebukes him and warns him that he now has, Neither part nor lot in this matter, for your heart is not right before God.

Repent thereof, of this wickedness of yours, and pray to the Lord that, if possible, the intent of your heart may be forgiven you, for I see that you are in the gall of bitterness and in the bond of iniquity.

So there's someone who very clearly got saved, and yet just as clearly returned to the bond of iniquity.

Four: even people claiming eternal security aren't really assured of their ultimate salvation.

Now, as I said at the start of the episode, I think one of the promises of eternal security is this idea that you've got an unshakable assurance that you are going to be saved, no matter what.

But that then leaves this serious problem.

What about all of those ex-Christians who were once assured that they too were saved, no matter what?

Take the case of Charles Templeton, the influential preacher who co-founded Youths for Christ with Billy Graham.

After preaching Jesus Christ to huge crowds of people, almost certainly leading to the salvation of many, many people, Templeton himself had a crisis of faith and left Christianity.

As John MacArthur puts it

He abandoned all Christianity and all biblical truth, became a journalist in Canada.

In 1999, he wrote a memoir on his life titled Farewell to God, and in it, he listed his reasons for rejecting Christianity and becoming an atheist.

He left all ministry at that point in 1957, returned to Canada, stepped into eternal blackness and apostasy, blasphemed Christ for his remaining years, and died in utter unbelief.

Now, that's a problem for eternal security.

How can someone like Templeton die in apostasy?

And I know that the standard answer to offer here is that Templeton must never have really been a Christian.

But such an answer beggars belief when you consider just how much time and effort the young Templeton spent in trying to bring people to Jesus Christ.

At the very least, we must say that Templeton thought he was a Christian, thought he was saved, and was thought by the Christians around him to be saved.

In 1946, the National Association of Evangelicals published the Portraits of the Evangelicals Best Used by God.

Charles Templeton made the cut, Billy Graham did not.

So this was not somebody who seemed, to either himself or others, to be just a nominal or lukewarm Christian.

This is such an obvious problem for the doctrine of eternal security that the Protestant reformer John Calvin was forced to invent another doctrine called evanescent grace to try to explain it away.

According to Calvin, God sometimes gives people that he's not planning to save a confused sense of grace, leading them to think that their sins are forgiven and that they have the faith, when in reality, they've been damned the whole time.

Now, that solves the Charles Templeton problem in one way.

No wonder Charles Templeton could appear so sincere, he was.

He was just being tricked by God.

But even leaving aside what this says about Calvin's vision of God's goodness, the idea that maybe God is just tricking some of us into thinking that we're saved when we're not, well surely that undermines the whole promise of assurance of salvation and eternal security.

After all, all of the symptoms of being saved appear to be the same as the symptoms of being tricked into thinking you've been saved.

Whatever it is that you would describe that makes you confident that you're never going to fall away, you can find numerous people like Charles Templeton who would have claimed the same about themselves, but then did fall away.

So where does that leave us?

Well, hopefully a bit chaste, with a sense that our salvation is a gift, but it's a gift that we can lose through our deliberate turning away from God, the gift-giver.

We would do well to remember the words of St. Paul.

In one of his epistles, you can guess which one, he addresses all of the saints in Christ Jesus who were at Philippi.

And even though he calls them saints, his words to them are simple: Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling.

Apparently, nobody told St. Paul that the saints can't lose their salvation, or that there's no room for Christians to treat eternal life with fear and trembling 'cause then they're going to go hide in the closet.

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For Shameless Potpourri, I'm Joe Heschmair.

God bless you.