Eternally Secure?

Thoughts From a Bible Reader

I grew up in an Evangelical United Brethren church, which then merged and became a United Methodist church, and I never heard of the idea of eternal security until I got married, moved to Pennsylvania, and started attending my wife’s Baptist church. People who believe in the idea of eternal security will quote John 10:28-29 to you, where we are told that no one can snatch Jesus’ sheep out of either His or His Father’s hands. I believe that this is absolutely true. Romans 8:31-39 tells us that Paul was certain that death, life, angels, principalities, powers, present things, future things, heights, depths, or any other thing that has been created cannot separate us from God’s love, shown to us through Jesus. And I absolutely agree with Paul here as well. And in John 6:37 Jesus tells us that He will not cast out, He will not throw away, any who come to him. And from these verses people will go on to say that once you truly become a “born-again” Christian, you can never lose that. Your salvation is eternally secure.

But as I read through the Bible, again and again, certain verses kept popping up and catching my attention. The first was Colossians 1:21-23, where I read, “And you were at one time strangers and enemies in your minds as expressed through your evil deeds, but now he has reconciled you by his physical body through death to present you holy, without blemish, and blameless before him— if indeed you remain in the faith, established and firm, without shifting from the hope of the gospel that you heard.” And that left me wondering, why is that “if” in there? Is this passage actually saying that if we don’t remain in the faith, established and firm, and we are moved away from the hope of the gospel, then we will not be presented as holy, without blemish, and blameless? Logically that is exactly what it is saying. And so I asked our pastor, a man who I dearly love and respect, the pastor of a fundamentalist church that had in its doctrine that it believed that there are no errors in the Bible, I asked him about that “if” - if we don’t remain in the faith, established and firm, and are moved away from the hope of the gospel which we heard, then will we still be presented as holy, without blemish, and blameless? And that pastor’s response was that I shouldn’t allow myself to think anything that might question the doctrine of eternal security. Sadly, that pastor let his theology affect his understanding of the Bible, instead of letting the Bible determine his theology.

Since that time I have found a number of other verses that show me that that passage in Colossians is not an isolated, oddball verse. Romans 11:19-22 shares a similar “if”: God will show His goodness to us IF we continue in His goodness. If we don’t, He will cut us off like an unwanted branch. That’s a pretty stark warning! In 1 Cor. 15:1-2 Paul said that the Corinthians would be saved IF they hold onto the gospel that had been preached to them. Hebrews has several of these “ifs.” In 3:6 we are told that IF “we hold firmly to our confidence and the hope we take pride in” then we will be Jesus’ own house. In 3:12-14 we are told to that we are partakers of Christ IF “we hold our initial confidence firm until the end,” after being told to not have “an evil, unbelieving heart that forsakes (gives up) the living God”.

Moving away from the “ifs,” Hebrews 4:1, 11 and 14 tell us to not fall, and to hold on to our confession. Peter, too, warned us in 2 Peter 3:17 to beware of falling away, of being led away by the errors of wicked people. Paul told Timothy that some believers had strayed away from the faith because they were greedy (1 Tim. 6:10). He also told Timothy that some had “shipwrecked” their faith (1 Tim. 1:18-20), and also “Now the Spirit explicitly says that in the later times some will desert the faith and occupy themselves with deceiving spirits and demonic teachings, influenced by the hypocrisy of liars whose consciences are seared” (1 Tim 4:1-2). And Clement, who Paul mentions in Philippians 4:3 and is considered a Church Father, one of the second generation of leaders in the church, wrote around the year 100 AD, “It is right therefore that we should not be deserters from his will” (1 Clement 21:4).

So while it seems absolutely certain that we cannot be kidnapped away from Christ, that nothing outside of us can force us to lose our salvation, and that Jesus will not throw us away, it seems equally certain, taking the Bible at its most literal reading, that we can abandon our faith, or desert it, to use Paul’s and Clement’s word. And coming to this understanding has opened up so many other passages of scripture for me that previously made no sense. For example, Jesus’ parable about sowing seed on different kinds of soil makes no sense from an eternal security point of view (Matt. 13:3-23). After all, if this view says that people are either completely saved without question to start their walk in Christ or they are not, what sense does it make to talk about plants that started to grow but died for some reason or another? But Jesus was clearly emphasizing for us here the importance of being fruitful in the end. Not the beginning, when eternal security says that it all happens. Fruit never comes in the beginning. Fruitfulness comes after all has been said and done.

I have seen this parable in action for myself, when my wife, daughter and I spent half a year with a missionary family in western Africa, in the middle of the Sahara Desert, as a Muslim man whose starting to come to church and believing in Jesus and reading his Bible caused his family to threaten to take his wife and children away from him if he continued doing so. And so he stopped. His faith had begun to grow, and then it died without bearing fruit. And the children of that missionary couple are still hard at work, sharing Jesus among the Muslims of the Sahara, and they sadly share often of those who had been believers, people who had professed faith in Christ, but who have now abandoned Christ for one reason or another and have gone from believers to former believers. Just last month they shared of a man who professed Christ 50 years ago, but who this year went on the Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca. Some plants grow for awhile, but then they die and stop bearing fruit.

For another example, I would encourage you to read Stephanie Jo Warrens’ post, What Happened to My Parents?

What Happened to My Parents?

where she describes her parents’ change from being conservative Christians to becoming Christian Nationalists. Some seeds had started to grow, and it seemed as if they might become fruitful, but apparently Satan’s lies killed those seeds, and at this point it sounds like her parents are not fruitful Christians, but rather that they have deserted the gospel.

In Jesus’ letter to the church in Sardis (one of the churches called to repent), He told them that some of them had “not stained their clothes, and they will walk with me dressed in white, because they are worthy. The one who conquers will be dressed like them in white clothing, and I will never erase his name from the book of life, but will declare his name before my Father and before his angels” (Rev. 3:4-5). Think for a moment about what Jesus is implying here – there can be people whose names had been written in the Book of Life, but at this point they are in danger of their name being erased. For why would Jesus say that He will not erase the names of those who conquer, unless there was a chance of people’s names actually being erased, the people who don’t conquer? And some of you might feel the urge to say, “Well, those people were probably never really saved in the first place!” But if that were true, then why were their names already in the Book of Life? Is God writing the names of unsaved people in His Book of Life? I doubt that. But the whole idea of a believer’s name being removed from the Book of Life is difficult to swallow if you hold firmly onto your idea of eternal security. And we just read about Jesus’ promise to never throw us away, so that can’t be what’s going on either. So these, too, must have left Christ on their own. They must be deserters, people who abandoned their hope.

There is also the passage that I shared last time from John’s gospel: “I am the true vine and my Father is the gardener. He takes away every branch that does not bear fruit in me. He prunes every branch that bears fruit so that it will bear more fruit” (John 15:1-2). Jesus goes on from here to say that if we remain in Him, we will be fruitful. If we don’t remain in Him, we will be discarded and end up being burned (vs. 5-6). If you are an avid believer in eternal security, then please explain to me what you understand Jesus to be saying here. Because to me, the idea that there are branches that have been in Jesus, that have been connected to, have remained in, the vine, but that are now fruitless and are no longer allowed to remain in the vine and so they will be disposed of, is simply meaningless gibberish if the idea of eternal security is true. Once again, Jesus is most certainly telling us that we must remain in Him and have fruitful lives if we wish to be saved. Yes, faith saves us. But faith needs fruit to stay alive.

I have puzzled for years trying to understand part of Jesus’ wedding parable in Matt. 22. Specifically, verses 11-13 that tell us, “But when the king came in to see the wedding guests, he saw a man there who was not wearing wedding clothes. And he said to him, ‘Friend, how did you get in here without wedding clothes?’ But he had nothing to say. Then the king said to his attendants, ‘Tie him up hand and foot and throw him into the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth!’” What are we to make of this strange little part of this parable, of this teaching story? What was Jesus saying to us here? But it all makes sense now to me in the light of Revelation 19:6-8, where we read, ““Hallelujah! For the Lord our God, the All-Powerful, reigns! Let us rejoice and exult and give him glory, because the wedding celebration of the Lamb has come, and his bride has made herself ready. She was permitted to be dressed in bright, clean, fine linen” (for the fine linen is the righteous deeds of the saints).” Fine linen is the righteous deeds of the saints! Did the man in Matt. 22 who did not have a wedding garment lack in righteous deeds to clothe himself with? Did he have faith, but no works? Did this man, when the end came, lack fruit? Is that what led to his condemnation, to his being not only thrown out of the wedding feast, but severely punished as well? Somehow, for him, simply making it into the wedding hall was not enough to eternally secure him a place in heaven.

It is clearly not enough to save you to have just had one moment in your life where you said a “sinner’s prayer,” no matter how sincere you were at that moment. No, the Bible tells us that we have to hold on to the faith that we had in Jesus at that moment. We have to live in the hope that we were given at that moment, and not abandon it. We have to be fruitful in the days and years after that moment, else the part of us that is connected to Jesus will die, and God will remove the dead remains of our faith from Him. But don’t fear. We will soon look at how to live fruitful lives.

Do you have questions or comments that you would like to share with me? Feel free to drop me an email (stevesuterfaithandfruit@gmail.com).

Unless otherwise noted, the Scriptures quoted are from the NET Bible® https://netbible.com, copyright ©1996, 2019 used with permission from Biblical Studies Press, L.L.C. All rights reserved