Contradictions: The Bible Teaches Many Ways to be Saved?

The Purpose of the Wrap Up and the Apologetics Live Call-In

Welcome to The Wrap Up, Daily Edition, where we provide a quick biblical interpretations and applications. This is a ministry of striving for eternity.

What I want to do in this wrap up for the weekly is deal with, as we dealt with this week, the fact that we had someone that called in to our Thursday night Apologetics Live show. It's a live Apologetics show that Matt Slick and I do on Thursday nights.

You can go to ApologeticsLive .com so that you can watch or listen or join, I should say. There's a link to join us in there. And you can listen on the podcast. You can subscribe to it. It is a podcast.

Just search for Apologetics Live and you can listen every week. We do about two hours of apologetics. We had someone call in, say that he used to be a Christian. He was now creating his own religion. It was going to be a crowd-sourced religion.

They were going to vote on what the religion believed. Wow, that was an interesting one. But the reason he claims that he used to be a Christian youth minister, and he used to preach the Bible, but the Bible had all these contradictions on how to be saved.

Why the Caller’s “Many Ways to Be Saved” Argument Fails

We're going to deal with that in this wrap up. All the different ways he said, the Bible says there's different ways of being saved and showed that there's only one way to be saved. There is no contradiction.

And in fact, what you end up seeing if you watch that or listen to it, is the fact that this gentleman did not understand the terminology of salvation and what it means. He couldn't distinguish between what regeneration is and what sanctification is.

And this is a problem in the church because this is what the church is reproducing. This is someone that was teaching youth and he didn't understand the basics of theology. That's a problem in the church and we should take note of it because this is the type of person that's teaching the next generation.

Of course they don't understand what salvation is. The person who's teaching them doesn't either. Recently on the Apologetics Live podcast that I do live on Thursday nights with Matt Slick and myself, we had someone that called in and was trying to argue that he used to be a Christian, which always gets my goat because they never used to be a Christian.

They were a hypocrite that stopped pretending. Oh, we did a whole podcast episode on that on the dailies that you can go back and listen to. But the thing that ends up happening is they make the argument they used to be a Christian.

And this gentleman's argument is that he walked away from believing in Christianity after being a youth minister because of all the contradictions in the Bible. What contradictions? Well, I asked him that and wanted him to give me some.

And his contradictions all dealt with the issue of supposedly salvation. He said there are many ways to be saved in the Bible. I said no. Matt Slick said there's only one, to put faith in Jesus Christ.

And I said no, there's actually two. And Matt said that's correct. Live perfectly under the law or put faith in Jesus Christ. He went on to say that there's many contradictions in the Bible when it comes to salvation.

And what we'd like to do over the course of this week is address the issues he brought up because you may hear these issues and realize that people try to say there's contradictions in the Bible. But as I explained to this gentleman, they're usually because of someone's lack of interpretation of Scripture and following the rules of interpretation.

And he did just that in every one of his examples. And we're going to look at them coming up soon on The Wrap Report Daily. So this gentleman tells me he lost his salvation. That he used to be a Christian and became an unchristian.

Salvation as Regeneration, Sanctification, and Glorification

And the issue was because he claimed that there were many different ways that the Bible talked about salvation and how someone can get saved. And so the first thing we have to address with this is what is salvation?

Because so many people confuse this issue. Salvation is a very general term that actually has three specific meanings of time. We can look at salvation as that point in time that someone gets regenerated.

That is when they go from being an enemy of God to being adopted into his family. That is a time when they become justified in God's sight and have eternal life. All of those things are for the Christian in the past.

That is a past one-time event where they become regenerated or justified. That is salvation. However, salvation also refers to the process that begins immediately after justification and continues until the moment we die.

That is the process of sanctification. Sanctification is also referred to as salvation. But that is the process we are made more Christ-like. And the Christian continues in that sanctification process until the moment they die.

The moment they die is the third stage of sanctification which is future for the Christians living right now. And that is glorification. That moment that all the indwelling sin is gone. We are in God's sight and we are in a glorified state.

This is the final stage of salvation. All of them are referred to as salvation. So as I expected when talking to this gentleman, yes, he confused those three different things that we talked about in the last podcast about what salvation is.

Most people, you will find this consistently, that confuse the issue of salvation. They talk about whether you can lose your salvation. They talk about multiple ways of salvation. Well, often confuse regeneration and sanctification.

One, regeneration or justification is a past event for the Christian. Sanctification is an ongoing event. Glorification is a future event. All are referred to as salvation. And that is what confuses some people.

And that confused this gentleman. He argued there are multiple ways of salvation. Here is the first contradiction he said was in 1 John 2 .17. Which says, and the world is passing away along with its desires.

But whoever does the will of God abides forever. And he was trying to argue that this is another way of doing salvation. That if you do the will of God, you will abide forever. So doing the will of God was another way of salvation in his mind.

1 John 2:17 and the Sanctification of Believers

However, when we look at this text and we look at 1 John, who is 1 John speaking to? He is speaking to believers. That's right, believers. Therefore, he is not going to instruct people that are already saved on how to get saved.

This is the sanctification process. Not the regeneration process. And there he got confusion. Now, he tried to argue this gentleman that said there are multiple ways of salvation. That not only doing the will of God is one way of abiding with Christ.

We tried to explain to him that someone who already is a believer doesn't need to know how to get saved. Because he already is saved. He went on. He argued that in Romans it says this. And he was quoting Romans 10 .13.

For whoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved. And he said, see this is a second way of salvation. Because here it says whoever calls upon the name of the Lord will be saved. Now looking at the context here, this actually is dealing with regeneration.

Where the previous verse that he came up with in 1 John 2 .17 is dealing with sanctification. This passage actually deals with regeneration. And in this passage what you end up seeing is that he ends up arguing.

Here Paul argues that if we call on the name of the Lord we will be saved. This is the process when someone comes to repentance. What do they do? They call upon the name of the Lord. In fact if you look at the passage and what it says in its context.

Is that if you will confess with your mouth that Jesus is God or Lord. And shall believe in your heart that he is risen from the dead you will be saved. This is what you must believe to be saved. This is regeneration.

This is acknowledging that we are sinners. That Jesus is the Lord God Almighty. That we depend on him. We have to call out on him believing what he did in our stead. As we are talking about this gentleman who asked the question.

Or made the challenge that there are so many contradictions in the Bible on how to get saved. We looked at that he said you have to do the will of God. But forgetting that that's dealing with sanctification not regeneration.

We looked at Romans 10 which actually does regeneration. Which is what he was referring to when he talks about salvation. And then he brought up somewhere in Psalms. And we couldn't find out where exactly.

But it says he said it said render unto each according to his works. Well unless we have a verse we can't even see if that deals with regeneration. Here's the thing you end up seeing that they end up also not being able to clarify.

The terms regeneration or sanctification or glorification. When they talk about salvation. He brought up one last argument that is John 3 .5. Which says and Jesus answered. Verily verily I say unto you except a man be born of water and spirit.

He cannot enter into the kingdom of God. And he said see you have to be saved by baptism. Meaning water baptism. That is an interpretation on his part. Because there's nothing here that says water baptism.

In fact what many take this to mean. Is that this is you must be born from the water of the womb. And then born of the spirit. So the baptism would actually be the spirit baptism. Which would be consistent with what we define as regeneration.

When the Holy Spirit indwells us. That's one of the main things that happens. The Holy Spirit indwells us at our regeneration. And so there's not an inconsistency. There's not a contradiction. There's only one way of salvation.

Through Jesus Christ.

Regeneration, Spirit Baptism, and the One Way of Salvation

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