Can a Christian lose salvation? (Part 2) License to sin? What about apostasy? - Podcast Episode 69

Of our discussion of eternal security, the question of whether a Christian can lose salvation. So if you've not yet watched or listened to episode one, please do so because we're going to be piggybacking off some of the things we discussed in that episode.

Part one was more about making a biblical case for eternal security. Part two today is going to be a little bit more about dealing with some of the objections, including some of the passages in scripture that seem to teach that salvation can be lost.

Eternal Security Is Not a License to Sin

So that's our discussion today, and it's like part one, I've got with me, Jeff, the administrator of BibleRef .com.

Hello.

And Kevin, the managing editor of GotQuestions Ministries. So welcome, gentlemen. Look forward to our conversation again today. So to start out, let me just tell a brief story. It was several years ago where someone emailed at GotQuestions and said, I'd really like to debate the CEO of GotQuestions on the matter of eternal security.

And so I've done a couple of debates like that, but it's really not something I enjoy, especially when I know it's going to turn into a hostile argument rather than a productive conversation. So I went and checked out this guy's site, and he was just being against eternal security was his hobby horse.

It was like all he ever wanted to talk about, and he was seriously to the point that anyone who believes in eternal security can't possibly be saved. It's a, in his words, a damnable heresy. And just going through some of his mindset and reading some of his articles, obviously, I turned down the debate.

His main objection was, and we discussed this briefly in part one, eternal security is a license to sin, meaning that if you can never lose your salvation, that means once you get saved, you can do whatever you want, live however you want, and you're still saved.

You might as well just give it's like giving someone a free ticket, say, you're in no matter what. Now, go live your life however you want to. And the issue with this is that never in my life have I heard someone who believes in eternal security teach that in the sense of, oh, great, you're saved.

Go live however you want.

No.

The message of eternal security is you are saved because God has secured your salvation. Therefore, go live your life out of gratitude for the so great salvation that God has provided. Live a life of dedicated discipleship, of following Christ.

Live your life in community with a body of believers who will help you grow, help you overcome sin, help you know how to submit to the Holy Spirit. Eternal security does not teach that salvation means we can just live however we want.

Now, the implication, yes, if you are truly saved and nothing you can do can cause you to lose that, yes, I guess you could say technically that salvation is secure no matter what you.

Do.

But that being a fact does not mean that's actually how proponents of eternal security.

Teach.

Now, we teach that Christians should live holy lives. We teach that believers should submit themselves fully to Christ, that we should live our lives in light of us being a new creation as 2 Corinthians 5, 17 teaches.

But for him, he just cannot get past the fact that even in a theoretical sense that eternal security means you can live however you want. And so, as I did not engage in the debate with them, nor do I tend to, because we get a lot of questions from people who object to eternal security.

This is the most common one they come back to. But today we're going to discuss some of the other issues that go along with it, again, in some of the scripture passages. So, Jeff, I wanted you to touch a little bit on two, maybe two points, the difference between assurance and security, and also the difference in just the mindset of what are you actually relying on for your salvation?

Assurance, Security, and What Saves Us

Yeah, both of those are very important. I think it's also important to re-stress what you were saying, that the idea that eternal security is a license to sin is what we would call a caricature. Some people would call it a straw man.

It's a cartoon. It's a myth. There is simply no sense in which legitimate salvation results in a person who does that. So when we say, yes, that's theoretically possible, but only because it's not our place to say, here's a sin God won't forgive.

That's really all that means. The idea that a person would just continue to live in grievous sin goes against so many things that we see in scripture. And one of the things that does confuse people is that there are verses in the Bible that speak in ways that parse a difference between having confidence that you're saved, as opposed to your salvation being secure.

And for people who might struggle with the difference, a good analogy for that would be something like a roller coaster. The reason roller coasters are exciting is because you have security, but you don't have assurance.

You're safe for the most part. You're strapped in, bad things are not going to happen. But the reason it's exciting is because you don't have confidence that bad things aren't going to happen. There's an exhilaration that's natural to doing that because you're not exactly sure.

So there's a difference between saying, I am confident. I am sure that I am saved versus a person who actually is saved. And you can have combinations of either one. You can have people who are legitimately believers who don't have confidence.

You can have people who are confident, but aren't actually believers. So that's one of the things that we have to do is separate the difference between verses that are talking about being confident, resting in Christ, trusting, not being afraid, and separate those from verses that talk about where exactly salvation comes from and how we obtain it.

That I think is the real key when it comes to looking at different concerns about eternal security. From my perspective, almost every single verse that a person looks at that they want to interpret and ask the question about what does this mean for or against eternal security?

It always comes down to the question of what is it that you really truly believe saves.

You?

Is it grace through faith? Or is it your own works? Is it your own good deeds? Is it your own balance of karma or whatever that you'd like to call it? And I think usually when somebody looks at a verse and says, see, this means that you can lose your salvation.

What they're really implying is that, see, my salvation is dependent on what I do. It's dependent on the things that I accomplish. And I'm not necessarily saying that everybody who's an advocate for a lack of eternal security honestly believes in works-based salvation, but that's sort of the inevitable logic of where that goes.

If you honestly believe that a person can sin too much or that they have to maintain a certain level of piety to earn that salvation, then you don't really believe in salvation by grace through faith.

Now, from a logical standpoint, I can see how there are some versions, and we talked about this last time. There are some versions of eternal security that make more sense than others. There are some versions of a lack of security that sort of philosophically, you know, we talk about apostasy being one of those.

This idea that a person could deliberately choose to walk away to set aside their salvation. I'm not saying that I believe that, but I can better understand how that works. But for me, when I go through scriptures, I see many, many of these where when you take that tactic, you just don't come out with any other conclusion.

And not to get into them, but just to list for those who want to look, you have things like Jude 1 .21, John 6 .39 and 40, 2 Timothy 4 .18, Revelation 3 .5, Romans 11 .29, Philippians 1 .6, Ephesians 1 .13.

All of those very strongly indicate the idea that a person's salvation is eternally secure. Now, there's one more that I actually think a lot of people miss that's extremely important. But first, I know people hear us talk about this and they say, okay, here's all these verses that say this, but what about the verses that say something else?

There's a couple of places in the Bible that do present arguments that I suppose, even if you understand what causes your salvation, you could be confused about. And Kevin, I know you have some information about those that you wanted to share.

Hebrews 6 and the Warning to Fence-Sitters

I do. We need to take a look at some of those passages. I also want to say that I really like that rollercoaster analogy that you shared, Jeff. Sometimes we meet people that seem to be going through life just terrified, white-knuckled, not sure if they're going to make it, not sure about their salvation, just don't have that assurance at all.

And one of my jobs as a pastor many times is just to get them to look at the safety system that's in place, take a look at the restraints and get them to relax a little bit and enjoy the ride, trusting in Christ, the author and finisher of our faith.

He who began a good work in us is going to see it to completion. That's the promise. And what a privilege it is to kind of calm people's nerves on that as we just trust in Christ. But we do have some passages, as you mentioned, that we need to take a look at that seem to, at first glance, be teaching that a person could lose salvation.

One of those passages is Hebrews 6, verses 4 through 6. It says this, It is impossible for those who have once been enlightened, who have tasted the heavenly gift, who have shared in the Holy Spirit, who have tasted the goodness of the word of God and the powers of the coming age, and who have fallen away to be brought back to repentance.

Now, this passage says that there were some people that had been enlightened. They've tasted the heavenly gift. They shared in the Holy Spirit. They've tasted the goodness of the word of God. They've tasted the powers of the coming age.

And yet, it seems to say that they have fallen away, or at least there's that possibility that they would fall away. The way that I look at this is that the author of Hebrews is writing to people who were on the fence.

He's writing to a group of Jews that were in the church as far as being attenders of the church. To put it in a modern parlance, they were attending church. They may even have been members of the church.

They maybe had made a profession of faith, but they were really on the fence as far as whether they were going to go with Christ or go back to what they were used to, which was Judaism, to go back to the law.

And the author of Hebrews is saying, don't go back. I know that it's tempting to stick with what you're used to. You grew up in Judaism. You grew up keeping these rules and regulations. You grew up keeping the law and offering the sacrifices and all of that, and keeping the Sabbath.

And I know that those types of things make you feel safe. They make you feel religious. They make you feel right with God. But the author of Hebrews says, the sacrifice of Christ has fulfilled the law, and you can't go back.

Why would you want to go back? And he gives this description of them. You've been enlightened. There's a passage in John 1 that describes Jesus as the true light, which lights every man that comes into the world.

Now, that's obviously not referring to salvation, because not everyone is saved. But what John is saying is Jesus is the true light, and everyone who is in this world has been given enough light to be responsible for either rejecting or accepting Christ.

And so, yes, these fence sitters in the book of Hebrews, they've got enough light to make a decision. They're responsible for this decision that they make. They've tasted the heavenly gift, which I take to mean that they've had a momentary experience akin to Jesus having tasted death for everyone in Hebrews 2 and verse 9.

So there was a brief experience, maybe an emotional response to the gospel, maybe even an intellectual response to the gospel. But they had not gone all the way to saving faith in Christ. This idea of sharing in the Holy Spirit, though, is one that seems to be really tricky.

But the way I look at it is this, that these people had seen the work of the Holy Spirit. They had been eyewitnesses to the miracles. They have seen the blind see. They've seen the lame walk. They have heard the gospel being preached in their own language, even from people who should not be able to speak that language.

They have had so many things that have been the product of the Holy Spirit. Earlier in the book of Hebrews, chapter 2 says that all of these gifts are gifts of the Holy Spirit. And so they're witnessing the gifts of the Spirit.

And in that way, they are partakers of the Spirit. They're responsible for making a decision for Christ based on these things. So the testimony of the gospel was crystal clear. For them to make an informed decision to go back to the Old Testament law and try to earn their salvation through the law is what the author of Hebrews is warning against.

He says, if you reject the sacrifice of Christ, there's no other sacrifice for you. I mean, this is it. This is God's plan of salvation that has been presented to you so clearly. You must accept it. You must not go back to those old ways.

So it's a warning passage to those that were sitting on the fence.

Yeah, Kevin, excellent point. I think Hebrews 6, 4 to 6 of all the different scriptures that people will bring up as an objection, this is probably the most common one people will bring up as evidence against eternal security, so to speak.

And what's most interesting, if you take this verse to mean that, it starts out, it is an impossible, and then it concludes with to be brought back to repentance. So if you're going to use this verse to say that salvation can be lost, it also says, once it's lost, it can never be regained.

And I've never met anyone who believes in the loss of salvation who says it can't be gained back. Typically, it's something akin to, you're saved, then you sin, you're unsaved, you repent, you're saved, you sin.

A horrible way to live, and not what the Bible describes at all, but that's generally what their belief is. And they have trouble defining which sins are bad enough to cause you to lose your salvation, but that's generally the pattern they describe.

But if you're going to use Hebrews 6, 4 to 6 for that, and even Hebrews 10, 26, which is another common verse that's used, they do not communicate that there's any way back. It's like, if this verse means you can lose your salvation, it also means you can never get it back.

And I think before people are going to jump on to this verse as evidence against eternal security, they really need to think through the implications of what it would actually be saying if that's what it meant.

I think the other thing that we have to be careful of when it comes to that part of Hebrews 6 is knowing exactly what the author is talking about in that particular moment. When you look at that passage, he's saying, let's leave elementary doctrines behind.

Let's leave the shallow, unsophisticated things. Let's not go over things like repentance and works and washings and laying out of hands. And he slides right into that, then saying, it's impossible for those who have been enlightened, who've tasted the heavenly gift.

He's really talking about a context of people who have this sort of shallow, like Kevin would say, the sort of the fence sitter attitude towards faith. And then he goes on after to say they can't be restored to repentance.

But he says, because what they're doing is they're basically saying, yeah, Jesus probably should have been crucified. And then he says, land, he makes an analogy to a field and he says, land that gets rain and doesn't bear crops, but just weeds isn't good for anything except to be burned.

And that's a critical piece of what he's talking about there. Because of a farmer who owns a field in that time, if that field is just riddled with weeds and there is no way it's going to produce anything productive, it doesn't say that the farmer destroys it.

It doesn't say that he gets rid of it. It doesn't say that he sells it. It says that he burns it. That's judgment. That's chastisement. That's discipline. That's basically saying, look, if people have this shallow sort of fence sitting understanding of faith and then they fall away and they decide to move away, there really isn't anything any human person can do.

None of this elementary doctrine, none of this other stuff is going to mean anything to that person. You're not going to be able to restore them. The only thing that's going to bring that person back to repentance is going to be God's judgment.

That means the pain and the suffering and the experience that's going to force that person to acknowledge the God that they didn't want to acknowledge in the first place.

And I think that ties in beautifully with Jesus' parable in Matthew 13 of the four soils, where I look at that almost as a warning passage as well to the fence sitters. Because two of those soils that Jesus talked about received the seed at first.

They received the word of God and some of them receive it joyfully. They say, hey, this is good news. This is good stuff. I like hanging around Christians. I like the idea of doing these good things. Makes me feel good.

I like the idea of being religious or whatever, but they receive it with joy, but then it has no root and it withers away. And then the other set, they receive the word, but the cares of this world choke it out.

And so there are sets of people who seem at first to be part of the group, and yet there's no fruit there. There's no lasting value in what they might have called faith, but it was a false faith. It was maybe an emotional response.

Maybe it was an intellectual ascent, but it was not true faith in Jesus Christ. And I think that parable of Jesus takes some good study.

Pete. Excellent.

That's a study. That's a passage I've studied numerous times. And maybe we could do another episode sometime on the parable where how many of the four soils are saved, because that's where you land on that.

It says a lot about what you view salvation, but that'd be a whole different topic to discuss. But let's jump quickly to apostasy, because that's a big one. And Jeff mentioned it briefly. So apostasy is a theological term to leave the faith, depart from the faith.

Apostasy and the Difference Between Profession and Possession

Now, what's interesting, I think I discussed this a little bit in part one, is that those who believe in eternal security and those who reject eternal security would generally agree that a person who at one point seemed to be a Christian, but now is completely denying the faith, living a life opposite of what a Christian life should be like, that that person is not saved.

The question is, were they ever saved to begin with? I mean, the person who believes that salvation can be lost would say that person was a believer who has now lost salvation, while the person who believes in eternal security would say that person was never a Christian to begin with.

But what we agree on is a person who's living that Christ-denying, Christ-rejecting lifestyle now is not a believer. So it's interesting in that we agree on the person's current state, we just don't necessarily agree how that person got there.

But I've never heard anyone who teaches eternal security, and that would include me, and I do not believe this, that you could deny the faith, you could actually reject Christ as your Savior, no longer believe in Him and still somehow be saved.

And that's the opposite of what these passages that we've already talked about is discussing. So apostasy is a big issue, and Jeff earlier was saying that it's the one issue where, okay, I can understand how someone could believe that if someone apostatizes from the faith that they have lost their salvation.

That at least makes sense, but that's not what I believe the verses that talk about apostasy are saying. And there's very strong warnings in the New Testament about apostasy, including some of the passages we've already talked about.

It's not a matter of whether salvation has been lost, it's a matter of whether it was ever possessed to begin with. In one of our articles, I was doing a little reading before this episode, and so I can't remember if I wrote this, or Kevin wrote this, or Jeff, or someone else, but I really like that apostates had a profession of faith, but not a possession of faith.

I think that's a good way to distinguish.

That is probably a good way to separate them. I think that when we're talking about apostasy being this sort of coherent option, it logically makes sense because there's the whole idea of it's not God rejecting you, and it's not that there's too much sin.

It's just the idea that I took it on, so I'm allowed to walk away from it. There's a logical consistency to that, but there isn't a theological consistency to that. And there's a subtle difference between those.

We touched on this last time where we've talked about the idea that if the greatest possible sin is unbelief, it's rejecting our purpose, it's rejecting our creator, then the idea you can lose your salvation through apostasy basically means God will provide you with the power it takes to avoid all sorts of sin, but ultimately he won't let you avoid the one sin that will actually guarantee you eternal damnation.

Theologically, that just doesn't seem to make sense. And then we have on top of that all of the verses that talk about this idea that he's the one who began the good work, he will complete it. It's his power, not ours.

Those verses that we listed before are in that same category where they talk about the power that God has in you and for you for that. One verse that I think is really crucial that we miss sometimes and it touches on that same general idea of how do we determine what happens when something that we see in the world either changes or doesn't match with what the Bible is saying about a person's salvation.

Matthew 7 verses 21 through 24, there's a part where Jesus is speaking about a group of people and he says, this group of people is going to say, we did good works and we preached and we did miracles and all these other things and Jesus is going to respond to them and he's not going to respond in a favorable way.

Some people would look at that and say, okay, that's false believers or that's those who were never believers in the first place. Well, the never is the key and that really does come down to an issue of eternal security because Jesus looks at those people and he says, all of these people who said, look at all the great Christian things I did, he doesn't say, I will say to them, I don't know you because that would cover people who had salvation and lost it.

It would also cover people who were never saved. Jesus doesn't say, I don't know you now. He doesn't say, I don't know you. He says, I never knew you. And that puts an awful lot of weight behind the idea that in the end, a person who is not saved was never saved.

That's not an easy thing for us to wrap our minds around. It's not a comfortable thing because it's hard for us to judge exactly where people are coming from. But I think that verse really does strike a blow for the concept of eternal security.

The fact that Jesus explicitly says to those self-deceived persons, I never knew you, despite all of those things that they were doing and able to do. Now, some people will look at that and say, yes, but those are just your false believers.

But here again, if we're talking about the issue of can we possess something, really have it and then lose it or walk away from it, that doesn't seem to make sense. So these different verses that we've gone through, all these things, when we read through these and we really have a sense of I'm saved by grace through faith, that's what saves.

Me.

That's what keeps me saved. That is the core point here. I don't think that you can look at any of these passages and interpret them without making that mistake. Some of the other ones that we've had questions people ask about, Hebrews 10, starting around verse 26.

You can read that in the sense of eternal security, but the context is about things like chastisement, 1 Corinthians 15, Galatians 6, Philippians 2, where it says to work out your salvation with fear and trembling.

The Bible tells us to live out the things that we need to live out and bringing this.

Full circle.

You can see things in scripture that lead you in one direction or the other. I think that the Bible does a good job of presenting us with brackets. To use another analogy, in most countries where there are roads that cars drive on, they put lines on the road.

The reason they put lines on the road is because it's much, much more reasonable to tell people stay between these two lines than it is to put a stripe down the middle of the road and tell people you have to drive perfectly on top of this.

Because sticking to one perfect, tiny, minute idea is really, really difficult. As human beings, we're limited, we're fallible, we're sinful. There's a lot of issues in the Bible that were presented with lines, with brackets.

I think when it comes to eternal security, Paul tells us in his writings things like test yourselves, examine yourselves to see if you're in the faith. Well, that's meant to keep us away from things like the easy believism and fooling.

Ourselves.

At the same time, he tells us things like, it's grace that you're saved by. It's not your works. We're meant to stay away from these extremes of hyper-legalism and works-based salvation versus this easy believism.

I don't think we're ever supposed to be in a position where we say, I don't have to think about what I do or how I act because I'm eternally secure. We're also not supposed to live our lives saying, I need to be really paranoid about every single thing I say and do, because this could be the thing that tips me over.

The edge.

God wants us to trust that when we have a real legitimate relationship with him, that saves us. And insofar as we see him working and moving in our life, that's all we really have to.

Know.

And that's all we really have to be concerned with.

So we're about out of time. So just to kind of tie all these things together again, please watch part one. If you've not, this is part two of the same discussion. And really this question, is eternal security biblical?

Once saved, always saved. Can a Christian lose salvation? And then all the related ones about apostasy, about specific passages of scripture, very, very common questions we get. I mean, if you put them all together, it might be number one topic that we're asked about.

And so many different articles we have, so many different questions go into this. So it's a very important issue. If we have not covered the passage that you want to hear about, I invite you to visit the website, search, or even submit a question.

Because we're more than happy to address any concerns, any questions. This is a very important issue. But if I were to try to summarize what the view of Got Questions Ministries is on eternal security, it is that our eternal security is found in God's faithfulness, not ours.

God is the one who keeps us saved, not us. It's not a matter of we are saved by grace through faith, but we have to maintain that by our works, or maintain that by maintaining our faith. No, that is God's job.

God is the one who is able to keep us from falling. It is through Christ that there is no condemnation. It is God's love that we cannot be separated from. It is God's hand that we cannot be removed from.

All these things, our salvation is in God, it's not in us. So it is a total mindset of recognizing the perfect and complete salvation that God has provided through Christ and trusting in that rather than trusting in ourselves that leads us to believe in eternal security.

So I hope this conversation has been encouraging to you. We invite you to study these scriptures. Ask us any questions you have. We're more than happy to explain our viewpoint to you, especially on an issue as important.

As this.

This has been the Got Questions podcast with Jeff and Kevin, our two regulars. Got questions? Bible has answers, and we'll help you find them.