In I John, Chapter 5, John is dealing with a group of people who had some very strange beliefs, and they have affected us throughout the centuries. They emphasized knowledge, and were called “gnostics”. In chapter 5, John contrasts to their “Knowledge” several “know-so” statements of true knowledge from God. In verse 9, John points out the terrible sin against God of unbelief. It is calling God a liar. The one who won’t believe makes God a liar because he has not believed in the witness that God has borne concerning His Son. And notice what the witness is: (verse 11), – that God has given us eternal life. Any view of conditional salvation or security runs smack into the problem that God promises life, not for ten years or a hundred years, or until we backslide, but forever. In Verse 11, “this life is in His Son. He who has the Son has the life”. (Black and white) “He who does not have the Son of God does not have [this eternal] life. “These things I have written to you”, verse 13, “that you may know that you have eternal life.” That is very simple, isn’t it? Note John’s certainty – Verse 15, “if we know”… Verse 18, “we know”… Verse 19, “we know”… Verse 20, “we know.”
We need to ask some questions. One of them is: “How am I saved? (Or by what right do I get into Heaven?)” Whether you have assurance of security or not depends on how you are saved. If you are saved by your good works then you can never know if you are saved. If you are saved by God that is something else. Scripture teaches that you are saved by God’s grace, (Eph. 2:8,9). The word “grace” means “the undeserved favor or gift of God”. By God’s undeserved favor He gives you the gift of salvation. It is because of Christ’s death that God can be so generous.
Romans 3:24,25 tells us “being justified freely [that means “without a cause” – see John 15:25 where the same word is translated ‘without a cause’], by His grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus whom God has set forth as a propitiation in His blood.” The satisfaction of God’s wrath was paid for by the blood of Christ. That is a clear teaching of Scripture. I can rest on the fact that “Jesus paid it all, all to Him I owe, sin had left a crimson stain, He washed it white as snow.”
It is through faith. That is the only thing that God asks. Faith is never a work. It is never a good thing that God will attribute to you. It is simply the channel through which you receive the gift, that is all. It is as negative as it is positive. It is as much saying “I will not trust anyone or anything else, nor my own good works”, as it is receiving the gift of eternal life that He gives in His Son. It is through faith. Romans 4:4,5 says if you work, then it is not a matter of grace; it is a matter of earning something, a matter of reward. John 3:16, is that best loved verse… Did you ever notice the negative and the positive stated there? Not only does God promise eternal life, He says “you shall never perish”. He puts it both ways for us. How am I saved? By God’s grace, by Christ’s death, through faith. That is it.
The second question we must answer is “Has God provided salvation or has God provided a chance for salvation for those who believe?” You see, those who teach in any sense that you can lose your salvation must say that God has not provided salvation for us, but He has only provided a chance for those who believe to be saved. So that when you trust Christ as your personal Savior, what God gives you is not salvation, but a chance. He gives you a raffle ticket. If you work well enough and you stay faithful enough and if you will be good enough, then you will earn your salvation at the end of life. That is essentially what they have to say. But that is not what Scripture teaches.
There are three views that you can take at this point. Let me express them by little analogies -
First is the view I am presenting. I call it the doctrine of divine seat belts. God has made us secure in Christ.
A second view that you can take is the doctrine of revolving door. It is the idea that you can get salvation and lose it and get it and lose it and get it and lose it (and some believe you lose it almost every time you sin.) It is like a revolving door. You are in and out of heaven.
The third I call “The waterfall.” Salvation is like being swept along with a current and unless you swim really hard against that current you are going to fall off the waterfall to oblivion to perish. It is the idea that there is the possibility of apostasy, that if you ever turn your back on God you are lost forever and forever and forever, never to be renewed, never to be saved. It is not an in and out thing. If you ever apostatize you are gone forever.
Those are the three views. Let me quickly say that the one view that you cannot take and be serious with Scripture is the revolving door view. That view is never taught in Scripture and there is not even a verse that they can give you to indicate such a thing. I don’t believe the waterfall idea is in Scripture either, but those who believe it have some verses that sound that way. You only have two choices. Either you are eternally saved or you are eternally lost. Either you are eternally secure or you are eternally over the waterfall never to be able to come up again. Those are the only views that are consistent with any serious understanding of the Word of God.
So, has God provided us salvation or just a chance for salvation? The answer is: He has provided a complete salvation. Again in Ephesians 2:8,9 the whole process is the gift of God complete. “Not of works lest any man should boast.” To any degree that you could work for your salvation, to that degree you would get glory for it, and God will not share His glory with anyone. There is no boasting. In Hebrews 9:27,28, God says it is a once-for-all action that we are resting upon. The sin question has been settled once for all when He died. It is a once-for-all salvation. There is no continuation to it. He has provided salvation, not merely a chance for salvation to us.
Four passages teach clearly the Doctrine of Divine Seat Belts:
1. Ephesians 1:3-6. God didn’t choose us because He knew we would be good, etc. His purpose looks beyond this life – “To be holy and blameless before Him in love.” (That only happens when you are in glory, but in the mind of God that happened in eternity past.)
2. Romans 8:33-39, what Paul does in Romans 8 is take everything that might ever make us lose our salvation and discuss it
3. Philippians 1:6, “being confident of this, that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus. (NIV)
4. John 10:28-30 “I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish; no one can snatch them out of my hand. v29 My Father, who has given them to me, is greater than all; no one can snatch them out of my Father’s hand. (NIV)
John gives us tests so that we can be sure we have exercised faith:
1. A Personal Test. I John 5:11-13. Do you have the Son? Have you taken the knowledge about Jesus and His death on Calvary for you, combined it with a desire to have your sins forgiven and a love for Him, and by a personal act of your will said, “Lord Jesus, I here and now trust you alone as my personal Savior. I transfer my trust from myself and my goodness to You and You alone for eternity.” Have you passed the personal test?
2. A doctrinal test. Faith has some content to it. I John 2:18-27, I John 4:1-6, are all about Jesus coming in the flesh. Anyone who denies that God came in the flesh in Jesus is the Antichrist. That is the very spirit of the antichrist. To deny the true person of Jesus Christ. Jesus is undiminished deity and perfect humanity in one person forever. Any man who denies that cannot call himself a Christian.
The same thing he tells us in his second book. In fact, he says that if anyone comes not bringing the doctrine of Christ, if he is in error in his relationship to the person of Christ then don’t bring him into your house and don’t bid him God-speed. Even to bid him god-speed is to be a partaker of his evil deeds. That is II John 9-11.
The test of the doctrine of Christ – is your faith exclusively in Christ, not a church, not some ritual, not some living a good life, or having a life style that pays your bills and takes care of your neighbor and goes to church, all those things are good. But that is not the primary step. The primary step is trusting Jesus Christ and His death on Calvary’s cross for you alone. Is there some content to your faith or is it merely some vague religious feeling?
3. A Moral Test. I John 2:3-6,; I John 5:18. That is one of the most difficult verses, if you are going to take it the way those who have a revolving door theology want to take it. I think there is a fairly simple answer to it but I agree it is a difficult verse.
Let me say two things about it. #1, it is a difficult verse. #2, it is one of the most essential verses in the Bible. I am so glad John put it there. What John is saying is the same thing he was saying back in chapter 2, and chapter 3, and in chapter 4. That the one who is born of God does not live in sin. And he states it here in the absolute so that no one can ever say that one can justify his sin. He has a whole different nature.
It is like the difference between a pig and a lamb -not their size but their nature. A sinner may sin, and a believer may fall into the same sin that an unbeliever falls into. (You cannot interpret this to mean that the as a Christian you never sin again for the simple reason that it would contradict John’s first chapter. (1:8-10)) It cannot mean that you can ever come to a point where you are not able to sin. Scripture never teaches that. What it does mean is that you are able not to sin. That the rule of life is opposition to sin, not sin. A pig may fall into a mud hole and so may a lamb. The difference is that the pig by nature loves the mud hole. A lamb may fall in the mud too but he doesn’t love it. He may for a little while. Pretty soon a lamb gets tired of the mud and he will bleat and he will try until the shepherd gets him out. They are of two different natures. We often talk about someone who as a habit does something. We begin to call them certain words. A man who is constantly lustful is a “lecher”.. John is saying that the one born of God does not remain in a life obsessing sin.
Now you say, “Why did he put it that way?” Suppose he had put it any other way. The ancient heretics, the Gnostics, used to say, “We can do as we please. It doesn’t affect our spiritual life.” Many ever since that have been trying to say that. Suppose John had said, “We know that no one who is born of God does very many sins.” Then there would be rascals and hypocrites all the way through history saying, whenever you tried to point out some sin in their lives, “Oh, but John just said we won’t do much sin but this one is all right.” They would rationalize it.. You would never have any standard by which you could say, “Be ye perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect.” (Matt.5:48)
John is saying the same thing James says. Faith produces activity. If your life is bent towards sin and there is no desire of change somewhere, then you had better ask yourself the moral test of your faith. God will never allow any idea that he entertains darkness, that he entertains sin. We are both sinners and sinless at the same time. Sinless in the eyes of God but sinners every day, yes. But there is a life style, he says, that is a test of your faith. I have a lot of compassion for people who sin. No one has ever come into my office and ever honestly presented me with a sin and some problem in their life that I, as best I know in my heart and life, have not been compassionate. But when someone comes in and tries to rationalize sin by some religious means, like one man who told me that God had told him that it didn’t matter if he divorced his wife and married his secretary, and that his secretary was so spiritual that they could have a greater ministry together than his wife – My answer for those kind of people is never compassion. It is the same blast Jesus gave the Pharisees. You hypocrites and generation of snakes, why did you come to me? We should never tolerate justification of sin by some religious or spiritual or Bible quoting means. The man who is harsh on his family and tells me it is because God tells him that he is the head of the home, I feel like hitting him over the head with a Bible before he gets out of there. That is unadulterated barf and we should have no part of it.
If you come as a repentant sinner, friend, there is compassion for the sinner. But there is no excuse for the lazy. You can never presume upon the grace of God. This verse is somewhat like the fact that there is only one death-bed confession in Scripture. That is the thief on the cross. There is one, so no one ever need despair, but only one so no one ever dare presume.
4. A social test. John 13:34-35, I John 2:7-11, 3:11-18, I John 4:7-21 all say the same thing. By this shall all men know that you are my disciples, that the one mark of the Christian is going to be that you love one another. Any one, John says, that comes and like the Gnostics in their cold individualism says, I can love God and hate my neighbor, is a liar. The bent and direction of my life is forgiveness and understanding and kindness and consideration and love for my family and for my neighbors. It is a social test of whether I have faith.
How do I apply these? I ask first of all, have I personally trusted Jesus Christ alone for my eternal salvation? Has that faith included the fact that Jesus is God become man and dying for my sins. Has it resulted in some direction in my life that points toward God and has it made me more loving toward others. Those are the questions that you and I need to ask ourselves.
Faith is believing God and God’s Word. It is the response to whatever God says. If God says, “Here is a promise”, faith is believing that promise. If God says, “Here is a commandment”, faith is obeying that commandment. If God says, “Do not do this”, faith is not doing that. Faith is the response to God’s initiative. Therefore, it involves all three of our faculties: intellect, emotion and will.
One good way to illustrate this is by an analogy that God Himself uses – marriage. The primary meaning of marriage is that it is a life-size picture of Christianity. It is one huge object lesson, life long, of all that God is to the believer. That is why divorce is so terrible in God’s eyes. It breaks the analogy of Christianity. It has God separating in the analogy from His loved one, and He never does that.
The analogy brings up two different sets of questions. Let us suppose that you asked me if I were married? I would answer, “Yes”. Not “I think so”, or “I hope so”, or “I am trying to be.” I would give you no nonsense about having been married all my life or that I grew up in a married home. “I go to weddings all the time.” How about that one? You laugh because that is a stupid answer. You ask me if I am married? “Yes.” How do I know I am married? Not because I wear a ring. A ring is a symbol of a marriage, not the marriage. I know because of something that happened. Because I came to know Norma? No, I knew her about two years before we were married. I knew quite a bit about her. That is the intellectual part. But somewhere I fell in love with her. I was willing to condition my happiness on her happiness for the rest of my life. My need to please her became greater than any other need in me. That is love. We weren’t married for another two years after that. I knew her and loved her, isn’t that enough? No. We were not married until I combined the intellectual knowledge with the emotions of the heart and made a decision of the will before a man representing God, and before witnesses, and promised that exclusively and only she would be my partner for the rest of my life.
Now that is the way faith acts. Faith says, “I know about Jesus. He died on the cross. He bore my sin. He paid the penalty for all my sin.” (You can know that a long time and not be saved.) But faith says “Somewhere along the line I began to love this One who loved me so much that He died for me. (And you can love Him and not be saved.) That intellectual knowledge along with the emotion of love has to be acted upon in a moment of choice that says, “I, the sinner, exclusively take you, Jesus, as my Savior forever and forever. See the analogy?
There are other questions you could ask now, but they are different. You could ask me, “Are you a good husband?” I would say “Well, I think I am. I hope I am. I am trying to be.” Or, “You had better ask my wife.” That is like the question, “Are you a good Christian?” My answer to that has to be, “I think I am. I hope I am. I am trying to be.” Or, “You had better ask my wife.” But that is quite different from the question, “Are you a Christian?” Wouldn’t it be crazy for me to say, “I hope that I live up to the ideal of being a good husband so that I can be married some day.” That would be just as silly as to say, “I am trying to be a good Christian so that I can know that I am a Christian some day.”
Last month I defined faith by the acrostic “Forsaking All I Trust Him”. In trying to teach that definition of faith, I found that many people think it means forsaking all in the sense of forsaking family, friends, bad habits, or little vices. But that is not what it means. It means that I am Forsaking all my rules, religion, rituals, and regulations. It means believing that I cannot do anything to save myself – that I must trust Jesus Christ and Him exclusively for my salvation.
One of the men I met who best understood what faith is, at least at that moment, rejected Jesus Christ. When I explained to him how you can trust Jesus Christ alone he said, “But I think I am all right. You see, I was baptized as an infant and as long as I stay in that state of grace I am all right. I don’t need to make that decision you are talking about. As long as I go to church and attend to certain rituals, I am all right.” In other words, he was trusting in those rituals. He said, “What you are asking me to do (here is where he understood very well what faith is) is throw all that over and risk my eternal destiny on Jesus Christ alone.” I said, “You have got it.” That man understood it as well as anyone I have ever heard.
An old Methodist preacher put it well. When asked on his death bed what he was doing, he replied , “Doing? I am throwing overboard all my sermons and all my prayers and all my good works, and I am floating to glory on the plank of pure grace.” That is faith. Faith is a transference of your trust from yourself and all of your own goodness, your own rules, regulations, rituals and religions to Jesus Christ and His death on Calvary alone for your salvation. Forsaking All, I Trust Him.
Once you understand that faith is your response to God’s initiative, you can see why we sometimes talk about degrees of faith. Jesus said, “…if you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there’ and it will move. Nothing will be impossible for you.”(NIV) Matt 17:20
You see, it is not the size of your faith, it is the object of your faith that is important. If you are believing in Jim Borror you are in big trouble. I can not save you. But if you are believing in the God of the universe, that is something else.
Deuteronomy 32:20 and Mark 4:40 talk about the ones who had no faith. There were certain things Jesus could not do because they did not believe. James 2:17 talks about a dead faith. A man who says he has faith and does not love his brother, or have any godly activity , is simply showing that his faith was not living faith. It was dead faith. It was never alive to begin with. Matthew 14:30,31 talks about little faith. However this degree is never spoken of in that way. It is always an epithet. It is always a name Jesus called people. In Matthew 14, as the disciples waver, Peter gets out of the boat and starts to walk upon the water and soon begins to sink. He calls out to Jesus, and Jesus pulls him up into the boat. Jesus says to all the disciples, “You of little faith.” They did not believe who He was. Again, the important element is the object of faith. There is great faith in Luke 7. The centurion came to Jesus and said, “But say the word, and my servant will be healed.” Luke 7:7 (NIV) Jesus turned to His disciples and said, “I tell you, I have not found such great faith even in Israel.” Luke 7:9 (NIV) Why was his faith great? It was the faith that made him love a slave and faith that made him believe that Jesus could heal. It made him respond and be submissive to authority. In other words, it was still his response to God’s initiative. Jesus says, “That is great faith.” I Corinthians 15:14 says you can have vain faith. If you do not believe that Jesus rose from the dead and that we are going to be resurrected, then your faith is in vain. It is still the object of your faith that is important. I Timothy 1:15 talks about a sincere faith in contrast to a fake faith. Some people try to put on and take off faith as they would a coat. Faith itself may have degrees, but the object of the faith must remain the same – TheOne Whose death was the penalty for our sins. Next month -How Can I Know I Have Faith?
