January 6, 2009: "Is Yellow Round?" And The Question Of Eternal Security

The last two Sundays in a row I've been asked by different people whether a believer could lose his salvation. I have written on this subject before, and include below two essays from 2006 for reference' sake. I think I have something to add to that now.

I believe the question "Can a person lose his salvation?" is unanswerable. Not because only God knows the answer, and not because Scripture is ambiguous about it, but because the question itself is so ill-formed that it does not make sense.

I owe to C. S. Lewis the idea that some of our most basic questions will never yield answers, and that our deepened knowledge of God in the afterlife will not so much give us solutions to our questions as it will reveal why so many of them were impossible in the first place. In A Grief Observed, Lewis writes: “Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable. How many hours are there in a mile? Is yellow square or round? Probably half the questions we ask - half our great theological and metaphysical questions - are like that.”

Exactly. If the question "Is yellow round?" were asked of you by a small child, what would you say? That yellow is a color and not a shape, that it is not the sort of thing that is round or square or triangular? But suppose he comes back with, "But the sun is yellow and it's round!" And you say yes, right, but the roundness of the sun is not a necessary feature of its yellowness. And he (precocious child) says, "Now you're just confusing me. All I want to know is whether or not yellow is round."

After having heard a thousand defenses of the doctrine of "once saved always saved" and (much more rarely) attacks on the same, I have now come to the conclusion that when we speak of the "possession" or "loss" of salvation we are perilously close to discussing something as meaningful as the shape of a color. Salvation is something God does to people who place enduring, living faith in Jesus Christ. It is not so much an object that we put in our pocket (like a wallet) and then debate about whether we can lose it or drop it or have it stolen from us. That is not to say that the metaphor of salvation-as-possession is wholly invalid. It is a useful and biblical metaphor, and has many good applications. But, like any metaphor, it has limits, and one of those limits is stretched and broken at the point where we begin talking about the possibility of losing it. Salvation can't be "lost" any more than yellow can be "round". In both discussions, if we do not qualify our terms, we will soon find that we are talking nonsense. Though "yellow" is neither round nor square, a yellow object like the sun is certainly very round. Likewise, though "salvation" is neither losable nor secure, a person who trusts in Christ with living, permanent faith is safe forever. He may rejoice in perfect hope, and never fear hell.

That is not to say that there is no such thing as apostasy, as I remind readers below with a couple old essays.

So You Received Jesus Into Your Heart? So Have Many Apostates (July 16, 2006)

Evil makes cynics of us.

I know it has made one of me in an area that can be nearly fatal to a preacher: conversion. I call people to faith in Christ. It is what I do, and I am convinced that I would be disobedient to do anything else.

So why don't I get all excited about "decisions for Christ"? Because experience keeps teaching me the fragile and untrustworthy nature of such decisions. I trust Jesus, but I do not necessarily trust the steadfastness of those who say they have received him.

Here's a short list of those who have eroded my faith in people's ability to persevere: Charles Templeton, evangelist colleague of Billy Graham, became an outspoken atheist. Roy Clements, once one of England's most respected evangelical ministers, is now living with a homosexual lover. The minister who conducted my wedding also left his wife and announced that he is gay. I know two Wycliffe missionaries - one of whom translated the New Testament into a Colombian indigenous language - who left their wives and the Lord. My Arhuaco Scripture co-translator (about whose faith I once wrote glowing tributes) walked away from Christ. My ex wife, who once dedicated her life to missionary service and who encouraged me to enter the pastoral ministry, is now a cold-blooded apostate.

And time would fail me to list all the people I know who once received Jesus but who now live such reprobate lives that no one would ever guess they were once people of faith.

I have been fooled so many times by so many people that I am forced to acknowledge the hard truth that I cannot tell who will persevere in the Lord and who will not. If Charles Templeton can fool Billy Graham, and Wycliffe missionaries can fool their colleagues in Colombia and Brazil, and Roy Clements can fool the faculty of Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, and my wife can fool me, then who can't be fooled by whom?

That which I have learned about the heart's inconstancy is what keeps me from saying to any new convert, "You have just been saved eternally - welcome to the family of God!" These words of encouragement are actually a prophecy that is both arrogant and naïve. Only God knows who will persevere and who will not. I know no one with access to that foreknowledge.

That is why I preach perseverance so much more than I do conversion. I don't care any more how you started - I care how you end up. Just as St. James said, "You believe that there is one God? Great - even the demons believe that," so I might say, "You received Jesus into your heart? Great - so did Larry Flynt." (The publisher of Hustler magazine was briefly "born again" in the '70s.) The mere decision to follow Christ really puts you on no better spiritual footing than that of Judas Iscariot. He decided to follow Christ too - for a while.

Excuse my cynicism. Of course I know there are legitimate conversions, and I know that I must not let grief over false brothers spoil my joy over true ones. But just as we must take our sufferings and let them make us patient, so we must take our disappointments and let them make us wise. Here is wisdom: something is begun, but nothing settled, when a man says, "I have received Christ." From that point forward we must preach perseverance both to him and to ourselves until on our deathbeds we can truthfully say, "I have fought the good fight, I have run the race, I have kept the faith." Then into God's hands we may commend our spirits.

Loss Of Salvation (September 24, 2006)

"Can someone lose his salvation?"

I was asked this the other day. I've been asked it before, and will be asked it again. It seemed good to write out a response.

I have come to believe that the key word in that question is the word "someone". Who exactly is the "someone" whose security of salvation we are questioning? Presumably "someone" here is understood to be "someone who believes in Jesus." But clarification is needed. Do we mean someone who believes in Jesus with living faith or dead faith? James distinguishes the two in James 2:14-17:

What good is it, my brothers, if a man claims to have faith but has no deeds? Can such faith save him? Suppose a brother or sister is without clothes and daily food. If one of you says to him, "Go, I wish you well; keep warm and well fed," but does nothing about his physical needs, what good is it? In the same way, faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead.

James says that faith without action is dead, and when he asks the rhetorical question, "Can such faith save him?" the answer is no. Even demons have dead faith, according to verse 19 of that chapter. And they're damned. (See Jude 6.)

So now the question is, "Can someone who believes in Jesus with living faith lose his salvation?"

I have one more thing to clarify first. By "believe" do we mean believe permanently or temporarily? For example, when Paul told the Philippian jailer, "Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and you will be saved" (Acts 16:31), suppose the jailer had asked, "How long do I have to believe before I can go back to my pagan religion?" Would Paul have given him a safe time period? Believe in Jesus a day or two, or a month, maybe 10 years - and that ought to do it? Or was it understood that the man was being called to permanent faith?

I don't think it is debatable that this, and all biblical invitations to believe in Christ, are invitations to believe in him permanently. What is debated, though, is whether it is possible to believe in him temporarily. Frankly it bothers me this is considered controversial, since Jesus spoke directly to the issue in Luke 8:13 in the parable of the sower and the seeds: "Those on the rock are the ones who receive the word with joy when they hear it, but they have no root. They believe for a while, but in the time of testing they fall away." Any who think it is impossible to "believe for a while" are met with a Scriptural rebuke in the plain words of Christ.

Now I feel that the question we started with is answerable. "Can someone who believes permanently in Jesus with living faith lose his salvation?" Absolutely not. All such people are children of God and eternally secure. Nothing can separate them from the love of Christ (Romans 8:35-39). They hear the voice of Jesus, follow him, receive from him eternal life, and nothing can take them out of his hand. (John 10:27-28).