Musing 83

When I was younger in my theological growth, one of the more . . . practical ideas I struggled working through was that of conditional salvation. Of course, before I became Reformed, I was more sympathetic to it (to my recollection, I wasn’t fully convinced either way even though both made sense to me), but even as a teen, there was something weird about the idea that the all powerful God, who infallibly knew what would happen, would act to truly save someone who He knew would ultimately not be saved. It struck me as an errand in futility that didn’t mesh with what the Bible said about God’s actions.

On top of that, I struggled with what appeared to be very clear statements about many Christians being self deceived about their salvation Matthew 7:21-23 were not told “I knew you, but because of your sin, you fell away”. They were told “I never knew you”.

And if that can be true of those self-deceived all the way to judgement day, how much more is this true of those who fall away in this life? On top of this, 1 John was pretty clear that those who left the faith weren’t real Christians to begin with.

At the same time, there’s pretty clear warning passages about falling away. Even if there are many who weren’t real Christians, that didn’t exclude the possibility of realChristians actually falling away, right?

As a voracious reader and over-thinker, these questions were swirling about my mind as I tried to fit what Scripture taught together. It wasn’t until I really became introduced to Reformed Theology through Sproul’s Chosen By God that I started to actually make progress on working through these questions in a way that started to feel like real resolution and not mere cope.

But the final breakthrough came when listening to Dan Corner talk about conditional salvation and realize that in Dan’s mind, God was a terrible father who only had 1 disciplnary action available - the dissolution of adoption and casting out for even the slightly sin. In Dan’s mind, any sin would need to be confessed and so until it was, you could not view God as Father. You were once again a mere sinner who needed to experience initial repentance.

Because of my home life as a kid, I grew to appreciate the doctrine of adoption very early on in my Christian walk. And the idea that God had no disciplinary tools in His wise raising of brothers for Christ seemed . . . idiotic to be blunt.

But it was this breakthrough that really brought together a more consistent understanding of what salvation really entailed and gave me the ability to break the stalemate in my mind. Because God is a good Father, He is able to bring about the work He starts in us to completion. Now it made sense why the testimony of Scripture seemed to be “those who prove to be false brethren were never true brethren in the first place”.

At the same time, it didn’t fully resolve the difficulties of the warning passages, but it did start giving me a framework to understand them.

Without getting into the specifics of each passage, one of the conclusions I ended up arriving at was that the warning passages are just like our calls to repentance, or a call to test ourselves if we’re in the faith. While that seems like cope at first glance, one of the evidences of this is that the general pattern of the warnings is “here’s this warning, but we’re convinced this doesn’t really describe you”. If the intention is to communicate that you can lose your salvation, it seems strange this would be the followup. I know that my follow up would be “and you better listen because you know how easy it is to lose your salvation.” But if instead the warning is intended as a wakeup call for those who are self-deceived, the apostolic commentary makes much more sense.

In turn, this points to a secondary function of the warning passages - they highlight our human limitations of the knowledge of the heart. Unlike God who perfectly knowes the human heart and is unsurprised by apostasy or gross unrepentatnt sin, we are taken by surprise when someone leaves the faith despite a strong profession.

But as a final note - the confidence I have in my salvation is not based on me. I am a faltering man who struggles mightily against sin. If my salvation’s security is rooted in me, I am going to be damned to hell. My confidence is rooted in the promise that Christ is at work in me through His Spirit and that He will bring that work to completion because Christ is my perfect high priest and has borne the full weight of God’s judgement for my sins.