Monday, February 18, 2008

Top 20 Bible Questions #4: Eternal Security

Q. What about "once saved always saved?" Is eternal security Biblical? Can a Christian lose salvation?

A. Writing about these questions has kept theologians busy for centuries. Any question of Salvation is predicated on the notion that we have a God who is always keeping score, watching every move and notion from his big white throne in the sky.

To most Christians and other religious sects, God is a extra-big old man with white hair. We must remember that according to Numbers 23:19, “God is not a man...”

Because God is not a man, we must suppose that he is a being, a force, an energy, a primal source or something of that nature. Paul tells us that God is ALL AND IN ALL. This is undefined and unrestricted. We do know that the Bible tells us in three places (Is. 45:23, Ro. 14:11, Phil. 2:10) that “At his name every knee will bow and every tongue will confess him as lord to the glory of God.” The word “every” is an unqualified word and means exactly that.

The word SAVED comes from the Greek word “SOZO,” meaning "to make whole, complete, unfragmented." It has nothing to do with an angry God.

There are many Christians living in pain that are on their way to heaven but are not saved in the Biblical sense of the word. It is clear from Revelation 13:8 and Ephesians 1:4 that the LAMB was slain before the foundation of the world. The lamb took away the sins of the whole world. This must include the cave men, the stone age men, the iron age men and all living being until this present age.

The “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” is part of religions mythology. There is no foundation in that sort of Catholic and protestant theology. To predicate that God was so angry with His children that He could only get less angry by having his beloved son tortured and killed in the most painful way is a primitive, non-Biblical bit of pagan foolishness. God so loved the world that He lovingly gave us Himself in His Son to show us the need to die to physical things. This is called Calvary. Calvary precedes resurrection and ascension-consciousness. We can know this only by being still and knowing that God is God.

The doctrine of Hell is based on at least seven words that are translated "hell" in various translations. The foreknowledge of God precludes any concept of eternal punishment. That we reap what we sow is of good sense and is taken care of in the Scriptures in various way that I will talk about in a future blog.

Until next time...

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