You know, we all come to God's word with certain presuppositions, filters, and experiences that color how we encounter and understand God's word. One of my presuppositions is that the person who is truly born-again cannot lose their salvation. And so, when I encounter the passages and verses that the saved-and-lost crowd like to cite as grounds for their saved-and-lost (SAL) doctrine, I interpret them through the lens of my OSAS presupposition. Of course, the SAL proponent is doing exactly the same thing. They are seeing Scripture through the lens of their presupposition that one can lose one's salvation and so they make Scripture fit to the shape of their presupposition. As a result, we can look at the same verses and passages and come to nearly opposite points of view on what they say. It's because this is so, that I sometimes tire of discussing the same verses and passages over and over, fortifying and explaining the OSAS view ad nauseum. What really needs to be discussed, I think, is the validity of the presuppositions the SAL and OSAS proponents hold and through which they understand God's word soteriologically.
So, here is the basic structure of my OSAS presupposition:
1. No man comes to God on his own.
Every man is "dead in trespasses and sins" (Ephesians 2:1) and "alienated and an enemy in his mind" toward God by his wicked works (Colossians 1:21). In this condition, no man ever naturally desires to know and walk with God. And so, God must initiate the process leading to a person's salvation, entirely apart from, and in contradiction to, their natural inclination. This means that our desire to be saved has nothing to do with whether or not God saves us. He is not governed by our wants or wishes in bringing us into relationship with Himself. And it stands to reason, then, that our desire toward Him after salvation, strong or weak, does not dictate whether or not He continues to relate to us as our Heavenly Father.
2. God saves us; we don't save ourselves.
God is responsible for drawing us to Christ (John 6:44), for illuminating our minds to His truth and causing repentance (2 Timothy 2:25), and for spiritually regenerating us by His Spirit who places the believer in Christ. (Romans 8:9-11; Titus 3:5). God also justifies, and sanctifies the born-again believer (1 Corinthians 1:30-31), giving him both the desire and the ability to do His will (Philippians 2:13). At every turn, it is God acting upon and for the believer, bringing them on into deeper fellowship with Himself. Salvation, then, is a work of God, not a work of Man. Apart from God, no man has the power to do anything for God - certainly not to bear the responsibility for his own salvation. God has done it all. It remains only for the believer to receive His saving work, not labour to create and sustain his own salvation.
3. God takes responsibility for a believer's continued life in Him.
Philippians 1:6
6 being confident of this very thing, that He who has begun a good work in you will complete it until the day of Jesus Christ;
What God started in saving a person, He promises to complete. He does not break His promises.
1 Thessalonians 5:23-24
23 Now may the God of peace Himself sanctify you completely; and may your whole spirit, soul, and body be preserved blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.
24 He who calls you is faithful, who also will do it.
Here is another biblical promise of God's faithful preservation of the believer unto the "coming of our Lord Jesus Christ." There are no caveats to this promise, no "only if you do thus-and-so." God takes on the burden of bringing us to our eternal destiny with Him and so we can rest easy in His power to preserve us unto that destiny.
Ephesians 2:10
10 For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them.
The genuinely saved person is God's "workmanship" created, not by his good works, but unto (in the KJV), or for, them. It is God, though, who has prepared beforehand - or ordained in the KJV - that those whom He has saved should "walk" in good works. Paul here emphasizes that the believer's salvation is more than a chance occurrence, depending ultimately upon their whim, upon the vacillations of their desire, but is a divinely predetermined circumstance. As such, it is not susceptible to dissolution by human will or power. There are other verses/passages which emphasize this fact very clearly:
Romans 8:29
29 For whom He foreknew, He also predestined to be conformed to the image of His Son, that He might be the firstborn among many brethren.
God has not merely invited people to receive salvation but has, in His omniscience, His foreknowledge, predestined, or predetermined them to salvation. How God does this through His omniscience without violating human free will is best explained, I think, by Molinism, but, be that as it may, God's predestination of the believer to salvation implies an inevitability and an irreversibility to that salvation that imparts to the believer great assurance and confidence in the permanency of their salvation.
Ephesians 1:4-5
4 just as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blame before Him in love,
5 having predestined us to adoption as sons by Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the good pleasure of His will,
Paul here again points out that our salvation is predetermined, a set reality, that cannot be reversed. God has chosen us to be His before the world's foundations were laid. Can ignorant, finite, impotent Man reverse God's eternal determination that he should be saved? Obviously not. And so, the believer can be confident that God will see to it that they are made "holy and without blame before Him in love." He will bring to full completion the saving work He began in each of His children.
1 Corinthians 1:7-9
7 ...eagerly waiting for the revelation of our Lord Jesus Christ,
8 who will also confirm you to the end, that you may be blameless in the day of our Lord Jesus Christ.
9 God is faithful, by whom you were called into the fellowship of His Son, Jesus Christ our Lord.
4. Salvation is a Person.
John 14:6
6 Jesus said to him, "I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me.
1 John 5:11-12
11 And this is the testimony: that God has given us eternal life, and this life is in His Son.
12 He who has the Son has life; he who does not have the Son of God does not have life.
Colossians 3:3-4
3 For you died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.
4 When Christ who is our life appears, then you also will appear with Him in glory.
Salvation is not fundamentally constituted of a set of propositions, of truths, but is found in a Person: Jesus Christ, the Saviour. Jesus is salvation. And he gives himself to us entirely and freely upon our trusting in him as Saviour and Lord. In him the believer finds redemption, justification, sanctification (1 Corinthians 1:30), crucifixion (Galatians 2:20; Romans 6:6-8), and glorification (Romans 6:5; Romans 8:17-18). He is the believer's life. All that Jesus has done for the believer in atoning for their sin has been done perfectly, completely fulfilling all of the demands of the Father's justice and holiness (Isaiah 53:11; Hebrews 9:12; Hebrews 9:25-28). There is nothing left for the lost sinner to do in gaining acceptance from God but, by faith, to receive and manifest the life of Christ. As Paul wrote, the believer merely works out what God has first worked in. (Philippians 2:12-13)
What, then, of the need for the believer to sustain their salvation by their good works? Is the believer accepted by God on the basis of their good works? No. (Ephesians 2:8-9; 2 Timothy 1:9; Titus 3:5) Has Christ's atoning work at Calvary fully satisfied God? Yes. Does the believer find all that God requires from him in Christ? Yes. How is it, then, that God requires the believer to sustain his salvation by good deeds? Christ has done it all. There is nothing more God requires from us to be in relationship with Himself than for us to believe it. What an evil doctrine it is, then, to propose that the believer can add to Christ's perfect saving work, that his atonement is not complete, that God requires something of us, too, in order for our salvation, for Christ, to be truly and irrevocably ours.
Colossians 2:9-14
9 For in Him dwells all the fullness of the Godhead bodily;
10 and you are complete in Him, who is the head of all principality and power.
11 In Him you were also circumcised with the circumcision made without hands, by putting off the body of the sins of the flesh, by the circumcision of Christ,
12 buried with Him in baptism, in which you also were raised with Him through faith in the working of God, who raised Him from the dead.
13 And you, being dead in your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, He has made alive together with Him, having forgiven you all trespasses,
14 having wiped out the handwriting of requirements that was against us, which was contrary to us. And He has taken it out of the way, having nailed it to the cross.
5. Good works are inevitable in the Christian life, but they are not, therefore, necessary.
It's been observed that an apple tree bears apples, not in order to be an apple tree but because it is an apple tree. The fruit an apple tree produces merely manifests its nature: An apple tree bears apples. This is true of the Christian also. The spiritual "fruit" he bears is a manifestation of who he is in Christ. If the apple tree is healthy and mature, and if the Christian is healthy and mature, both will bear their respective fruit. It's inevitable. While this is true, it doesn't follow that because a healthy, mature apple tree will bear apples, it must, therefore, bear apples. Many apple trees don't bear apples. Regardless, they are still apple trees. So, too, the Christian. If he is spiritually healthy and mature, he will bear spiritual fruit, but this doesn't mean, therefore, that he must bear such fruit. Many truly born-again Christians don't bear spiritual fruit. They are spiritually immature or malnourished, or diseased by false doctrine, they also may be hampered by old sinful habits, besetting sins, that hinder spiritual fruit production. Until these issues are resolved, bearing spiritual fruit is difficult, if not impossible. But, regardless, these spiritually fruitless people are still Christians. Paul wrote to just such Christians in his various letters to the Early Church. His first letter to the Corinthians, in particular, is to very unfruitful, even carnal, believers. Read chapters 3, 5, 6 and 11. In these chapters, Paul delineates the sin of which the Corinthians were guilty: gross sexual sin, petty jealousy, pride, litigiousness, contentiousness, etc. But he also makes it clear he considered them brothers and sisters in Christ:
1 Corinthians 1:2
2 To the church of God which is at Corinth, to those who are sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be saints, with all who in every place call on the name of Jesus Christ our Lord, both theirs and ours:
1 Corinthians 3:1-3
1 And I, brethren, could not speak to you as to spiritual people but as to carnal, as to babes in Christ.
2 I fed you with milk and not with solid food; for until now you were not able to receive it, and even now you are still not able;
3 for you are still carnal. For where there are envy, strife, and divisions among you, are you not carnal and behaving like mere men?
1 Corinthians 3:9
9 For we are God's fellow workers; you are God's field, you are God's building.
1 Corinthians 3:16-17
16 Do you not know that you are the temple of God and that the Spirit of God dwells in you?
1 Corinthians 3:23
23 And you are Christ's, and Christ is God's.
Paul acknowledged that the Corinthian believers ought to have been bearing spiritual fruit but, because of their spiritual immaturity and carnality, they were caught up in all manner of sin. He recognized that good works would be inevitable in a mature, healthy believer but he did not think, then, that they were necessary, that a Christian could not be a Christian without good works.
Part of the problem here between the saved-and-lost (SAL) and OSAS proponents is that SAL folk want to lay down a line beyond which a person can sin themselves out of their salvation. There must be some good works, they say, but what constitutes "some"? No one can say. And when they try, they quickly become legalistic. The Bible gives no hard and fast, clearly-identifiable line beyond which lies the loss of one's salvation. And this is because, for the genuinely born-again believer, there is no such line.
7. "Tares" in the Church.
The writers of the New Testament all acknowledged that within the Church, the Body of Believers, "tares" were present (Matthew 13:24-43), "false brethren," Paul called them (2 Corinthians 11:26; Galatians 2:4), false converts, who shared in the life and work of the Church but were not truly born-again (Matthew 7:21-23). In almost every instance that the SAL proponent offers in support of their idea that a believer can lose his salvation, it is evident that a false convert, or unbeliever, is in view. Hebrews 6:4-6 or 2 Peter 2:20-22 are prime examples. The SAL folk, seeing these passages through their SAL presupposition, immediately assume a fallen believer is being described. It never even occurs to them to understand the verses as saying anything else. But, this is the terrible power of our presuppositions. Knowing that "tares" have always occupied the Church, and having my own OSAS presupposition in place, it seems blindingly obvious to me that the passage in Hebrews 6 and 2 Peter 2 could only be referring to false converts. Certainly, the fact of "tares" in the Church makes this at least distinctly possible.
Usually, when all these things are laid out for the SAL proponent, they respond by saying that the rest of Scripture qualifies and restricts how one can understand them. They then cite all of the verses/passages they think indicate their own SAL presupposition. But their sense of qualification and restriction is always predominantly in one direction, the SAL proof-texts diminishing or negating the OSAS ones. They never seem to realize that, as much as they want their favorite proof-texts to qualify the verses/passages the OSAS person produces out of an OSAS line entirely, their proof-texts are also qualified and restricted by the verses/passages the OSAS proponents uses in support of their view. In other words, it isn't that SAL soteriology only constricts OSAS soteriology but that OSAS soteriology constricts SAL soteriology. To what degree this is so is, really, the fundamental debate between the two soteriological points of view.
So, here is the basic structure of my OSAS presupposition:
1. No man comes to God on his own.
Every man is "dead in trespasses and sins" (Ephesians 2:1) and "alienated and an enemy in his mind" toward God by his wicked works (Colossians 1:21). In this condition, no man ever naturally desires to know and walk with God. And so, God must initiate the process leading to a person's salvation, entirely apart from, and in contradiction to, their natural inclination. This means that our desire to be saved has nothing to do with whether or not God saves us. He is not governed by our wants or wishes in bringing us into relationship with Himself. And it stands to reason, then, that our desire toward Him after salvation, strong or weak, does not dictate whether or not He continues to relate to us as our Heavenly Father.
2. God saves us; we don't save ourselves.
God is responsible for drawing us to Christ (John 6:44), for illuminating our minds to His truth and causing repentance (2 Timothy 2:25), and for spiritually regenerating us by His Spirit who places the believer in Christ. (Romans 8:9-11; Titus 3:5). God also justifies, and sanctifies the born-again believer (1 Corinthians 1:30-31), giving him both the desire and the ability to do His will (Philippians 2:13). At every turn, it is God acting upon and for the believer, bringing them on into deeper fellowship with Himself. Salvation, then, is a work of God, not a work of Man. Apart from God, no man has the power to do anything for God - certainly not to bear the responsibility for his own salvation. God has done it all. It remains only for the believer to receive His saving work, not labour to create and sustain his own salvation.
3. God takes responsibility for a believer's continued life in Him.
Philippians 1:6
6 being confident of this very thing, that He who has begun a good work in you will complete it until the day of Jesus Christ;
What God started in saving a person, He promises to complete. He does not break His promises.
1 Thessalonians 5:23-24
23 Now may the God of peace Himself sanctify you completely; and may your whole spirit, soul, and body be preserved blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.
24 He who calls you is faithful, who also will do it.
Here is another biblical promise of God's faithful preservation of the believer unto the "coming of our Lord Jesus Christ." There are no caveats to this promise, no "only if you do thus-and-so." God takes on the burden of bringing us to our eternal destiny with Him and so we can rest easy in His power to preserve us unto that destiny.
Ephesians 2:10
10 For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them.
The genuinely saved person is God's "workmanship" created, not by his good works, but unto (in the KJV), or for, them. It is God, though, who has prepared beforehand - or ordained in the KJV - that those whom He has saved should "walk" in good works. Paul here emphasizes that the believer's salvation is more than a chance occurrence, depending ultimately upon their whim, upon the vacillations of their desire, but is a divinely predetermined circumstance. As such, it is not susceptible to dissolution by human will or power. There are other verses/passages which emphasize this fact very clearly:
Romans 8:29
29 For whom He foreknew, He also predestined to be conformed to the image of His Son, that He might be the firstborn among many brethren.
God has not merely invited people to receive salvation but has, in His omniscience, His foreknowledge, predestined, or predetermined them to salvation. How God does this through His omniscience without violating human free will is best explained, I think, by Molinism, but, be that as it may, God's predestination of the believer to salvation implies an inevitability and an irreversibility to that salvation that imparts to the believer great assurance and confidence in the permanency of their salvation.
Ephesians 1:4-5
4 just as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blame before Him in love,
5 having predestined us to adoption as sons by Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the good pleasure of His will,
Paul here again points out that our salvation is predetermined, a set reality, that cannot be reversed. God has chosen us to be His before the world's foundations were laid. Can ignorant, finite, impotent Man reverse God's eternal determination that he should be saved? Obviously not. And so, the believer can be confident that God will see to it that they are made "holy and without blame before Him in love." He will bring to full completion the saving work He began in each of His children.
1 Corinthians 1:7-9
7 ...eagerly waiting for the revelation of our Lord Jesus Christ,
8 who will also confirm you to the end, that you may be blameless in the day of our Lord Jesus Christ.
9 God is faithful, by whom you were called into the fellowship of His Son, Jesus Christ our Lord.
4. Salvation is a Person.
John 14:6
6 Jesus said to him, "I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me.
1 John 5:11-12
11 And this is the testimony: that God has given us eternal life, and this life is in His Son.
12 He who has the Son has life; he who does not have the Son of God does not have life.
Colossians 3:3-4
3 For you died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.
4 When Christ who is our life appears, then you also will appear with Him in glory.
Salvation is not fundamentally constituted of a set of propositions, of truths, but is found in a Person: Jesus Christ, the Saviour. Jesus is salvation. And he gives himself to us entirely and freely upon our trusting in him as Saviour and Lord. In him the believer finds redemption, justification, sanctification (1 Corinthians 1:30), crucifixion (Galatians 2:20; Romans 6:6-8), and glorification (Romans 6:5; Romans 8:17-18). He is the believer's life. All that Jesus has done for the believer in atoning for their sin has been done perfectly, completely fulfilling all of the demands of the Father's justice and holiness (Isaiah 53:11; Hebrews 9:12; Hebrews 9:25-28). There is nothing left for the lost sinner to do in gaining acceptance from God but, by faith, to receive and manifest the life of Christ. As Paul wrote, the believer merely works out what God has first worked in. (Philippians 2:12-13)
What, then, of the need for the believer to sustain their salvation by their good works? Is the believer accepted by God on the basis of their good works? No. (Ephesians 2:8-9; 2 Timothy 1:9; Titus 3:5) Has Christ's atoning work at Calvary fully satisfied God? Yes. Does the believer find all that God requires from him in Christ? Yes. How is it, then, that God requires the believer to sustain his salvation by good deeds? Christ has done it all. There is nothing more God requires from us to be in relationship with Himself than for us to believe it. What an evil doctrine it is, then, to propose that the believer can add to Christ's perfect saving work, that his atonement is not complete, that God requires something of us, too, in order for our salvation, for Christ, to be truly and irrevocably ours.
Colossians 2:9-14
9 For in Him dwells all the fullness of the Godhead bodily;
10 and you are complete in Him, who is the head of all principality and power.
11 In Him you were also circumcised with the circumcision made without hands, by putting off the body of the sins of the flesh, by the circumcision of Christ,
12 buried with Him in baptism, in which you also were raised with Him through faith in the working of God, who raised Him from the dead.
13 And you, being dead in your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, He has made alive together with Him, having forgiven you all trespasses,
14 having wiped out the handwriting of requirements that was against us, which was contrary to us. And He has taken it out of the way, having nailed it to the cross.
5. Good works are inevitable in the Christian life, but they are not, therefore, necessary.
It's been observed that an apple tree bears apples, not in order to be an apple tree but because it is an apple tree. The fruit an apple tree produces merely manifests its nature: An apple tree bears apples. This is true of the Christian also. The spiritual "fruit" he bears is a manifestation of who he is in Christ. If the apple tree is healthy and mature, and if the Christian is healthy and mature, both will bear their respective fruit. It's inevitable. While this is true, it doesn't follow that because a healthy, mature apple tree will bear apples, it must, therefore, bear apples. Many apple trees don't bear apples. Regardless, they are still apple trees. So, too, the Christian. If he is spiritually healthy and mature, he will bear spiritual fruit, but this doesn't mean, therefore, that he must bear such fruit. Many truly born-again Christians don't bear spiritual fruit. They are spiritually immature or malnourished, or diseased by false doctrine, they also may be hampered by old sinful habits, besetting sins, that hinder spiritual fruit production. Until these issues are resolved, bearing spiritual fruit is difficult, if not impossible. But, regardless, these spiritually fruitless people are still Christians. Paul wrote to just such Christians in his various letters to the Early Church. His first letter to the Corinthians, in particular, is to very unfruitful, even carnal, believers. Read chapters 3, 5, 6 and 11. In these chapters, Paul delineates the sin of which the Corinthians were guilty: gross sexual sin, petty jealousy, pride, litigiousness, contentiousness, etc. But he also makes it clear he considered them brothers and sisters in Christ:
1 Corinthians 1:2
2 To the church of God which is at Corinth, to those who are sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be saints, with all who in every place call on the name of Jesus Christ our Lord, both theirs and ours:
1 Corinthians 3:1-3
1 And I, brethren, could not speak to you as to spiritual people but as to carnal, as to babes in Christ.
2 I fed you with milk and not with solid food; for until now you were not able to receive it, and even now you are still not able;
3 for you are still carnal. For where there are envy, strife, and divisions among you, are you not carnal and behaving like mere men?
1 Corinthians 3:9
9 For we are God's fellow workers; you are God's field, you are God's building.
1 Corinthians 3:16-17
16 Do you not know that you are the temple of God and that the Spirit of God dwells in you?
1 Corinthians 3:23
23 And you are Christ's, and Christ is God's.
Paul acknowledged that the Corinthian believers ought to have been bearing spiritual fruit but, because of their spiritual immaturity and carnality, they were caught up in all manner of sin. He recognized that good works would be inevitable in a mature, healthy believer but he did not think, then, that they were necessary, that a Christian could not be a Christian without good works.
Part of the problem here between the saved-and-lost (SAL) and OSAS proponents is that SAL folk want to lay down a line beyond which a person can sin themselves out of their salvation. There must be some good works, they say, but what constitutes "some"? No one can say. And when they try, they quickly become legalistic. The Bible gives no hard and fast, clearly-identifiable line beyond which lies the loss of one's salvation. And this is because, for the genuinely born-again believer, there is no such line.
7. "Tares" in the Church.
The writers of the New Testament all acknowledged that within the Church, the Body of Believers, "tares" were present (Matthew 13:24-43), "false brethren," Paul called them (2 Corinthians 11:26; Galatians 2:4), false converts, who shared in the life and work of the Church but were not truly born-again (Matthew 7:21-23). In almost every instance that the SAL proponent offers in support of their idea that a believer can lose his salvation, it is evident that a false convert, or unbeliever, is in view. Hebrews 6:4-6 or 2 Peter 2:20-22 are prime examples. The SAL folk, seeing these passages through their SAL presupposition, immediately assume a fallen believer is being described. It never even occurs to them to understand the verses as saying anything else. But, this is the terrible power of our presuppositions. Knowing that "tares" have always occupied the Church, and having my own OSAS presupposition in place, it seems blindingly obvious to me that the passage in Hebrews 6 and 2 Peter 2 could only be referring to false converts. Certainly, the fact of "tares" in the Church makes this at least distinctly possible.
Usually, when all these things are laid out for the SAL proponent, they respond by saying that the rest of Scripture qualifies and restricts how one can understand them. They then cite all of the verses/passages they think indicate their own SAL presupposition. But their sense of qualification and restriction is always predominantly in one direction, the SAL proof-texts diminishing or negating the OSAS ones. They never seem to realize that, as much as they want their favorite proof-texts to qualify the verses/passages the OSAS person produces out of an OSAS line entirely, their proof-texts are also qualified and restricted by the verses/passages the OSAS proponents uses in support of their view. In other words, it isn't that SAL soteriology only constricts OSAS soteriology but that OSAS soteriology constricts SAL soteriology. To what degree this is so is, really, the fundamental debate between the two soteriological points of view.
