Says what?
Ya, I'm not talking about these people. Every human will have had enough observable proof of God for their judgement by God. That will be totally Gods call.
But, not my point.
It will never use terms we use today. They are modern words for Biblical details. So, ya, not going to hear or read " did you accept Christ into your heart".
God's requirement for salvation is simple, "believe" in Christ, "believe" He was Christ the son of God, "believe" He can forgive your sins, "believe" He died for you, basically believe.... and.... that takes one thing.....Faith.
This is what saves us, Faith to believe that what Christ said is the truth and we are saved by our faith in His Mercy and Grace.
I fail to see the relevance of the "too whom much is given" quote. That is expected all of us. Our talents, gifts, wealth, time.... In any event, these are not to question our salvation. They are to determine our rewards in our guaranteed final home in paradise.
Like you said before, you cannot sin away salvation. You can also not lose it though not doing what you are capable of doing.
This is the only unforgivable sin:
Mark 3:28-29New American Standard Bible (NASB)
28 “Truly I say to you, all sins shall be forgiven the sons of men, and whatever blasphemies they utter; 29 but whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit never has forgiveness, but is guilty of an eternal sin”—
The problem is that believe, or Pistis, in the Greek, is not a one time thing. Pistis, or Pisteuo (verbal form), both come in the Perfect Continuous tense, something that doesn't really have a corollary in the English language. It means that it is something that must carry through continuously, and not just an action done once that has future effects.
The closest one could get to properly translating the word Pisteuo is to use the word "Faith" as a verb. In the English, the closest we have is faithfulness. To Pisteuo in God, you can't just do it once. You must live in Pistis continuously. Until your Pistis has the same nature as the Pistis of God, salvation, Sozo, is not yet complete in you. This is why Paul speaks of salvation in two different ways. We are saved, for we have been forgiven. That is even reflected in how we refer to salvation in the song which follows the receiving of Communion in the Orthodox Church:
We have found the true Light!
We have received the heavenly Spirit!
We have found the true Faith,
worshiping the undivided Trinity,
for He has saved us!
In terms of forgiveness, we are saved. However, salvation is also continuous, as Paul said, we "are being saved", as well. Certainly, we have received the forgiveness of God, but like any present we receive, we must put that gift to use if we expect to benefit from it. My mother received a Kitchenaid mixer for her birthday from my father. Now, if my mother were to put that mixer in the attic and never use it, would she have really benefited from that gift? Of course not! It will profit her nothing in a box in the attic. If she wishes to benefit from that gift, she must use the mixer, for the mixer will not use itself. Likewise, God will do nothing in our lives in any way which would compromise our free will. Certainly, there are many benefits of the gift of salvation. Christ Himself even said we would do greater things than He did. That was not said only of the Apostles, but of all the Saints. The reason we do not see miracles in the same way is because we are like Peter trying to walk on the water, to whom Christ would say "oh ye of little faith".
Salvation's greatest gift, however, is for us to become like God, through Christ. The person who has reached complete salvation is the person who has become, through the Grace which God is, what God is by nature. This is the fullest realization of what the Psalmist said in the Scriptures: “You
are gods, And all of you
are children of the Most High.” (Psalm 82:6) Now this does not mean we become EQUAL to God, for we will never be equal to Him. What it means is that we have rid ourselves of the Passions, those feelings of greed, lust, and pride, and replaced them with the Virtues by way of the Grace God gives us. This is the end of salvation, the glorification of the man to become what God intended from the beginning for us all to be.
This is why we are both saved in the past, being saved today, and we will be saved in the future.
I was saved 2000 years ago when God became man, and willingly gave up His life on the Cross to defeat death
I am being saved today in my constant struggle.
I will be saved in the future when God glorifies my body and rids it of all imperfections, both the physical colitis, anemia, and pain of this earth, and the spiritual lusts and sins which still linger in my flesh.
But He will not save the unwilling man. He respects us and loves us enough to allow us to be the deciding factor, not because we are more powerful than He, but because He loves us enough not to be overbearing. Certainly, God could save any person, with or without their will. But in His love for mankind, He is willing to let us choose to love Him.
This is why you cannot simply sin your salvation away. It is nothing like some kind of quota of sins or good deeds. There is no cosmic scale of justice upon which your good deeds are measured against your evils, for just as there are men like the thief on the cross who lived sinful lives and came to their senses in the last hours, there are also men who have lived what we would call virtuous lives, but for whatever reason, they gave up their virtue in the end, rejecting the God who they seemingly served their whole lives. It is not for us to judge them or their salvation. There are men whose good deeds were all done in secret, and so we only ever saw their evil. For all I know, any person who may seem to be unquestionably evil may be in heaven, and many who have seemingly declared the Faith their whole lives may be in torment in eternity.
Like a divorce, though, it is no secret to the two who split up why the relationship fell apart by the time one leaves Christ. We who are not party to the goings on between Christ and one who rejects Christ after seeming years of devotion may not know why one would reject Christ and turn to Atheism or Islam or whatever. What I do know is that the relationship which would have saved the man is no longer there in many cases. And Christ, though it pains Him, will not force someone to come under His wing, whether or not he had been there before.
It is not like he was plucked suddenly out of the flock. This sheep can choose to leave. That is what free will means. Free will is always free. It can change. Sure, it isn't very comforting. IT certainly would be easier for me to stick to the Eternal Security doctrine I was raised to believe from the time I was a child. But just like the difficult truth of the existence of evil in the world, some things must be accepted if we are to accept that man is given free will.
