You made a statement that appeared to attack the Bible's teaching on the “
work of faith” (
1 Thessalonians 1:3,
2 Thessalonians 1:11) being a part of the “
faith” (Which accesses the saving grace of God). So I put down a wall of Scripture for you and or others to dig into on one's own time to show that your belief is simply unbiblical. For information should not be our enemy.
What makes you think I am not aware of all the verses you posted? In fact, I am. Quite. And I
still hold the views I do on salvation - not by ignoring the verses you offered, but by properly synthesizing them with the entire counsel of Scripture, understanding any particular verse or passage
first and foremost in its immediate context.
One cannot isolate a text of Scripture at the expense of the rest of the Bible.
But you have a common practice - demonstrated in this very thread - of isolating a verse or passage from its immediate context! It's at least inconsistent of you to write what you do here but prooftext on a regular basis. Some would say its downright hypocritical.
We know that believers can fall away into spiritual death according to Scripture and then later become spiritually alive again.
"We" don't know this. In fact, I think this is an entirely spurious idea, quite in contradiction to basic, orthodox, Christian doctrine. Believers may halt their fellowship with God, their intimate communion with Him, but they cannot undo the saving work of God that brought them into relationship with Him. Believers have a choice in the level of the former but, once accomplished, none at all in the security of the latter.
The Parable of the Prodigal Son proves this point. When the Son came home to his father and sought forgiveness of his sins in living it up with prostitutes, his father said he was “dead” and he is ”alive AGAIN.” The father said he was lost, and now he is found. Generally when we speak of the lost we are talking about the unsaved. So the parable is speaking in spiritual terms.
We've had this discussion before. As I've told you in other threads in the past, the story illustrates the difference between
fellowship and
relationship. At no time in the parable is the Prodigal ever not his father's son. All throughout the parable, the Prodigal is confirmed in his relationship as a son to his father. And when the son returns home, his father repeatedly refers to him as his son. In what sense, then, was the son "dead"? He wasn't literally, physically dead; he wasn't dead relationally. The only thing that was "dead" (which term speaks of
separation, as in many other instances in Scripture) was the Prodigal's intimate, face-to-face
communion with his father. There was no
fellowship between them - just as there would have been none if the son had been separated from his father by actual death. In this sense, then, the Prodigal was "dead" to his father.
What spiritual truth does the parable communicate, then? It can't be speaking to the death of one's
relationship to God the Father because such a death never occurs in the parable between the father and his son. The son is always a son to his father in the parable; his relationship to his father is always secure. The only thing in the parable that "dies" is the
fellowship between father and son. It is the loss of this fellowship that is the focus of the parable, picturing the loss of an individual's fellowship, their intimate communion, with God.
At the end of the parable of the Prodigal the restoration of fellowship - not relationship - is emphasized:
Luke 15:21-24
21 And the son said to him, ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son.’
22 But the father said to his servants, ‘Bring quickly the best robe, and put it on him, and put a ring on his hand, and shoes on his feet.
23 And bring the fattened calf and kill it, and let us eat and celebrate.
24 For this my son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found.’ And they began to celebrate.
This parable spoken to Jews as it was, would have been quite scandalous. The father's behaviour, in particular, would have been thought quite appalling. His grace, and patience, and welcome to his prodigal son would have run opposite to all that the Jewish audience to whom Jesus was speaking would have expected from the father. As God's Chosen People, the Jews were in a relationship with God, though they had wandered far from Him. Jesus's parable of the Prodigal maintains the relationship of the Prodigal Son (Israel) to the father (Jehovah) and declares that although His Chosen People were, nationally, "in a far country" relative to their God, He was waiting for them to return to Him, His heart and arms open wide to receive them, should they repent of their "wandering" and come "home" to Him.
In this regard, the parable confirmed that God's relationship to His Chosen People, wayward though they were, had not "died." What's more, God was waiting with love and mercy to receive His wayward people to Himself, and to celebrate their repentant return to fellowship with Himself.
In light of these things, your idea that the parable teaches a saved-and-lost doctrine couldn't be more mistaken.
James 5:19-20 teaches a similiar truth, as well. It says to the brethren that if any of them errs from the truth and another faithful brother converts them back (living again in dedication to their life solely to Jesus), we are to let that brother who helped us back to serving the Lord again faithfully know that they helped to save a soul from death (spiritual death) and they helped to cover a multitude of sins (in the fact that they confessed of their sins to the Lord Jesus in coming back in rededication to Him).
James 5:19-20 (ESV)
19 My brothers, if anyone among you wanders from the truth and someone brings him back,
20 let him know that whoever brings back a sinner from his wandering will save his soul from death and will cover a multitude of sins.
James 5:19-20 (NASB)
19 My brethren, if any among you strays from the truth and one turns him back,
20 let him know that he who turns a sinner from the error of his way will save his soul from death and will cover a multitude of sins.
James 5:19-20 (YLT)
19 Brethren, if any among you may go astray from the truth, and any one may turn him back,
20 let him know that he who did turn back a sinner from the straying of his way shall save a soul from death, and shall cover a multitude of sins.
I've posted these versions of the two verses in
James 5 to show that there is a general consensus among translators that
verse 19 does
not say, "if any of
the brethren wanders from the truth," but uses a very generic referent instead: "
anyone among you."
John, Paul, Peter and James all acknowledge that within the Early Church were false teachers, and false brethren, and carnal, spiritually-juvenile believers. (
2 Corinthians 11:26; 2 Peter 2; James 4:1-4; 1 John 2:15-24) The Early Church community was not populated exclusively of truly spiritually-regenerate, born-again children of God. It is no surprise, then, that James wrote of "
anyone among you" rather than of "brethren" in
verse 19; for it would be these "tares" and carnal, spiritually-immature believers who would be wandering from the truth and need retrieval, not stable, mature, truly born-again children of God.
James 5:19-20 does not, then, make your saved-and-lost case for you. Only when you add to it, subtly altering what it actually says to conform to a saved-and-lost, works-salvation perspective, can it be forced into grounding such a perspective.
In contrast, I have had to add nothing whatever to what James wrote. He wrote "anyone" not "brethren" (as he does at least a couple of times earlier in the chapter) and that is how I understand him, not constraining his meaning, narrowing it, to fit my point of view, as you have done.
With this truth in mind, the tares in the Parable of the Weed could very well be those who went prodigal and never came back to the Lord. They also could be false nominal Christians from the get go, too. We don't know for sure.
I'm afraid not. See above.
We don't know for sure. We just know that they end up in turning out to be tares in the end. Not everyone starts off as a tare but they can end like one. Judas. The believing widows in
1 Timothy 5 who turned aside after Satan. Ananias and Sapphira. The list goes on and on.
These are all either never truly born-again people or people who, seen through your works-salvation doctrinal lens, you are obliged to think were unsaved. As I've just shown, however, your lens is skewing your reading of Scripture, forcing you to add to it, or twist it to fit what you've taken up as a soteriological perspective.
