The following "Question" was asked by a member of the congregation at Grace Community Church in Sun Valley, California, and "Answered" by their pastor, John MacArthur Jr. It was transcribed by Brenda Rivera of Orlando, Florida from the tape, GC 1301-O, titled "Bible Questions and Answers Part 17."  A copy of the tape can be obtained by writing, Word of Grace, P.O. Box 4000, Panorama City, CA 91412 or by dialing toll free 1-800-55-GRACE. ©1978. All Rights Reserved.

Question

I have a question that my sister wants some answers to and I think you’ll do a better job. She’s a brand new Christian and we come from a Catholic background and she’s having a little bit of difficulty with the fact that you do not loose your salvation even if you do backslide. So can you elaborate on that?

Answer

So, just to help you understand why you don’t loose your salvation? There are a lot of reasons by the way.

1. The primary one being that the Bible does not indicate that you can loose your salvation. Anybody who believes you can loose your salvation is unable to find a single statement in the scripture that says that. There is no place in the Bible that says you can loose your salvation.

2. On the other hand, everywhere it says your salvation last how long? How long does it last? Forever. Forever. Now to me that is the issue, if the Bible said your salvation lasts as long as you hang on to it. That would be very clear, but it says it lasts forever. How long is forever? And then people say, “well, what about so and so and what about this and what about that” and then you start bringing in all of these exceptions and all these confusions, and then they say, "Well I had an old aunt and she used to go to church and she read her Bible and all this, all of a sudden she bailed out, she left the church and didn’t walk with the Lord, she curses...she lost her salvation." But you see you can’t redefine the Bible on the basis of your old aunt. But that’s what people do. If you can’t explain your old aunt don’t change scripture. Define the situation through the scripture and go to 1 John 2:19 where it says “they went out from us because they were not of us, they went out from us that it might be made manifest they never were of us, if they had been of us they would have remained with us.” The key thing is you can not defend that biblically, so it is an extrapolation from experience, the inability to really describe what happens in a person’s life. Any other way then to say they lost their salvation when there are other explanations, and the other explanation is that they were never saved to begin with.

3. Let me take another approach. The Bible says those who were saved were chosen in Him before the foundation of the world, right? So whoever He chose, was redeemed because of His sovereign choice. In John 6, Jesus said this “all that the Father gives to me, shall come to me and I have lost none of them, but I’ll raise him up at the last day.” The security of the believer then is bound up in the character of eternal life, which is eternal salvation, and it is bound up in the decree of God. And that’s how it is.

And so the idea that you can loose your salvation is an accommodation to human misunderstanding, in other words, because people aren’t able to figure out what happened in somebody’s life they therefore determine you can loose your salvation.

4. Now let me give you one other thought. I think the reason people have come up with the doctrine of the fact that you can loose your salvation is because they never had a strong enough salvation to begin with. They let too many people in cheap and then when they bail out they question the eternality of salvation rather than questioning the legitimacy of that salvation to start with. You know, in the Book of Hebrews it says it says, “you’ll be saved if you continue” if you continue, if you don’t fall away. And that’s true, because if you don’t fall away you prove that your salvation was the real thing. But if you fall away you’ve proved it wasn’t real to begin with.

So I think maybe those thoughts can give you some help. Salvation that is genuine results in a new creation, you’ve been born again unto eternal life and that’s the only way the Bible ever describes it. It’s eternal. But it’s our weak doctrine of salvation that gets us into trouble with that.
 
Added to Bible Bulletin Board's "MacArthur’s Questions and Answers" by:

Tony Capoccia
Bible Bulletin Board
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