Is it Warranted to Say You Are Already Guaranteed to be Saved?

2 Peter 1:4 speaks of those with authentic faith in Christ as “having escaped the corruption that is in the world through lust.” This can rightfully be said of anyone who is presently justified through Christ. Yet this is not the end of the Christian life. It is rather the beginning. All diligence is required going forward (see 2 Peter 1:5-11). The things which Peter wrote in the epistle of 2 Peter are practically one continual warning to the Christians that their ultimate salvation is not guaranteed unconditionally nor automatically. They rather need to be steadfast in doing right before God and abstaining from sin while not heeding those who deny the necessity of that. Jude would essentially devote his epistle to the same theme. Like Peter, Jude connected his warnings with deceivers who teach unconditional eternal security and disconnect saving faith in Christ from a person’s actual deeds.

Those who teach unconditional security (or, Once Saved Always Saved) doctrine think they’re clever when they try to defend their doctrine with the question “How can you lose eternal life?” They throw out this question in a rhetorical sense to try to make those who believe contrary seem foolish. However, the examples and instructions of the Bible demonstrate that the possibility of eternal life being lost is a basic Bible concept. You just have to read the first three chapters of the Bible to see how eternal life can be lost. Those who say otherwise essentially claim that the Serpent told Eve the truth when he said she would not surely die by eating of the forbidden fruit. Saying that Adam and Eve lost the spiritual life from God in them and became separated from Him is just another way of saying that they lost eternal life.

Refusal to be subject to God’s authority is what brought us into spiritual death and put us in need of an unspeakably costly atonement. A valid restoration from our fall would have to involve a real solution to both these problems. We need the atoning death of Christ to wash our sins away and we need His Spirit to be restored to spiritual life. We need to repent of sin and be subject to God’s authority through Him in order to be justified through His atoning blood and born-again through His Holy Spirit.

John 17:3: “And this is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent.”

1 John 2:4: “He that saith, I know him, and keepeth not his commandments, is a liar, and the truth is not in him.”

The eternal life that those who truly believe in Christ receive in this life is a pledge or a deposit of eternal life rather than eternal life in its fullness. Ultimate salvation has not been finalized nor already arrived at for anyone in this life. The following things were all spoken directly to Christians who had really been born again and given a pledge of eternal life.

1 Timothy 6:12: “Fight the good fight of faith, lay hold on eternal life, whereunto thou art also called, and hast professed a good profession before many witnesses.”

Revelation 2:7: “He that hath an ear, let him hear what the Spirit saith unto the churches; To him that overcometh will I give to eat of the tree of life, which is in the midst of the paradise of God.”

Fullness of eternal life is only granted on Judgment Day after one endures faithfully on the narrow way to life in Christ until the end. Those who enter that way but don’t endure in subjection to the authority of Christ lose eternal life. This does not negate the truth that some who think they’ve entered that way never really did at all.

There is free-will after a genuine conversion as well as beforehand. Those who think that Christian works of righteousness are just a by-product of conversion which happen automatically are greatly in error. The warnings given in the Bible to Christians about their danger of departing from the Lord by becoming hardened in sin are straightforward and numerous.

A frequent refuge for those who attempt to represent God’s grace in Christ as a license to sin is the concept of the carnal Christian. Though we see in 1 Corinthians chapter 3 that Paul called the Corinthian Christians carnal, this was said as a rebuke which was intended to destroy their improper high regard for their own spirituality. A key goal in the writing of 1 Corinthians was rescuing the Corinthians out of their carnal ways which they had regressed into after their conversion. Paul would make it clear in 1 Corinthians (and throughout his epistles overall) that there is no ultimate salvation for those who persist in carnality.

1 Corinthians 11:31-32: “For if we would judge ourselves, we should not be judged. But when we are judged, we are chastened of the Lord, that we should not be condemned with the world.”

We also read in Hebrews 12:9: “Furthermore we have had fathers of our flesh which corrected us, and we gave them reverence: shall we not much rather be in subjection unto the Father of spirits, and live?”

The Lord chastens His own children to bring them back into line with Him when they go astray from Him (i.e. astray from subjection to His authority). If they don’t get in line by receiving the correction which that chastening is intended to produce, they will yet be condemned with the world. The Corinthians had to get back in line or be damned. Carnal Christians go to hell.

To say that the teaching of Lordship salvation is wrong because it doesn’t make provision for the carnal Christian is like saying the teaching that humans need to breathe air to live is wrong because it doesn’t make provision for those who are suffocating.

Enduring on the narrow way involves much striving against the powers of darkness and denying one’s own carnal tendencies. To think that anyone still living in a mortal body’s salvation is already guaranteed is a denial of Jesus Christ’s Lordship and also a denial of His High Priesthood. The Christian needs to relate to the Father through Christ’s High Priesthood in order to have their record kept clean. There is no need for Christ to save you to the uttermost (i.e. all the way to the end) if you are already guaranteed to be saved in the end.

Hebrews 7:24-25: “But this man, because he continueth ever, hath an unchangeable priesthood. Wherefore he is able also to save them to the uttermost that come unto God by him, seeing he ever liveth to make intercession for them.”

Matthew 24:13: “But he that shall endure unto the end, the same shall be saved.”

The verses leading up to Matthew 24:13 demonstrate that enduring to the end can only happen as one walks in subjection to God’s law. The very essence of carnality is not being subject to His law.

Romans 8:7-8: “Because the carnal mind is enmity against God: for it is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can be. So then they that are in the flesh cannot please God.”

Paul would go on to show that those who have been born-again by God’s Spirit need to not resist the Spirit’s leading afterwards by living after the flesh. This is a matter of eternal life and death. Dying in Romans 8:13 is obviously a reference to eternal condemnation while living in Romans 8:13 is referring to ultimate salvation. Every one of the Roman Christians went on to die naturally whether they remained faithful to the Lord or not.

Romans 8:13: “For if ye live after the flesh, ye shall die: but if ye through the Spirit do mortify the deeds of the body, ye shall live.”

Christians have never been relieved from needing to use God’s law as their guide to acceptable faith in Christ. Though we have been released from keeping the ceremonies of Judaism, the grace of Christ does not relieve anyone from the requirement of being subject to God’s moral law. Jesus upholds the righteousness of God’s law and hates transgression of it.

Hebrews 1:8-9: “But unto the Son he saith, Thy throne, O God, is for ever and ever: a scepter of righteousness is the scepter of thy kingdom. Thou hast loved righteousness, and hated iniquity (that is, anomia in the Greek- lawlessness); therefore God, even thy God, hath anointed thee with the oil of gladness above thy fellows.”