BLESSED ASSURANCE
John 10:28,29 I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish; no one can snatch them out of my hand. My Father, who has given them to me, is greater than all; no one can snatch them out of my Father’s hand. I and the Father are one.”
Can anyone including Satan and the powers of darkness take away our salvation? No! Can we willingly give it up? Yes! Once saved, always saved is just not true. Most all people that believe this tend to believe in Calvinist thinking regarding predestination. They believe that God has created certain people to find forgiveness through Jesus, and literally nothing they can stop them from having it. Also because of this they believe that once becoming a Christian there is nothing a Christian can do to not go to heaven. They are locked in so to speak. Right along with this is the logical conclusion that if God has created some to go to heaven then he has created others not to go to heaven. This is called double predestination. With this thinking there is certainly assurance. It can be good news or bad news. If you are going to heaven it is good news. If you are not it is not so good. Either way it is out of your control. If you are going to heaven you can fight as hard as you might, but you're going to heaven. If you are going to hell, no matter how good you try to be you will slip up and into hell you go. These same people follow this line of thinking into everyday life. They feel we don’t have much control over what will happen in our life. God is in control and if today you are doomed to have a car accident, you will have one.
If you have read very many of my devotionals or my commentary, you know by now I do not believe this way, but I believe in free will. If we do not have a free will, why does God test us? As we see with Abraham in Genesis 22:12 where the angel of the Lord says, “Now I know that you fear God, because you have not withheld from me your son, your only son.” We can go back even further to Adam and eve and the tree in the garden.
There are at least 24 verses that warn of turning away from Jesus. John 6:66 tells us that even in Jesus’ days on earth many of his disciples turned back and no longer followed him. Hebrews 3:12 says, “See to it, brothers that none of you has a sinful, unbelieving heart that turns away from the living God.” II Peter 2:24 tells us, “It would have been better for them not to have known the way of righteousness than to have known it, and then to turn their backs on the sacred commandment that was passed on to them.”
According to John 3:6 Jesus came for whosoever that believed in him might have eternal life. How can God be just , righteous and holy for sending people to hell to suffer for all eternity if they were predestined to go to hell. We are certainly not more righteous than God, and yet we wouldn’t punish someone for doing something that they had no choice in doing.
Romans 8:29 talks about predestination. It says that, “For those that God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the likeness of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brothers. And those he predestined, he also called, he also justified; those he justified, he also glorified. So in other words God created us to be righteous and holy like Jesus, but because of our free will everyone can choose to sin.
All creation has freedom, at least limited freedom. While God can use all of creation to do his will, he doesn’t sit back and think how can I use creation to bring frustration and sorrow? While this is certainly true, if a Christian will pray for God to intervene in the freedom of creation. God will help, protect and bless us, if we only ask. If there is a bad storm coming, and we ask him to protect us he will. If we are having a drought he will send rain. And God will also work within our free will as well, if we ask God to help us. Because of our free will, we can limit God to even helping us. I believe that we will still have a free will with our new resurrected body. Without it and we can not love the Lord. All of God’s angels have a free will. This is the reason why Satan and the other fallen angels could rebel from the Lord. If they didn’t have a free will it wouldn’t have been rebellion. They would have been obedient.
So do we need to fear of losing our forgiveness and reconciliation with God? Romans 8:35-39 says, “Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword? As it is written: “For your sake we face death all day long; we are considered as sheep to be slaughtered. No in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
I believe that this tells us that we can have assurance that we will always have our forgiveness and eternal life with Jesus as long as we want it. What I do believe we need to fear is no longer loving Jesus and putting him first in our life.
Prayer: Thank you Lord Jesus for your assurance regarding our salvation and your love for us. Please keep us to yourself and help us to never stop loving you. We ask this in your holy name.
