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TOO MANY BODY PIERCINGS

The great reformer Martin Luther certainly believed in assurance of salvation, and forcefully attacked the religious systems of the day which denied it. He believed in what we would call “the joy of adoption.” But he did NOT believe in “once saved, always saved.” How come?

It was five minutes before Showtime. The concert hall was packed, the spotlights were sizzling, the soundboard was vibrating, the guitars and keyboards were plugged into their amps. Behind the curtain, the lead singer gathered together with her band and her backup singers and all the dancers who were part of her entourage. It was the same before every concert: “Let’s have prayer.” Before the curtain went up for the two-hour rock extravaganza, the entire team always prayed together. That was the way this musical superstar wanted it.

You and I read about it these several years later, and we’re touched by that kind of spiritual dedication. Asking God to bless and use your talents. Seeking His will, dedicating your performance to Him. It sounds nice, doesn’t it?

The challenge is this: pop icon Madonna would then take the stage for her Blonde Ambition rock tour and give the audience 120 minutes of shameless vulgarity, X-rated song lyrics, promiscuous dance moves, and all sorts of sacrilegious symbolism. I won’t insult you with the details, but the average Christian, hearing about the prayer and then seeing the show itself, would have to sense a very distressing dichotomy. Something here doesn’t match up. The prayer and the show are seemingly headed in opposite directions.

What makes this a hard illustration, hitched to a hard Bible doctrine — assurance of salvation — is that Madonna has a Catholic background. However you wish to define it, she’s “in the Church.” Those prayers before concerts are real. So we continue to wrestle with the question: To what extent can an adopted son or daughter of God know that they will always STAY adopted?

There’s a web page called “Catholic Answers” which addresses this very difficult question. Does it matter how Madonna behaves on stage? Is she guaranteed to move from her Hollywood Hills mansion to one in heaven one day soon?

“For many Fundamentalists and Evangelicals,” the site says, “it makes no difference — as far as salvation is concerned — how you live or end your life. You can heed the altar call at church, announce that you’ve accepted Jesus as your personal Savior, and, so long as you really believe it, you’re set. From that point on there is nothing you can do, no sin you can commit, no matter how heinous, that will forfeit your salvation. You can’t undo your salvation, even if you wanted to.”

We’ll explore that statement a bit more, but from the salvation perspective of ADOPTION, assurance would sound wonderful except for that last line right there. Would a child want to be adopted and feel, in his new home, not safe but imprisoned? Borrowing from that classic line from the Eagles and “Hotel California,” “You can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave”? If you’re “once saved,” are you required to always STAY saved?

We’ve used as a kind of second textbook in this series the wonderful book by J. I. Packer, entitled Knowing God. And he confesses that this concept of security of salvation is extremely difficult: a “tangled skein,” is how he puts it. The Reformers equated true saving faith with assurance — as opposed to simply “head knowledge.”

“They called it fiducia,” he writes —“‘confidence’ — confidence, that is, first in the truth of God’s promise of pardon and life to believing sinners, and second in its application to oneself as a believer.”

He continues:

“‘Faith,’ declared [Martin] Luther, ‘is a living deliberate confidence in the grace of God, so certain that for it one could die a thousand deaths, and such confidence . . . makes us joyous, intrepid, and cheerful towards God and all creation.” And now please brace yourself for this, as I continue Packer’s quoting of Luther: “[Luther] attacked ‘that pernicious doctrine of the Papists, which taught that no man knows certainly whether he be in the favor of God or not; whereby they utterly defaced the doctrine of faith, tormented men’s consciences, banished Christ right out of the Church, and denied all the benefits of the Holy Spirit.”

Wow! That is heavy sledding, friend. In all honesty, the Catholic Church’s own web sites here in 2004 consistently proclaim the position that salvation can be lost — specifically through what the Church defines as “mortal sin.” The three condition in the Catechism are as follows:

“Sin whose object is grave matter and which is also committed with full knowledge and deliberate consent.”

One church web site, in a long list under the headings of the various Ten Commandments, included such things as: putting faith in horoscopes, being married by a justice of the peace, using God’s name intentionally as a curse, telling a lie, missing mass without a serious reason, doing unnecessary work on Sunday, getting an abortion or voting for a pro-abortion candidate, using birth control, driving under the influence or in a deliberately reckless way, getting excessive tattoos or body piercing . . . and the list goes on. If a born-again Christian commits any of these sins, he or she is in a lost state, needing confession and the sacrament of penance. In fact, one definition of “mortal sins” is worded as follows:

“Sins so serious that the grace of justification can be destroyed within a man.”

Now, let me humbly say this. This is not a Catholic versus Protestant issue. It’s true that the doctrines of mortal sin and penance are distinctly part of the Church of Rome. But it is decidedly not true that every Protestant or every evangelical in the world is in the “once saved, always saved” camp. A quick tour on the worldwide web will quickly tell you that, and, to be very frank, my own Adventist denomination does not hold to that position, partly because of our fear of that line we quoted earlier: “You can’t undo your salvation, even if you wanted to.” God believes in free will, and He does not take hostages. An adopted son or daughter can un-adopt themselves if they decide to leave Dad’s kingdom.

Here in our five-week radio study, we depart for a moment from the viewpoints espoused by this eminent Bible teacher, Dr. James Packer, because in his opinion, the Bible teaches that salvation is an absolutely irrevocable gift that cannot be lost — especially within the framework of adoption.

“If God in love has made Christians His children,” he writes, “and if He is perfect as a Father, two things would seem to follow, in the nature of the case. First, the family relationship must be an abiding one, lasting forever. Perfect parents do not cast off their children. Christians may act the prodigal, but God will not cease to act the prodigal’s Father. Second, God will go out of His way to make His children feel His love for them and know their privilege and security as members of His family. Adopted children need assurance that they belong, and a perfect parent will not withhold it.”

It’s hard to find fault with any of that, isn’t it? We mentioned yesterday a book which “seconds” this view: Protestants & Catholics: Do They Now Agree?, by John Ankerberg and John Weldon. They present the position of many — not all —Protestants in this paragraph:

“Christ is the unchanging basis of a man’s justification. Therefore, once a person believed in Christ, he was entirely and eternally secure. In essence, because salvation was a gift from God based solely on Christ’s atoning death, the number of good or bad deeds in a person’s life” — mortal sins, venial, or otherwise — “would never change a person’s perfect standing before God.”

That’s drawn from several prominent books: Eternal Security: You Can Be Sure, by Charles Stanley; Shall Never Perish, by J. F. Strombeck; Secure Forever, by H. Barker; Salvation Is Forever, by Robert Gromacki; Once Saved, Always Saved, by R. T. Kendall. A couple of chapters later, Ankerberg and Weldon reemphasize their position even more forcefully:

“The Bible teaches,” they write, “that any person who simply and truly believes in Jesus Christ as his or her personal Savior from sin is at that moment irrevocably and eternally justified.”

Interestingly, that word “irrevocably” is found in the Bible, Romans chapter 11. Notice this in verse 29:

“God’s gifts and His call are irrevocable.”

So friend, you can pick your long list of venerable theologians and go on either side. There are many Ph.D.’s on both ends of this difficult spectrum. Time is up, but we add a necessary P.S. to what these gifted writers quote Martin Luther as saying. Despite his own very strong words against “pernicious doctrines of the Papists,” and how Christians should have joy and assurance, it turns out that even Luther, the Reformer, did not believe in “once saved, always saved.” Here’s the word-for-word concession from Ankerberg and Weldon:

“We should point out that although Luther agreed that the merits of Christ were the sole basis of a man’s justification, and that it did not depend in any way on a man’s deeds, Luther still thought that a man COULD lose his justification if he TOTALLY AND FINALLY TURNED AWAY FROM CHRIST. Since God’s gift of forgiveness of sins and eternal life was appropriated by faith, if a man decided not to rest his eternal destiny in Christ, and totally turned against Him, Luther believed that only then would a man lose his salvation. In other words, the only sin that Luther thought would cause a man to lose his salvation was the sin of unrepentant apostasy.”

That’s a heavy note to end on, but notice what it preserves: our joy of adoption. Our assurance, because the decision is always ours. Best of all, our freedom. Dad runs a home, not a prison.

Stay tuned.