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NASB | John 10:28 and I give eternal life to them, and they will never perish; and no one will snatch them out of My hand. |
AMPLIFIED 2015 | John 10:28 "And I give them eternal life, and they will never, ever [by any means] perish; and no one will ever snatch them out of My hand. |
Subject: The Myth of Temporary Salvation |
Bible Note: Once upon a time in a village called Vanity Fair there dwelt a community made up of sinners, saints and saint wannabes. The saints let their light shine for their Lord in the midst of a crooked and perverse generation. Yet under the shelter of God's wings, all was well until a look-alike professor of religion took into his head the strangest fantasy ever known. He imagined that his brethren were inferior to him in his great understanding of the Word of the Lord. He decided that he alone, among the saints, was right and everyone else was wrong. In his dementia was born the idea that all he needed was his Bible and no outside help. He reasoned since (other) men were fallible, yet he himself was not, that he would ignore the teachers that his Savior had given to the church. He knew the Scriptures taught that the Spirit had given gifts to men and that his Lord had given those gifted men, including pastors and teachers, to the church. But since the idea did not seem reasonable to him, he thought it best to ignore that Scripture and devise some scheme to explain away what it clearly said and meant. How thrilled was he with his new freedom and power (as he thought) derived from being so close to God that he had a special insight, a direct line to God, that no one else had. But soon he became dissatisfied. He wondered what good did it do him to possess this new truth, if he was the only man who knew about it. He began travelling far and wide, preaching his new revelation. Soon he drew a small following. Having started on the path of solo Scriptura (me and my Bible), he was now unstoppable. He decided to bestow upon himself a license to forget or twist any and all Scripture that he in his wisdom did not understand, agree with or find reasonable. After disassociating himself from more than 1,000 years of church history -- indeed pretending there was no such thing -- he decided that one need not interpet the Bible in light of what the rest of Scripture had to say about a subject. He deemed it sufficient to base an entire teaching on a few select verses taken out of context. He was delighted to discover that the parables of his Lord contained figurative language upon which he could superimpose any interpretation that came into his head. Soon, he reasoned that Eternal Life by definition could just as easily be temporary as not. Further, he found it convenient to take all the literal language of the Bible as figurative and to interpet all the figurative language as literal. Having an unteachable spirit he lacked the ability to discern between figurative and literal (plain) passages. He soon found that nothing is impossible to him who does NOT believe. Eventually, he came across an idea that appealed to his pride -- the idea that although God may be the one to do the saving, He (God) wasn't able to keep a person saved without that person's help. That if he manipulated the Scriptures enough, for example, adding the words "But you can separate yourself from God" to the ending of Romans 8 and adding the words "But you can take yourself out of God's hand" to the inspired words of John 10, then he could deny God's righteousness and go about to set up his own righteousness. Then he would have something to be proud of -- the work of his own hands, not unlike the idol makers and worshippers of past centuries. Though he had never heard it said, he instinctively knew that if a lie is repeated enough times, some people will eventually believe it. Soon he was defining the following words to suit himself: grace, faith, works, eternal and other key words of the Bible. In short, he rejected the light that had already been given him, and his Creator and Redeemer gave him over to a reprobate mind to do those things which were not fitting. And that is how the revolving-door, roller-coaster-ride, works-oriented doctrine of Eternal Insecurity was born into the world. Since then many professing Christians have chosen to reject, disbelieve, and ignore God's Word and replace it with their own fevered fantasy. The moral of the story: we know what the Bible means by what it says. If you twist it long enough and hard enough you can falsely get it to mean whatever you want it to -- that is, until God does to false prophets what they have done to His Word. Just as they have taken away from the words of His Book, so He will swiftly take them away to destruction. |