I recently wrote a post about the Bible’s teaching on why having correct beliefs about who Jesus was and what he did in history is necessary in order to be considered righteous by the God of the universe.
Mary wrote a comment in response that I am reproducing below.
Take it away, Mary.
Really good post, WK! This is an important question. And to be a good friend you need to answer it for your friend – gently, but clearly and honestly – because truth is more important to your friend’s wellbeing than their comfort. You’ve done this very ably here.
A few things I’d like to add:
Firstly, the questioner is coming with the assumption that there actually are such things as truly good people. This is a common assumption. The problem with it is that it makes light of the depravity of man and undervalues the holiness of God. We need to understand how perfect and pure God is. We need to understand how sinful and impure we are. The Bible tells us that all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. This is confirmed for each of us by experience. Not only that, but our good works are as filthy rags to God. That sounds harsh, but we need to understand to what extent even our best actions are marred by depravity, by selfish motives. We have fallen not just a little bit short of God’s standard, but a lot. There is a vast chasm between us and God. The only thing we are deserving of is God’s judgment, God’s wrath. This is true of EVERYONE.
So the real question is really this: why does God let ANYONE into Heaven at all, rather than sending all of us to Hell? If it’s not because of our good works, then what is it?
The answer is that we go to Heaven because of Jesus’ good works. He is the only Person throughout the whole of history to live perfectly, to meet God’s standard. Because God loves these depraved, rebellious creatures that we are, Jesus comes to Earth, lives the perfect life which we don’t and then (astoundingly!) He takes the punishment which we deserve and gives us His righteousness. This is a magnificent gift with no equal. The Bible tells us that the wages of sin is death (so we’re in a bad way because all we’ve earned is death), BUT the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ (so God has offered us something we totally don’t deserve). Like any other gift it is offered but has to be accepted for it to be owned by the recipient. This is what is meant by “believing” – it is taking up that gift and placing one’s trust in Jesus’ work and not in our own work. It’s not about mere intellectual belief (although that is necessary), but about a relational belief. It’s about saying, “Jesus, I reject my own ability to be good enough and instead I accept Your gift of being good enough in my place. I place my trust in You. You have bought me with your own life and I belong to You”.
Does this mean that good works are unimportant? No. Here’s what is possibly one of the most well-known 2 verses in the Bible, Ephesians 2:8-9: “For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God — not by works, so that no one can boast.” So it’s clear that salvation is by grace (God’s unmerited favour), NOT by works. But here’s the next verse, Ephesians 2:10: “For we are God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.” So our new selves are GOD’S work, not ours, but the purpose for which He has recreated us is to do good works. Good works are not what saves us (only Jesus is truly good), but good works are the purpose for which God saves us. What are those good works? 1) Love God and 2) Love your neighbour. (WK referenced this in his post.) Loving God is something we can only do if we acknowledge God’s existence and once we are redeemed by God (i.e. have accepted the gift) and have His Holy Spirit in us, changing our desires and motivations. Loving our neighbour is also something we can do only to a limited extent before we are redeemed. This is because we need to have Christ-centred motives in our intentions towards that person in order to truly love them as we should. We can only have Christ-centred motives once we have been saved by Christ.
So what does this mean when we hear good, solid advice from respectable, decent non-christians. Firstly, we acknowledge that non-christians can indeed be correct about the right behaviour. What they can’t be correct about are the central correct motivations for that behaviour. They can’t be Christ-centred in their motivations. And there are also necessarily aspects of behaviour which are fundamentally affected by being Christ-centred.
Let’s take the example of marriage, seeing as that was raised. A non-christian can give good advice on marriage and how to build a better marriage. They can teach love, respect, fidelity, unselfishness, responsibility, etc. These are all good things. However, they won’t teach a Christ-centred marriage. They won’t teach that marriage is meant to be a picture of Christ’s relationship with the Church. They won’t teach how the husband is supposed to model Christ in serving his wife as her leader. They won’t teach how the wife is supposed to model the Church as it should be in submitting to her husband’s leadership. The won’t teach how marriage is a picture of the Gospel, of God’s unconditional love for us and our response to Him. This means that even though non-christians may give excellent advice, their advice is inherently lacking because it is not Christ-centred.
WINTERY KNIGHT 
Glad you find it helpful. :)
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Mary — wow — and wait until you get the $50 honorarium that Wintery gives guest bloggers!
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I am about to ship her her first order of books (in all seriousness). Five books in all, and the total value was just over $50.
I send Christmas presents to all of my regular commenters. You’re getting them this year, for example. Last Christmas I sent out 9 packages. I don’t know if I should be broadcasting this because then everyone will comment. One of the joys of being a chaste engineer who lives as poor as a church mouse is that you have lots of money for apologetics gifts and Christian events. I (partially) sponsor many of the events and scholars that I blog about!
I’ll e-mail you the list of books that I’m shipping her.
Mary is a single Christian woman, and part of being a Christian man is being kind to single Christian women. Several other single Christian women who comment also got book orders. I also sent white roses to my favorite one’s workplace, (of course). And I guess you also know about the 4-hour Skype video call sessions that I have with Christian women as well, with the record being a 9.25 hour one, which shattered the previous 6.5 hour record. My heart is filled with love for Christian women – I can barely get it all out as it is. The best way to get attention from me is to leave comments. I have tons of time for single Christian women, especially conservative ones.
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Aww, isn’t he good to us? ^_^
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I do agree with you for the most part. But I do have a question. Do you believe that we can lose the salvation that we have received through Christ. If so, how?
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Hi Shalini. Well, this is one of those issues which is disputed among Christians.
Some believe that you can lose your salvation. You wouldn’t lose it for a single sinful act, but for turning your back on God’s grace. So it would be a change of heart. Testing this in another is difficult. But God knows our hearts.
Some believe that you can’t lose your salvation. They believe in “eternal security”. I’m one of those who believes this. I believe it because I believe that God saves us entirely and that even our trust in Him is from Him. And I believe that is able to save everyone whom He draws to Himself and that He is the one who not only makes us Christian, but keeps us Christian. There are people who appear to fall away but, according to this view, they weren’t really Christians to begin with. This view is NOT compatible with blithely doing anything you want. If you merrily do anything you want and don’t want to change, then it’s evidence of not having the Spirit of God inside you.
There are genuine Christians on both sides of the debate.
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Well, I belong to the former group which believes one can lose one’s salvation. If not, what Paul says in 1 Cor 9:24-27 seems to make no sense. As I said, I do agree with you for the most part but on this one, I am afraid, we’ll just have to accept that we are of differing opinions.
(I was a little wary of bringing up this topic because in this very blog there was a commenter who said I was siding with heretics because of my views!!! Some people, really!!!)
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Shalini, I see you are siding with heretics once again (just kidding!).
I believe that it is possible to lose one’s salvation, but just barely.
Remember we don’t hold on to Christ — he holds on to us. So losing our salvation would not merely entail us letting go of Christ, but Christ letting go of us. There is a difference between relationship and fellowship. One can easily fall out of fellowship with God, but only with great difficulty fall out of relationship.
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Heretic! Sorry, I just had to say that.
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My motto: heretic today, gone tomorrow.
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I mostly agree with you Mary, and want to agree with you, but it seems to me a stretch to indicate that the persons in Hebrews weren’t actual Christians. It seems they were. And doesn’t Paul conditionalize our salvation by saying “if you hold fast to the end” or something to that effect — surely he is not saying you are not a Christian now?!
But, on your side of the ledger is the guy who is sleeping with his father’s wife, whom Paul wants delivered to satan for the destruction of the flesh, so that his soul may be saved on the day of judgement. Sounds like he is still saved, but just.
I think we get into trouble when we try to articulate the faith to a mathematical certainty. I’m happy to have a bit or fuzzy uncertainty and mystery.
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Hi Richard.
I believe you are referring to the following passage from Hebrews 6:4-6: “It is impossible for those who have once been enlightened, who have tasted the heavenly gift, who have shared in the Holy Spirit, who have tasted the goodness of the word of God and the powers of the coming age, if they fall away, to be brought back to repentance, because to their loss they are crucifying the Son of God all over again and subjecting him to public disgrace.”
The above passage doesn’t necessarily refer to actual people, but could rather refer to a hypothetical situation.
Also, we do all know people who appear to fall away from the faith and come back to it. Those who hold to eternal security as I do would say that either these people were drifting away from the faith, but never lost their salvation entirely or we would say that they didn’t have TRUE faith to begin with (God knows which one it is) – seeing as (as this passage indicates), it would be impossible for any with true faith who fell away to be restored. So I would say that this passage is actually more consistent with eternal security.
I do agree with you though that it is one of those areas which is difficult to navigate. What it really boils down to is this: if a person has seriously turned their back on God (irrespective of whether they truly were a Christian before or merely gave the appearance of being one) then they need to do some soul-searching and come to the Cross in repentance and faith. Their salvation may be in jeopardy (whether because they lost it or because they never had it to begin with). So, practically speaking, it works out the same way.
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