Hebrews Lesson 106
NKJ Psalm 119:11 Your word I have hidden in my
heart, That I might not sin against You!
We are looking at Hebrews
7:25. Hebrews
What’s interesting is that
over the last several weeks, couple of months, I have gotten a number of
different questions, requests, comments for clarification from people who are
out there really on the front lines of applying the Word in terms of their
ambassador ministry for the Lord Jesus Christ.
Things like this where you really get into the nuts and bolts of some of
these doctrines really won’t mean a whole lot to you if you’re sitting alone in
your little house and you never interact with unbelievers or with people who
are not on the same sheet of music with you (so to speak) in terms of an
understanding of doctrine. If you are
out there talking to people about the Bible and what you believe and why you
believe it, then they’re going to be asking these questions. If you’re in situations as I pointed out last
time from one of the families that is listening to some of the streaming video,
but they live out on the West Coast in an area where there are not too many
good churches. They have been trying to
find an acceptable church in their area.
So the husband, the father has been going to the pastors and asking
questions to find out what these churches believe. What do they actually believe? He finds that he doesn’t always get a
straight answer. He gets acceptable
answers, but then he has to learn the right questions to ask to really expose
what people believe. Interaction with
him was one of the reasons that I thought it was important to go into some of
the aspects of this. He was struggling
because he would get these different answers and he sort of smelled a rat, but
he wasn’t sure what the terminology is.
You have to sort of understand that there is jargon here just like in
any area of thought, any area of study whether you are in business, whether you
are in academics or whether you are in literature or writing or whatever area
it is; there is always jargon related to whatever the arena of thought is. You have to figure out that certain words and
certain phrases come loaded with a whole lot of baggage. You have to learn to spot these things. If all you do is come to Bible class and take
notes and go home and you never talk to anybody about what you are learning in
Bible class, you are never trying to witness to anybody to help them understand
the Truth; then studies like this are going to fall flat.
“Well, that is kind of
interesting but I never see anybody who believes these strange things.”
That’s because you’re not out
there getting your fingers dirty as it were in the real market place interacting
with people. But you get somebody who is
following the example of the apostles and the challenge to communicate the
gospel to the lost, then you are going to be hit with so many questions you
won’t know what to do. You’ll be in
Bible class listening to lessons every time you get a chance just to figure out
what the answers are. There is nothing I
think that’s more embarrassing (I think) than to sit in a conversation with two
or three people and they think, “Well, the Bible says this and the Bible says
that.”
You go, “I know it doesn’t,
but I can’t answer it and I ought to be able to say something.”
So you feel rather
helpless.
The purpose for the church
according to Ephesians 4 is not to come together and share. It’s not to come together and encourage. It’s not to come together and praise God and
feel good. It’s to equip the saints to do the work of the ministry. That comes through the teaching ministry of
gifted leaders that God gives the church, specifically pastor-teacher and
evangelist. Ephesians 4:11-12
So we are looking at Hebrews
7:25. This verse says:
NKJ Hebrews
That is Christ in His high priestly ministry,
specifically beginning at the cross and then ongoing after the ascension.
to save to the uttermost those who
come to God through Him, since He always lives to make intercession for them.
The basis for salvation is
what Christ did on the cross. But, that
ongoing security that secures the eternal salvation that you and I have that
can’t ever be lost is based on His eternality. As we have gone through this
study in Hebrews 7 talking about the uniqueness of Christ’s high priestly
ministry and that it is following the order of Melchizedek. What makes His high priestly ministry
significant and greater than any human high priestly ministry is because He is
eternal. He is the eternal Second Person
of the Trinity.
Now I pointed out last time
that the key phrases here are this phrase “to the uttermost”. He is able to save not partially, but to the
uttermost - completely. He brings it to
its full end. He saves to the uttermost
those who come to God.
The phrase “save to the
uttermost” is a compound word from the Greek word pas meaning all and
the root word telos meaning to its proper end. So it comes to mean to save completely,
totally, to bring it to its full completion those who come to God.
This is the same root word erchomai,
but it used proserchomai there in Hebrews 7, but it reminds me of Matthew
11:28. Jesus said.
NKJ Matthew
Coming to God is comparable
to trusting Christ as your Savior.
That’s how we come to God.
NKJ John 14:6 Jesus said to him, "I am the
way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me.
Same word. No one can come to the Father except through
Him. The only way to come to the Father
is by faith alone in Christ alone. We
trust in His completed work on the cross.
So this brings together two
key ideas and two key doctrines – one is eternal security and the other is the
intercessory ministry of Jesus Christ in terms of His ongoing high priestly
ministry at the right hand of the Father.
They intersect in terms of the securing forever of our salvation.
So we started last time with
the Doctrine of Eternal Security. I
taught this before back in the salvation series several years ago. I have reviewed parts of it in Revelation and
I’ve gone back and added some verses and talked about some new aspects and
tweaked it a little more in the last couple of weeks. So I have added some from where we started
just by way of introduction last week.
So we looked at our definition.
Doctrine of Eternal
Security
So
it’s the work of God toward the believer at the instant of faith alone in
Christ alone which guarantees that God’s free gift of salvation is eternal and
cannot be lost, terminated, abrogated, nullified, or reversed by any thought,
act or change of belief in the person saved.
Now every element of that is important because somebody comes along and
makes some issue out of some aspect of that.
The
last phrase is you can’t think anything, you can’t think of any sin, and you
can’t perform any act.
You
can’t suddenly wake up a week from now and say, “Christianity is full of
contradictions. They are just a bunch of
hypocrites. Every where I go they call
themselves Christians and I don’t believe Christ and I am going to deny Him
now.”
There
are many Christians who say if you ever deny Christ, that’s it. You have lost your salvation. So you can’t change anything because your
salvation wasn’t based on who you are or what you did; so its preservation is
not based on who you are or what you’ve done.
If you think you can do something to lose it… somewhere in your thinking
buried deep maybe or it’s just that you don’t realize it is an idea that there
is something that you do to get it. I
really do believe that even though it may not be overt, people may not
understand it that if they don’t understand eternal security or don’t think you
can be eternally secure, they usually have some element where they think you do
something to get salvation.
Then
I broke it down this way related to understanding what happens at salvation.
When a person trusts in Christ that means to believe, to accept Him as their
savior to rely exclusively upon Him. I
say that – that really gets at the Roman Catholic construct of salvation. It’s Christ alone. It’s not Christ plus the mass. It’s not Christ plus the various sacraments. It’s not Christ plus good works or doing
good, involvement in the church. It’s
Christ alone – that if you don’t do anything else trust in Christ alone – not
Christ and the church, Christ and Mary, Christ and the saints. It’s Christ alone and it’s faith alone. What else you do has nothing to do with it.
It is pure and simple. That’s why you
have to have “alone” modifying both faith and Christ. Because if it’s faith alone in Christ that
opens the door to something else. If
it’s faith in Christ alone, that faith can come with some baggage. So faith alone in Christ alone makes it
very clear. And, it’s for salvation. There’s an understanding that Christ died for
your sins.
There is a sad thing that has
been going on for the – actually it has been going on for four or five
years. It’s only been on my radar for a
year and a half, two years maybe. It is
splitting the Grace Evangelical Society.
For those of you who aren’t familiar with that, when Prof Hodges (Zane
Hodges) who was a Greek prof at Dallas Seminary started writing some books
clarifying the issues between a pure free grace salvation and Lordship salvation,
and what was coming out of the reformed camp and if you don’t know what that
means we will get into it again in just a minute. As those things became clear there were a
number of people who really began to understand the nature of grace – that grace
means it’s free, no strings attached.
It’s not you are saved and it’s free as long as you do something later
on. It’s free as long as you are
grateful. It’s free as long as you have
works consistent with your faith. It’s
free. It’s a gift. He made that clear. There were many, many
pastors and theologians who organized themselves together in what became known
as the Grace Evangelical Society. They
produced a bi-annual journal (I guess), annual meetings, things of this
nature.
In the last few years there
have been some theological issues that have slowly reared their ugly
heads. Some of us became acquainted with
that here at the Chafer’s Pastor Conference in March ’06, a year and a half ago
when John Nimela presented a paper related to understanding or accepting the
gift of eternal life which God had offered.
The illustration they keep coming up with and you hear a lot is if you
are stranded on a desert island and you pick up a piece of paper and it has one
little section of a couple of verses in it out of John 5. (I am going to turn there so I can
articulate this correctly.) You have a
couple of verses there from John 5. (I
start talking about it and I get ad hoc here and I can’t find the exact
verse.)
NKJ John
No, it’s not 27. Anyway the idea is that this one verse they
pick up a couple of statements in there.
They believe in the Son. They
accept the gift of eternal life and they’ll believe. It doesn’t mention the cross. It is just mentioning this principle that
Jesus came, offered eternal life and if you “accept me” you have eternal
life. But there is no mention of the
substitutionary atonement of Christ, no mention that Christ died for your sins,
no understanding of any of these aspects.
It is just accepting the gift of life from Jesus. They go to a number of passages in John to
support this.
The problem is that John 5
occurs before the cross. So Jesus hadn’t
gone to the cross yet. So there is no
mention of the cross and there is no mention of His substitutionary atonement. There are some other issues with that. What they have done is they have basically
said you can become saved and you don’t have to believe in the cross. You don’t even have to know about the
cross. In fact, you don’t have to
believe that Jesus is God. They play
around with the meaning of Jesus is the Christ the Son of God.
“Well, that just means
something else. It is messianic
term. It doesn’t means He’s full
deity. You don’t have to believe the
Messiah is full deity in order to get saved.”
This is really tearing the
Grace Evangelical Society apart. That’s
why you have a new organization that is starting called the Free Grace Alliance
that’s had some impact on Chafer Seminary and some other things. So this is why I emphasize this. When a person trusts in Christ for salvation,
what does that mean? That He died on the
cross for your sins.
Paul says in I Corinthians 2:
NKJ 1 Corinthians 2:2 For I determined not to know
anything among you except Jesus Christ and Him crucified.
NKJ 1 Corinthians 15:3 For I delivered to you first of all
that which I also received: that Christ died for our sins according to the
Scriptures,
NKJ 1 Corinthians 15:4 and that He was buried, and that He
rose again the third day according to the Scriptures,
That was the priority. So this is very important to understand the content
of the gospel. When you trust in that
gospel, then God permanently justifies. He imputes righteousness, justifies,
regenerates, gives eternal life and this cannot be lost no matter what a person
does or does not do from that instant on until the day he dies.
That’s our definition. Now another aspect of this is just talking
about terminology. There are other terms
that are used in this. I was asked some
questions about this last week so I added this statement in here.
Some
people think that assurance of salvation and eternal security are synonymous
terms and that all three of these are basically saying the same thing. And, they are not. They are each saying something a little
differently.
Eternal
security is a term that refers to the objective work of the triune God. We will see that God - God the Father, God
the Son, God the Holy Spirit - each is involved is securing our salvation, in
keeping it secure. Eternal security
refers to the objective work of the triune God in keeping us saved. This is often called the objective aspect of
the doctrine. In other words God is
keeping you secure whether you understand it, believe it or have confidence in
it or not. No matter what is going on
God is the one who holds you in His hand.
That’s the objective side. That is what eternal security is.
Assurance
of salvation is the subjective side.
That’s my understanding of what Christ has done for me and my confidence
and assurance that I cannot lose my salvation.
Now there are many people who don’t believe in eternal security, but
they’re still eternally secure. There
are many people who do not have an assurance of their salvation. They are so afraid because they haven’t been
taught anything…that if they commit some sin that they can lose their
salvation. So they don’t have much
assurance of salvation. There are
others who are taught that the only way you can know if you have real, genuine
saving faith is if you have certain works that are consistent with genuine
faith. They don’t feel like they have
those works so they doubt their salvation.
So assurance of salvation is the subjective side. People can believe in eternal security and
not have an assurance of salvation.
That’s true of many High Calvinists.
That’s true of people in Lordship salvation. They just can’t have an assurance of their
salvation, but they believe in eternal security. Don’t confuse the two.
On
the other hand if you’re an Arminian you may believe that you have an assurance
of salvation, but you don’t believe in eternal security. So they are not the same thing. There are different groups with different
views.
The
other phrase I mentioned is “once saved, always saved.” A lot of High Calvinists will say they
believe once saved, always saved.
“But
I don’t know if I am really saved.”
You
can’t really be sure you are fully saved because you have a false faith in
Christ. I went over that and their views
on that last time.
First
of all High Calvinism. That really is
the best way to refer to a strong Calvinism – High Calvinism. The difference between High Calvinism and
Hyper-Calvinism is Hyper-Calvinists do not believe you should ever witness to
anybody because “if God wants them saved He’ll save them without any help from
you or me. “
That’s
a direct quote from a Baptist minister in the late 1700’s in England who when
William Carey who’s considered the Father of Modern Missions came back from
India and was giving a report to the Baptist denomination about all the souls
that were being won to Christ in India, this old Hyper-Calvinist Baptist got up
and said, “Son, if God wants them to be saved, then He’ll do it without any
help from you or me.
That
was his point.
“We
don’t need to raise money and send out missionaries. If God wants them saved, He’ll save
them.”
So
that is Hyper-Calvinism.
High
Calvinism is typically a 5 point Super-Lapsarian or infralapsarian type of
Calvinism. If you don’t know what that
means I am not going to get distracted now.
Like the old problem trying to understand the infralapsarian,
Sub-Lapsarians, the Super-Lapsarians and
High
Calvinism represents the 5 points of Calvinism indicated by the acronym
TULIP.
T
stands for total depravity or total inability that man is so enchained, bound,
his will is so bound that he cannot do anything to please God. That’s true.
We would say that. But they would
say that he can’t even express non-meritorious volition. You can’t do anything.
You
can’t even say “God, I want to know more about you” because for them that would
have merit. You can’t do anything
meritorious so they’re totally depraved.
Martin Luther held that view. He
wrote a book on it called The Bondage of the Will.
Speaking of Martin Luther,
how many people know what yesterday was?
That’s so good. Yesterday was the
390th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation – Reformation
Day.
The
U is for unconditional election. That
means God doesn’t have any conditions on His choice. He’s just going to arbitrarily choose. That is where I have a problem because I
don’t think God arbitrarily chooses who will be saved and who won’t. He just hasn’t told us what the conditions
are; but He has conditions. I think the condition is that He knows who would
believe under certain circumstances and who won’t – who will have positive
volition and who will not.
The
L stands for limited atonement. Jesus
died only for those who were elect.
The
I is for irresistible grace. The Holy
Spirit will irresistibly make the gospel clear to someone so that when they see
the light they will respond and trust in Christ. The Holy Spirit only performs that act of
irresistible grace on the elect.
The
P stands for perseverance of the saints.
Those who were truly elect upon whom the Holy Spirit has irresistibly
moved will necessarily persevere in good works and never turn totally from
Christ, never reject or renounce Christ and they will ultimately be saved. It is not equivalent to eternal security
although for many people they have made it such.
For Louise Sperry Chafer they
were virtually synonymous. He did not
hold to a High Calvinist view of the perseverance of the saints.
On the other end of the
spectrum there’s Jacobus Arminius who died in 1609, but his followers were
challenged and brought to a church trial at the Senate of Dort in
1618-1619. They believed that a saved
person in classic Arminianism can lose salvation only by a complete denial of
Christ. It’s not by sin. There is only one way you can lose your
salvation. That is to turn your back on
Jesus and to completely renounce him.
Once this occurs, according to their view you can never again be
saved.
That’s not the only form of
Arminianism that is out there. There is
also Wesleyan Arminianism which is out there which is named for John Wesley,
the founder. (He is actually not the
founder, but one of the founders of Methodism.)
It actually started with an evangelist named George Whitfield. George Whitfield was a High Calvinist and an
evangelist. When he came to
The Wesleyan view is that
salvation can be lost in any serious intentional sin. But, you can be resaved if you’ll
repent. So this is referred to - we have
TULIP theology with Calvinism and this is daisy theology (He loves me, He loves
me not, He loves me, He loves me not, He loves me, He loves me not).
Wesley stated this way:
I
cannot believe attainable in this life from which a man cannot finally fall.
In other words, you can’t be
permanently, totally confident of your salvation and eternally secure.
He also said:
I
find no general promise in holy writ that “none who once believes will finally
fall.”
A third quote:
On
this authority (he is commenting on Ezekiel 18:24) I believe a saint may fall away, that one who
is holy or righteous in the judgment of God Himself may nevertheless so fall
from God as to perish everlastingly.
So that gives you a little
bit of the historical issue.
They
whom God has accepted into the Beloved (go down to the end)...they shall
certainly persevere.
It puts the emphasis on the
“they”. This is a tough passage.
Some people think, “Oh. This is just eternal security.”
But the last phrase paragraph
picks up the subject from the first of the paragraph – they shall persevere.
It’s the person who perseveres, not God or Christ who perseveres in keeping
you.
There are those who have a
balanced view. Louis Berkoff is a High
Calvinist.
But he says, “Look, we have
to be careful not to put the burden of perseverance on the individual on the
continuous activity of man, but on God.”
Charles Hodge said related to
the Apostle Paul in his comments on I Corinthians 9:27, “This devoted apostle
considered himself as engaged in a life struggle of his salvation.”
Paul wasn’t relaxed?
When we get there, just think of all the verses that I am going to go to
from Paul that he knew who he believed and was confident that He was able to
keep his salvation against that day.
NKJ 2 Timothy 1:12 For this reason I also suffer these
things; nevertheless I am not ashamed, for I know whom I have believed and am
persuaded that He is able to keep what I have committed to Him until that Day.
So the idea of perseverance
in Calvinism is there must be perseverance in holiness therefore in opposition
to our weakness and temptations. It’s
the only sure evidence of the genuineness of past experience. How do you know you are saved? By persevering. They bring works in the back door.
So ironically it’s not much
different than the Arminian opposite.
You have Lordship salvation on the one hand (no assurance) and assurance
based on works following faith and the Arminian position - no eternal security
salvation.
Actually it is more like
this. They are just slightly
different. Neither one can have any
genuine assurance or eternal security.
So let’s get into the
doctrine itself.
What I want to do is begin
with general arguments from the character of God. Then we will look at specific arguments on
the basis of each member of the trinity. So this will probably take two or
three weeks. So we’ll start with the
general arguments from the character of God Himself.
So we’ll start with our
essence box. God is sovereign. He is righteous. He is just.
He is love. He is eternal
life. He is omniscient, omnipresent,
omnipotent, veracity and immutability.
God is all of these things simultaneously. Each of these modifies all
the others. So His love is righteous and
just and eternal. It’s also immutable
and true. His truth is based on
righteousness and justice. All of these
intersect and interconnect.
But let’s think about a few
of these. For example, God is
omniscient. That means that God knows
all the knowable. God is eternal. That means that God has eternally known all
the knowable. Well, if God knows
everything there is to know (all the actual as well as all the hypothetical)
then God knows every single sin you do commit and every single sin you might
commit. God’s not surprised. Billions and billions of years ago in
eternity past when there was no time, there were no angels. There was only the triune God. God in His omniscience knew every single sin
that you were going to commit. And He
knew every single sin that you might commit.
He knew all of the realities and all of the possibilities. Now in His omniscience, that means that when
God decided on a plan of salvation He was going to construct a plan (I’m
speaking somewhat anthropopathically) that would be so complex and so
comprehensive that every one of those sins that He knew every human being would
commit would be paid for by Christ on the cross. In His omniscience He didn’t overlook
one. He didn’t miss one.
He didn’t wake up one
morning…“Oops. I forgot to take care of
this sin.”
He knew every single sin –
the big sins, the little sins, the sins that you don’t want to admit are sins,
every single sin, every word, every thought He was aware of. He put every one
of those sins on Jesus Christ. He
imputed every one of those to Jesus Christ.
Because God is also
omnipotent He had the ability to fulfill His plan and He had the ability to do
that. Because He is just He could judge
all of those sins on the cross and design a salvation that would fully and completely
satisfy His justice in relationship to all those sins. To say or think that you can do something
today that wasn’t paid for on the cross that would cause you to lose your
salvation is really blasphemy. What you
are really saying is that God forgot about this sin or “I can (commit a) sin
that is too great for the justice of God, too great for the grace of God, too
great for the love of God and was unknown by the omniscience of God”.
What that reveals is that you
have a very small god. You don’t have a
biblical view of God or His attributes.
Another aspect of this kind
of thinking is that in the character of God He is righteous and He is
immutable. That means when He makes a
promise, He’s going to keep the promise.
He’s going to be true to His word.
He is going to be faithful to His promise and He is never going to
change once He has said that He will do something.
A verse that focuses on this
aspect is in II Timothy 2:11-13.
NKJ 2 Timothy
The faithfulness of God’s
promise – the word there is not a title for Christ. It is an emphasis on the promise of the
Scripture. That’s where we know we have
assurance. That’s one thing that’s
missed in the debate. How do you know
you’re saved? Because God said so. God said if you believe in Jesus Christ you
will be saved. He is true to His word.
NKJ 2 Timothy
Now does that mean that He
will deny us salvation or that He’ll deny us rewards? Those are the two options. But in the light of the last phrase of the
verse which says that if we are unfaithful (that is if we quit believing in
Him) He remains faithful.
NKJ 2 Timothy
So you can’t take the denial
that He will deny us as losing salvation without violating the meaning of the
last phrase. We do know that at the
Judgment Seat of Christ, Jesus Christ will deny us rewards and He will deny us
blessings. If we are unfaithful (that
means if we are disbelieving) He remains faithful for He cannot deny Himself.
So all of this relates to the
argument from the character of God – who He is and what He has done.
Do we have time? Yes, we do.
I want to get into the first
part which flows from the security from God the Father. The believer is secured by the purpose, the
power, the provision and the love of God the Father. We have seen that from the character of God
there is a security of our salvation.
Now we are going to look at some specific verses related to how God the
Father secures our salvation. First of
all, and we will probably just get to the first aspect tonight, that is the
purpose of God. God has a purpose in
salvation and that purpose cannot be overwritten. The purpose is to save those who believe in
Jesus Christ as their Savior. And we see
this laid out in a series of verbs in Romans 8:29-30. Each of these describes the same group. That is what is so important to focus
on. Let me read the verse and then we
will go to the end.
NKJ Romans
NKJ Romans 8:30 Moreover whom He predestined, these
He also called; whom He called, these He also justified; and whom He justified,
these He also glorified.
So what we have is a final
group of people that gets glorified.
They end up in heaven. Now is
that the same group of people that are justified? Yeah.
It doesn’t say most of those will be justified or glorified. So everybody who gets justified gets
glorified.
He calls through the
proclamation of the gospel. It is
through the hearing of God’s word that people respond to His calling. So He is going to call them.
Predestined are those who
have a predetermined destiny. That’s
what predestined means. It doesn’t mean
fatalism. The Word has that concept of
determining a destiny ahead of time. The
point in these two verses is that those who are justified are those who are
glorified. He doesn’t drop any. Nobody falls out by the wayside. Those who are justified are glorified.
Now part of the problem that
people have when they look at this whole issue of eternal security is they
think they can do something that can violate the purpose of God. God’s purpose
in saving us was to bring us to glorification.
He planned salvation to secure salvation through justification and
regeneration that was not reversible.
One of the big problems that you have if you think you can lose your
salvation is you have to explain how your righteousness gets “unimputed” and
how God is now going to declare you unjust and how you go through this process
of going from being spiritually alive and that whole transformation that occurs
at regeneration to becoming spiritually dead again and losing your human spirit
and everything related to it. Salvation
is an extremely complex thing. Once it
happens then God’s plan is going to be brought to completion.
That looks at just the first
aspect which is the purpose of God. I
still want to look at the power of God, the provision of God, and the promise
of God.
But I thought that tonight we
would stop a little early and have a special presentation.