The Warnings of the New Testament #1
The message of many frequently avoided
New Testament passages
by Anastasios Kioulachoglou
In Acts 20:26-27 we find Paul speaking to the Ephesian
elders. Making a summary of his ministry, he told them:
“Therefore I testify to you this day that I am innocent of the blood
of all, for I did not shrink from declaring to you the whole counsel of
God.”
Paul did not shrink, did not withhold from telling the
Ephesians, and the church of God in general, the whole counsel of
God. One could say that one more study on the matter of salvation
would really be redundant, as salvation is something very
fundamental and one would expect that we would all get it right.
But I do not think we do. At least this is my own experience. I was
born a Greek Orthodox, went as a kid to catechism and followed
the liturgies etc. However, I was already a teenager and had never
heard about salvation by grace through faith. My conclusion at
that time was that God is a rather harsh figure waiting for me to
do something wrong so that He can punish me. Of course this is
not true and I found it out a few years later, at the age of 21, when
I met the true, living and loving God. Then for the first time I
heard about the Bible being the Word of God and
about salvation by grace through faith. This was so liberating!
God was not a distant figure any more. He was a real God, as real
as I saw Him in the Bible.
The main teaching I received was that once a man believes
he is immediately, once and for all, saved, regardless of what he
will do with his faith in his life. However, in the more than two
decades since then, I had various trials and temptations which
made me realize that staying in the faith is not something
automatic, something that can be considered as given right from
the moment that somebody believed. What I understood is that
faith is a rather continuous than a one-off decision.
In these 25 years I have seen friends who were so happy in
the beginning when I told them about Christ and were all for it,
praising God, praying etc., only to get mad at me and God soon
after, not wanting to hear anything about Him any more. Why?
Because a girlfriend abandoned them or because a relative told
them that all this was “heretic” etc. In time of temptation and
tribulation because of God’s Word they did not hold up. I have
also seen others who though they accepted Christ, were
eventually carried away by their simultaneous love for the world,
which choked, the seed of the Word exactly as the parable of the
sower says. Thus Christ became to them someone they once heard
about but the fruit or the difference He made to them nobody
could really see. In addition, I came across many warnings and
initially puzzling scriptures that did not appear to reconcile with
the doctrine according to which a person who once is saved is
always saved regardless of whether they later, for various reasons,
essentially discontinue in the faith.
The present study looks at a multitude of Scriptures from
the New Testament, that make clear that faith is more a race that
has to be run to the end than a one-off event which upon
happening it is guaranteed that will be valid forever. Staying in
the faith, ending the race, is neither automatic nor it is guaranteed
for all those who start the race. Some, as the examples I gave
above, in the first difficulties and trials drop out. Others have a
very strong love for the things of the world and they too move
away. Only some of those who start the race really run it to the end.
This, as we will see, is very clear from the New Testament.
WARNING! NARROW GATE, DIFFICULT PATH AHEAD!
Not many like narrow and difficult roads, but it is clear
from what the Lord tells us that the road of faith is just that: a
difficult way passing through a narrow gate:
Matthew 7:13-14
“Enter by the narrow gate; for wide is the gate and broad is the
way that leads to destruction, and there are many who go in by it.
Because narrow is the gate and difficult is the way which leads to life,
and there are few who find it."
Warnings along a difficult, narrow road are very
important, for we can easily move away. And moving away in our
case means to a road that is easy and wide i.e. to a road that feels
good to the five senses. Who has driven on a narrow path and has
not paid full attention to the warnings? Who has thought while on
such a path that the warnings are there to terrify him (instead of
keeping him on the road) or that perhaps they are not relevant to
him but refer to some other drivers? I think none of us does this.
Equally speaking, there are many warnings in the New Testament
and their purpose is to alert us, so that we keep on the right path,
especially since the right path is also a narrow, difficult path. As
we would never ignore the warnings on any difficult path, so also
we must not ignore or explain away the warnings given in the
Word of God concerning the difficult path of faith, for they are
there for our good. Our purpose in this study is to bring out these
warnings.
FOR WHOM IS THIS BOOK WRITTEN?
This book does not speak – with the exception of the first
chapter - about the great realities of being born again, the great
realities of having the spirit of God in you, the great realities of
being a child of God by faith etc. Many of us have heard about
these realities already. The problem however is that some have
heard about them in a rather unbalanced way, without hearing
also or taking seriously into consideration all passages on the
matter and especially those dealt with in this study. Thus they
have concluded that these truths and salvation in particular are
based on a first moment of faith, after which we are forever saved,
regardless of what happens to our faith after that moment. This is
the main audience of this book, and our main purpose here is to
balance out, through focusing exclusively to the warnings of the
New Testament, some of the imbalances created because of the
almost complete ignorance of these warnings.
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SALVATION: WHAT DOES IT TAKE?
Faith in the resurrected Jesus Christ as Lord, the Christ, the
Messiah, the Son of God is undeniably the only way for somebody
to get saved. This is very clear from a multitude of Scriptures.
Here are some:
John 3:14-18
“And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the
Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have
eternal life. "For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son,
that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. For
God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world,
but in order that the world might be saved through him. Whoever
believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe is
condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of
the only Son of God.”
John 20:30-31
“Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of the disciples,
which are not written in this book; but these are written so that you
may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing
you may have life in his name.
John 11:25-26
“I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me, though
he dies, yet shall he live, and everyone who lives and believes in
me shall never die.”
Mark 16:15-16
“And he said to them, "Go into all the world and proclaim the
gospel to the whole creation. Whoever believes and is baptized will be
saved, but whoever does not believe will be condemned.”
Acts 16:30-31
“And brought them [Paul and Silas] out, and said, Sirs, what must
I do to be saved? And they [Paul and Silas] said, Believe on the Lord
Jesus Christ, and you will be saved, you and your household.”
Romans 10:9
“if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord, and believe in
your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.”
Before saying anything else, I would first like to point out
that in the “whoever believes” and the other similar statements
given in the above passages, the present tense is used. In other
words, what is described here is an active, present faith and not a
past event that perhaps may or may not hold true now. An even
more accurate translation of these statements would be “whoever
goes on believing” i.e. believes now and goes on believing. This
would correspond more to the fact that the present tense in
ancient Greek was used to point out duration rather than one-off
events. The first appendix of this book gives more insight to this
and the usage of the present tense in ancient Greek.
Back to our subject: it is obvious from the passages we
gave above (and there are more) that we are not saved through
works of the law or our own works. Salvation is given free, by
grace, as a gift to everyone who believes in Jesus Christ as his Lord,
the Messiah, the Son of God. This is the undisputed truth of
God’s Word. Faith therefore is the one key to salvation with grace
being the other key. Ephesians 2:8 summarizes this very well:
Ephesians 2:8
“For by grace you have been saved through faith; and this is not of
yourselves: it is the gift of God”
There are two components that when combined give
salvation: grace and faith. Each of them alone cannot give
salvation. The grace of God alone cannot save a person if this
person does not have faith i.e. if he does not honestly and truly
believe, from the heart, in Jesus Christ as his Lord, as the Son of
God and Messiah.
Basically God wants everybody to be saved and gave His
Son for everybody as a ransom. As 1 Timothy 2:3-6 says:
“This is good, and it is pleasing in the sight of God our Savior, who
desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the
truth. “For there is one God, and one mediator between God and
men, the man Christ Jesus; Who gave himself a ransom for all, to be
testified in due time.”
And also Titus 2:11
“For the grace of God that brings salvation has appeared to all men”
Jesus Christ gave Himself for everybody! God wants
everybody to be saved. His grace has appeared to all men.
Therefore, the grace of God - the first part of the salvation
condition of Ephesians 2:8 (“by grace”) - is available to everybody;
it “has appeared to all men”. But the second part (“through faith”)
is not there in everybody. Only some truly believe in what God
says in His Word about His Son and only these will be saved, for
salvation is not just by grace, but “by grace through faith”.
Having clarified this point, the critical question is: once
somebody believes, is faith something guaranteed to last forever
or is it something that has to be kept, which in turn means that it
can also be abandoned? How does the Bible treat faith? Does it
treat it as something dynamic or as something static i.e. as
something that once you have it, you will always have it? What
does it mean to have true faith? What happens to salvation, in case
the faith is abandoned? Is this possible at all and if yes what are
the consequences? Many people do not bother to ask these
questions. In this study we will ask these questions, and see the
plain answers the Bible gives, starting from the most appropriate
person to speak about salvation: the Savior Himself and then
continuing with the teachings of His apostles, given in the epistles.
Posted January 4, 2015
To be continued on next post...
To be continued on next post...
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