Which one is right

[Jac3510]

It's not terribly helpful, Paul, to try to offer a critique of free grace theology by providing an argument from John MacArthur. That would make about as much sense as me posting at article from AiG that explains the differences is OEC and YEC. Such an approach demonstrates either a terrible ignorance on the subject matter from your part or else a complete disinterest in an honest discussion on it.

As it stands, by the way, almost every point in your post above is highly distorted at best or just factually incorrect at worst, but I've come to expect no less from MacArthur. That's typical of him. Whatever my (very deep) theological differences with him, I lost respect for him a long time ago over his consistent and blatant misrepresentation of what other people believe. If I may say it plainly, he is a liar, and even if he were right in his overal theology, his methods are completely unacceptable.

[RickD]

Paul,

I didn't know you were quoting a link by MacArthur. Now that I've had time to read the link you posted, it's so inaccurate. Jac is right. MacArthur misrepresents free grace, just like Ham misrepresents OEC. Actually, MacArthur may be worse. While he doesn't come right out and say he's talking about free grace, anyone familiar with the LS vs FG debate knows "easy believism" is a term used by LS adherents to describe free gracers.

Macarthurs misrepresentation of free grace is horrible. But besides that, you can see in his own words, some of what is heretical about his Lordship Salvation.

[PaulSacramento]

Guys, that is WHY I posted it.
You just don't state that "X" is a false gospel and not explain why or whatnot.

Heresies, and there are many as you know, tended to always be based on some INTERPRETED biblical truth ( the key word being interpreted).

MacArthur doesn't "misrepresent" free grace, he simply states HIS view and interpretation of it ( just as I am sure He would say that we are misrepresenting free grace).

If we decide to take some like Bonhoeffer and "taint" his name by insinuating he has heretical views then we should at least explain why and even, if we are posting in good faith, explain those views.
EX:
http://www.gotquestions.org/cheap-grace.html

http://www.gotquestions.org/lordship-salvation.html

[RickD]

PaulS wrote:
Guys, that is WHY I posted it.

Mmm..okay? Kinda like a reverse psychology thing. Post a link that says the same thing you and B. W. Have been saying in this thread to show us that you really don't actually believe something that agrees with what you've been saying.

MacArthur doesn't "misrepresent" free grace, he simply states HIS view and interpretation of it ( just as I am sure He would say that we are misrepresenting free grace).

No Paul. MacArthur completely misrepresents free grace. Just like Ken ham misrepresents OEC. He misrepresents what free gracers believe, because he's saying they believe things that they don't believe.

If we decide to take some like Bonhoeffer and "taint" his name by insinuating he has heretical views then we should at least explain why and even, if we are posting in good faith, explain those views.

Jac was simply stating that Bonhoeffer taught a false gospel because he taught LS. Do we taint Benny Hinn's name when we say he's a false teacher?

And I'm sure Jac would've been more than happy to explain why LS is a heresy, If someone only asked.

[Philip]

You actually thought it was a good idea to allow guns in bars?

I have a friend here, an older gentleman, who is the biggest gun advocate I've ever known. And even he thinks guns and bars don't mix.

I guess my attempt at funny sarcasm didn't come across in type. Only a nitwit would think it's a good idea to allow guns in bars.

[RickD]

You actually thought it was a good idea to allow guns in bars?

I have a friend here, an older gentleman, who is the biggest gun advocate I've ever known. And even he thinks guns and bars don't mix.

I guess my attempt at funny sarcasm didn't come across in type. Only a nitwit would think it's a good idea to allow guns in bars.

Georgia state motto-Wisdom, Justice, Nitwits

[Philip]

As for the arguments over Lordship Salvation and OSAS, there seems to be some generalization all around. Yep, the OSAS doctrine, while true, can be abused, misunderstood and tragically applied both Christians and people who merely THINK they are Christians.

As for LS, the words of Jesus reveal that HE has made the availability of salvation quite simple - it is WE that often make it FAR more complicated. I would guess that very few of us here would have had anywhere close to an accurate or comprehensive understanding of the deep level that Jesus calls us to, back when we were initially saved. We surely didn't realize the COST of our commitment or the call to abandon the ambitions of the self, our narcissism - to truly making Jesus Lord. Most of us wouldn't have understood that nor known how to - and learning how to is something we continue to learn and grow toward. And when one doesn't truly understand the cost of following Christ, how can he truly understand the level of commitment He calls us to or anticipate the cost of our commitment, of making Him our personal LORD - cant' be done. Every one of us here, day by day, better understands and grows in our commitment to Jesus. And we look back just a few years and we realize what Christian babes we have been, and how much maturity we had ahead of us, and looking forward, how much more we have to learn.

My point is, there is a moment of authentic belief in a person, in which he or she truly believes, in their heart and mind, in Jesus as God's Resurrected son and Savior, that we want to obey, are repenting of our sins, and thus turn our lives over to him by stepping out in faith with a desire to do so BEFORE we really know the depth of what that totally means or the cost of it. The problem I see is, those of us with even the minimum of theological understanding look at what salvation requires through the lens of years of studying Scripture and significant growth in our faith. And so we sometimes confuse what Jesus SAID He actually REQUIRES for salvation with the sanctification process. We don't make Jesus Lord all at once - which is different from the simple (but sincere and true) faith required for salvation. We make Jesus Lord through growth and learning, day by day, to die to self. This is the sanctification process, but many of us confuse that with what must be in place in a person's mind and heart, in order to be saved. God made it simple; we, however, so often, make it FAR more complicated. And I doubt next to none of us had the more "sophisticated" and truly comprehensive understanding of coming to Christ that those of Lordship Salvation would assert is necessary, when we first came to Christ.

Easy grace, to me, means that all one need to is pray a prayer, check a box, say the right words, be baptized, etc, and yet none of this matches up with the intentions of the heart and mind. It's a desire to obtain the Kingdom without truly desiring Jesus, repenting and desiring to obey Him, just dishonestly wrapping oneself in the trappings of belief without the heart and true intentions for a relationship with Jesus. For such people, their words and actions are futile and pointless.

[jlay]

If you want to read a thorough and polite critique of McCarthurs position based on one of his books.
http://www.cocoris.com/Topical%20Pages/ ... %20PDF.pdf

The biggest problem I see is confusing discipleship with salvation.
Yes, Jesus said follow me. And I'm amazed that the people that promote this view really think they are following Jesus.
Jesus' disciples literally FOLLOWED him. They left jobs, families, etc.

Others like Lazarus did not. It is nothing short of self-righteous to imply that you are following Jesus and make up your own arbitrary standard of what this means. Following Christ had a definitive, measurable standard. Period.

Yes, JM completely misrepresents free grace theology and conflates it with easy believism. Cocoris demolishes this argument.

[Silvertusk]

To be honest I am more inclined to not believe in OSAS, only through personal experience. I have seen people who were on fire for Christ and genuinely believed in him, fall away into unbelief. Now are these people still saved?

I know at one point in my life I had 100% certainty that Jesus was real and I gave my life to him. However since that moment I have gone through deserts of doubt, some quite crippling. In fact I am just recovering from possibly one of the worst ones I have ever experienced. Am I saved? Or because I have these doubts I am not truly saved yet because I don't really believe?

[Jac3510]

To be honest I am more inclined to not believe in OSAS, only through personal experience. I have seen people who were on fire for Christ and genuinely believed in him, fall away into unbelief. Now are these people still saved?

Yes

I know at one point in my life I had 100% certainty that Jesus was real and I gave my life to him. However since that moment I have gone through deserts of doubt, some quite crippling. In fact I am just recovering from possibly one of the worst ones I have ever experienced. Am I saved? Or because I have these doubts I am not truly saved yet because I don't really believe?

At the risk of picking a nit, I have some concerns that you talk about "genuine belief" above and then about having "100%" certainity and "giv[ing your] life to him" here. Salvation is not dependent on on "giving our lives to Christ." It is dependent on believing in Him. The former is a matter of discipleship, the latter of faith.

What you seem to be suggesting is that God won't save someone who isn't living up to some particular standard. I don't care what the standard is. The fact is that you seem to have an unstated one in mind. So now, you have God saving us because we act a certain way, but that's little more than (read: identical to) salvation by works.

OSAS necessarily and logically follows salvation by faith alone, ST. There are really only two positions. Either we are saved by faith alone, which entails OSAS, or we are saved by works, which entails a rejection of OSAS. There is absolutely no middle ground on this. But in more logical terms, we must affirm one of these two arguments:

• 1. If we are saved by faith alone, then OSAS is true;
  2. We are saved by faith alone;
  3. Therefore, OSAS is true;

OR

• 1. If we are saved by faith alone, then OSAS is true;
  2'. OSAS is not true;
  3'. Therefore, we are not saved by faith alone

Anyway, I think you would do REALLY well to read Cocoris' work J linked to above. It will help clarily some of this for you, because the position you are leaning towards is just lordship salvation.

[Silvertusk]

To be honest I am more inclined to not believe in OSAS, only through personal experience. I have seen people who were on fire for Christ and genuinely believed in him, fall away into unbelief. Now are these people still saved?

Yes

I know at one point in my life I had 100% certainty that Jesus was real and I gave my life to him. However since that moment I have gone through deserts of doubt, some quite crippling. In fact I am just recovering from possibly one of the worst ones I have ever experienced. Am I saved? Or because I have these doubts I am not truly saved yet because I don't really believe?

At the risk of picking a nit, I have some concerns that you talk about "genuine belief" above and then about having "100%" certainity and "giv[ing your] life to him" here. Salvation is not dependent on on "giving our lives to Christ." It is dependent on believing in Him. The former is a matter of discipleship, the latter of faith.

What you seem to be suggesting is that God won't save someone who isn't living up to some particular standard. I don't care what the standard is. The fact is that you seem to have an unstated one in mind. So now, you have God saving us because we act a certain way, but that's little more than (read: identical to) salvation by works.

OSAS necessarily and logically follows salvation by faith alone, ST. There are really only two positions. Either we are saved by faith alone, which entails OSAS, or we are saved by works, which entails a rejection of OSAS. There is absolutely no middle ground on this. But in more logical terms, we must affirm one of these two arguments:

• 1. If we are saved by faith alone, then OSAS is true;
  2. We are saved by faith alone;
  3. Therefore, OSAS is true;

OR

• 1. If we are saved by faith alone, then OSAS is true;
  2'. OSAS is not true;
  3'. Therefore, we are not saved by faith alone

Anyway, I think you would do REALLY well to read Cocoris' work J linked to above. It will help clarily some of this for you, because the position you are leaning towards is just lordship salvation.

I do see what you are saying Jac -and I do get it - but I wouldn't go as far to say that I leaning towards LS. I am just saying that if at some point in my life I just stopped believing in God because of some silly doubt - would I still be saved? Even though I would honestly say in my heart that at one point I did believe in God/Jesus.

I guess you are saying that the answer here is "Yes". But to me that seems a little strange - I could in theory go on and be a bad person because I lost my faith but still be saved because at one point I "believed".

?

[Jac3510]

If you would not be saved because you went on to become a bad person, you ARE promoting LS, since the essence of LS is that we are saved if and when we live up to God's standards. As I said, there are only two positions here.

And yes, I believe the Bible says that if you lose your faith, then you are still saved. The fact, though, that you put "believed" in scare quotes should tell you a lot about your own position. You are, as per my comments above, overloading "believe" with ideas foreign to it. For you, it seems to entail some kind of commitment or ongoing good works or living up to some standard. And so people who don't meet those standards haven't REALLY "believed"; they might have just believed. And so you implicitly distinguish between belief and "belief" and implicitly argue that we are not saved by believing but by "believing." Of course, your version of "belief" is not belief at all, which is precisely the point. If Jesus had wanted to say that we were saved by something other than belief, He would have. He did not. So your position is just saying that Jesus is mistaken insofar as what He actually SAID is not true. I know you don't mean it that way, but that is the absolutely inescapable conclusion of your position, no matter how well meaning you are.

Jesus said something very hard to believe. He said that every person who believes in Him has everlasting life. You, like most people, are just having trouble believing that Jesus actually meant what He said. And this is precisely why it is so fitting that faith alone be the means of salvation. Until you start believing Him, you are always going to struggle with your doubts.

[neo-x]

To be honest I am more inclined to not believe in OSAS, only through personal experience. I have seen people who were on fire for Christ and genuinely believed in him, fall away into unbelief. Now are these people still saved?

Yes

I know at one point in my life I had 100% certainty that Jesus was real and I gave my life to him. However since that moment I have gone through deserts of doubt, some quite crippling. In fact I am just recovering from possibly one of the worst ones I have ever experienced. Am I saved? Or because I have these doubts I am not truly saved yet because I don't really believe?

At the risk of picking a nit, I have some concerns that you talk about "genuine belief" above and then about having "100%" certainity and "giv[ing your] life to him" here. Salvation is not dependent on on "giving our lives to Christ." It is dependent on believing in Him. The former is a matter of discipleship, the latter of faith.

What you seem to be suggesting is that God won't save someone who isn't living up to some particular standard. I don't care what the standard is. The fact is that you seem to have an unstated one in mind. So now, you have God saving us because we act a certain way, but that's little more than (read: identical to) salvation by works.

OSAS necessarily and logically follows salvation by faith alone, ST. There are really only two positions. Either we are saved by faith alone, which entails OSAS, or we are saved by works, which entails a rejection of OSAS. There is absolutely no middle ground on this. But in more logical terms, we must affirm one of these two arguments:

• 1. If we are saved by faith alone, then OSAS is true;
  2. We are saved by faith alone;
  3. Therefore, OSAS is true;

OR

• 1. If we are saved by faith alone, then OSAS is true;
  2'. OSAS is not true;
  3'. Therefore, we are not saved by faith alone

Anyway, I think you would do REALLY well to read Cocoris' work J linked to above. It will help clarily some of this for you, because the position you are leaning towards is just lordship salvation.

I do see what you are saying Jac -and I do get it - but I wouldn't go as far to say that I leaning towards LS. I am just saying that if at some point in my life I just stopped believing in God because of some silly doubt - would I still be saved? Even though I would honestly say in my heart that at one point I did believe in God/Jesus.

I guess you are saying that the answer here is "Yes". But to me that seems a little strange - I could in theory go on and be a bad person because I lost my faith but still be saved because at one point I "believed".

?

OSAS, necessarily entails that if you ST right now, a Christian, drop a thermo-nuclear bomb on a population of millions (reason is irrelevant) you are still saved. That is just the logical conclusion of OSAS. If you happen to turn gay you are still saved. There can be "punishments" by god and you may be disciplined but in essence you are still saved. I recall an old convo with Jilay here in which he did agree that even the enola gay pilots were saved, if they ever believed, dropping a nuke cannot take our salvation away from us.

I agree with the internal reasoning on this to some extent. It does make sense according to scripture as far as sins are concerned. Grace in my view is too radical to be easily believed. But my point is the same you feel, what if I don't want salvation anymore, what if I really have to come to hate God where once I loved him, even if from God's pov I am saved, I really don't care. I don't wanna be saved, do I have a say in the matter or am I still saved, dragged to heaven while I scream I hate you God? Does not my wish matter or does God rejoice in a dictatorship. The whole concept of being one with God is rendered in love. If I have no love, then the love of God should be able to understand that. You can't marry a girl who doesn't love you and then say you love her when you really don't care what she wants. That is what in my view is the total opposite of how I come to understand God and from here OSAS doesn't make sense to me.

[Silvertusk]

If you would not be saved because you went on to become a bad person, you ARE promoting LS, since the essence of LS is that we are saved if and when we live up to God's standards. As I said, there are only two positions here.

And yes, I believe the Bible says that if you lose your faith, then you are still saved. The fact, though, that you put "believed" in scare quotes should tell you a lot about your own position. You are, as per my comments above, overloading "believe" with ideas foreign to it. For you, it seems to entail some kind of commitment or ongoing good works or living up to some standard. And so people who don't meet those standards haven't REALLY "believed"; they might have just believed. And so you implicitly distinguish between belief and "belief" and implicitly argue that we are not saved by believing but by "believing." Of course, your version of "belief" is not belief at all, which is precisely the point. If Jesus had wanted to say that we were saved by something other than belief, He would have. He did not. So your position is just saying that Jesus is mistaken insofar as what He actually SAID is not true. I know you don't mean it that way, but that is the absolutely inescapable conclusion of your position, no matter how well meaning you are.

Jesus said something very hard to believe. He said that every person who believes in Him has everlasting life. You, like most people, are just having trouble believing that Jesus actually meant what He said. And this is precisely why it is so fitting that faith alone be the means of salvation. Until you start believing Him, you are always going to struggle with your doubts.

Thank you Jac - that actually makes a lot of sense. My next question would be then - what about the demons who believe in Christ? Why aren't they saved? If they are not - then does that then imply that actually there is more to it then just belief?

[RickD]

Neo,

Do you think it's a sin to hate God?