All Christians will say there is no security outside of Christ. We all know Christ is the only way; He is the Rock, and to build without Him as Lord is to build on sand.
However there's a continuing discussion among Christian believers about whether you can lose your salvation. It's a deadly serious issue, literally. In our minds at least.
God, as the supreme Good Parent, wants happy, secure, resilient and stable children. He also wants children who behave honourably and show real kindness to their fellow men. How does He build His virtue and substance into us?
Some think God will threaten us with total rejection based on our lapses in behaviour.
If you think you might lose your salvation, you will at times be on tenterhooks, wondering whether God has lost his patience with you entirely. This is judging by my own experience. We normally feel like this because of our sins and failures. If you have sinned in a way which seems obvious, unacceptable or unforgivable to you, this is particularly likely to be the case. Alcohol or drug abuse, watching pornography, inappropriate angry behaviour and language, are common examples. Perhaps as a Christian you have succumbed to these or other things. You are disappointed with yourself. The devil, the accuser, is very likely also on your case.
Has God rejected and abandoned us? Will our fellow Christians? Perhaps they know what we have done, or maybe we fear they'll find out, not knowing how they'll react, which is probably even worse. This can be a horrible place to be, a place of both shame and insecurity. It is entirely possible to live much of our Christian lives bouncing between these episodes of failure, while having a constant background fear we will fall into them again.
The reality is we all sin continually to some degree. But the fear of rejection and abandonment by God is not necessary. God loves us into wholeness, having adopted us as His children. Within the family, He doesn't terrify us into wholeness. By saying all this I am not condoning or encouraging sin. It's just that, particularly if we have experienced a lot of rejection, especially early in life, we are inclined to expect harsh judgments and rejection from God. God is feeling none. If we turn to Him, He's there for us, forgiving and restoring us. It is His opinion we need to be firstly concerned with. Fear of harsh rejection will only ever succeed in getting us to behave outwardly anyway. God works through love, reaching the inner motives, winning us over from the heart with His mercy.
We need to trust Him to the extent that we truly open our hearts to Him when we are tempted, and, if necessary, when we have just fallen into sin. He will receive us in love, and handle us with gentleness and patience. If discipline comes, it is corrective and will come in a timely, considered way. There will be no sudden angry disowning.
Eternal Calling, Yes, Eternal Falling, No.
Here's one of the verses sometimes quoted by people who say we can lose our salvation.
Therefore, brothers, be all the more diligent to confirm your calling and election, for if you practice these qualities you will never fall.
2 Peter 1:10
Peter tells believers to confirm their calling as sons of God. Certainly it's good to remind and reassure yourself of this calling. It should help you live better. But in view of the following Romans verses it's hard to see how you would confirm your calling in God's eyes. You don't need to. He has already predestined you. He has already called you to glory. All because you chose Him. In the thoughts of God, this passage applies:
For those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he might be the firstborn among many brothers. And those whom he predestined he also called, and those whom he called he also justified, and those whom he justified he also glorified.
Romans 8:29-30
We have here a straightforward statement of God's thinking and planning toward us. There's a chain of actions, each dependant on the last, each performed by God. It would be very easy to assume we had no part at all in this process. After all, God is performing every step. It reads as a highway to heaven!
That's not quite how it is. We are completely involved in the first, crucial, step.
The only step in the chain of God's actions where He's passive is the first one. It's a knowing, not a doing. He knows the complete picture through from Alpha to Omega, beginning to end. Already. He's eternal. In particular, He had foreknowledge about whether we chose Him.
I am God, and there is none like me, declaring the end from the beginning and from ancient times things not yet done, saying, ‘My counsel shall stand, and I will accomplish all my purpose,’
Isaiah 46:9b-10
Let's look again at the first two verbs 'foreknew' and 'predestined'. Here's a simple illustration of the difference. Suppose I had a flatmate, and he kept a diary. He'd been very excitable recently. I knew he was always honest, and I knew he kept his word. One afternoon I came across his open diary. Curiosity got the better of me, or perhaps he had told me I was free to look in it! I saw the entry from that morning. There he had recorded his intention of proposing to his girlfriend later that evening. At that point I had foreknowledge of what he was going to do, but I certainly didn't predestine him to do it.
God foreknew those who would come to Him.
That foreknowledge God uses to determine what happens next. After His foreknowing a person did or will come to Him in Christ, the other four actions in Romans 8:29-30 are active actions on God's part. God is actively, continually supervising our salvation to ensure the outcome.
Joining Him in Eternal Life
God is not constrained by time in the way we are. The verses from Romans chapter 8 quoted above read as a fait accompli, a done deal. When God has the foreknowledge that we will accept His offer of salvation, He ensures everything else follows. It is predestined. Even the glorification of the saints is done. He knows who chose Him and who rejected Him. Based on that knowledge, He predestined us to follow through on a track, a road, leading to justification, to conformity to His Son, and eventually to glorification. The last happens when we receive our eternal body and environment. He knows the end from the beginning**.
He foreknew some would step out of the temporal realm and enter the eternal realm. This happens at the new birth; we enter the eternal realm, and so our true inner self is established forever (Ephesians 2v4-6, 2 Corinthians 5v17).
So can our 'true self' drop back out of eternity? I don't believe so. Please read on.
* Predestination without the condition of foreknowledge leads us to the hard Calvinist theology where we have no active part in our salvation. Hard Calvinism developed a doctrine known by the acronym 'TULIP'. The 'I' represents 'irresistible grace'. God chooses us, we can't choose Him. This leaves us a robots, and leaves those not chosen as damned without recourse. However, including the foreknowledge of God in our concept of predestination resolves the dilemma.
** Yet He is also able to experience and understand human life lived within the constraints of time. This is how Jesus experienced life; the same as we do.
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