Today’s reading: 2 Kings 24; Hebrews 3-4
Is, “Once saved, always saved,” really what the Bible teaches about salvation?
This is the gospel as I was taught it when I came to know the Lord in college, that salvation is by faith alone in Christ, and that once you are saved, that can never change because all of your sins have already been paid for by Jesus. If someone did walk away from the faith, people either said that they must not have actually believed in the first place, or they never would have walked away, or they would say that walking away was impossible and they were going to heaven when they died whether they liked it or not.
I have actually heard is said before, in a teaching, that even if you aren’t sure yet if you believe it, you should just pray and ask Jesus into your heart in case you die while you’re still trying to figure it out as a sort of “fire insurance.” “If you just pray this prayer, you won’t end up in hell, and then you can decide after the fact whether it’s really true and/or whether you want to actually follow Jesus, but either way, you won’t be going to hell because you’re saved!”
To put it bluntly, this is not what the Bible teaches about salvation.
The author of Hebrews is very clear about this over and over throughout the letter, but just take these couple verses from our reading today in chapter 3:
“Take care, brothers, lest there be in any of you an evil, unbelieving heart, leading you to fall away from the living God. But exhort one another every day, as long as it is called “today,” that none of you may be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin. For we have come to share in Christ, if indeed we hold our original confidence firm to the end.”
Clearly, in these verses, the author is addressing Christian believers, and yet he warns them about the possibility of falling away from God. And what is the basis of that falling away? Failing to hold their original confidence firm to the end.
Salvation is not a matter of praying a prayer to ask for forgiveness or to ask Jesus into your heart, salvation is a matter of faith. If your faith is in Christ for the forgiveness of your sins and your entrance into heaven, you are saved, if it’s not, you are not. This is why the author of Hebrews spills the ink to warn his readers against letting their hearts be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin, causing them to fall away from the confidence (their faith) that they had at first.
Salvation can indeed be lost, but not by sinning too much or by committing too heinous of a sin. Salvation is by faith alone, and that which is gained by no merit of our own cannot be lost by a failure or lack of merit. The reason the author of Hebrews warns his readers against sin is the deceitfulness of it to harden our hearts against the faith we had at first. The danger of sin is not that it costs us our salvation, but that it calluses our hearts against the voice of God in our lives, and, unchecked, can ultimately lead us to turn from our faith in Christ for our salvation.
This is part of the reason Christian community is so incredibly important. And by “Christian community” I don’t mean showing up to church, shaking hands, maybe hanging out for a donut and coffee afterwards, and then seeing each other next week, but I mean real, significant investment in one another’s lives, such that we are able to exhort one another daily, that none of us may be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin. If we want the best chance of holding our original confidence firm to the end, we need people in our lives who know us deeply enough to be able to tell where we are drifting from that confidence or where we are allowing sin to harden our hearts to it.
So while the Bible does not teach a “once saved, always saved” version of salvation, it does teach us that we can have assurance of our salvation, but that assurance does not come from having prayed a prayer one time, but from having our faith rooted in Christ.
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