Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 07020 The question of whether a believer can lose their salvation is one of the most personally significant doctrinal questions a Christian can face. It touches the very nerve of assurance, and how it is answered shapes the whole tenor of the Christian life. Is the believer’s relationship with God genuinely permanent, or is…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion Q07091 Few things matter more to a believer’s daily Christian life than the question of assurance. Whether someone can know with genuine confidence that they belong to God shapes everything: how they pray, how they face difficulty, how they relate to the prospect of death, how they live. The New Testament takes this question…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion Q07092 In evangelical circles, the doctrine of justification rightly receives enormous attention. It is the declaration by which a sinful person is pronounced righteous before God on the basis of Christ’s atoning work received through faith. But there is a danger that in rightly emphasising justification, other dimensions of what happens at salvation receive…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion Q07093 Of all the soteriological categories the New Testament uses, union with Christ may be the most comprehensive and the least understood. Justification describes the believer’s legal standing; sanctification describes their moral transformation; adoption describes their relational status. Union with Christ underlies all of these without being reducible to any one of them. Whether…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion Q07094 Few theological questions carry more pastoral weight than this one. Get it wrong in one direction and you have added a human work to the gospel, corrupting the message of grace. Get it wrong in the other direction and you have effectively disconnected baptism from any serious obligation, reducing it to a personal…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 7046 Union with Christ is one of the richest and most comprehensive concepts in the New Testament, and it functions as the theological foundation on which virtually every other aspect of salvation rests. It is also among the most underappreciated. Believers who have sat under solid Bible teaching for years can sometimes be unfamiliar…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 7047 The phrase “in Christ” appears in Paul’s letters more frequently than almost any other expression, and yet it tends to wash over readers without registering its full weight. It is not filler language or pious decoration. It is Paul’s most concentrated shorthand for the most fundamental thing that is true of a person…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 7041 “The perseverance of the saints” is a technical term from Reformed and Calvinist theology where it forms the fifth point in what has become known as the five points of Calvinism. But the underlying question it addresses, whether genuine believers can lose their salvation and what the relationship is between present faith and…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 7043 Did Christ die for every human being who has ever lived, or only for those who would ultimately believe? The question of the extent of the atonement is one of the most theologically significant in Christian history, and the answer has practical consequences that reach all the way into how the gospel is…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 7045 Scripture repeatedly and plainly states that Jesus died for all people, and yet it is equally plain that not everyone will be saved. For some, this seems like a genuine tension requiring a theological resolution. Understanding how the biblical picture holds together not only resolves the apparent difficulty but opens up the full…