Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 06035. Spiritual backsliding is an old-fashioned phrase for something very modern. It describes a Christian who was once warm towards God and is now cold, who once prayed and now does not, who once delighted in the Lord’s people and now avoids them. The word may sound like something from a Victorian tract, but…
Reading Time: 10 minutesQuestion 6166. The Hebrews 10 warning has probably cost more sleep among sincere believers than any other paragraph in the New Testament. “For if we go on sinning deliberately after receiving the knowledge of the truth, there no longer remains a sacrifice for sins.” Read that at two in the morning after a bad week…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 7108 Arminian theology is the other great system in the English-speaking Protestant world, and it is almost as frequently misrepresented as Calvinism. Many who reject Calvinism assume they must therefore be Arminian, and many Calvinists use the word as a synonym for shallow thinking. Neither assumption survives contact with the actual documents. I am…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 7091 The question of assurance of salvation is one I am asked more often than almost any other, and it is usually asked by people who are already believers. That in itself is telling. The person living happily in unrepentant sin rarely loses sleep over whether they belong to God. It is the tender…
Reading Time: 8 minutesQuestion 7070. Biblical apostasy is a word we reach for quickly and understand slowly. I have heard it applied to a friend who stopped attending church, to a denomination that has drifted, to a preacher whose theology went sideways, and once or twice to somebody who had simply irritated the person speaking. Scripture handles the…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 07062 Judas Iscariot was never saved. I hold that with more confidence than I hold most things, because Jesus Himself said so in several ways, and the alternative would require us to believe that a man could be chosen, indwelt and forgiven and still be described as one who was lost from the beginning….
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 07059 Can a true Christian commit apostasy? My answer is no, and the reason is not that believers are strong but that God is faithful. A person who genuinely, finally and contentedly repudiates Jesus is revealing what was always the case rather than losing something they once possessed. That answer needs working out carefully,…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 07050 Few things trouble a tender conscience quite like the fear of falling away. I have sat with believers who could recite the promises of God perfectly well and still could not sleep, because somewhere at the back of the mind sat a suspicion that one cold enough season, one serious enough failure, and…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 7041. The perseverance of the saints, or final perseverance, is the fifth point of the Calvinist system, and it teaches that everyone God has chosen will certainly continue in faith and holiness to the end. The elect cannot fall away finally, and anyone who does fall away permanently demonstrates by that fact that their…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 07022. Where do those who commit suicide go? I have been asked this question across a kitchen table more often than from a pulpit, usually by someone whose face tells me the answer matters more than any other thing in the world just now. So I want to answer it plainly and gently, and…