Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 7082. The antinomian error is the conviction, held openly or lived out quietly, that because a Christian is under grace, God’s moral commands no longer have any claim on him. The word is built from two Greek pieces meaning against law, and it names the opposite ditch from legalism on the same narrow road….
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 7078. To believe on Jesus is the single condition Scripture attaches to salvation, and it is worth being precise about it, because the English word believe has grown thin. In ordinary speech we believe things we are fairly confident about and nothing follows from it. I believe the train leaves at ten past. That…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 7077. The place of confession in salvation is one of those subjects where a single verse has been made to carry more weight than it can bear. Romans 10:9 mentions the mouth, and a whole practice of guided prayers and public declarations has been built on it, sometimes with the implication that a person…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 7076. That demons believe correct theology and remain lost is one of the more unsettling statements in the New Testament, and James makes it deliberately. He is arguing with somebody who thinks that holding the right ideas about God is sufficient, and he produces the most damaging counter example available: the demonic realm is…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 7075. The gospel message can be stated in a sentence, and it needs to be, because most of the conversations in which it matters will not give you twenty minutes. At the same time a summary that leaves out something essential is not a shorter gospel but a different one. So the task is…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 7074. Sinless perfection in this present life is taught by a number of sincere traditions, and I want to treat the question with the seriousness it deserves rather than waving it away. The people who hold it are usually not careless Christians. They are often the opposite, people with a high view of holiness…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 7073. Positional sanctification describes where you stand before God; practical sanctification describes how you are getting on. Both are scriptural, both matter, and a great many discouraged Christians are discouraged precisely because they have been measuring the first by the second. If you have ever wondered how Paul could call the Corinthians saints with…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 7072. Progressive sanctification is the part of this doctrine most Christians have heard about, and it is the part that feels true to experience. We are being changed, slowly, unevenly, over a lifetime. What fewer believers have been taught is that Scripture also speaks of sanctification as something already accomplished, finished, and never to…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 7071. Religious legalism is the instinct to add something of our own to what Jesus has already finished, and it is remarkably persistent in the human heart. I have never met a Christian who was entirely free of it, including the one writing this. We know that we are saved by grace, we say…
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…