So, at what point? (Loss Of Salvation)

There is less agreement on this than you think, and these matters are in fact foundational.

You have the Reformed people who believe that everyone is "lost" by default. They maintain that people are born lost, and unless God intervenes, they are headed to perdition. All of them. Hell is the default state, heaven is salvation. From what I can tell (and if that's not the understanding, feel free to correct me).

I don't see such a thing in Scripture. Jesus was very fond of children, and stated "for of such is the Kingdom of heaven." I don't see "original sin" in His statement. I don't deny that perdition or hell exist, but I don't agree with the way they are defined. Jesus stated He came to the "lost sheep of the house of Israel". What does that even mean? Did He mean that all of the house of Israel were lost sheep, or that He only came for the sheep who were lost, and that other sheep weren't lost at all? He also stated "only those who are sick are in need of a physician." That implies that at least some were/are actually well.

I know we all have our "proof texts" that we use to undergird our understanding of the process of salvation, and people's need for it. There are other verses in Scripture that people conveniently skip over. Such as the ones I just mentioned. What do these verses mean, how do they fit in our "salvation narrative" and how can they be explained? Do we disregard them, or do we need to examine our own understanding?

Even Paul tailored the salvation message to the audience he had in front of him. In Acts 17 when he was at the synagogue, he reasoned from the Scripture that Jesus was the Jewish messiah, and that the messiah's death and resurrection were necessary. Paul reasoned with people; he did not proclaim hellfire & brimstone upon their heads, and he did not turn the Gospel into an emotional fearmongering horror show (and if you've never been subjected to such a thing, then bless you; it's horrific).

Then we have Paul in Athens/Mars Hill. He built his sermon on the religious disposition that his audience had to begin with, and he reasoned from there that "in Him we live and move and have our being." The "WE" Paul was talking about were ALL PEOPLE PRESENT THERE. He included everyone as of God, created by God, being in God by default, yet ignorant of their state in God and in need of being awakened to this fact. He used their own philosophers' quotes, and he did not disagree with them. What???!!!!

So are we in God by default, or are we lost by default?

These things are important and foundational, because they inform the very definition and understanding of salvation; of what it is, and why it matters.

I see people as being in God by default. I had a relationship with Him as a child. I knew He was real and I connected with Him all the time, in my own little simplistic childlike way. Because children are innocent and also very capable of understanding God; theology is not at all reserved for adult scholars with an IQ of 150. I do not at all, whatsoever, agree that we are born lost sinners. Because we are created by God, and we are still "very good", even though we can certainly be indoctrinated and brainwashed and become wicked. Although I maintain that we would all know God if people didn't brainwash us with their ideas of the world and pull us another way. Idolatry is taught. Hatred is taught. These things are not in a child by default from birth. Children take their clues from adults; for good or for bad. Little children are, in fact, not sinners. They are citizens of the Kingdom, by default and by birthright. Repentance simply means "drop your brainwashing and the twistedness that you have adopted on your way to adulthood which has caused you to become hardened, and return to your God as an innocent child". Salvation isn't the rescue from a lost default state; it's the call back to our "in God" default state that people either forget or willfully ignore.

So we see that Jesus' disposition towards children is in fact very positive. He proclaims the very Kingdom of God to be full of children, and He states very clearly that "unless you become like a little child, you will never enter the Kingdom". How can we so blatantly ignore that as we build our "theology" that somehow now has become "all people are born with a sin nature in a lost state and are going to hell unless God intervenes"?

How can these things be?

That's my point. Thank you for reading.

 

What's our default state? In God? In sin? At what point does it change, one way or the other?

I know I stated above that I think 99.9% of us are disqualified from the Kingdom. That's actually not what I believe foundationally; it's a mindset I adopt after I look at people for a while and at how awfully we tend to behave, and then I get frustrated and think "well then we're just all done then, God help us". But I'm also aware that this mindset isn't truth; it's just my perception. The Bible actually presents a very positive message about God and mankind, and I have to discard the negative when I read it, and remember that God has goodwill towards us, by default, that He is Love, and that Salvation is who God is. The fact that Jesus came is indeed good news, as it proves that we are all worth saving, despite our tendencies to ignore God and go our own way because our ego pulls us that way because we are surrounded by dysfunction and constantly brainwashed into thinking it's all about "me me me".

And so, despite my personal inclinations to the contrary, I believe, based on Scripture, that being "lost" isn't actually as easy of a state to achieve as I (we?) sometimes believe it is. We are not born corrupt, but become corrupt. The "Roman Road" isn't some "default" way of salvation; it's a "compare and contrast" of Jew and Gentile, and the way God deals with both groups when it comes to morality and matters of conscience, how the Law comes into play, and what it means for Israel that God was now also including the Gentiles as His own people. The audience of the Bible isn't children, but adults who are supposed to know better but who have disregarded the fact that they know better. We allow ourselves to become corrupt, and then we choose to pass on our own corruption to our children (who are in fact born innocent), just to validate our own egos.

You believe in some sort of "age of accountability", yes? I think I remember us having a discussion on that in the past ...

 

We are told in Scripture that by nature we are sinful. ALL have sinned. That's not an opinion or idea it's the word of God and that line should jump right out at you as coming from Romans 3.

“None is righteous, no, not one;
no one understands;
no one seeks for God.
All have turned aside;
together they have become worthless;
no one does good,
not even one.”

 

Yes I'm aware.

Also Romans 3:
(9) What then? Are we any better? Not at all. For we have already made the charge that Jews and Greeks alike are all under sin.

Got it.

However, when you follow the trail to Romans 11:32, you get this gem:
For God has consigned all men to disobedience, so that He may have mercy on them all.

WHY did God consign ALL MEN to disobedience?

SO THAT He may show His mercy to ALL OF THEM.

God did NOT consign everyone to disobedience to doom most and save some. God shut us all up in disobedience in order to save us all. Because Jesus took our disobedience into death with Himself, and was raised out of it, and we with Him. When Jesus died, we all died. When Jesus was raised, we were all raised. In Adam ALL die. In Christ ALL will be made alive.

Again, Romans is a compare/contrast of Jews vs Gentiles and that the disobedience of the Jews led to salvation of the Gentiles, but that in the end, God will save Israel too because He is so merciful.

It's not a proof text that everyone is going to hell, except some "elect" who God has mercy on according to His sovereignty based on whatever undiscoverable and utterly mysterious reasons.

We all read in Acts that when Paul preached Christ to the Jews, he ran into brick wall after brick wall after brick wall because the Jews put up so much resistance and wanted nothing much to do with Jesus being their messiah. Which then caused Paul to say "I'm done with you people; I'm going to the Gentiles."

You can't divorce Romans from Acts. Can't. You can't divorce Paul the theologian from Paul the apostle who dealt with actual people in actual situations and drew his own conclusions based upon what was happening. Romans is Paul trying to make sense out of what we see happening in Acts, and still hoping and reasoning for Israel's ultimate salvation even though they were not coming to Christ; but doing the exact opposite of coming to Christ, which was persecuting the Church and driving them away.

However, even so -- Paul was fully expecting God to save all of Israel in his lifetime, after taking a detour and saving the Gentiles after shutting the Jews out for a while (basically hitting the "pause" button, but with the goal in mind of making the salvation of the Jews even more glorious than the salvation of the Gentiles in the end, because the Jews were the root and the firstfruit). Paul was expecting God to save all Jews: Romans 11:16 "If the part of the dough offered as firstfruits is holy, then the whole batch is holy; if the root is holy, so are the branches."

"The elect" are the root and the firstfruit. They are the visible, current promise of the full salvation to come. The elect are not the only ones who will obtain salvation in the end; at least not according to Paul, who understood Jewish Scripture and history better than I can ever hope to.

The entire argument Paul makes in Romans about why the Jews were hardened so that the Gentiles could be grafted in, culminates in Romans 11:32 with him arguing that all would end up saved, and then giving glory to God for His indescribably mercy in Romans 11:33-36.

Bottom line: Paul was far more universalist than Calvinist, as far as I can tell.

 

Paul wasn't even close to being a universalist! You are confusing Could and Can with Shall.
For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.
Jesus Himself said that unless one be born again he cannot enter the kingdom of heaven and that No One come to the Father except through Him.
How do we come to the Father through him? By believing in him, being born again and loving God with all of our everything and by enduring until the end.
What will Christ tell many on judgement day? Away from me I never knew you.

Universalism is a lie directly from the father of lies and any who believe in it has been badly deceived. If we aren't born again we won't be with God in the new heaven and earth. If you believe Scripture at all you know that is a fact.
If you believe scripture at all you know that Universalism is completely contrary to the gospel.

As to the OP I don't have any idea at what specific "point" someone would lose their salvation but I do know that we are warned to endure until the end and that we have been given warnings about falling away. If it was impossible to fall away then why would we need the warnings at all? We wouldn't.

RK made a great point about that ( and it seems to me to be essential in context of this conversation ) that was pretty much left to blow away in the wind. Why?

 

Romans 11:25:26 25 I do not want you to be ignorant of this mystery, brothers and sisters, so that you may not be conceited: Israel has experienced a hardening part until the full number of the Gentiles has come in, and in this way all Israel will be saved.

That's will. Not could, can, might, maybe. Will.

 

We're still crunching the actual numbers, but yea.

(Incredibly enough it's possible for us to agree but also not agree at the same time. )

 

That's a far cry from saying that Paul was any kind of Universalist. What's he's talking about here is Israel's calling as a nation and that in the end times they will repent and be born again. They will recognize Christ as messiah and as God and fulfill prophecy.

Of course that isn't saying that every Jew that ever lived will be retroactively saved and it certainly isn't saying anything about Gentiles at all.

 

So your understanding is that those in Israel who happen to be alive during that (yet future) time will be saved as a nation, and those who aren't/weren't alive at that time (before AD 70 and after AD 1947 until the current time), won't be included, but have an individualized choice of salvation like we do now as Gentiles (supposedly)?

So are there 2 separate salvations for Israel; a national one (includes everyone) and an individual one (includes ... I'm guessing the "elect")?

If Paul had 2 salvations or "salvation tracks" in mind, why didn't he just say so? It looks to me as though he is presenting one salvation track/plan/event.

I'm tracking with "Israel's calling as a nation" (or people group) ... but then you split it up into individual Jews --- and that's when I'm not tracking because now you're presenting two plans of salvation for Israel, vs the one I see in Romans.

How many salvations are there, do you think?

 

I didn't say anything close to that. Those Jews who are born again now become Christian's now. Those who rejected Him and died aren't any different than anyone else who rejects Him and they will face the same judgement.
Christ will say "I never knew you." And they will not enter.

Just a hint if you weren't able to figure it out: I completely reject replacement theology.

Edit: Just to clarify - Under the New Covenant there is only one plan of "salvation" and that is quite simply by grace we are saved through faith.

 

Good, as do I. Romans 11 is where I think replacement theology happens. And then "Israel" becomes "God's chosen people of all time; Jew and Gentile" instead of "Israel the Old Covenant nation of YHWH." And it just gets more confusing from there (I think).

Anyway.

I'm not a universalist (although I do believe we have biblical permission to hope) and can't with certitude state that Paul was either. I simply said he was more universalist than Calvinist. By compare/contrast, not as an absolute statement. By that I mean Paul's idea of who was going to be found in the Kingdom after it's all said and done seems to include lots more people than Calvin's idea, as far as I can tell. It seems to me as though Calvin had a very narrow understanding and definition of salvation and was a very "letter of the law" kind of person, which was borne out by how he ran Geneva when he was put in actual governmental control of a city. I can appreciate a lot of what he had to say, but my view is much broader based upon my own walk with God throughout the last 20 years. I'm far more spirit than letter, if you will. If you think that my view of salvation is too broad based on that, then that's your right.

However --- none of this releases any of us from the call to be disciples of the Jesus we claim to follow and to proclaim the Gospel when we are provided with an opportunity to do so.

It's a fallacy to think that those of us who hope for or believe in a wider inclusion of people into the Kingdom play fast and loose with the Gospel or with sin. That is 100% not the case. Sin is still sin, the call to repentance stands, "you must be born again" also stands, and faith in Christ is absolutely 100% necessary to enjoy adoption by God the Father and become part of the elect in this life on Earth (which we are created in and bound to for the time being). I just present the Gospel and faith in Christ with a greater focus on the here-and-now than the by-and-by; and you can try and fault me for that, but I see great examples of exactly this in Scripture, so that's what I go by. There remains an imminence and right-now-ness to Christ's preaching and conduct and teaching that I believe has been a bit neglected with this (almost obsessive) focus shifting to some future state. Where "heaven" and "hell" have become the very center of, and reason for, the "Gospel" message --- rather than the resurrection from the dead. I have heard way too many "Gospel invitations" never even mentioning our hope of a future resurrection!!! When a believer dies, it's not "they fell asleep and are awaiting the resurrection" like they believed and proclaimed in the early Church; now it's "they are in glory now dancing with the angels" or somesuch pseudo-biblical half-truth.

So when we discuss "salvation", I would love to see us actually mentioning the resurrection from the dead and center our discussion around that. That would be fantastic.