Why These Passages Deserve an Honest Reading
Sooner or later every believer reads Hebrews 6:4–6 and stops. Maybe it is late at night. Maybe he has fallen back into a sin he thought he had left behind. He wonders whether he has crossed a line and cannot come back. Other believers read the same chapter and conclude that a child of God can fall away and be lost.
The Bible is full of promises that a believer will never perish, and it holds sober warnings against falling away. An honest reader has to take both. We hold eternal security: everyone who has been born again through faith in Christ is kept by the power of God and can never be lost. But we do not hold it by skipping these passages. Christians who read them differently did not invent them.
Four Questions to Ask of Any Warning
- Whom does it describe? Does the text call these people saved, or does it describe what they heard, saw, and professed?
- What is at stake? Is it eternal life, or is it reward, fellowship, usefulness, or the Father's chastening?
- What is the setting? Who is being addressed, and what is the writer's argument?
- What do the clear promises say? Clear texts should guide how we read difficult ones.
When God warns you, is He threatening to disown you, or is He keeping you on the road?
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For Deeper Study
- Four Views on the Warning Passages in HebrewsAmazon Herbert W. Bateman IV, ed.Two Arminian and two Reformed scholars read the five warnings and answer one another (Kregel, 2007). No contributor holds our exact view, but the book shows what is at stake in each text.
- Salvation Is ForeverAmazon Robert G. GromackiA Cedarville University Bible and Greek professor answers, text by text, whether a saved person can ever be lost.
- Eternal Security: Can You Be Sure?Amazon Charles StanleyA warm, readable defense of eternal security with answers to the hard passages.
- Kept by the Power of God: A Study of Perseverance and Falling AwayAmazon I. Howard MarshallA careful exegetical study from a non-Calvinist scholar who argues that believers can fall away. We differ. Read it to hear the strongest form of that case.
- The Race Set Before Us: A Biblical Theology of Perseverance & AssuranceAmazon Thomas R. Schreiner and Ardel B. CanedayReformed. Two Calvinistic Baptist scholars argue that the warnings are God's means of keeping believers. We share their confidence that God keeps His own and differ on its ground.
- Foxe's Book of MartyrsAmazon John FoxeThe classic Protestant record of those who died for the faith, from the early church to the English Reformation.
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Eternal Security
Everyone who is genuinely born again through faith in Christ is kept by the power of God and will never perish, because salvation rests on Christ's finished work and God's unbreakable promise.
Open Doctrine