I enjoy drawing parallels between seemingly disparate things, and as a Bible college student I love when questions pop up in my studies that I never considered before. So here's a two-in-one: How are the Christian concepts of forgiveness and eternal security related?
The thing is, all Christians will agree that forgiving and forgiveness are central to our faith, but not all agree that eternal security (the impossibility of losing salvation once gained) is correct theology, so some believers may feel the connection is obvious while others find it nonexistent. A wide difference of opinion and understanding indeed.
Transparency time: During my 47ish-year walk with the Lord, I have gone back and forth between the can you/can't you lose your salvation camps. I don't mean flip-flopping like a landed fish every few years; I mean I came to Christ in the "yes you can" community, eventually began to doubt the Scriptural certainty of this and adopted the "no you can't" position for a time, moved back to the "yes you can" thinking without really examining it that closely, and am currently perched on the precipice again even though I belong to a local body that believes you can. Part of the reason I'm reconsidering the question will be explained by my current in-depth study of forgiveness, and most of the rest of my argument is this:
First, when we are saved, we are sealed by the Holy Spirit for the day of redemption (Ephesians 1:13-14). Though "sealed" seems to be the most-used translation, other words including "marked," "stamped," "signed," and "identified" are also used. Can we really break a Holy-Spirit seal, mark, stamp, signature, or ID? I would err on the side of saying we cannot, certainly not by anything less than conscious and permanent repudiation of Jesus. Too, there's a logic problem: having received salvation by faith, if we can lose it by something we do, then salvation is by works. It would seem, then, to lose salvation you would have to nullify faith. Finally, and I recognize this is not a biblical argument, when we are adopted as children of God (Ephesians 1:5), is He really going to let us go? Most human parents will not give up on or cut ties with their children no matter what the children have done. Does God do less? It just doesn't sit right. At this time, I'm prepared to state that if a believer in Jesus Christ can lose their salvation, it will have to be by a conscious, willful, for-all-time rejection of Jesus that will grieve the Holy Spirit enough to break that seal. In other words, if salvation can be lost, it's not nearly as easy as most "yes you can" believers assume--and fear. I submit that to the extent they're too set in this fear, their trust is in their own ability to be good rather than in Jesus. Again, the line of thinking tends to turn into a subtle salvation by works. But now let's look at my forgiveness study to trace how I even got to the eternal security question in the first place.
In recent years, by which I mean the last twenty or so, there's been an increase in the teaching that forgiveness doesn't require continuation of a relationship in order to be forgiveness. I don't disagree. An obvious example is the case of an unsafe individual such as an abuser. Do we need to forgive? Yes. Do we need to maintain relationship and thus stay in the abusive situation? Of course not. Yet, when God forgives, he takes us back into relationship, right? Therefore, I mused, are we forgiving on some lesser level than God does, and is that okay?
Spoiler: I believe we are not forgiving on a lesser level, and that the doctrine of eternal security may well be germane to arriving at this conclusion. But this post will get too long if I detail all of that here, so I'll continue in Part 2 on Wednesday, February 18.
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