Hebrews 6 and Assurance of Salvation II

Here's the second part of my serialized sermon manuscript on Hebrews 6.

II. There is a Difference Between the Security of Salvation and the Assurance of Salvation 

1. Passages      that Affirm Eternal Security

John 6:39-40 say this: 

^39 And this is the will of him who sent me, that I shall lose none of all that he has given me, but raise them up at the last day. ^40 For my Father’s will is that everyone who looks to the Son and believes in him shall have eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day.”

John 10:27-30 says this: 

^27 My sheep listen to my voice; I know them, and they follow me. ^28 I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish; no one can snatch them out of my hand. ^29 My Father, who has given them to me, is greater than all; no one can snatch them out of my Father’s hand. ^30 I and the Father are one."

There is something you ought to notice about these two passages of Scripture and that is simply that it is Jesus who does the saving. Whether we are saved or not is His choice not ours. In John 6:39-40 it is the father who gives us to Jesus and He says that He will raise us up on the last day. 

 

In John 10:27-30 Jesus speaks of His sheep as being in His hand and no one can snatch us out of His hand. And then He says that no one can snatch us out of the Father’s hand. It is as if we have two sets of hands that no one can overcome that are holding us in place in our salvation.

    Salvation is His choice not ours. We often think backwards. We think that if we will choose to believe or have faith then God will save us. The Biblical picture is the opposite. If God will choose to save us, then He will enable us to have faith.

The fact that you have believed in Jesus is not a cause of your salvation, it is an evidence of your salvation. You believe because God has chosen you, God doesn’t choose to save you because you have believed.

Ephesians 2:8-9 says: 

By grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God.

 The grace and the faith are given to us by God. It is His choice whether or not to save us. And the point of John 6 and 10 is that He says that once He chooses to save us He won’t un-choose us. If He saves us, He’ll keep us.

 So when we speak of the “security” of salvation, we are talking about the objective reality of salvation. If God has chosen us and saved us He won’t “un-save” us. 

    But that is different than the subjective experience of the assurance of salvation.

2. Passages      that Speak of Assuranc 
   

I John 5:13 speaks of the assurance of salvation:

^13 I write these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God so that you may know that you have eternal life.

Whereas security of salvation is an objective thing – you are either saved or you aren’t, it’s up to God to decide that, assurance of salvation is very different. 

The assurance of salvation is a very subjective thing – assurance deals with knowing and feeling that you are saved. There are some who are saved but don’t know it or don’t feel it. 

Assurance is something you can have, but it is not the same thing as the security of salvation. In my mind, the Westminster Confession of Faith has some of the clearest summaries of the biblical teaching on security and assurance.

In speaking of the perseverance of the saints, the confession says correctly:

Those whom God has accepted in his Beloved, effectually called, and sanctified by his Spirit, can neither totally nor finally fall away from the state of grace, but shall certainly persevere in it to the end and be eternally saved.

 And then it goes on to say what we talked about – that this is because our salvation doesn’t depend upon us, but upon God.

    In chapter 18 it speaks of assurance when it says: 

those who truly believe on the Lord Jesus, love him sincerely, and strive to live in all good conscience before him, may in this life be certainly assured that they are in the state of grace and may rejoice in the hope of the glory of God, a hope that shall never make them ashamed.

But it goes on to say that assurance is not essential to faith and that there are many ways that our assurance can be shaken, and there are many ways it can be renewed.

• Sidenote for the blog - this is not in my manuscript but I wanted to point out that I am aware that there is a debate in reformed circles as to whether or not assurance of salvation is of the essence of salvation.  Some believe that it is.  If memory serves me correctly, Michael Scott Horton discusses this in his book Christ the Lord.
     

Now I bring all of this up as a kind of prelude to the rest of today’s message and an intro to next week’s message. We tend to think that assurance of salvation is based on a past experience, whether it is a prayer we prayed or a card we signed or an aisle we walked or something like that.

I was in a seminar one time where the speaker said he was dealing with someone who always struggled with the assurance of salvation. So, he told them to go ahead and reconfess Jesus as savior and Lord at that time and then to write up some kind of sign and attach it to a post and go and stake it in the yard somewhere. Then he said that, in the future, whenever Satan tempts you to doubt your salvation just take him out back and show him the sign, proving that you got saved on whatever date.  

Furthermore, we treat the assurance of salvation based upon such a past act as something sacred.  We often teach that, once a person has prayed the prayer or signed the card of laid the post that we should never, ever call that person’s salvation into question.

As the confession shows, at least in our tradition, such an idea is really foreign to what we believe. Yes, we can have assurance of salvation, but this assurance is not based upon looking to some past experience.  

But more importantly in our text today, it is clear to me that the writer of the book of Hebrews wanted to make his readers at least a little worried about the state of their souls.

One of the problems we have when reading the Bible is that none of us comes to the Bible as a blank slate. We like to think we do. We like to think that we come to the Bible as blank slates and we are just going to read it and let it say what it says.

But the truth is that all of us have presuppositions and prejudices that we bring with us when we read the Bible. We come to the Bible with certain questions and sometimes the questions we bring to the text are not the questions that the author of the text was trying to answer.  

I think this is why this particular text causes so much trouble for many of us. We come with this notion that we should never ever question whether we are saved and then we get this guy who is writing to professing Christians and he sure seems like he wants them to question if they are saved.

And he is absolutely unconcerned about anything they have done in the past. He is warning these folks based on present day realities.  He doesn’t ask about a past decision or something like that in evaluating their spiritual condition, he talks about present day realities.