Category: Salvation

Q. Many speak as if Paul’s salvation took place when he saw Jesus on the road to Damascus. In fact, the term “Damascus Road experience” is often applied to those with a dramatic conversion testimony. In Acts 9, we learn that Paul was knocked to the ground, terrified by the heavenly light. The Lord told him to go into the city and wait. In the meantime, the Lord spoke to Ananias and told him to go and visit Paul. Later, in Acts 22:16, we learn that Ananias said to Paul, “And now, why do you wait? Rise and be baptized and wash away your sins, calling on His name.” So perhaps it was only after acknowledging his sins and calling on the Lord for forgiveness that Paul became a saved sinner? What do you think? (By the way, water baptism can’t save or “wash away sins” or be part of a “work” required to be saved. However, believers should agree to water baptism. But that’s another topic.)

Your question highlights how, on the one hand, we may speak of a “moment of conversion,” but how, on the other hand, we may also describe conversion as a process. It’s true that when people are converted suddenly and dramatically, we often call that a “Damascus Road experience,” as if Paul’s own conversion had been sudden and dramatic. But as you point out, there was more to it than the encounter with Jesus on the road. Luke relates in Acts 9:9 that Paul fasted for three days after he was led into the city, and Jesus tells Ananias in Acts 9:11 that Paul has been praying. Christians of some traditions would refer to this as the “use of means” toward salvation. So things were still in process between the time Paul encountered Jesus on the road and the time when Ananias came to visit him.

One way to think about the sacraments is that they are the church community bearing witness to the work of God in individual lives. Based on what Jesus told him about Paul, Ananias was prepared to call Paul his “brother” in the faith and to offer him baptism (indeed, to challenge him to be baptized). So we could say that Paul’s baptism was the moment at which, from the perspective of the Christian community, for all it knew, Paul was a saved sinner. (Only God ultimately knows people’s hearts.) However, we see both a moment and a process even here. When Paul went to Jerusalem, the believers there did not want him to join them. They were afraid of him, thinking that he was not a genuine disciple but only trying to infiltrate their group so that he could arrest more of them. It was only when Barnabas vouched for Paul that the Christian community ultimately considered that, from its perspective, for all it knew, Paul was a saved sinner.

Furthermore, in appreciating how the “moment of conversion” is also one step in an extended process, we might consider what leads up to that moment. Suppose someone is converted suddenly and dramatically at a gospel meeting. What brought them to that meeting in the first place? In many cases, they had developed a relationship with a believer who invited them, and they agreed to come. All of this testifies to God’s ongoing prior work in their life. We might similarly recognize God’s work in Paul’s life prior to his Damascus Road experience. The most important question for Paul before his conversion was, “Who is Jesus?” He was convinced that Jesus was not the Messiah and had not risen from the dead, and so in his zeal for God, he persecuted the followers of Jesus. Well, he had the wrong answer. But he had the right question! It was alive in him, driving him, and he no doubt saw and heard much that ultimately helped him recognize that Jesus was the Messiah and had risen from the dead, for example, when he tried to make Christians renounce Jesus but they refused, despite threats, coercion, and punishment.

So I think the answer to your question is that we can speak meaningfully of the moment of Paul’s conversion, but we can also recognize how his conversion was a process. That’s a paradox, but so are many other things in the Christian life!

Thank you for your question. Here are a couple of other posts on this blog that relate to it.

Am I still considered a Christian if I haven’t been baptized?

What if I’ve never had “that moment” of asking Christ into my heart?

Q. Will believers see God in eternity? We read, “God is spirit” (John 4:24); “To the King of the ages, immortal, invisible…” In John 14:9, Jesus tells Philip, “whoever seen me has seen the Father.” Jesus is teaching about His deity and unity with the Father. But perhaps these words apply for eternity and all believers? That is, we will “see” God only in the person of Jesus?

Personally I would say that in eternity, believers will see God. In fact, they will experience amazing, loving fellowship with God, in the full expression of the Godhead in the three persons of the Trinity. That is, believers will not only see God the Son, they will see God the Father and God the Holy Spirit. (And perhaps at that point we will finally understand how the three are also actually one!)

I think the scriptures you have cited, and others like them, indicate that in this life on earth, no human being may or can see God. As God said to Moses, “no one may see me and live.” But I believe it’s different in eternity. The apostle John wrote in his first epistle, “Beloved, we are God’s children now, and what we will be has not yet appeared; but we know that when he appears we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.”

I acknowledge that many interpreters take this to be a reference to the return of Christ, in which case this would be saying no more than what you are asking about, that even in eternity we will see God only in Christ. But I think it’s important to realize that the verb translated “appeared” and “appears” is actually passive, so John is saying that what we will be “has not yet been made to appear” or “been revealed,” and that we will see God when he “is revealed.” The closest antecedent in the context of “he” and “him” is “God.” So I understand this to be a reference to believers seeing God in the fullness of the Godhead.

Meyer says about this statement in his commentary, “For man in his earthly body, God is certainly invisible; but it is different with the glorified man in his spiritual body; he will not merely know God (the believer has knowledge already here), but see God.” That is a fair statement of how I would also understand this myself.

Q. The author of Hebrews speaks in the 1st person plural when giving the warning, “We must pay the most careful attention, therefore, to what we have heard, so that we do not drift away.” So, is it possible that the author was addressing all the members of the local church? Within this gathering there would be believers, non-believers, those “sitting on the fence,” and so forth. So, is the “therefore” not for believers who have assurance, but a warning for those who would “drift away” from the truth they’re receiving? Similarly, is the controversial passage in Heb 6:4-6 not for the believer who needs to hear the warning against apostasy, but for those non-believers, those “on the fence” who could “drift” into apostasy and never be restored again?

I think you are suggesting a very good possibility. I think the warning is against presumption: just because you’ve heard about Jesus and know about Jesus, don’t assume that you have received the salvation that Jesus brought—not if you haven’t done anything in response to what you’ve heard and learned. In other words, the recipients of this letter must not “ignore” (or “neglect,” as some versions translate it) this salvation, that is, they must not fail to take action in response to it.

So the author of Hebrews is basically saying to the whole church, “I’m not going to assume that any of you are genuine believers—and neither should you either. You can’t complacently assume this; you need to know that you have made a definite commitment in response to Jesus.” This would be similar to what Paul wrote to the Corinthians: “Examine yourselves to see whether you are in the faith; test yourselves. Do you not realize that Christ Jesus is in you—unless, of course, you fail the test?” (And here in Hebrews, since this is in the 1st person plural, as you note, the author is actually saying, “I’m not going to assume that any of us are genuine believers.” The author models self-examination by taking part in it personally.)

I think the case is similar for the other passage from Hebrews that you mentioned: “It is impossible for those who have once been enlightened, who have tasted the heavenly gift, who have shared in the Holy Spirit, who have tasted the goodness of the word of God and the powers of the coming age and who have fallen away, to be brought back to repentance.” I find it interesting that the author says, right after providing an analogy to illustrate this point, “Even though we speak like this, dear friends, we are convinced of better things in your case—the things that have to do with salvation.” In other words, while the ones who cannot be brought back if they fall away have “tasted” and “shared in” some things, those are not the things that have to do with salvation. Those are necessary but not sufficient conditions. What is needed is a definite commitment.

The analogy itself supports this understanding. The author speaks of the same rain falling on two different types of land. One type produces “a crop useful to those for whom it is farmed” and is blessed, while the other type produces only “thorns and thistles” and is cursed. The warning, in effect, is to both types of land: Don’t think that you’re going to be blessed just because you’re receiving all this rain; what kind of crop are you producing as a result of it?” So the “tasting” and the “sharing” that all the people in the church have experienced are like the rain. They are not the crop.

So I think in the end I would agree with you that these warnings are not addressed so much to people who are genuine followers of Jesus as to people who are part of the believing community but who have not made a definite commitment. The danger of “falling away” (from participation in the life of the community, not from salvation itself) was very real for those who were not committed, since, as the author warns, there had already been persecution of Christians in this place and time and there was going to be more. So the warnings are to count the cost up front and realize that the glories of the salvation that Jesus brought, which the author describes throughout the letter, are worth far more than the suffering that followers of Jesus may experience in this life.

Q. Matthew records in his gospel that after Peter declared, “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God,” Jesus “ordered his disciples not to tell anyone that he was the Messiah.” Why did Jesus do that?

I think that if Jesus’ disciples had started proclaiming at that point that he was the Messiah, people would have misunderstood what this meant. People would have thought that Jesus was the kind of Messiah they were expecting. As I say in this post, they would have been expecting a Messiah who would “see his primary role as that of meeting the physical needs of people” or who would “do dazzling daredevil feats that would win admiration and an audience” or who wold “try to achieve his purposes by obtaining political and military power.” The devil tried to tempt Jesus to see himself as the Messiah in these ways.

But after Jesus suffered, died, and rose from the dead, the disciples were not only free to proclaim that Jesus was the Messiah, they were commanded to do so. The fact that Jesus had willingly undergone these things showed what kind of Messiah he actually was, and so people would not have misunderstood the disciples to be proclaiming that he was a different type of Messiah, along the lines I have described. The fact that Jesus willingly underwent these things also showed what kind of Savior the world actually needed.

Q. Is it possible for a person whose heart has become hardened, and been hardened even further by God, to come back to God?

I’m not exactly sure what you mean by God hardening someone’s heart even further. We do have a record in the Bible of God hardening Pharaoh’s heart. But that was for a specific purpose. Pharaoh had already set himself up against God, as became clear from his first answer to Moses: “Who is the Lord, that I should obey him and let Israel go? I do not know the Lord and I will not let Israel go.” So this was a matter of God confirming Pharaoh in choices that he had already made, but that was for the purpose of God showing who he was to all the world through what he did to what was then the greatest empire in the world. We know that this made an impression on all the surrounding peoples, because later one of them told the Israelites how they had heard of what God had done to the Egyptians, and as a result, they knew that “the Lord your God is God in heaven above and on the earth below.”

But I would say that, apart from such extraordinary purposes within God’s historical plan of redemption, God would not harden the heart of an individual so as to make it harder for that individual to repent and return. Sometimes God will confirm us in our choices in the sense of allowing us to experience the consequences of those choices. But God does that specifically so that we will realize that they were the wrong choices and repent.

So my essential answer to your question is yes, a person whose heart has become hardened can indeed return to God. Specifically if you are asking about yourself, the very fact that you are asking shows that your heart has begun to soften. You want to know if there is a way back to God. And there always is, for anyone who desires to return. The door is always open on God’s side. As the Bible says, “God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself, no longer counting people’s sins against them.” God is eager to forgive and to restore us to relationship to him. So if you are asking about yourself, I would encourage you that the way is genuinely open for you to return to God.

And even if you are asking about someone else, the fact that God has put this person on your heart and you are wondering if there is still hope suggests to me that God, through his Holy Spirit, is reaching out to the person through you, wanting you to pray and intercede for that person. So I would encourage you to do that. See your concern for the person as something that God has given you because God is concerned and knows that you will pray and perhaps be someone who is able to encourage and help the person to return.

Only God truly knows what is in a person’s heart. Even if it might appear to us that someone has become so hardened against God that they would never return, we do not know what is going on inside that person. Jesus said he came to seek and save the lost. That is what we do know. If someone seems lost, then he or she is precisely the kind of person whom Jesus came to save.

Q. Good day to you. I am just curious. Are Muslims/Arabs the descendants of Ishmael, while the Christian Church is the descendants of Isaac? Did God promise kings and princes under the race of Isaac only? Is the division of Muslims and Christians because Sarah didn’t believe right away that she can have a child? Thank you for answering these questions. Thank you and God bless you.

Thank you for your question. We should distinguish between people of a specific faith and people with a specific ancestry. While Arabs traditionally trace their ancestry back to Ishmael, a person can be a Muslim without being an Arab, and a person can be an Arab without being a Muslim. There are, in fact, Arab communities that have been Christian for many centuries. Similarly, while Jesus Christ was descended from Isaac, a person can be a descendant of Isaac without being a Christian, and a person can be a Christian without being a descendant of Isaac.

God did not promise specifically that there would be kings and princes in the race of Isaac. Rather, God renewed to Isaac the promise he had made to his father Abraham, that through his “seed,” all nations on earth would be blessed. The initial meaning of the word “seed” in this promise is “descendants,” but Christian interpreters in the New Testament understand it as a reference to one particular descendant, Jesus Christ, whom they believe brought blessing to all nations when he came to earth as the Savior of all who would put their faith in him. So we may expect that there will be kings and princes in many different races of humanity.

Since it is not the case that Muslims in general are descendants of Ishmael and that Christians in general are descendants of Isaac, we should not see the division between them as the result of Abraham first having a child, Ishmael, through his concubine Hagar and then having another child, Isaac, through his wife Sarah. That would be the origins of an ethnic rivalry, not a religious division. However, we should note that while there was some rivalry between Ishmael and Isaac while they were growing up, they seem to have reconciled by the time they were adults. The Bible records that when Abraham died, “His sons Isaac and Ishmael buried him.” This gives us hope that any ethnic rivalry between the descendants of these two sons of Abraham can similarly be resolved and the groups reconciled.

We can also hope that the same will be true of the religious division between Christians and Muslims. I do respect Islam as a great historic religion that, when followed in its true spirit, leads its followers to live good lives. Beyond that, as a Christian, I want my Muslim friends to meet my friend Jesus. The Quran describes Jesus as a great prophet and miracle-worker and even calls him the Messiah. So my hope is that my Muslim friends will want to find out more about who Jesus is and what he has done. This can and should be a matter of dialogue, not division, between Muslims and Christians.

Q. Faith vs. works has always been a troublesome topic for me. I have read all of your posts on this topic. (Thank you so much for the “Categories” listing. It is a wonderful resource.) I have found that James, in particular, has made a lot of sense to me. But recently I came across 2 Corinthians 5:10, “For we must all appear before the judgement seat of Christ, so that each of us may receive what is due us for the things done while in the body, whether good or bad.” I find that hard to square with salvation based on faith, even when taking into account understandings such as in James’s. When confused with Scripture, I often find it useful to read the same passage in The Message. It says, “We will appear before Christ and take what’s coming to us as a result of our actions, either good or bad.” That version hasn’t helped me any.  I find that Paul writes the words you are asking about solidly within the context of salvation by faith. Shortly afterwards, summing up the discussion, Paul says, “Christ’s love compels us, because we are convinced that one died for all” and “God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” Beforehand, Paul talks about how God as “has given us the Spirit as a deposit, guaranteeing what is to come.” So there is no notion here of conditional salvation, dependent on works. I would therefore say that when Paul speaks of us receiving “what is due us for the things done while in the body,” he is speaking not of salvation but of rewards. That is a topic about which the Bible does not tell us as much as we might like. But Paul told those same Corinthians, in his first letter, “No one can lay any foundation other than the one already laid, which is Jesus Christ. If anyone builds on this foundation using gold, silver, costly stones, wood, hay or straw, their work will be shown for what it is, because the Day will bring it to light. It will be revealed with fire, and the fire will test the quality of each person’s work. If what has been built survives, the builder will receive a reward. If it is burned up, the builder will suffer loss but yet will be saved—even though only as one escaping through the flames.” Paul does not tell us what these rewards are, and we don’t find a description of them anywhere else in the Bible. But it is clear that they are not “earned salvation.” Paul says that the only foundation is Jesus Christ, meaning his saving work for us on the cross. Rather, these rewards are some special blessing from God in acknowledgment of faithful service on earth. Certainly they are an incentive to obedience. But we should not obey God in order to get the rewards. We ought to obey God out of joy-filled love and devotion. I think that if God simply said, “Well done, good and faithful servant,” that would be enough of a reward to satisfy for all eternity.

Q. In Matthew 26:2, Jesus says, “Ye know that after two days is the feast of the Passover, and the Son of Man is betrayed to be crucified.” Does the word translated “betrayed” actually mean “betray,” or does it just mean “deliver”? Because to betray someone means a cunning malicious wicked action against someone who is ignorant of what is going on, while Jesus knew that He would be arrested with the help of Judas and He did not mind or resist that. What do you think?

I hear both a linguistic question and a theological question in what you are asking.

To take up the linguistic question first, the word that the King James Version translates as “betrayed” does mean simply “hand over” or “deliver.” It is the same word that Paul uses, for example, when he says about the Lord’s Supper tradition, “For I have received of the Lord that which also I delivered unto you.” So the idea of malicious deception of an innocent, trusting individual is not implicit in the Greek verb. That would have to be inferred from the context. Because the notion of betrayal is not implicit in the verb, many modern translations do not use the word “betrayed” in the passage you are asking about. The NIV says, for example, “the Son of Man will be handed over to be crucified.” The ESV says “the Son of Man will be delivered up to be crucified.”

But if we do translate the word with its basic meaning, is it still appropriate for us to make the further inference that in this context, Jesus is talking about an actual betrayal? That is the theological question. It has two parts, based on two things you assert in your inquiry: (1) Was Jesus ignorant of what was going on? (2) Did Jesus mind that Judas enabled the authorities to find him and arrest him and demand his execution? I believe that the premise behind your inquiry is that if the answer to both of these questions is no, then it would not be accurate to say that Judas betrayed Jesus. We shall have to investigate that premise as well.

(1) Certainly by the time Judas actually led the authorities to Jesus, Jesus knew that he was going to do that. Jesus said as much at the Last Supper. Now personally I do not believe that Jesus recruited Judas to be a disciple with the direct knowledge that Judas was going to betray him. I don’t think it would have been fair to Judas for Jesus to give him the impression that he sincerely wanted him to be his disciple when all along Jesus was just looking for someone to betray him. Rather, I think that Jesus knew generally that one of his disciples would eventually betray him, and that one turned out to be Judas. Jesus described in the Parable of the Sower how some people “receive the word” but are then “scandalized” when the experience of living according to the word turns out not to be what they expected. That was what happened to Judas, and this was not a surprise to Jesus.

(2) However, when that happened, Judas could simply have walked away from Jesus, as others did. Instead, Judas seems to have wanted to “cash in” on Jesus by selling him out to the authorities. If, given the realities of human nature and spiritual conflict, it was inevitable that some of Jesus’ followers would turn away from him, it was still not necessary for any of them to sell him out to his enemies. As Jesus said in another context, “It is necessary that scandals come, but woe to the person through whom they come.” So I don’t think it was all right with Jesus that Judas led the authorities him in exchange for money.

But let us assume, in order to address the premise behind your question, that Jesus ultimately realized it was necessary for someone to tell the authorities where he was in order for him to be arrested and executed, and so, all things considered, he accepted what Judas did. Since Jesus knew it was going to happen, and if he accepted it, would be accurate to call it a betrayal?

I would still say yes. Right up until the last moment, Judas pretended that he was Jesus’ friend. When he led the authorities to Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, he didn’t point Jesus out from a distance and say, “That’s the man you want!” Instead, he walked over to him and kissed him on the cheek, which is how, in this culture, one man would greet another man who was his friend. At this, even though Jesus knew that Judas was going to lead the authorities to him, he said (I think with some incredulity), “Judas, are you betraying the Son of Man with a kiss?” Here Jesus uses the same verb as in Matthew 26:2, but now the NIV (which I quote here) and the ESV, like the KJV, translate it as “betray.” And I think the context justifies that translation. Pretending to be a friend when you are really an enemy is a betrayal, no matter how much idea the person you are betraying has of what you might actually be up to. Indeed, this action of greeting Jesus with a kiss illustrates how Judas went about the entire process of handing Jesus over. He acted all along as if he were deceiving an innocent, trusting individual, because that was what he believed he was doing. And in that sense, from the perspective of Judas’s own moral responsibility, he certainly did betray Jesus.

Q. I have never been baptized, but I pray a couple of times a day, asking God to forgive me for my mistakes in life and to watch over my family and friends. I feel as if I am a Christian, but I’m not sure.

Regarding the issue of baptism in particular, please see this post, which I think will help answer part of your question:

Am I still considered a Christian if I haven’t been baptized?

More generally, I would say that I am glad that you have a relationship with God through prayer, but I would like you to have the assurance that you do belong to God through Jesus because of what Jesus did for you when he died on the cross as your Savior. The Bible teaches that we can have confidence about this through faith in God’s promises and through the presence of the Holy Spirit in our lives.

But this confidence is not something we are expected to acquire on our own. Being a Christian is not a matter of pursuing certain devotional practices in isolation; it is a matter of becoming part of a community of people who love and serve God together. So I would encourage you to seek out such a community near you, a church that honors and worships Jesus, and find your place in it so that you can grow in your knowledge of God and in your confidence that you are indeed a Christian through faith in Jesus.

I trust that in this way, God will indeed bring you to the place where you are sure that you do belong to him.

Q. What does the Bible say about true religion, and how are we to identify it today? Let me respond to your question about “true religion” in a couple of senses. In terms of true religion, we might ask when religion is truly what it should be. James, a brother of Jesus who was a leader in the early church in Jerusalem, spoke directly to this question in his New Testament epistle: “Religion that is pure and undefiled in the sight of God the Father is this: to take care of orphans and widows in their affliction and to keep oneself unstained by the world.” In other words, the Bible says that religion is truly what it should be when it leads people to help others who are in need and to live in an honorable and morally pure way. Another way to put this would be to say that people are truly living out their religion when they do these things. The Bible suggests that this is a legitimate expectation that others can have of people who claim to be religious. We might also ask what makes religion “true” in the sense of genuinely teaching what God is like and how people can know God. You asked specifically what the Bible says about this, and the Bible says that in Jesus, God came to earth and revealed to us what God is like. As the apostle John wrote in his gospel, “No one has ever seen God, but the one and only Son, who is himself God and is in closest relationship with the Father, has made him known.” Jesus himself said, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father [God the Heavenly Father] except through me.” So according to the Bible, true religion is that which points people to Jesus as the way to God. The Bible indeed identifies Jesus as the way to God, but it also demonstrates that God will take any way necessary to get to us. It illustrates, for example, how Jesus spoke to Nicodemus, an elderly Jewish leader, about being born again, but to a Samaritan woman whom he met at a well about living water. Jesus introduced himself as the light of the world to a blind man he healed. The apostle Paul preached from the Hebrew Scriptures when he spoke to Jews in the synagogues, but he quoted from Greek philosophers when he spoke in the Areopagus in Athens. So we can expect, on the Bible’s own testimony, that God will reach through the whole range of human cultures and languages to help people find the truth that the Bible says is uniquely in Jesus.