Some believers are astonished by this teaching about knowing you’re saved for all eternity. Should we correct their thinking?

This text is from a transcript of a talk by David Gooding, entitled ‘Key New Testament Themes’ (1996).

As you probably know, it's not only Christian folks in this part of the world who hold such views. Many feel that they can fall away and be lost forever. It used to be that in The Salvation Army, they had to swear an oath upon conversion. It had ten conditions, one of which was that they would serve God in the ranks of The Salvation Army for the rest of their lives. One of the other conditions was that they swore before God that they did believe that a true believer could fall away and be lost in hell forever. The further east you go into Eastern Europe, the more you'll find that is a predominant view amongst believers. They get very distressed if preachers come along and preach what we call eternal security.

You may ask me if it is worthwhile troubling to try to correct their thinking. My answer to that would be, here are dear believers in Romania, in Bulgaria and places like that who have suffered enormously, and they look at us in the West and they feel that what we're preaching is such a heresy as would encourage believers to misbehave: that it doesn't matter how you behave, you're still saved. To them that is outrageous. When you've had situations in churches where the elders of the church have been doing work with young people, for instance, and in cases I know of, the secret police have put pressure on a couple of chaps in the church until eventually they got those two fellows so scared that they betrayed the two elders in the church, and the two elders were put in prison. You try telling the elders of that church that those two fellows who betrayed them were saved eternally. You can see their difficulty, can't you? Pastorally too.

Take an analogy. A father goes upstairs one night and his seven-year-old daughter is still awake at midnight, and he says, 'Dear, what's wrong? Why aren't you asleep?'

'I'm afraid you're going to throw me out and give me to the dustbin man.'

And dad says, 'No, my dear. I'd never do that.'

'But you said the other day, "I'll give you to the dustbin man." I'm afraid you're going to throw me to the dustbin man.'

So what does the father say now? Does he turn round and say, 'You wicked girl. If you go on believing I would ever throw you out, I will throw you out'? That would be daft, wouldn't it? If you find folks who can't believe that they are eternally secure, the first thing you must not do is to frighten them. It's a question of God gaining their confidence. If their view of God is that he's a God who could eventually throw them out, you don't charge them with heresy and scare the daylights out of them. You might have to leave it and say, 'Well, I personally believe that you can be eternally sure.' This is something that the Lord will show them eventually through his word. Very often these things come not simply by a text that proves it, in a 'proof text' sense. They come as the very heart of God is revealed to them through his word, and they sense the arms of the Father around the neck of the prodigal.

How do we preach some of these things?

I think it's a grave pity that so often this thing has been argued as though it were a debate between Calvinists and Arminians. I'm not a Calvinist, but I wouldn't like it if you said I was an Arminian either! Whatever I am, I think Paul is wiser. Some people say, 'I am of Paul', and somebody else says, 'I'm of Apollos'. Well you shouldn't be either anyway. We shouldn't be of Calvin or of Arminius. The labels may be useful shorthand sometimes in theological debate, but to raise that whole question simply on those grounds is unhelpful.

Round the parts of East Anglia, notably in the villages around Cambridgeshire, where Spurgeon ministered as a young man, you could find in days gone by very strong Calvinists who had no assurance of salvation whatsoever. A friend of mine was conducting a tent mission in some of those villages and he visited a gentlemen who was over eighty years of age and he'd been attending a very strict Baptist church, strict in the Calvinist sense, all his life, but he had no assurance of salvation. Why not? Well the elect, according to them, can be absolutely sure they're saved. The trouble is to know whether you are the elect or not. That's the difficulty. If you could be sure you are the elect, you can be sure of salvation.

Then in some circles, it comes down to the doctrine of evidences. If you are elect, there'll be evidence, so you have to look around for the evidence and one of their favourite verses was 'I will take away the heart of stone and give them a heart of flesh' (Ezekiel 36:26). And this poor old man told my friend, 'My brother once upon a time broke down and wept. I think that's evidence that he might have a heart of flesh instead of a heart of stone. But I've never been able to weep.' So here they are, with eyes on their own emotions, and in the end, whether they're saved or not now appears to depend on their emotions. That's extreme Calvinism. It gives you no more assurance than the extreme Armenian.

I think it's a pity to raise it on that score, but if you ask, I think there are two things that are important. One is we need ourselves to be sure that what we teach is what Scripture says. There is big debate at that level. I told you the other day that last year I had a Romanian Baptist pastor living with me for three months or so. He used to believe in the eternal security of the believer, he told me. Now he doesn't and it's a raging matter in Romania. I fear it's going to split many churches. We had long discussions and I took it as a very great compliment what he said to me last time. As he came with one of his revised ideas which seemed to him to be marvellously supporting his view, I said, 'Yes, that's very interesting. I could think of parallels of that.' So I drew out some ideas on a bit of paper and of course they led to conclusions that he didn't altogether want them to lead to. But he said, 'Well at least you don't beat us over the head with it.' Pastorally, you don't beat people over the head with it, but let God reveal himself and warm their hearts and instil the confidence in him. On the theological side, we've got to be sure that we're preaching the truth. What about those other Scriptures that seem to actually say you can fall away and be lost—'the branch that doesn't abide in the vine gets put in the fire' (John 15:5–6, own trans.), for instance. What about that? So we have to be sure ourselves on the theological side, and argue we must. But listen to how Paul would do it, not in any bitter spirit but humbly saying, 'Is this what the verse says?'

Yes, we need to be sure ourselves, and what I would want to do in a passage like this is to take this matter of a great inheritance. Paul is explaining that we're not only justified by faith, but there are various other things that are also by faith. There are all the marvellous promises of Abraham and then there is the inheritance and the covenant. What a marvellous thing this is, and he comes round to the grand conclusion, 'If you are in Christ, then are you Abraham's offspring and heirs according to the promise'—heirs of all this vast inheritance. God is getting at our hearts and getting across the wealth of the gospel. So we need to know what the covenant means and is, and what kind of a covenant it is.