Thoughts from Mark "Hat" Rackley

Dear friends, although I was very eager to write to you about the salvation we share, I felt compelled to write and urge you to contend for the faith that was once for all entrusted to God’s holy people. For certain individuals whose condemnation was written about long ago have secretly slipped in among you. They are ungodly people, who pervert the grace of our God into a license for immorality and deny Jesus Christ our only Sovereign and Lord.

• Jude 1:3-4

This is the message we have heard from him and declare to you: God is light; in him there is no darkness at all. If we claim to have fellowship with him and yet walk in the darkness, we lie and do not live out the truth. But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus, his Son, purifies us from all sin.
If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness. If we claim we have not sinned, we make him out to be a liar and his word is not in us.

• 1 John 1:5-10

For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God—not by works, so that no one can boast. For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.

• Ephesians 2:8-10

“ ‘A man that does but begin to be converted is even at that instant the very child of God, though inwardly he be more carnal than spiritual.  The first material beginnings of the conversion of a sinner, or the smallest measure of renewing grace, have the promises of this life and the life to come.  A constant and earnest desire to be reconciled to God, to believe and to repent, if it be in a touched heart is accepted by God as reconciliation faith, repentance itself.  To see and feel in ourselves the lack of any grace pertaining to salvation, and to be grieved therefore, is the grace itself.  He that has begun to subject himself to Christ and his word, though as yet he be ignorant in most points of religion, yet if he have a care to increase in knowledge and to practise that which he knows, he is accepted of God as a true believer. … The foresaid beginnings of grace are counterfeit unless they increase.’ (A Grain of Mustard Seed or the least Measure of Gracethat is or can be Effectual to Salvation [the six conclusions which are expounded throughout the work])”

• Tony Lane, A Concise History of Christian Thought

William Perkins (1584-1602) was a theologian, cleric, and one of the foremost leaders of the Puritans.  The Puritans could not abide by the Calvinists’ idea of salvation without works.  They would not say it in so many words, but in the quote above, you get the idea.  Sure, someone can accept Jesus, but they are at that moment carnal.  If they do not get fully pure and chaste within an arbitrary time frame, the ‘conversion’ is to be considered counterfeit.

The problem here is an incomplete understand of terminology.  Salvation comes by acceptance of Jesus Christ, trusting in Him in everything.  But as a former “carnal” person, God works within us to make changes.  We will never “arrive” at a pure state here on earth in this stage, called “sanctification.”  As the sculptor chips away at one sin after another, there will still be more fine tuning.

But the Puritans felt we could “arrive” here on earth and a lack of doing so was that we faked being saved in the first place.

Now, some denominations speak of a falling from Grace.  I joked in a short story that this man chased the girl of his dreams by horseback and when he missed a fence and fell from his horse, he had fallen from Grace, meaning the horse’s name.  But being serious, if someone exhibits no fruits of the Spirit and eventually drifts away from the church, it was not a matter of falling from Grace.  It was a matter of what Rev. Perkins suggests, that his/her conversion was counterfeit to begin with.  Basically either seed planted in rocky soil that dies out quickly or among the weeds so that the enticements of this world choke them out later on.  But if we are truly one of God’s elect, Jesus has been promised that we cannot slip through His fingers.

So, I can agree with much of what Rev. Perkins says, if the definitions of the terms are carefully understood.  But I hold to the provision that our sanctification, as Perkins suggests depends on our personal will for God to make those changes, is not complete until our first, and only, death.

But part of our modern language regarding this subject is because such theologians as Wiliam Perkins struggled through trying to explain this odd mess of a Christian not really having a home in this world and being prepared for an eternity with Jesus.

If you like these Tuesday morning essays about philosophy and other “heavy topics,” but you think you missed a few, you can use this LINK. I have set up a page off the home page for links to these Tuesday morning posts. I will continue to modify the page as I add more.

Soli Deo Gloria.  Only to God be the Glory.