Salvation Is Irrevocable, Part 2 B

The church that He loved is the church He died for. The church He died for is the church He's making holy. The church He makes holy is the church He will present to Himself, and when the church is presented to Himself in all glory, the church will be absolutely holy. Now that's just another way to say that whom He foreknew, He predestined, whom He predestined, He called, whom He called, He justified, and whom He justified, He won. Be glorified. Welcome to Grace to You with John MacArthur.

I'm your host, Phil Johnson. Charles Spurgeon said if he didn't believe that salvation is permanent, that once you're saved, you're saved forever. He said he should be of all men the most miserable because he would lack any ground for comfort. Well friend, how about you? Do you have assurance that you are saved for good? That right now as I'm speaking, you are permanently in the grip of God?

Helping you settle that question is what our current study is all about. John calls this series the grip of God. And now with today's lesson, here's John. Well, we have the opportunity to turn to the Word of God in Romans chapter 8. We find ourselves in the closing part of the chapter, verses 31 to the end, which is sort of a doxology that ends the chapter, but at the same time also it's a fitting summation of Paul's argument for the security of the believer. He started out in chapter 8, verse 1, there is no condemnation to those who are in Christ. In other words, those who are in Christ who are believers will never be condemned. They'll never lose their salvation. They'll never be sent to eternal punishment.

There will be no condemnation of those who are in Christ. That is the fact that he states in chapter 8, verse 1, spending the rest of the chapter showing why that in fact is true. In Jeremiah 31, 3, God said this to His people, I have loved you with an everlasting love. And that is still how God loves His people. He loves His redeemed people with an everlasting love. One hymn writer had it right.

This is what he wrote, and you're familiar I'm sure with this hymn, many of you are. How firm a foundation, you saints of the Lord, is laid for your faith in His excellent Word. What more can He say than to you He has said, you who to Jesus for refuge have fled?

Fear not, I am with you. Oh, be not dismayed, for I am thy God and will still give thee aid. I'll strengthen thee, help thee, and cause thee to stand upheld by my righteous, omnipotent hand. When through the deep waters I call thee to go, the rivers of grief shall not thee overflow. For I will be with thee, thy troubles to bless and sanctify to thee thy deepest distress. When through fiery trials thy pathways shall lie, my grace all sufficient shall be thy supply.

The flame shall not hurt thee, I only design thy dross to consume and thy gold to refine. The soul that on Jesus has leaned for repose, I will not, I cannot desert to its foes. That soul, though all hell should endeavor to shake, I'll never, no never, no never forsake. And that, of course, is a hymn based upon the great truth of Romans 8, no never forsake. That is the promise of God to those who are in Christ, there will never be any condemnation. Because He anticipates at this point that somebody is going to throw up some objections.

Remember, we talked about this. Somebody is going to say, well, that's all fine, but what about this possibility and what about that possibility? First possibility, there are some persons who can take away our salvation. Second possibility, there are some circumstances which can take away our salvation.

Those are hypothetical and Paul knows that they might be raised by someone, so he wants to eliminate them altogether. So in verses 31 to 34, he deals with whether or not any person can take away our salvation, and in verses 35 to 39, he deals with whether any circumstance can take away our eternal salvation. The argument is simply this, very simple argument. God delivered up His own Son Jesus to die on the cross to provide our salvation. That was the greatest gift, the greatest sacrifice, the greatest act, and God will do all the lesser acts necessary to keep us saved.

That's the argument. Can we be legitimately accused and condemned? Can we be damned? Will God hear such accusations?

Back to verse 33, here's the answer. Who will bring a charge against God's elect? God is the one who justifies. Literally, shall God, the justifying one, is God going to listen to such an accusation who has justified us? Can God, listen carefully, can God at the same time condemn us and justify us? If He has declared us righteous, can He at the same time condemn us? If He has made us righteous in Christ, if He has granted us the righteousness of Christ, can He at the same time hold us guilty? Answer?

No. If He did, it would be to negate the work of Christ, wouldn't it? It would be to depreciate the work of Christ. I love Isaiah 53, one of the great chapters of the Old Testament. Unfortunately, the unconverted Jews who reject Jesus Christ don't understand it.

But to those who do understand it, it is so rich. Isaiah 53, which talks about how He carried our griefs and our sorrows and all of that. He was led as a sheep to slaughter and so forth. But at the very end of Isaiah 53, down in verse 12, it says, He poured out Himself to death. He was numbered with the transgressors, yet He Himself bore the sin of many. That's talking about Christ and His sacrificial death. But Isaiah 53 ends with this line, And interceded for the transgressors.

Every time an accusation might come before God, you have a lawyer for your defense, the High Priest, Jesus Christ, interceding on your behalf. And when Satan comes with a list of iniquities, Christ is there to say, I paid for that one. I paid for that one. I died for that one. I suffered for that one.

I was separated from God for that one. That one's covered. They're all covered. The price has been paid. It's all done. It's all accomplished.

No accusation can stand because the lawyer for the defense was Himself the sufficient sacrifice. What a tremendous truth that is. Go back to verse 27 in this chapter just for a moment. So many things, so many Scriptures flooding my mind.

I've got to do a little editing here so I don't get carried away here. But in Romans 8, I want you to go back to verse 27 for a minute. He who searches the hearts, that's God, the one who knows the hearts of men is God. He who searches the hearts knows what the mind of the Spirit is.

All right? God knows the mind of the Holy Spirit. Why? Because they're one. That's the Trinity. Because He, the Holy Spirit, intercedes for the saints according to the will of God.

Remember what we said about that? As a believer, you possess the Holy Spirit, right? Back in chapter 8, verse 9, if you don't have the Spirit of Christ, you don't belong to Him. If you do belong to Him, you have the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit lives in you. And the Spirit does many things.

You are the temple of the Holy Spirit. One of the things the Holy Spirit does is right here. The Holy Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God. He always prays according to God's will, and God knows the mind of the Spirit. And what is the Spirit praying for?

Praying for your security, praying to bring you to glory, interceding for you. The Spirit is your intercessor, your personal indwelling intercessor, interceding according to the will of God. The Father will always hear and always answer the intercessory prayer of the Spirit, because the Spirit always prays according to God's will, and God always does His will. And God's will is that all who are predestined be glorified, and the Spirit prays to that end. It doesn't happen just because God had said it happened. It happened because God makes it happen, and the Spirit prays that it happened, and Christ intercedes so that it happens. The Trinity is very involved in that. The Spirit is praying that we get to glory. That is God's will. God hears that prayer and answers it according to His will.

Now carry that same idea down into verse 34. Here is the Son at the right hand of God, also interceding for us in perfect harmony with the will of God, and that gives us the confidence that Christ doesn't have to argue God into anything. Christ is praying consistently with the will of God, which is to bring us to glory. In John 11 42, Jesus said, talking to the Father, I know that you always hear Me.

God always heard the prayer of Jesus, because Jesus always prayed for God's will to be done. So you have the Holy Spirit praying for the continuity of your faith. You have the Holy Spirit praying for your protection, that you might never have to face something more than you could bear. The Holy Spirit praying, as it were, from within you before the throne of God, always according to the will of God, and then in heaven at the right hand of God, you have Jesus Christ interceding for you, also in perfect harmony with the will of God.

And as a result of all of that intercession going on, we are kept secure. Turn to Hebrews for just a moment, chapter 4, verse 14. Since then we have a great high priest, speaking of Christ, who has passed through the heavens in His ascension, Jesus the Son of God. Let's hold fast our confession, for we do not have a high priest who cannot sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who has been tempted in all things as we are, yet without sin. Let us therefore draw near with confidence to the throne of grace that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need. Listen, he's not a high priest who will only intercede for us if we're innocent. He's not a lawyer who only takes the case of those who are innocent. He is a high priest who intercedes for us knowing we're guilty, and knowing that we need grace and we need mercy.

We can't possibly get what we deserve and survive. So here we can go to this high priest with confidence, verse 16 says. That he will provide the necessary grace, that is the necessary favor in spite of our iniquities, that we need the necessary mercy, the withholding of judgment, and we will find from him mercy and grace.

This is just a tremendous, tremendous promise. There are people, you know, who think that, well, you can lose your salvation if you sin too much. There is no limit to grace. When you go before the Lord, no matter what you've done as a Christian, and you seek grace and mercy, it's there, isn't it? Where sin abounded, what?

Grace did much more abound. Look at Hebrews 7, verse 24. Just in case somebody might think that Christ might turn over His priestly work to somebody else. He abides forever and holds His priesthood permanently. I'm glad for that, aren't you?

There won't be any change, folks. He will always be there. He will always be interceding for us. Hence, verse 25, He is able, listen to this, to save for a while. Is that what it said? I don't think so. He's able to save what?

Forever. Well, how can He do that? Because He always keeps on living to make intercession for them. He is that High Priest, verse 26, holy, innocent, undefiled, separated from sinners, and exalted above the heavens, and He doesn't have to daily, like other high priests, offer up sacrifices first for His own sins and then for the sins of the people because this He did once for all when He offered up Himself. Is that a great verse? It's all done. It's all finished. And now we have a High Priest who's perfect, and He's paid the penalty, and He's done the work, and He's made the sacrifice, and now He just keeps on interceding for us. You see, everything is settled in heaven. Everything is settled in heaven.

I can't resist this. Go back to chapter 6. Once I get into Hebrews, I can really get lost. Go back to chapter 6 of Hebrews. Look at verse 17. In the same way, talking about oaths and swearing to confirm things in the human level in verse 16, and in verse 17, in the same way God, listen to this, desiring even more to show to the heirs of the promise, look at this, the unchangeableness of His purpose. If God purposed before the world began to save you, is it going to change?

It's not going to change. It's unchangeable. And in order to demonstrate to the heirs of promise the unchangeableness of His purpose, He interposed with an oath. People who want you to, you know, this is the typical pattern in the Old Testament, Abraham and so forth, you make a promise, you make an oath. You make a covenant.

You make a contract. So God, using a human sort of means, wanting us to understand how absolutely perfect and unalterable and unchangeable His saving promise is, made an oath. Verse 18, He did it in order that by two unchangeable things in which it is impossible for God to what?

To lie. God made a promise, that's the way it will be, we may have strong encouragement. We who have fled for refuge in laying hold of the hope set before us.

This hope we have is an anchor of the soul, a hope both sure and steadfast and one which enters within the veil where Jesus has entered as a forerunner for us, having become a high priest according to the order of Melchizedek. God made pledges. God made promises. And then God sent Christ into heaven as the anchor that holds those promises.

And those promises are based on two things, the fact that God can't lie and the fact that Christ is in heaven interceding for us. Now when you go through this in Romans chapter 8, you really begin to wonder how people can believe someone can lose their salvation, right? Now there are people who come into the church and confess and profess Christ and go away, and maybe even deny the Lord.

How are we to understand them? Look at 1 John 2, 1 John 2. And this is a very important passage because otherwise it leaves a question in people's minds because they say, well, you know, there's a member of my family and they came to church and I thought they knew Christ and, you know, they seemed to respond to Christ and so forth and so on. And then all of a sudden they turned their back and went away and they're living in sin. How are we to understand that? 1 John 2, 19, here it comes, they went out from us, okay, but they were not really, what, of us.

Boy, that's so important. If they had been of us, they would have, what? Remained with us.

Let me tell you something. One of the evidences of genuine salvation is continuity of faith. When God grants saving faith, it's not temporary. It's not that God gives you the faith to believe and then after you've believed you're on your own faith, no. It's not that God by His Holy Spirit empowers you to believe at the moment of salvation and then abandons you to your own faith to hang on to that salvation, impossible. When He gives you the faith to believe, He gives you the faith that sustains that belief right on to glory. True believers persevere in faith. They went out from us, they were not really of us.

If they had been of us, they would have remained with us, but they went out in order that it might be shown that they're all not of us. But you, verse 20, have an anointing from the Holy One. You true believers have an anointing from the Holy One.

Who's that? The Holy Spirit. Implication they didn't have the Holy Spirit. The first act of Christ's priesthood was sacrifice. The second act of His priesthood is intercession. He was the sacrifice and now He is the intercessory priest and He will bring us to glory and anybody who comes and goes, goes because they really weren't of us. I want to show you one other passage, and then I'm actually going to save the rest for next time.

The part about circumstances I want to save for next time. But I want you to look at Ephesians 5, and I promise this will be the last one. In Ephesians 5, this you might overlook in the context of eternal security, but you shouldn't. Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ also loved the church and gave Himself up for her. Buying your wife as Christ loved the church means giving yourself up for her.

It doesn't mean buying or something, it means self-sacrifice for her. Just like Christ loved the church and He loved the church, now you notice this interesting thing, He loved the church and gave Himself up for her. You get the idea here that He had set His love upon the church before He ever died. He loved the church and gave His life for her with the view, verse 26, that He might sanctify her. That is to make the church...what?...holy, pure, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the Word, so that...that's the idea of that there, the purpose clause...so that He might present to Himself the church in all her glory, having no spot or wrinkle or any such thing, but that she should be holy and blameless. Now there is the plan of salvation in those verses.

Forgetting the message to husbands here, let's just talk about what this says about our salvation. First, Christ loved the church. He loved the church. He loved the church that the Lord had Himself chosen before the world began. He set His love on the church. Because He loved the church, He gave His life for the church. He gave His life for the church in order that He might make the church holy, completely cleansed and washed so that He might someday present to Himself the church. Now what's that?

When's that going to happen? In glory, right? The church that He loved is the church He died for. The church He died for is the church He's making holy. The church He makes holy is the church He will present to Himself and when the church is presented to Himself in all glory, that church will no longer have any spot, any wrinkle or any blemish.

The church will be absolutely holy. Now that's just another way to say that whom He foreknew, He predestined. Whom He predestined, He called. Whom He called, He justified. And whom He justified, He what?

He glorified. He'll bring the church to glory. There is no person who can change that plan. There is no legalist, no cultist, no false teacher, no religionist. There is no person who can change that plan.

There is no group of secular educators. There is no brilliant, bright, savvy marketers plying all the media trade who can wrest your salvation away from you. God Himself won't do it because He already did the greatest thing in giving His Son. He'll do the lesser things to keep those who are in His Son for whom His Son was given. Satan can't do it.

He can't do it because no matter what he accuses us of, it's already been paid for. And we're not righteous on our own anyway, but we have been given the righteousness of Christ. I love Philippians 3, 7 and 8.

Because I was found in Him not having a righteousness of my own, but the righteousness of Christ which was given to me. So Satan's accusations are a waste of time. And Christ won't do it because Christ died for us, rose for us, was exalted for us and continues to intercede for us. No person or persons can remove us from salvation or cause us not to persevere, not anyone, not God, not Satan, not demons, not Christ, not anyone.

Let's pray. Father, it's just a joy to bask in these great truths. We're just literally overpowered by the wonder of this grace. We were lost in sin, darkness, condemnation, headed for eternal hell, dead without capability. We couldn't muster up the understanding to grasp the gospel. We couldn't somehow crank up the faith to believe it.

We were hopeless. And in inexplicable and boundless mercy and grace, you reached down and awakened us to truth and give us life in Christ that we didn't deserve and we still don't deserve. And not only did you save us, but you keep us and we rejoice beyond words with gratitude. And Lord, the fact that you keep us does not make us irresponsible. There are some who would accuse us, saying, if you feel so secure, then you'll be irresponsible in the way you live.

Just the opposite is true. It is the gratitude, it is the boundless gratitude of our hearts that causes us to want to be faithful to you. We just praise you and thank you. And that thanks turns to obedience.

That's John MacArthur, chancellor of the Masters University and Seminary, and his current study on grace to you. It's called The Grip of God. John, throughout this series on assurance and our security in Christ, we've talked quite a bit about the doctrine of election, because if it's God who chooses us for salvation, if salvation is entirely His work, He isn't going to mess up the job or give it up before it's complete. So our security is rooted in that. And yet I occasionally meet people who can't quite seem to gain assurance because of the doctrine of election. They always ask, how do I know that I'm elect?

How would you answer that? Well, I think the most telling statement on the doctrine of election is in John 6, where Jesus said, All that the Father gives to Me will come to Me, and I will lose none of them, but raise them up on the last day. So God chooses, gives whom He chooses to Christ as a love gift. Christ receives, keeps, and raises into eternal glory. So God's choosing, God's election, results in the glorification of the elect, and nobody gets lost in the process. That's why Paul says, Nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus. The reason people doubt is because they don't understand, first of all, the solidarity of that divine promise of election unto glorification.

It sweeps through justification, through sanctification, and ends up at glorification. And secondly, because they perhaps don't understand how that doesn't require for them to be perfect. And I often tell people, it's not the perfection of your life that validates your salvation, it's the direction of your life.

None of us is perfect. Even the apostle Paul says, Wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from the body of this death. He feels like he's got a dead corpse strapped to his body, and because the sin is still present in me, he says, so we're all battling that. So if you're going to look at only your sin and conclude that, well, I have sins in my life and they tend to be the same kinds of sins, I have habits that I have a difficult time getting over with, just remember this. First John in chapter 1 says this, If we are the ones confessing our sins, that's present-tense continuous action. If we are the ones continually confessing our sins, he is continually forgiving our sins.

That is the promise. So the assumption of that promise is that we're going to sin and we're going to be confessing our sins and he's going to continue forgiving our sins. Having said that, I would just say on the positive side, you know you're a Christian because you love the Lord, you love his word, you love his people, because you recognize your sin and you desire to live righteously, and thirdly, because there's a longing in your heart to be obedient and you're disappointed by your own disobedience. Those indications of new life are bound only in the heart of a believer. No nonbeliever loves God, loves the truth of Scripture, and loves the Church.

No nonbeliever is humbled and broken by his own sinfulness, and no nonbeliever has a willing heart to obey the Lord. So it's those directions in your life that indicate you're saved. Right, and friend, if you need help fighting your lack of assurance, let me recommend John's book Saved Without a Doubt. It explains from Scripture how any Christian can know spiritual peace and assurance. To order a copy, contact us today.

You can call our toll-free number, 800-55-GRACE, or shop online at gty.org. Saved Without a Doubt will help you know the difference between genuine saving faith and false assurance. The book answers questions like, why do I lack assurance of my salvation?

And are my doubts legitimate? Am I really saved? To get a copy of this book Saved Without a Doubt for yourself or for a friend, call 800-55-GRACE or go to gty.org. And wherever you're listening from today, know that you're not alone.

This broadcast is heard in almost every major city around the nation. People are tuning in to Grace To You, listening, learning, and growing. That is the very personal ministry you help sustain when you give. To express your support, write to Grace To You, Box 4000, Panorama City, CA 91412. Or you can call us at 800-55-GRACE, or go to our website, gty.org. The website one more time, gty.org. Now for John MacArthur, I'm Phil Johnson, reminding you to watch Grace To You television this Sunday on DirecTV, channel 378, or check your local listings for Channel and Times, and then be here Monday for another half hour of unleashing God's truth, one verse at a time, on Grace To You.