- In every generation, the Church of Jesus Christ must face the question, “What is required for a person to be saved and to possess the assurance that he is destined for Heaven when he dies?”
- Another way of stating this basic question is to ask, “How much does one have to know and to what does one have to commit in order to receive the gift of eternal salvation?”
- The Church can be wrong about many issues, but if she is wrong about this matter, she guarantees her demise.
- I have often heard testimonies like this: “I was saved when I was twelve years of age. I joined the church; I was baptized and very active in the church, but I never really committed my life to Christ until I was thirty-five years old.” Others express it this way: “I was saved when I was twelve, but I did not make Jesus the Lord of my life until I was thirty-five years old.”
- So what about individuals like these who confess they are saved but never totally commit their lives to Christ?
- Are they saved because of their one-time decision of inviting Jesus into their hearts, even though there is no evidence of repentance or change in their lives?
- Or is it possible that these so-called Christians were never actually saved until later when they finally committed their lives to Jesus Christ?
- Could it be that thousands — even millions — of people make shallow commitments based only on intellectual assent to the Gospel and are therefore not really saved?
- If the answer to this latter question is yes, then this statement is also true: The people who fit this description and die in that lost state will be separated from God in hell forever.
- There is a widespread teaching in evangelical circles today that goes like this:
- All that is required for a person to be saved is that he believes the facts of the Gospel and verbalizes those facts to God in prayer; it is not necessary for him to repent and to be changed in lifestyle.
- No commitment of any kind is required for salvation, since a person is saved by simple faith.
- To require repentance — a change in one’s life and actions — would be the same as teaching salvation by works. But God says, “Only believe the Gospel plus nothing.”
- A special term is now applied to this kind of teaching. It is called “Easy Believism.”
- What Is Biblical Saving Faith?
- This, then, is the question that must be addressed.
- The Scottish preacher, Robert Sandeman, embraced the heresy of “Easy Believism” in the nineteenth century, insisting that saving faith is merely believing the facts about Christ’s atoning death. He taught that to require repentance and a change of lifestyle would be a corruption of the Gospel. The result of this teaching was an absolutely intellectualizing of evangelical faith. A Baptist named Andrew Fuller, a contemporary of Sandeman, opposed this teaching, asserting that its propagation would result in spiritual death in our churches.
- In our day, this old heresy has raised its head again. Professors Zane Hodges and Charles Ryrie of Dallas Theological Seminary have strongly advocated the doctrine of “Easy Believism,” writing that the central issue of salvation is not repentance and a change from one’s former lifestyle, but rather a mere belief that Jesus is the Messiah (the Christ) and one’s Savior.
- Hodges and Ryrie further insist that the conditions of salvation are set forth in Romans 10:9,10 — namely, that to be saved, one must “confess with his mouth the Lord Jesus Christ and believe in his heart that God has raised him from the dead.” These conditions do not require one to commit to the Lordship of Christ, but only to profess his intellectual faith in the deity of Jesus. According to Professors Hodges and Ryrie, the confession of “Lord” in Romans 10:9 is an acknowledgment that Jesus is God or deity, not the acceptance of His lordship over one’s life.
- That the “Easy Believism” view of saving faith is erroneous can be easily seen when we understand the way that saving faith is stated in the Greek New Testament. Three prepositions are used to elucidate the Greek verb “believe,” which is pisteuein. This word is followed by three different Greek prepositions, each of which explain the true nature of saving faith and prove that it entails more than intellectual belief and outward confession.
- For example, John 3:15 asserts, “…Whosoever believes in [pisteuon en] Him should not perish but have eternal life.” The preposition “in” here simply means in. However, the preposition used in John 3:16 is pisteuon eis, meaning believing into Him or in union with In addition, Acts 16:31 reads like this: “…Believe on [pisteuon epi] the Lord Jesus Christ, and you will be saved….” The preposition in this context means to believe upon; to rely; to rest; to commit.
- Thus, we can see that saving faith means to believe in; to believe into (union); and to rest or rely upon — all of which add up to the kind of total surrender and personal trust that changes one’s life. To say that John 3:15, John 3:16, and Acts 16:31 — all classic texts on how to be saved — teach that only intellectual faith is necessary for salvation is to deny the clear meaning of the Greek text.
- The meaning of true saving faith was lost during the Middle Ages by the Roman Catholic Church. According to Roman doctrine, one could be saved without any personal knowledge of the Bible or the Gospel. All a person needed was to trust the word of the church as articulated by his priest — that word being in essence, “Submit to the sacraments, beginning with baptism and penance, and you are sure to be saved.” The Magisterium of the church had spoken, and [his decree] was infallible.
- By the time of the Reformation in the sixteenth century, a conversation with the faithful may have gone something like this:
- “What do you believe?”
- “I believe what my church believes.”
- “But what does your church believe?”
- “My church believes what I believe.”
- “What do you and your church believe?”
- “My church and I believe the same thing.”
- The Reformers, especially Luther and Calvin, did not bow to the Roman church as they sought to define true saving faith. Instead, they went back to the Holy Scriptures. There they discovered that saving faith consists of three essential components.