Posted on 10/20/2013 11:29:26 AM PDT by CHRISTIAN DIARIST
Once upon a time, Groucho Marx hosted the popular game show, “You Bet Your Life.” At the start of the show, a “secret word” was revealed to the studio audience. If a contestant said the word during the course of the show, a reward would descend from the rafters (a one hundred dollar bill).
Whether we know it or not, we are all, Christians and non-Christians alike, contestants in the spiritual equivalent of “You Bet Your Life.” If we bet wisely, our reward is eternal life. But if we bet foolishly, we condemn ourselves to eternal damnation.
That brings to mind Pascal’s Wager, credited to the seventeenth-century French philosopher, mathematician and physicist Blaise Pascal. He famously posited that every human being bets his or her life on whether or not God exists.
“Let us,” he wrote, “weigh the gain and the loss in wagering that God is. Let us estimate these two chances. If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation that He is.”
To put this in terms to which most of us can relate, even if the odds of God’s existence are, say, 1 in 175 million – the odds of winning Powerball on a single ticket – it is worth the wager.
Because, if we have bet on God, and God does not exist, we lose nothing. That is, save for indulging in certain behavior proscribed by God, including sexual promiscuity, idol worship, adultery, homosexuality (and other sexual perversions), thievery, greed, substance abuse, slander and robbery.
But if we bet against the Almighty, and indeed He does exist, we shall be cast into the lake of fire, eternally separated from God. We shall be condemned to place where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. Where we will be burned with unquenchable fire. Where we will be tormented day and night forever and forever.
Most of us are rationale. So we heed Pascal’s advice.
Even if we are uncertain there is a God, we hedge our bet. We respond to an altar call at some point in our lives. We say we accept Jesus as our personal Savior. We get baptized.
In so doing, we believe we have ensured our eternal security. We believe that, because we went through the ritual of being “saved,” we have a lifetime “Get Out of Hell Free” card. And that we can live our lives as it pleases us – not God – with impunity.
But what if we are wrong? What if this doctrine of “Once Saved, Always Saved,” espoused by many Godly pastors, preached in many purpose-driven churches, is errant? What if it actually is possible for us to forfeit our eternal salvation, to condemn ourselves to hell, by living brazenly and unrepentantly in defiance of God’s law?
That presents a corollary to Pascal’s wager, one that has not been considered by those who profess themselves Christ followers, but who are not truly leading a Christian life.
Let us call this corollary the Salvation wager, in which we weigh the gain and loss in betting on “Once Saved, Always Saved.”
Those who reject the doctrine, who believe those of us whom the Son sets free, must go and sin no more, must faithfully strive to live in obedience to God, have everything to gain if the doctrine is wrong and nothing to lose if the doctrine is right.
But those who subscribe to the doctrine, who believe that, having been saved, they can commit any and all manner of sin and it doesn’t matter in the eternal scheme of things, have hell to pay if they are wrong.
So what might Pascal advise?
That even if it’s more likely that once a person is saved, there is absolutely nothing they can do to lose their salvation, and that even if the odds are, say, 175 million to 1 that the widely-accepted doctrine of “Once Saved, Always Saved” is right rather than wrong, it still is wise to bet against the doctrine.
Because there are many who claim themselves Christians, who think their names have been written in the book of life, who will appear before the great white throne of judgment, who will find themselves sinners in the hands of an angry God.
They will look to Jesus and say, “Lord, Lord,” hoping He will spare them from punishment. But He will declare to them, “I never knew you, depart from me, you who practice wickedness.”
That’s a warning to those abiding unabashedly and unrepentantly in sin. They have bet their lives on “Once Saved, Always Saved.” And if they are wrong, eternal torment awaits.
“I find it interesting that nowhere in Scripture is anyone’s name ever written into the Book of Life.
However, it can be blotted out (Psalms 69:28). “
True, hence we are or perhaps better said no one is created to be destroyed.
Once again predestination or grace.
The only argument that seems logical is a timeless quality of God. Nothing else makes any sense to my desire for logic in religion. Faith is a trait required of parents to children. Tell your kid not to climb the fence at the zoo hippo cage and he will ask “Why Daddy” But the cool thing is you can point out the hippos to your kid and say they are dangerous. The kid must have “faith” in your answer or at the very least comply and file away for further reflection.
Actually, the Christian God doesn't do that.
Who've you been talking to?
G.K. Chesterton - “The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.”
An omnipotent God creates a race he knows will choose knowledge of good and evil, and then continues to create souls to be damned (destroyed, eternal suffering).
That is a faith thing I struggle with and a bitter pill. We are created in the image of God, and I find that act fundamentally wrong. A Natural Wrong as it were. Then you have to accept God as he is, not as we wish him to be. Which I have but the full magnitude of this cannot be discounted. The abject HORROR of this thing!!! It boggles the mind and fully twist the concept of fairness as humans grasp fairness.
So do we bargain? Are we gamblers? Do we accept this out of fear? Does God accept those who choose out of fear alone this monstrous proposition?
I will ask this here because there is such a varied selection of knowledge and opinion.
I had a very similar discussion with a friend about this. Are some people actually denied salvation from the onset? Specifically, we were discussing Judas. Although Judas was the ultimate betrayer...his betrayal resulted in what was a predestined event and led to our salvation.
So did God deny Judas forgiveness? Did Judas have a choice in his decision if God chose him for this?
Thank you for your slander. The Word of God says:
“Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of Me. Rejoice and be glad, because great is your reward in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.”
Even God accepted his ignorance of life on earth having to cast himself to witness first hand and save all from death that he allowed.
get it right.
I suppose you may need to consider that belief and faith cannot be secured by authority alone.
Unless you proclaim Islam.
Even among Christians, faith must come from the heart.
Flawed, as we are.
“Then you have to accept God as he is, not as we wish him to be.”
I wouldn’t dare to call it monstrous, but I would say this:
“Thou wilt say then unto me, Why doth he yet find fault? For who hath resisted his will? Nay but, O man, who art thou that repliest against God? Shall the thing formed say to him that formed it, Why hast thou made me thus? Hath not the potter power over the clay, of the same lump to make one vessel unto honour, and another unto dishonour?”
(Rom 9:19-21)
We should have fear of God, but we should not dare speak against why He has mercy on some but not all.
“I suppose you may need to consider that belief and faith cannot be secured by authority alone.”
I don’t remember saying that faith and belief are secured by authority alone. I was quite positive that my meaning, even if I didn’t say it outright, was that we believe by the power of God’s grace.
“So did God deny Judas forgiveness? Did Judas have a choice in his decision if God chose him for this?”
Pontius Pilot asks from the perspective of man “what is Truth?”
That is our problem. We are Man.
If we throw out the Bible God we are left with a random grinding of our souls by trouble and time. I just don’t know how to answer that but the lives of man, much ink and parchment have been spent trying to answer that question.
The best answer as a human is “I don’t know?” The “higher” churches, Orthodox and Catholic accept these things as mysteries. Many will tell you they have the answer to this question and quote a few bible verses. Then you are supposed to be happy and move along to a nice song and pot luck.
“Even God accepted his ignorance of life on earth having to cast himself to witness first hand and save all from death that he allowed.
get it right.”
Where is it written that God is ignorant of anything? Such a comment is utterly blasphemous. God did not become incarnate to experience what He did not know. He came to fulfill the law and save us from sin, since He knew already our limitations and inability to be saved by the law.
“I wouldn’t dare to call it monstrous”
But speaking as Man, it is monstrous. To say otherwise is not to be Man.
Job had a monstrous experience from the perspective of Man. Otherwise they would never have written down his travails.
” Such a comment is utterly blasphemous.”
If you cannot question the nature of Man and God without being called a blasphemer than it is hard to explore these questions. I get it he told you to “get it right”, a clearly provocative statement. Many times honest exploration is destroyed with the deceleration of “blasphemer!”
This is indeed my struggle. I love God but hate my sin.
Someone posted here the other day about what holiness means. How becoming more holy every day means becoming more strange and otherworldly to this culture.
I pray that I remember to strive for this.
It is one thing to be saved but quite another to become more and more Christlike.
If there is no fruit, there is no Christ-life within. So simple.
It's not quite so simple as that...Those things would show us who we should and could not fellowship with...But we don't know their spiritual condition...
Just as with the Prodigal Son...The son turned away from the Father...The Father on the other hand never disowned the son...
I know from experience...Apparently most of you guys don't...I had a time in my life where I turned away from God...Did I ever deny God??? No...Did I ever lose my belief??? No...
Why did I come back??? I learned that wallowing with the hogs never turned out right...And God whipped me with His Godly belt one time too many and I had no choice... Did I ever lose my salvation??? Not a chance...
Joh_5:24 Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that heareth my word, and believeth on him that sent me, hath everlasting life, and shall not come into condemnation; but is passed from death unto life.
"For if after they have escaped the pollutions of the world through the knowledge of the Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, they are again entangled therein, and overcome, the latter end is worse with them than the beginning. 21 For it had been better for them not to have known the way of righteousness, than, after they have known it, to turn from the holy commandment delivered unto them."
And we go full circle, back to the point of the original post.
And my reply, in a song, "His grace is sufficient for me"
The fundamental problem with Pascal’s Wager as well as the “once saved always saved” question as posed, is that these are not bets that we make with the cosmos about God’s existence and forgiving nature. They are true questions of faith.
Faith is not a simple rational decision to believe in one way and not another. Faith requires introspection and divine revelation resulting in true belief, not merely plopping down 100 cosmic bucks on “God to win.”
Which leads me to another topic— “converting” to another faith for a spouse or other loved one. How does one simply decide that one’s faith is now “wrong”?
OSAS is a false doctrine of the non-Catholic sects.
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