6. Assurance and the Security of the Believer

Two questions are often run together, and it helps to separate them. The first is the question of assurance: can a believer know that he is saved? The second is the question of security: once a person is truly saved, can he ever be lost? A man might answer yes to the first and no to the second, or the other way around. Rock and Sand addresses both, and this section takes them in turn.

What Trenham Teaches

Trenham does not deny all confidence. An Orthodox Christian, he writes, may “confidently affirm that he has been saved, and at the same time labors to be saved.”⁸² But the confidence he allows is a confidence about the past. About the future he urges fear. Paul told the Philippians to work out their salvation “with fear and trembling” (Phil. 2:12), and Trenham takes this to mean that trembling over one’s salvation is a mark of great faith. Salvation is a work in which our own wills must hold fast to the truth, “so that we do not become Judases.” Christ has saved us, is saving us, and will save us, he writes, “unless we ruin ourselves.”⁸³

He believes that the Protestant view leads to “great overconfidence, a lack of ascetic discipline, and sinful presumption.”⁸⁴ As evidence that even an apostle did not presume, he points to Paul’s words about disciplining his body, “lest after preaching to others I myself should be disqualified” (1 Cor. 9:27).⁸⁵

There is something here that deserves respect. Trenham is right that presumption is a real danger. A man who says he is saved and lives as though it made no difference has reason to be afraid, and Scripture never flatters him. The question is not whether false confidence exists. It plainly does. The question is whether true confidence is possible.

Can a Believer Know?

The apostle John answers that question directly. Near the end of his first letter he explains why he wrote it: “I have written these things to you who believe in the Name of the Son of God, so that you may know that you have eternal life” (1 John 5:13). He does not say “so that you may hope,” or “so that you may wonder.” He says “so that you may know.”

Jesus spoke the same way. “Amen, amen, I tell you; the one who hears my word and believes in him who sent me has eternal life and does not come into judgment, but has passed out of death into life” (John 5:24). Every verb is in the present or the past. The believer has eternal life. He has passed from death to life. Paul writes that “the Spirit himself testifies with our spirit that we are children of God” (Rom. 8:16), and near the end of his life he could say, “I know him in whom I have believed and I am persuaded that he is able to protect what I have committed to him until that Day” (2 Tim. 1:12).

It is important to see where this confidence rests. It does not rest on the believer’s feelings, which rise and fall with his health and his circumstances. Nor does it rest on his performance, which is never as good as it ought to be. It rests on the promise of God and on the finished work of Christ. That is why the argument of Section 5 matters so much here. If a sinner’s acceptance depended partly on his own works, assurance would be impossible, because he could never be sure that he had done enough. But if his acceptance rests entirely on Christ, then to doubt it is not humility. It is doubting Christ.

A small child who is sure of his father’s love is not being proud. He is simply believing what his father has told him. If he were to say, “I hope my father will still love me tomorrow, but I dare not be sure,” no one would praise him for his modesty. They would wonder what kind of father he had. Assurance of salvation is not a boast about the believer. It is trust in the character of God.

Can a Believer Be Lost?

The life that Christ gives is called eternal life. “God so loved the world that he gave his only-begotten Son, so that everyone who believes in him should not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16). This is worth thinking about slowly. A life that might end next year, or at the end of a long struggle, would not be eternal life. It would only be long life. The word itself describes a gift that does not run out.

Jesus also described salvation as a new birth (John 3:3–8), and Peter adds that believers have been “born again, not of corruptible but of incorruptible seed, through the word of God which lives and remains forever” (1 Pet. 1:23). Birth is an event that happens once, at a particular moment. A child may later wander far from home, disgrace his family, or refuse to speak to his father. But nothing he does can make him unborn. He remains his father’s son. This is only an illustration, and illustrations can be pressed too far. But it is an illustration that Scripture itself supplies, and the seed from which the believer is born is said to be incorruptible.

The clearest statements, however, come from Jesus Himself. “My sheep hear my voice; I know them, and they follow me. I give eternal life to them; they will never perish, and no one will snatch them out of my hand. My Father, who has given them to me, is greater than all. No one is able to snatch them out of my Father’s hand” (John 10:27–29). It is sometimes said that while no one else can snatch a believer from Christ’s hand, the believer may still remove himself. But the believer is someone. “No one” includes him.

Elsewhere Jesus describes His Father’s will: “that of all he has given me, I should lose nothing, but raise it up on the last day” (John 6:39). If even one true believer were finally lost, the Father’s will would have failed. Paul writes that believers were “sealed with the Holy Spirit of promise,” who is “a pledge of our inheritance, until the redemption” (Eph. 1:13–14), and that they were “sealed for the day of redemption” (Eph. 4:30). A pledge is a down payment that guarantees the rest will follow. God does not make down payments on purchases He does not intend to complete.

The same confidence runs through the New Testament. “God who began a good work in you will complete it until the day of Jesus Christ” (Phil. 1:6). Believers “by the power of God are protected through faith for a salvation which is ready to be revealed in the last time” (1 Pet. 1:5). Christ “is also able to save to the very end those who draw near to God through him, because he lives forever to make intercession for them” (Heb. 7:25). And Jude closes his letter with praise “to him who is able to keep you from stumbling and to present you blameless before the presence of his glory in great joy” (Jude 24).

Paul’s great conclusion in Romans 8 should be heard in full: “I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other created thing, will be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom. 8:38–39). Trenham warns that we may “ruin ourselves.” But each believer is a created thing, and Paul has just said that no created thing can separate him from the love of God.

Those Who Fall Away

If true believers cannot be lost, what of those who once professed faith and later abandoned it? Every pastor has known such people, and Trenham is right to take them seriously. Scripture explains them. “They went out from us, but they did not belong to us! If they had belonged to us, they would have continued with us. But [in fact] they left, so that it might be revealed that none of them belonged to us!” (1 John 2:19). Their leaving did not undo a salvation they once had. It showed that they never had it.

Jesus describes such people in the Sermon on the Mount. They will say on that day, “Lord, Lord, did not we prophesy in your Name, cast out demons in your Name and do many deeds of power in your Name?” And He will answer, “I never knew you! Depart from me, you who do what is wicked” (Matt. 7:22–23). He does not say, “I once knew you, but you fell away.” He says that He never knew them at all.

This also answers Trenham’s warning about becoming a Judas. Judas was not a true believer who later lost his faith. Long before the betrayal, Jesus said, “there are some of you who do not believe,” and John adds that Jesus “knew from the beginning who were those who did not believe, and who it was who would betray him” (John 6:64). Jesus also said, “Did I not choose you, the Twelve? And [yet] one of you is a devil!” (John 6:70). Judas walked with the apostles, but he was never one of Christ’s sheep. His fall is a warning against false profession, not evidence that true salvation can be lost.

Baptists do not believe that every person who has prayed a prayer or been baptized is therefore saved. A profession of faith that never changes the life is no evidence of salvation at all, as James warns (James 2:17). The doctrine of the believer’s security is not a promise to everyone who once made a decision. It is a promise to those whom Christ has truly made His own, and their lives will, in time, show whose they are.

The Hard Passages

Several passages are often offered as proof that a believer can be lost. Each deserves a fair reading.

Philippians 2:12–13. Paul tells the Philippians to “work out your own salvation with fear and trembling,” and then gives the reason: “for it is God who works in you, both to will and to work, according to his good purpose.” They are to work out what God is already working in. They are not working for a salvation they do not yet have. The fear Paul commends is the reverent seriousness of those who know that God is at work in them, not the anxiety of those who fear He may abandon them. Paul says elsewhere that believers did not receive a spirit that leads back into fear, but the Spirit of adoption, by whom they cry, “Abba! Father!” (Rom. 8:15).

1 Corinthians 9:24–27. Paul compares the Christian life to a race, in which runners compete “in order to receive a corruptible crown, but we [seek] an incorruptible crown” (9:25). His fear is that he might be “disqualified” (9:27), that is, lose the prize. The same letter explains what that loss means. A believer’s work will be tested by fire on the last day. If it stands, “a reward shall be received” (3:14). But if it is burned, “it will be lost, but that person shall be saved, as through fire” (3:15). Paul feared losing his reward and the usefulness of his ministry. He did not fear losing his Savior.

Hebrews 6:4–6. This is the most difficult passage, and it should be read carefully. It speaks of those who “were once enlightened, who tasted of the heavenly gift, became partakers of the Holy Spirit, tasted the good word of God and the powers of the age to come, but then fell away,” and it says that “it is impossible to renew them again to repentance!” Notice first that if this passage teaches that a true believer can lose his salvation, it also teaches that he can never regain it. Yet the Orthodox Church, like most churches, receives back those who have lapsed and repent. Notice too that the writer goes on to compare such people to ground that drinks in the rain but produces only thorns (6:7–8), and then tells his readers, “we are persuaded of better things for you, of things that accompany salvation” (6:9). The people described had tasted the gospel, seen its power, and shared in the life of the church. Like Judas, they had come very near. But they bore no fruit, and the writer clearly distinguishes them from those who are truly saved.

Hebrews 10:26–27. The same letter warns that “if we sin willfully after receiving the knowledge of the truth, there is no more sacrifice for sins.” But it ends the warning with the same distinction: “we are not of those who shrink back to destruction, but of those who believe and so are saved” (10:39). The warning is real, and it is meant to be heeded. It separates those who merely know the truth from those who believe it.

2 Peter 2:20–22. Peter describes false teachers who had escaped the world’s corruption through knowing about Christ and then returned to it. He sums them up with a proverb: “The dog returns to his own vomit” and “the swine that had been washed [has returned] to wallowing in the mire.” The pig was washed on the outside, but it was still a pig. Its nature had never changed. These men had been cleaned up, but they had never been born again.

Other warnings, such as Galatians 5:4 and John 15:6, are best read the same way. They are not threats aimed at those whom Christ holds in His hand. They are the means by which God tests whether a profession of faith is real, and by which He keeps true believers walking with Him.

Does Security Lead to Carelessness?

Trenham’s deepest worry is practical. If a believer knows he cannot be lost, will he not grow careless? Paul heard the same objection in his own day. “Shall we continue in sin, so that grace may abound? May it never be! We who died to sin, how could we live in it any longer?” (Rom. 6:1–2). The grace that saves is the same grace that changes. “The grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation to all. It has taught us that we should deny what is ungodly and worldly lusts” (Titus 2:11–12). Christ gave Himself “to purify for himself a people for his own possession, zealous for good works” (Titus 2:14).

And a believer who strays does not escape his Father’s hand. He meets it. “For whom the Lord loves, he also chastens, and he disciplines every son whom he receives” (Heb. 12:6). Discipline is not the sign of a child about to be disowned. It is the sign of a child who belongs.

Consider a man who knows that his marriage is secure. His wife has promised to love him for life, and he knows she means it. Does that knowledge make him careless of her? It ought to do the opposite. The security of the bond does not release him from faithfulness. It makes faithfulness a joy rather than a fear. The man who serves his wife only because he is afraid she may leave him has not yet understood her love. The same is true of the believer and his God.

Conclusion

Trenham asks his readers to fear and tremble over their salvation, never quite sure that they will not ruin it. Scripture offers something better. It invites believers to know that they have eternal life, and to rest in the promise that no one, not even themselves, can snatch them from the Father’s hand. “There is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus” (Rom. 8:1). That is not presumption. It is faith in what God has said.

If salvation is received by faith and kept by the power of God, then a further question follows. What, then, is baptism? Trenham teaches that it is the moment of salvation itself, and that it should be given to infants. The next section examines that teaching.