The key reason you can’t lose your salvation

It’s easily in the top five of all Christian debates. Maybe even number one.

And sometimes believers get testy when it’s brought up. Arguments ensue that are akin to political or sports team skirmishes where one side can’t fathom why the other side thinks the way they do.   

I’m betting the question of whether a believer can lose their salvation will never be firmly settled until Christ returns. And I get why that is.

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When we do as the Bereans and “[examine] the Scriptures daily to see whether these things were so” (Acts 17:11) we’re immediately met with difficulty because some verses seem to suggest that, once saved, we can’t lose our salvation, while other verses seem to imply we can. Further, there’s the issue of having a false faith and living in actual unbelief, eventually leading to apostasy and a jettisoning of that fake faith (see 1 John 2:19).

Then comes the inevitable accusation from the “can side” of cheap grace with the charge being that an eternal security mindset leads to sinning without limits. This even though the Bible clearly says, “What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin so that grace may increase? May it never be! How shall we who died to sin still live in it?” (Rom. 6:1–2).

On that point, I like what D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones once said: “You’re not preaching grace correctly unless you’re eventually accused of antinomianism.”

I’ve written in CP before that I fall on the side of the perseverance — sometimes called the “preservation” — of the saints and think that once saved, a believer is eternally secure just as the Westminster Confession of Faith says: “They whom God hath accepted in His beloved Son effectually called and sanctified by His Spirit can neither totally nor finally fall away from a state of grace, but shall certainly persevere therein to the end and be eternally saved.”

But the main reason I hold that position is a biblical doctrine that you rarely, if ever, see applied to the question. Follow my train of thought while I do my best to explain.

It’s the justice of God that keeps us saved

I think we’re all in agreement that we’re not saved by anything we do, but instead by God’s grace and through faith, just as Paul writes: “For by grace you have been saved through faith; and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God; not as a result of works, so that no one may boast” (Eph. 2:8–9).

The Bible is clear that salvation is not about trying to be good, just as Lloyd Jones explains: “To make it quite practical I have a very simple test. After I have explained the way of Christ to somebody I say ‘Now, are you ready to say that you are a Christian?’ And they hesitate. And then I say, ‘What’s the matter? Why are you hesitating?’ And so often people say, ‘I don’t feel like I’m good enough yet. I don’t think I’m ready to say I’m a Christian now.’ And at once I know that I have been wasting my breath. They are still thinking in terms of themselves. They have to do it.”

Scripture’s great news is, no, we don’t have to do it; Christ did it for us. No work will ever save us, only Jesus’ finished work on the cross will.  

Think of it this way on the faith vs. works front: with Jesus, you belong to God no matter how superficially sinful your life looks, or, without Christ, you don’t belong to God no matter how superficially righteous your life appears.

This brings me to some questions I want you to consider as we work down to the key reason we can’t lose our salvation. The first is: if we’re agreed that nothing we do can save us, then once saved, how can anything we do damn us?

Don’t answer yet — just hold your thoughts.

Let’s now move on to my next question: how many of our sins were in the future when Christ died for us? Some of them or all of them?

All of them, right? Now, if that’s true, and no sin can somehow overcome Christ’s shed blood for us, doesn’t that mean no sin we commit tomorrow, next year, or 20 years from now can separate us from God once we’re under the blood of Christ?

It does. But the million-dollar final question is, why is that?

Here’s the reason that I see no one bring up when it comes to the question of eternal security and the believer: it’s not the mercy of God that keeps us saved, but rather the justice of God.  

Now, at first, you may think I’m all wet and say God’s mercy has everything to do with salvation, quoting verses like: “So then it does not depend on the man who wills or the man who runs, but on God who has mercy” (Rom. 9:16) and “He saved us, not on the basis of deeds which we have done in righteousness, but according to His mercy” (Titus 3:5).

Don’t get me wrong — I’m not arguing God doesn’t have mercy and bring undeserving people to salvation. I’m saying once we’ve been given that gift, we’re “kept for Jesus Christ” (Jude 1:1) through His justice.

John points this out very subtly in his first epistle when he says: “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:9).

John says that when we admit we “fall short of the glory of God” (Rom. 3:23), God is faithful and … what? “Merciful” to forgive our sins? No. “Just” to forgive our sins.

How is God “just” to forgive our wrongdoings? Because Jesus has already been punished for them, just as someone once remarked, “I am Christ’s punishment.”

God let loose his wrath on Christ for all (not some of) our sins once forevermore, and in the same way our courts have the double jeopardy law that says a person can’t be punished for the same crime twice, God’s justice prevents Him from charging us with the sins Christ took for us on the cross.

This is the key reason we can’t lose our salvation — it’s not us going continuously back to God for more mercy because we keep sinning, but rather us being secured under God’s own righteous double jeopardy justice once and for all and His amazing promise of “[all] their sins and lawless acts I will remember no more” (Heb. 10:17).

So, if you’re in possession of true saving faith and worried today that there’s a line you can cross that’s the point of no return and you can somehow sin your way out of God’s Kingdom, you can’t. God’s justice keeps you secure, which means you can forget about losing your salvation and rest just as the writer of Hebrews says: “For the one who has entered His rest has himself also rested from his works, as God did from His” (Heb. 4:10).

And that’s a great place to be.