Hello, I'm Phil Johnson, Executive Director of Grace To You, and I'm in the studio today with Pastor and Bible Teacher John MacArthur. Hi, John.
John MacArthur: Hi, Phil. Good to be with you.
Phil Johnson: John, we've invited you into the studio this hour because we would like to talk with you about apostasy, falling away from the faith. What does it mean when someone who professes to be a believer and even seems to be a believer turns his back on Christ and falls away completely? This is a theme we see in Scripture and sometimes Scripture even refers to people like that as believers when they start out. At the end of John chapter 2, the Apostle John says, “Many believed on Him when they saw His miracles.” But the very next verse says, “But Jesus didn't commit Himself to them because He knew what was really in their hearts,” implying that that faith wasn't real. And then that becomes a theme in the gospel of John because in chapter 6, “Many of His disciples turned away and walked with Him no more.” They abandoned the faith completely.” It's a big topic, why do we choose it for this?
We've been thinking about this for a while. We received a letter last year from one of our supporters, a former Grace partner, in fact, and it was one of the saddest, most troubling, most provocative letters we've seen in 40 years of ministry and we wrote back right away and didn't receive a reply. We've tried two or three more times to contact this man, and still again with no response. But his letter raises some important questions.
So we wanted to get you in the studio and just discuss these for a while. We need to warn our listeners. And this isn't really going to be a highly academic discussion. We're not going to talk about theological fine points. But this is a difficult issue that every Christian has questions about and the questions that come to us from this listener are personal, practical questions that frankly all of wish we could have helped him with before he ultimately turned against Christ. But I think these are going to resonate and hit home in many ways with lots of our listeners and some of them in ways they may not expect.
So, let me ask you to start by reading this letter we got from Steve as kind of a starting point.
JOHN: Yeah, Phil, I want to do that. Before I do that, I want to say this. The people who believe you can lose your salvation, and that's a pretty wide range of people across the world, usually are brought to that belief because of people like Steve. It isn't because they find it in the Scripture, it's because they're trying to explain how this person could be a Christian and now they're not a Christian. So that's what leads to that view that you can lose your salvation. And so it is an important issue because there, as I said, is a massive professing Christians around the world who think you can lose your salvation and they've got people to prove you can. As I said, it's not a biblical issue but we'll look at it biblically, try to help the folks who might be drawn to that conclusion because of people they know who denied the faith.
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