Eternal Security
By Jerry Batson, Th.D.
Special to The Alabama Baptist
A common expression about Baptists from both inside and outside the Baptist family is that Baptists are people who hold to a doctrine of once saved, always saved. Unfortunately and also inaccurately, the phrase is often used with stress on the second part, “always saved.”
This yields the unbiblical and distorted idea that regardless of what unfolds in a person’s life in the aftermath of a public confession and water baptism, that person is forever heaven-bound. The crucial ingredient, however, lies not in the last part but with the first part, “once saved.”
Eternal security in salvation is irrevocably connected with a genuine conversion experience of personal trust in Christ and the resultant spiritual union with Christ. It is only in light of biblical saving faith that we assert the eternal security of the believer.
‘Through faith’
Hence when we read 1 Peter 1:5 that believers are those “who are kept by the power of God through faith for salvation ready to be revealed in the last time,” we must give equal stress both to the “through faith” part as we do to the “kept by the power of God” part.
The significant confession contained in the Baptist Faith & Message statement captures the matter of eternal security in these words: “All true believers endure to the end. Those whom God has accepted in Christ and sanctified by His Spirit will never fall away from the state of grace, but shall persevere to the end” (Article V).
The Bible garners several common human experiences or ordinary analogies by which to undergird a more formal or theological understanding of eternal security.
For several weeks Theology 101 will draw upon some of these analogies that serve to express the idea of “once saved, always saved” in less formal expressions.
‘Must be born again’
One such analogy from human experience is that of birth. In the physical realm birth is neither an irreversible nor a repeatable event for what is born. Babies are not returnable commodities.
Eternal security rests on the fact that salvation is a matter of a divine birth. Jesus’ well-known declaration to Nicodemus is a solid focal point: “You must be born again” (John 3:7).
Final salvation with its entrance into heaven is not dependent on multiple divine births but on a singular, unrepeatable spiritual event in which the Holy Spirit brings into being new life that flows and grows from that singular, supernatural spiritual birth.
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