THE BOOK OF JAMES
ETERNAL SECURITY
DR. JIM DIXON
JULY 14, 1985
JAMES 5:19-0
“How many mummies are there in the world, Daddy?” That’s the question that Heather asked me a year or so ago. I don’t often think about mummies, and so I thought Heather was talking about mommies. I told Heather that there were hundreds of millions of them in the world and her eyes grew big and she looked stunned. And she said, “What do they do?” And I said, “Well, they have kids, of course. Some of them are homemakers and others have other careers and jobs. Some like to shop a lot.” Heather looked totally fascinated. But when I understood that she was talking about mummies and not about mommies, I had to confess that I didn’t know the number of mummies in the world (and I still don’t know).
But I do know that there are only three mummies in the state of Colorado. They’re all Egyptian mummies, and they’re all on display until November 5th at the Denver Museum of Natural History. I think we look at mummies with a certain combination of awe and curiosity. What’s underneath all those bandages? Mummies, of course, are simply embalmed bodies that have been preserved for thousands of years. Through the years people have done many strange things with them. In the 19th century, people used mummies as logs to burn fires in their fireplaces in some parts of the world (that’s not the type of fire you want to cuddle up to I don’t think). Since the 16th century, ground mummy has been considered (in some parts of the world) to be a male aphrodisiac. And in the city of New York, you can still, for $40, buy an ounce of ground mummy (that’s what they tell me). But if the Egyptians knew that mummies had been so abused and burned and ground, they would have been appalled, because the very purpose of mummification was the preservation of the body.
Nothing was more important to an Egyptian than that the body be preserved from harm. They had a tremendous fear of damage to the body, both in this life and even in death. And that is why they prepared the body. That is why they soaked the body in sodium carbonate. That is why they wrapped the body. That is why they placed the body in decorated coffins, and that is why they placed the coffins in tombs and burial chambers. It was all done for the preservation of the body, that nothing might harm the body in death, because they believed that if the body didn’t continue there was no life.
How unlike the teaching of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, who says, “Do not fear that which can harm the body, but fear that which can harm the soul.” He says, “Fear that which can kill the soul.” We live in a world preoccupied with the physical. God wants us to focus on the spiritual. It’s not physical death that should scare us. It’s spiritual death, the death of the soul, that should scare us. There are only two possible destinies for mankind, and the Bible refers to them as Heaven and hell. Heaven is described as eternal spiritual life, fellowship with the Father. But hell is described as eternal spiritual death, separation of the soul from the living God. Hell is separation of the soul from the presence of the Lord and the glory of His might. That’s spiritual death. And in our passage of scripture for today, James warns us of spiritual death. He warns us of the death of the soul, and he poses two questions.
The first question is this: is it possible for a Christian—someone who believes in Jesus Christ, someone who has given their life to Jesus Christ, received Him as Lord—to ultimately lose salvation? Is it possible for a Christian to commit apostasy and experience eternal spiritual death, the death of the soul?
We are surrounded by death. Everything around us dies. Scientists tell us that even the stars of the heavens will one day die. And that’s true of our star called the Sun. One day, our Sun is going to go nova—the core of the Sun is going to contract, and the temperature is going to increase (and that’s amazing because the temperature at the core of the Sun is already 27 million degrees Fahrenheit. You can do a lot more than fry an egg with that). Because of the increased temperature, the conversion of hydrogen to helium will accelerate. Thermonuclear activity will increase. The surface of the Sun will expand. It’ll expand by 40 million miles so that the Sun actually touches the planet Mercury.
The Sun will have become what scientists and astronomers refer to as a red giant star. It will be so hot it will incinerate the Earth. But for the Sun, it will only be the beginning of the end. The great rate at which the Sun will be burning energy will cause the Sun to begin to contract and the Sun will then begin to shrink from a red giant and it will become a white dwarf. Right now, a million Earths could fit inside the Sun, but the Sun will shrink to the size of the Earth itself. And when it is a white dwarf, it’ll be very close to death, and ultimately the Sun will become what is called a black dwarf. It will be dead and the planets will be lifeless, dark, barren spheres floating in space. This will be a dead solar system.
Everything in the world dies. But the Bible says there is one life, one energy, that never dies. That life is God—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. God never dies. The Bible says, “Thou, O Lord, did found the Earth in the beginning. The Heavens are the works of Thy hands. They will perish, but Thou remaineth. They will grow old like a garment, like a mantle. Thou will roll them up and they shall be changed, but Thou art the same and Thy years never end.” The incredible truth is that when you become a Christian, when you receive Jesus Christ as Lord, you come into contact with the eternal living God. And He who is eternal sends His Spirit within us, and by His Spirit He rejuvenates, He rekindles, our spirit and He begins to feed our spirit.
There is one food for the soul, and that food is God. Everything needs to be fed or it dies. The tree in your backyard and the body itself both need to be fed. If it’s not fed, it dies. There’s one food for the soul, and it is God. And that is why Jesus said, “I am the true bread, come down from Heaven. He who believes in Me will never hunger and he who receives of Me will never thirst.” He is eternal food for our souls. And when we receive Him as Lord and Savior, He sends His Spirit in, and He feeds our souls forever. That’s eternal life.
But here is the horrible thought. Is it possible that someone, having received Christ, having invited Christ within, could turn from Christ, commit apostasy, leave the path of Christ, begin to walk another path, fall into a lifestyle of sin, and reject their faith so much that Christ would no longer feed their soul and their soul would ultimately fall into spiritual death? Loss of salvation—is that possible?
In our passage of scripture for today, James warns us that if we turn away from the truth there is the danger of spiritual death. In the 16th century, Jacobus Arminius, a Christian theologian, said, yes, we can lose our salvation. He said, “We are free to accept Christ and free to reject Christ. Even after we become Christians, we can lose our salvation.” And Arminius has very much influenced the Wesleyan movement in the Methodist church. In the same century, John Calvin, the Reformer, said, no, we cannot lose our salvation. Once you’ve truly become a Christian and Christ has sent His Holy Spirit within you, you are His and He is sovereign and will never let you go. It’s predestined. You will have eternal life with Christ and that’s guaranteed the moment you truly believe. John Calvin has very much influenced the Presbyterian churches and the Reformed movement. But the real issue is not what Jacobus Arminius or John Calvin said. The real issue is, what does God say? What does the Bible say? We turn to the Bible when we confront this question, and I must say the answer is not simple. There are passages of the Bible which would seem to indicate, at least at first glance, that perhaps a Christian could lose salvation.
The Bible says it is impossible to restore again to salvation “those who have once been enlightened, who have tasted the heavenly gift, who have partaken of the Holy Spirit, who have tasted the powers of the age to come, if then they commit apostasy, since they recrucify the Son of God and hold Him up for contempt. For land which has drunk the rain that often falls upon and it brings forth vegetation useful to those for whose sake it was cultivated receives a blessing from God. But if it bears thorns and thistles, it is useless. It is near to being cursed and its end is to be burned.”
Again, the Bible says, “If we sin deliberately after receiving a knowledge of the truth, there no longer remains a sacrifice for sin, but a fearful prospect of judgment and a fury of fire that shall consume the adversaries. For if a man who violates the law of Moses dies without mercy at the testimony of two or three witnesses, how much worse punishment do you think will be deserved by a man who has spurned the Son of God, profaned the blood of the covenant by which he was sanctified, and outraged the Spirit of grace? We know Him who says, ‘Vengeance is Mine, I will repay.’” And again, “The Lord will judge His people. It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.”
Again, the Bible says, “For if after they have escaped the defilements of the world through the knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ and they are again entangled in them and overpowered, their last state has become worse than the first. It would have been better for them never to have known the way of righteousness than, having known it, to turn their back on the holy commandment delivered to them. It has happened to them according to the proverb: ‘Behold, the dog returns to his vomit and a sow is washed only to wallow in the mire again.’”
These passages of scripture and many other passages could be taken to mean that a Christian could lose salvation. They also could be variously interpreted, but certainly there is this warning, this caution from God: sin is serious. Apostasy is serious. Stay in the light.
Now, there are other passages of scripture which are meant to encourage the Christian, meant to give us confidence. They are meant to encourage us to believe that once we are saved we’ll always be saved, which seems to indicate that you can’t lose your salvation. That’s why Jesus said, “He who hears My words and believes in Him who sent Me has everlasting life and will not come into condemnation. But he has already passed out of death into life.” That is why John says, “I write this to you who believe in the name of the Son of God that you may know that you have eternal life.” That is why Paul said, “I’m convinced that neither death nor life, nor angels nor principalities, nor things present nor things to come, nor heights, nor depths, nor anything else in all of creation, can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” That is why Jesus said, “I am the good shepherd. I know My sheep. They hear My voice, and they follow Me. I give them eternal life. No one is able to snatch them out of My hand. My father is greater than all, and no one is able to snatch them out of My Father’s hand.”
The Bible speaks of Christians, those who have truly accepted Jesus Christ, as predestined for everlasting life and conformity to the image of the Son of God. The Bible speaks of the Christian as indwelt by the Holy Spirit and speaks of the Holy Spirit as the seal of our salvation and the guarantee of our inheritance. Now, all of these things are meant to give us confidence that once we are saved, truly saved, we will be forever saved.
I want to say that, personally, I believe in eternal security. I believe that after somebody truly accepts Jesus Christ as Lord, if somebody has truly taken Christ as Lord of life and the Holy Spirit has come in, that person cannot lose salvation. However, I don’t hold that position dogmatically. I acknowledge that there are passages in the scripture that are problematic, and I certainly affirm that there is a big caution given consistently in the Bible to avoid lifestyles of sin—to avoid apostasy. Do not leave the path.
When I was in high school, I had a best friend who was a great athlete. He was bigger than the rest of us. He was popular at school and he was popular at church. He grew up in a Christian home. His parents loved Jesus Christ. He came from the neatest Christian home and he himself, by everything I could see, had become a Christian. He’d gone forward at an altar call at Forest Home Christian Conference Center, and he asked Jesus Christ to come into his heart. As the years passed, he led bible study groups. He was a leader at our church. We all looked up to him. One day his parents sent him to a private high school on the East Coast and I didn’t see him for that next year. When the year was done, I drove down to the airport to pick him up. And as I was driving him home, it became very evident that he had changed. He began to describe to me gross group sexual activities that he’d become involved in. He began to talk about women as though they were merely created as objects for his personal sexual gratification.
In the months that followed, he sometimes would say he was a Christian. Sometimes he wouldn’t. He went to college and he dropped out of college and said he was going to make a million dollars. For the better portion of the last 20 years, I’ve hardly seen him. People tell me there was a time when he was following an Eastern religionist guru. People tell me that today he has totally abandoned the Christian faith. I hope and I pray that someday he will come back and embrace Christ and I’d love to have some part in his journey home. But what if he never comes back? What if he never confesses Christ again? Is he lost, eternally lost? Or is it “once saved, always saved”? Those are the kinds of questions that parents with tears on their faces ask us. The answers are not simple.
None of us can ever know whether such a person truly believed and truly accepted Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior. And no matter how apostate someone appears to be, none of us truly knows their heart. I do believe in eternal security. I’ve said that before and I say it today, but here in this passage James poses the question of spiritual death. He warns us not to commit apostasy and not to enter into lifestyles of sin. The warning just can’t be any stronger. If you love Christ and you long to please Him, you make mistakes. God wants you to know you are His and He is yours. But if you’re rejecting and disregarding Christ blatantly, He warns you strongly: turn back. Spiritual death is ahead.
This leads us to our second and final question posed by James: what do we do if, as Christians, we find ourselves moving towards spiritual death? What do you do if, as a Christian, you know you’ve entered into apostasy, into a lifestyle of sin? If you’re not sure whether you believe anymore, what do you do?
When we went to the Black Hills last week, we went to the Wind Cave National Park. And there we went into the Wind Cave. It’s an incredible cave. It only has two natural holes that reach the surface of the earth. One of them was just discovered recently, and the other hole, the other entrance to this cave, was discovered in the year 1881, more than a hundred years ago. Scientists have gone into that cave, and they have concluded that human beings prior to 1881 never ever stepped foot in that cave. That’s incredible, because geologists claim that the cave is 60 million years old. That’s what they claim.
The cave is 42 miles long under the earth, one of the 10 largest caves in the world. There is a constant temperature of 52 degrees down there, winter or summer. Barbara, Heather, and Drew had never been in a cave, and it was an amazing experience. As we entered the Wind Cave, we descended to a depth of 200 feet beneath the earth and we took a walk for a half mile. Now, if you want to walk for three and a half to four hours, you can descend 500 feet beneath the earth and you’ll find subterranean lakes. It’s incredible.
As we walked in this cave, every once in a while you’d see a tunnel leading off to the side. It would be a black tunnel with no light. We asked our guide where those tunnels went, because our tunnel was lit. The guide said that some of the tunnels (they’ve all been charted, but they’re discovering new tunnels all the time) go on and on, perhaps for miles, but only the tunnel we’re in leads back to the surface of the earth. Only the tunnel we’re in takes us back home.
Now, somebody went into one of those other tunnels and into the darkness. They began to wander, and suddenly they began to long for home. What do they have to do? There’s only one thing they can do. They have to turn around. They have to turn back and return to the tunnel that is lit. That’s what James tells us in this little passage of scripture. If anyone wanders away from the truth and someone brings him back, they save his soul from death. You must turn back. The Greek word means “to turn.” It’s a kinship word to the word for repentance. That’s what’s demanded in our lives when we find ourselves in a black tunnel off the lit path. Jesus said,” I am the way.” He says, “I am the light of the world. I am the way. No one comes to the Father but by Me.” And if you find yourself off that path, the answer is to turn back. You turn back through repentance when you say, “Lord, I turn from this sin, from this lifestyle. I want to return to You. I want to walk with You.” God wants us to take sin very seriously. Ultimately, as we walk through this world, He wants us to be steadfast. He doesn’t want us to be looking down dark tunnels. He wants us to stay on the lighted path. That’s what He’s looking for. If we would truly have life in our souls, if we’d truly be spiritually alive… He’s looking for a people who consistently take sin seriously.
Now, last month or a few weeks ago, I went to see the movie Pale Rider starring Clint Eastwood. Believe it or not, I was given a free ticket to the movie. Most of the ministers (or many of the ministers) in the metropolitan Denver area were given free tickets to this movie Pale Rider. We were given a letter along with the free tickets saying that there was a special showing for ministers, telling us that there were, they believed, Christian messages and Christian content in this movie. And they knew we’d want to go see it and commend it to our congregations. So I went to see Pale Rider. It was a Monday morning special showing. That theater was packed with ministers.
Now, the movie was rated R (that might surprise you), but you have to understand, the movie was free. So, the place was packed, and a man from Inspirational Films was up front and he was telling us how he really believed there was good Christian content in this movie. “Go home, recommend it to your congregation,” he said. I can’t recommend it to you. Now, if you like Clint Eastwood movies, I’m sure you’ll like this, but I can’t recommend it to you as a Christian movie. I just can’t. When the movie begins, there’s this community of people, a mining community. And they’re good people. And suddenly there’s this massive group of bad people on horseback from the city, and they just sweep their horses over this mining community and they lay it in ruins. Then they leave in a cloud of dust. And when the dust clears, a little girl by a tree begins to recite the 23rd Psalm. When she’s done reciting the 23rd Psalm, she says, “Lord, send a miracle. Send a miracle.” And suddenly you see Clint Eastwood on a pale horse.
Now, Clint doesn’t show up immediately. He doesn’t come till the next day, but when he comes, this little girl is with her mother inside the house and she’s reciting a passage from the book of Revelation: “Behold, there comes a pale horse, and his rider is death.” And we’re to understand that Clint has returned from the dead. In response to this little girl’s prayer, God has sent Clint back from the dead—perhaps to seek vengeance on those who killed him, but certainly to rescue this little mining community. And he wears a white collar and he’s called the preacher and he is a minister of sorts, and he has nifty little things to say and he kind of binds the community together. He becomes for them a source of strength. But then, as the going gets tough and the bad guys get worse, he knows it’s time for drastic action. And so, he takes his white collar off and throws it down. The first thing he does is go to bed with a mom—a little fornication—then he heads into town and pulls out his guns and hands out a few prefrontal lobotomies.
And when the movie was done, I found myself thinking, “Aren’t a lot of Christians like that?” When the going gets tough, we just take our white collar off and toss it down. We just take it on and off. If we want to cut a few corners at work in our business, we just take our collar off. We’re attracted to somebody sexually? Why, we just take our collar off. We want to tell a little lie? We take our collar off.
God hates hypocrisy. He’s told us to take sin seriously. He’s called us to walk in the pathway of His Son, and that pathway is light. And when we ask Christ to be the Lord of our life, we’ve done a very serious thing. He doesn’t want to just be Lord on Sunday. He wants to be Lord every day of the week. He wants to be Lord of our business, Lord of our social life, Lord of our friendships, Lord of our money, and Lord of everything. Anything else is hypocrisy. He’s called us to be faithful.
You know, 125 years ago during the Lincoln-Douglas debates, Douglas accused Lincoln of being two-faced. Lincoln smiled. He said to the crowd, “If I was two-faced…tell me, if I had two faces, would I be wearing the face I have today?” Unfortunately, the world views many Christians as two-faced, perhaps three-faced. We have a Christian face and we have a business face, and they’re different. We have a social face and it’s different. But God has called us to steadfastness, to complete surrender. He wants to carve us and mold us into His likeness so that when people see our face they see a little bit of Christ. That’s what He longs for.
You know, 1930 was a big year in our country’s history (and with this we’ll conclude). In 1930, Shirley Temple was two years old and Herbert Hoover was president of the United States. All Quiet on the Western Front won the Academy Award. The stock market had just crashed. We’d plunged into the Great Depression. But on July 4th, 1930, an incredible thing happened at Mount Rushmore in South Dakota. That incredible sculpture of George Washington was unveiled that July 4th, 55 years ago. It would take another 11 years for the faces of Lincoln and Roosevelt and Jefferson to be completed. But the Washington face (which most people regard as the most beautiful of the four) was completed by Gutzon Borglum, the great American sculptor. He used 300 men to carve that face out of that mountain. That face is five stories high.
This last July 4th when we were there at Mount Rushmore, we were at a July 4th ceremony that night. And some of those 300 men, after 55 years, were still alive. And they stood—some bald, some with gray hair. Some of them could barely stand. The ovation was great, but I was told that the ovation paled when compared to that first ovation on July 4th, 1930, when a 70-foot flag covered the face. People had come from all over the United States, and suddenly that flag was lifted, and they saw this perfect face of George Washington. Nobody had ever seen anything like that. The crowd gasped. They marveled. It was a beautiful work of art.
As Christians, we know there’s going to come a far greater unveiling someday when our Lord Jesus Christ will return in power and great glory, and we will see Him face-to-face. We will see His glory and we will see His majesty. But sometimes I think we forget that there’s going to be an even more personal unveiling, and that’s going to be when He sees our face. The Bible says, “We are laid bare before Him, and He sees us as we truly are.” He will see our true face. Before Him, nothing can be hidden. All is open and laid bare before Him. And He will see whether we’ve truly longed after righteousness, whether we’ve had a heart that longed to please Jesus Christ. He will see whether His holiness was our hunger and thirst. He will see if we’ve been steadfast, and it’s only then that we will truly know if it is well with our soul. He has warned us to seek purity, to walk in the light, and to avoid sin. The apostle Paul 2,000 years ago wrote to the Thessalonians and said, “May the God of peace sanctify you wholly, and may your body, soul, and spirit be kept sound and blameless until the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.” Paul’s prayer for the Thessalonians 2,000 years ago is our prayer for you. I believe in eternal security, but we have this warning: avoid sin. Let’s pray.
Lord Jesus, all of us here who are Christians can look back to some moment and we can remember that time when we first invited You to come into our life. When we welcomed You, we received You as Lord and as Savior. We pledged our lives to You and to the service of Your kingdom. Lord, we’ve not always been faithful, and for that we repent. Lord, help us to be ever more faithful, to walk in the light as You are in the light. Thank You for Your mercy, for Your grace. Help us not to take Your grace and mercy casually. Help us not to presume upon it, but help us to take sin seriously. Help us to serve You in this world so that we might truly have spiritual health, that we might stand before You and hear You say, “Well done.” Be with us, dear Lord, as we go from this place. We pray this in Your great name. Amen.