Perhaps Jesus was wrong when He taught:
John 5:28-29
28 "Do not marvel at this; for an hour is coming, in which all who are in the tombs will hear His voice,
29 and will come forth; those who did the good deeds to a resurrection of life, those who committed the evil deeds to a resurrection of judgment.
He wasn't speaking to a Christian audience about Christian living. See above.
§Works of righteousness have nothing to do with our salvation?
Then we have a big conflict in the NT.
1 John 3:7
7 Little children, make sure no one deceives you; the one who practices righteousness is righteous, just as He is righteous;
No, there's no conflict except what your mishandling of God's word has produced in your mind.
Works of righteousness have NOTHING to do with our salvation. NOTHING. This God's word repeatedly and explicitly states:
Ephesians 2:8-9
8 For by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God,
9 not of works, lest anyone should boast.
Titus 3:5
5 not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to His mercy He saved us, through the washing of regeneration and renewing of the Holy Spirit,
2 Timothy 1:9
9 who has saved us and called us with a holy calling, not according to our works, but according to His own purpose and grace which was given to us in Christ Jesus before time began,
Where does
1 John 3:7 deny these verses? In what part of the verse is "not of works" contradicted? The verse makes no comment at all on whether or not works are salvific. What's interesting, though, is that you are trying here to make a single verse that is non-explicit about salvation by good works greater in weight than
three highly explicit verses that deny salvation by good works. Your doing so demonstrates very poor handling of God's word.
What you do here is akin to little Willy who, hearing his mother say, "Don't eat any of the cookies in the cookie jar without my permission," goes to his Dad and asks him, "Is it all right to have some cookies from the cookie jar?" His Dad shrugs and says, "You shouldn't eat too many cookies." Willy dashes to the jar and is extracting a handful of cookies when his mother appears and in a sharp tone says, "Willy! What do you think you're doing?" Freezing in place, Willy eyes his mother fearfully and replies, "Dad said I could have some cookies."
Is Willy being honest about the statement his father has made? Concerning Willy's freedom to eat the cookies in the cookie jar, is the vague, general remark of Willy's father about eating cookies equal in force to the explicit command of Willy's mother about the cookies in the jar? Of course not. His father's general, non-specific statement doesn't stand on par with the specific and explicit one given by his mother. We know this just as well as Willy does.
Why, then, concerning the question of salvation by works, are you giving a single, non-explicit, generalized statement about righteousness as much, or more, weight than three very specific, explicit statements denying salvation by works? John says nothing about salvation in
1 John 3:7. He merely observed in the verse that the person who practices righteousness is righteous as God is righteous. About salvation, John makes no observation whatever in the verse. But in the three verses I've posted a number of times now in this thread, salvation by work is ruled out flatly and clearly. For the reason illustrated above, no text on biblical hermeneutics would ever teach that a general and non-explicit verse trumps a specific and explicit one. Instead, all the texts on hermeneutics I've read clearly teach the reverse.
So, no,
1 John 3:7 presents no difficulty to me in holding to an OSAS view.
Oh. So now we have the NOT SAVED BY WORKS strawman.
WHO on this thread, or any thread or forum...has EVER stated that we are saved by works??ù
NO ONE.
This is equivocation of the most obvious sort. The assertion that good works keep one's salvation intact is implying
necessarily that good works are salvific. This is not a Strawman but the unavoidable implication of making works essential to the maintenance of one's salvation.
Bob starts a bonfire at 10 a.m.. Sam continually feeds the fire with wood so that it's still burning at 10 p.m.. Who's responsible for the fire? Obviously, both Bob
and Sam are responsible for the fire - though Sam much more so than Bob. In the same way, if we say Jesus starts the "bonfire" of our salvation but we keep it burning, we are at least as responsible for our salvation as Jesus is (more so, I think). But this makes us co-Saviours with Jesus; it makes the "wood" of our good works as much the source of the "bonfire" of our salvation as what Jesus did to "start the bonfire."
Such thinking is horribly blasphemous, of course, and in direct contradiction to the plain and repeated statement of God's word. There is only one Savior, as the Bible says, and salvation is NOT by good works which we have done, as the Bible also says.
We are saved by faith.
AFTER we are saved by faith,
we are saved...
We are required to obey God.
No need to obey God before salvation.
I believe I've stated this quite a few times now.
See above.
A false idea oft-repeated doesn't make the false idea somehow true.
YOU bring up the LAW Kokyu.
Paul only states that we are not saved by keeping THE LAW.
He does state that we are saved by doing good works...
just Like Jesus did.
This is false. Paul nowhere in the NT states that salvation is maintained by our works, but says explicitly
the exact opposite three times. See above.
And you have yet to produce a statement by Jesus given to Christians within a post-Calvary, New Covenant context declaring that their good works keep them saved.
ALL the Apostles taught good works.
No one has said otherwise. I certainly haven't.
Faith, without good works, is a DEAD faith.
A dead faith
is
No faith.
No, this is in error. In context, James wrote that a "dead" faith was a faith that was alone (
Ja. 2:17), incomplete (
Ja. 2:22) and useless, practically-speaking (
Ja. 2:16). Nowhere in
chapter 2 does James write that "a dead faith is
no faith." Again, this is just another of your many contortions of what Scripture actually says, made in service to your false doctrine of works-salvation.
