Eternal Security - Part 1
INTRODUCTION:
This morning we come to a verse that is probably familiar to a lot of you. It is a verse that I believe is often quoted out of context and because of this I believe that we need to look more closely at it. So, for this morning we are going to begin to look at just one verse, keeping my promise that we will be in Romans 8 for a long time.
This verse, Romans 8:28, if taken in the context of this chapter contains a most wonderful promise for Christians. Paul in this chapter has talked about the believer’s security in the Holy Spirit and this verse is perhaps the pinnacle of Paul’s teaching on our eternal security, that once saved, always saved. That God will carry the person saved by grace through faith in Jesus Christ from the moment they placed their faith in Christ to the completion of their salvation which is glorification. This one verse contains everything that pertains to a believer’s life. The promise within this verse can be divided into four parts, first, that we can know that we are secure, second that our security is in all things, third, the people who are eternally secure, and fourth the source of the Christian’s security. Let’s pray and then read the verse that is our text for this morning.
SCRIPTURE:
Turn in your Bibles again this morning to Romans 8. This morning we will be looking at Romans 8:28. Please stand if you are able in honor of the reading of God’s Word and follow along as I read.
Romans 8:28,
“And we know that God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose.” (Romans 8:28, NASB95)[1]
KNOWING WE ARE SECURE (Romans 8:28a)
Following what we have already looked at in this wonderful chapter and in anticipation of what we will find in the rest of this chapter Paul opens this verse with three simple words, “and we know…” (Romans 8:28a, NASB95)[2] Paul speaking under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit and speaking what God has revealed to him says that we who have put our faith in Jesus Christ for salvation, we know that every aspect of our lives is in God’s control, and in this we do not need to doubt. We will be used by the Lord to display His glory but also to work out our own salvation and the ultimate blessing of our salvation will be our glorification and God will bring this about by His power. God is at work in us to bring about our conformity to Christ, so that we will be like Him in His glory.
This phrase “we know” in Greek is in the perfect tense which in Greek means that the action of the verb is completed and the results of the action are continuing on, which in this phrase “we know” could also mean “we can know.” Everything we need to know about our eternal security is available for our observation in God’s Word. The problem is that in the history of the church even to our present time Christians have refused to believe that God guarantees the believer’s eternal security. Why do they refuse to believe this? Because they believe that salvation is somehow a shared effort between God and men. God on His end will not fail, but man on his end might, this view causes insecurity, not eternal security. But if we believe that salvation is a gift of God alone, then God alone is responsible and He will not and cannot fail because He is God, this then leads to a sense of hope and a confidence that we are eternally secure in our salvation because it does not depend on us, but on God. In other words, Paul is saying that the truth of eternal security is clearly and unmistakably revealed to us in Scripture by God. That is why Paul says we know, because as believers, all believers we are able with certainty to know the comfort and the hope of being eternally secure if we simply take God at His word. And remember as I said last week, this hope is not the hope of hopelessness, when hope is spoken of in the New Testament it is the hope of certainty, that what God has said He will do, if He has said that He will bring our salvation to completion then He will bring it to completion, we will enter His presence glorified and forever free from the presence of sin and forever in our sinless, righteous, immortal glorified body, a body like the glorified body of the Lord Jesus Christ. As God’s child you never have to fear that you will lose your salvation, that you will be cast out of your Father’s house or that you will lose your citizenship in God’s eternal kingdom of righteousness. Our hope in His promise to keep us and bring our salvation to completion is sure, we are at the moment of conversion, when we put our faith in Jesus Christ, eternally secure!
OUR SECURITY IN ALL THINGS (Romans 8:28b)
God Himself is the One who guarantees our security, and He is the One who causes everything in a believer’s life to eventually become a blessing. Paul speaking of our security in all things says, “that God causes all things to work together for good.” (Romans 8:28b, NASB95)[3]
This verse teaches us that it is God Himself who brings about the good that we as His children receive. For God to do this He must be personally working in each of our lives and He does this as we learned last week through the personal and gracious work of His Son and by His Holy Spirit who indwells us. As we looked at last week the author of Hebrews wrote concerning Christ and His High Priestly work for us that He sustains us until our salvation is complete. Hebrews 7:25 states, “Therefore He [Jesus Christ] is able also to save forever those who draw near to God through Him, since He always lives to make intercession for them.” (Hebrews 7:25, NASB95)[4] He is able to save forever, that is eternal security. But we also have the Holy Spirit indwelling us and we learned last week in verses 26-27, “… the Spirit Himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words; and He who searches the hearts knows what the mind of the Spirit is, because He intercedes for the saints according to the will of God.” (Romans 8:26b–27, NASB95)[5] The work of Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit sustains us and guarantees our eternal security.
This phrase “all things” in verse 28, is one word in Greek and it means the whole, everything, all things, it has no restrictions on it, it means what it says, all things, not some things or just the good things but all things. Now understand that this is not saying that God will keep His children from experiencing things that can harm them. Paul is teaching us that God takes all that He allows to happen to us, even the worst things, and turns those things ultimately into blessings. In other words, no matter what our circumstances, suffering, persecution, sinful failure, pain, doubt, lack of faith, in all of these things as well as all other things, the heavenly Father will work to produce our ultimate victory and blessing. Looking at this from the opposite way we could say that nothing can work against us. Anything that comes into our life whether good or bad God will cause them to work together for our good. This includes circumstances and events that are good and beneficial in themselves and things that are in themselves evil and harmful. God will take these circumstances and events and by His power and will cause them to work together for good.
Paul in using this term “good” is not only speaking of the ultimate good that will come in the life to come, but also good in this present life. No matter what happens in our lives, God will use it either for our present benefit or our eternal benefit. Even what is a present benefit is ultimately for our eternal benefit. He does this by sometimes saving us from disaster and sometimes by allowing us to go through the disaster in order to draw us closer to Him. At the time that we are going through these tragedies we do not see how good can come from it, but often in retrospect we see what God was doing and how it was for our good. He is always working to refine and conform us to the image of His Son, the Lord Jesus Christ. Remember what Paul said to the Corinthians in 2 Corinthians 4:16-17, “Therefore we do not lose heart, but though our outer man is decaying, yet our inner man is being renewed day by day. For momentary, light affliction is producing for us an eternal weight of glory far beyond all comparison,” (2 Corinthians 4:16–17, NASB95)[6] So when our circumstances are especially severe and seem to us to be hopeless, just remember God is purifying and renewing our redeemed inner beings in preparation for glorification, the ultimate good. Paul says the eternal weight of glory will be so great that it will not even compare to the affliction that we suffer in this life.
First, God causes righteous things to work for our good. We see this in His attributes most clearly, His power, His wisdom, His goodness, His faithfulness. We also know that His Word is for our good, the more time we spend in it the more we will love and depend on Him and the more we will hate sin and desire righteousness. God’s righteous angels work for our good. The author of Hebrews writes in Hebrews 1:14, “Are they not all ministering spirits, sent out to render service for the sake of those who will inherit salvation?” (Hebrews 1:14, NASB95)[7] God even uses those who are His children as ministers of good to each other. If you remember in the first chapter of Romans Paul said the reason he wanted to come to Rome was not only to minister to them, but so that they could minister to him as well, that they might be mutually encouraged and built up by one another (Romans 1:12).
Second, God even causes evil things to work for our good. Even though this is hard to understand, these things must also be included in the “all things” that Paul states God causes to work for our good. Many of things that we do or that happen to us are just evil, or at best worthless. God takes these things and by His wisdom and power turns even the worst of such things to our ultimate good. These evil things might be broken down into three categories, suffering, temptation, and sin. God allows suffering as a means of good to His children. Often suffering results because of our faithfulness to God, and God does not always deliver us because of our faithfulness, sometimes through that suffering we graduate to our heavenly home which we see by the many saints martyred for their faith. Often suffering is God’s discipline for sin. Whatever the reason that we must endure suffering or affliction James tells us in James 1:2-3, “Consider it all joy, my brethren, when you encounter various trials, knowing that the testing of your faith produces endurance.” (James 1:2–3, NASB95)[8] Not only will trials and suffering produce endurance, but through suffering we can learn kindness, sympathy, humility, compassion, patience, gentleness which are all good benefits. More important than even these, God can use suffering to bring us closer to Him and make us more dependent on Him. Suffering can also teach us to hate sin more, when we see the sin that causes the suffering, not only our suffering, but when we see the sin that causes the suffering of others, we will abhor that sin. Suffering also helps us see and hate our own sin, God uses suffering to refine and purify us from sin.
God can use the evil of temptation as a means of bringing good. Temptation in and of itself is not good, but God can cause it to work to our benefit. First, temptation should cause us to turn to God in prayer asking for His power to resist temptation. It should cause us to run to Him for protection. God can use temptation to destroy spiritual pride when we find that we are not strong enough in our own flesh to resist temptation but must rely on Him for victory. Temptation should always strengthen our desire for heaven, where we will no longer be subject to temptation because we will be beyond sin’s draw, sin’s power, and sin’s presence.
Finally, God can use the evil of sin as a means of bringing good to His people. This is the most remarkable of all, that God can cause sin to work to our good. But understand, and this is important, God does not use sin for good in a sense that it is an instrument of His righteousness. Rather there is benefit that comes from God overruling sin, by canceling or minimizing the consequences, by forgiving them when we repent. Often, we more readily see the wickedness of sin in others and God uses this to cause us to abhor sin and avoid it because we see what it has done to others. For the believer, even his sin is as awful and evil as the unbeliever, but the ultimate good for the believer is his sin is paid for in full and he will never suffer the ultimate consequence for sin which is death, spiritual death and separation from God forever. A Christian may still have to suffer the immediate and temporal consequences of his sin, and he may be disciplined by the Lord to help him repent and turn from his sin, but he will never be eternally condemned for his sin. The discipline of the Lord is an instrument used by the Lord to produce holiness. The author of Hebrews says in Hebrews 12:11 concerning the Lord’s discipline of His children, “All discipline for the moment seems not to be joyful, but sorrowful; yet to those who have been trained by it, afterwards it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness.” (Hebrews 12:11, NASB95)[9] This is the ultimate good for which God causes our sin to work. This causes us to hate sin and to purse holiness, because when we give into temptation and fall into sin, we must humble ourselves and seek God’s forgiveness and restoration and often God must discipline us for this to happen.
In the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, we have the most clear and excellent example of God causing all things to work together for good for His children. God took the greatest evil that Satan could devise, the cruel, horrific death of God’s Son, and turned it into the greatest, most abundant and amazing blessing that could ever be conceived and He offered it to fallen, sinful mankind, eternal salvation from sin through the substitutional sacrifice of His only begotten Son for us.
CONCLUSION:
I am going to stop here this morning. I had hoped to get through this whole verse, but we did not we got through the first two parts of it. The first part that we looked at is that we know we are secure, because our eternal security is based on the faithfulness of God’s promise to bring our salvation to completion. What God begins He will finish, and it is not dependent on what we may do or not do, it is dependent only on the sovereign Lord of the universe who does not change and who is completely trustworthy. He is the One who Paul testified of when he wrote these words to the believers in Philippi in Philippians 1:6, “For I am confident of this very thing, that He who began a good work in you will perfect it until the day of Christ Jesus.” (Philippians 1:6, NASB95)[10] Because of this our hope of our future glorification is certain and if we hope for what we do not see, for that which is still future, with perseverance we wait eagerly for it. Our assurance is that our salvation was planned by God in the past before the creation of the world, it is ours in the present by faith, and it is now characterized by hope for its completion in the future. The hope of certainty, our eternal security is absolutely certain, we have a future, a glorious future in heaven in glorified bodies that are sinless, righteous, and immortal, like the glorified and heavenly body of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.
Because of this eternal security that is guaranteed by God the Father, He causes all things to work together for our good, at all times moving us toward His purpose, which we will look at beginning next week and on into the following week. The all things that God causes to work together for our good is everything that comes into our life whether good or evil, eventually God by His infinite wisdom and His omnipotence will cause it to be good, beneficial, a blessing moving us toward His purpose, which ultimately is His glory and our glorification. “For our citizenship is in heaven, from which also we eagerly wait for a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ; who will transform the body of our humble state into conformity with the body of His glory, by the exertion of the power that He has even to subject all things to Himself.” (Philippians 3:20–21, NASB95)[11] Your citizenship is already and eternally secure, because it is God who secured it and it is God who is causing all things to work together for good, if God has secured your salvation, if God has secured your citizenship in heaven, there is no power in heaven or on earth that can unsecure it, your eternal security is absolutely certain.
[1]New American Standard Bible: 1995 Update. La Habra, CA: The Lockman Foundation, 1995.
[2]New American Standard Bible: 1995 Update. La Habra, CA: The Lockman Foundation, 1995.
[3]New American Standard Bible: 1995 Update. La Habra, CA: The Lockman Foundation, 1995.
[4]New American Standard Bible: 1995 Update. La Habra, CA: The Lockman Foundation, 1995.
[5]New American Standard Bible: 1995 Update. La Habra, CA: The Lockman Foundation, 1995.
[6]New American Standard Bible: 1995 Update. La Habra, CA: The Lockman Foundation, 1995.
[7]New American Standard Bible: 1995 Update. La Habra, CA: The Lockman Foundation, 1995.
[8]New American Standard Bible: 1995 Update. La Habra, CA: The Lockman Foundation, 1995.
[9]New American Standard Bible: 1995 Update. La Habra, CA: The Lockman Foundation, 1995.
[10]New American Standard Bible: 1995 Update. La Habra, CA: The Lockman Foundation, 1995.
[11]New American Standard Bible: 1995 Update. La Habra, CA: The Lockman Foundation, 1995.