Perseverance of the Saints - is it biblical?

Here then, most assuredly, we have final perseverance, and that moreover, not merely the perseverance of the saints, but of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Yes, dear friend, this is the way we would have you view the matter. It is the final perseverance of the Holy Trinity. It is the perseverance of the Holy Ghost in opening the ears of the sheep. It is the perseverance of the Son in receiving all whose ears are thus opened. And, finally, it is the perseverance of the Father in keeping through His own name, the blood-bought flock in the hollow of His everlasting hand. This is plain enough. We must either admit the truth — the consolatory and sustaining, truth of final perseverance, or succumb to the blasphemous proposition that the enemy of God and man can carry his point against the holy and eternal Trinity. We see no middle ground. "Salvation is of the Lord," from first to last. It is free, unconditional, everlasting salvation. It reaches down to where the sinner is in all his guilt, ruin, and degradation, and bears him up to where God is, in all His holiness, truth, and righteousness. and it endures for ever. God the Father is its source, God the Son is its channel, and God the Holy Ghost is the power of application and enjoyment. It is all of God, from beginning to end, from foundation to top-stone, from everlasting to everlasting. If it were not so, it would be presumptuous folly to speak of final perseverance; but, seeing it is so, it would be presumptuous unbelief to think of aught else.

But if, on the other hand, I make Christ my viewing point, and look at the subject from thence, I shall be sure to have a correct view inasmuch as it then becomes a question of Christ's perseverance, and I am quite sure that He must persevere, and that no power of the world, the flesh, or the devil can ever hinder His final perseverance in the salvation of those whom He has purchased with His own blood, seeing "He is able to save to the uttermost them that come to God by him." This, surely, is final perseverance. It matters not what the difficulty, or what the hostile power may be. "He is able to save to the uttermost." The world, with its ten thousand snares, is against us; but "he is able." Indwelling sin, in its ten thousand workings, is against us; but "he is able." Satan, with his ten thousand devices, is against us; but "he is able." In a word, it is Christ's ability, not ours; it is Christ's faithfulness, not ours; it is Christ's final perseverance, not ours. All depends upon Him, as to this weighty matter. He has purchased His sheep, and surely He will keep them to the best of His ability; and, seeing that all power is given to Him in heaven and on earth, His sheep must be perfectly and for ever safe. If aught could touch the life of the feeblest lamb in all the flock of Christ, He could not be said to have "all power."

People say, “I see you believe in that old Baptist doctrine of ‘once in grace, always in grace.’” Or another says, “I understand you hold that old Presbyterian idea of ‘the final perseverance of the saints.’” I do not know why this should be called either Baptist or Presbyterian, only to the extent that Baptists and Presbyterians agree with the Book, and the Word of God clearly shows that once God takes us up in grace nothing can separate us from the love of Christ so that evidently the expression, “once in grace, always in grace,” is a perfectly correct one. But, on the other hand, I am not so enthusiastic about the other expression, “the perseverance of the saints.” I believe in it; I believe that all saints - all really belonging to God - will persevere to the end, for the Book tells me, “He that shall endure unto the end, the same shall be saved” (Matthew 24:13), and if a man starts out and makes a profession but gives it all up, he will never be saved, because he was never born again to begin with, he was never truly changed by grace divine. On the other hand, the reason he endures to the end is not because of any particular perseverance of his own. What I believe in, and what the Word of God clearly teaches, is the perseverance of the Holy Spirit. When He begins a work, He never gives up until it is completed. That is our confidence.

Some one may say, “Yes I do earnestly desire to be saved but I have a little misgiving about the future.” Do you think after the Lord Jesus Christ has suffered as He has done for sinners, that He is going to forsake those who have trusted in Him? No! There is an old theological doctrine once strongly held in the Universities of Scotland called “The final perseverance of the saints.” It means that once a person is really saved he will persevere through everything right to the end and eventually get to heaven. In a certain way that is true enough but let me ask you:Was it the sheep that finally persevered or was it the Shepherd? There is but one answer, and the proper way to state that doctrine would be, not “The final perseverance of the saints,” but “The final perseverance of the Saviour.” It is the great and glorious Son of God who sought until He found us; it is no less a Person than God the Son who laid us upon the shoulders of almighty power with rejoicing and it is our loving all-the-way-home Saviour who will never put us down till He sets our feet upon the land prepared for us. Once the great Shepherd makes us His, He says, “None shall pluck them out of My hand.” He holds the saved sinner with the grasp of omnipotence. This does not mean that the saved one is always joyful. It says the Shepherd rejoices and there is joy in heaven, but it does not say, the sheep rejoiced. One may struggle and doubt and be tempted, but the sheep cannot get away. The Word says, “He shall never perish.” It does not say, “He shall never know a cloud.” One said, “The Saviour saved me many years ago. He has kept me ever since. I have done all the kicking, but He has done all the carrying, and will do till the end.”

There are two sides to every truth. Believers are saved and saved for ever. We are the sheep of Christ, and we have our Lord’s own word that we shall never perish. On the other hand we are in this world, pilgrims on the heavenly journey, and this is where responsibility comes in. We are therefore exhorted to steadfastness and continuance in well doing. This is why the Spirit is given, the Holy Spirit of God, the Power by which believers are enabled to walk to God’s glory, and answer to their responsibility on this earth. This is where the “if” comes in as a salutary challenge, since continuance in the faith is the most conclusive proof of the reality of conversion. This is especially seen in the Epistle to the Hebrews, where the believers are exhorted to run the race set before them with patience (Heb. 12:1), and to look off unto Jesus the Author and Finisher of faith. And then we are told how God disciplines His children to help them on their heavenly way, to wean them from wrong ways and hindrances in the race.

The power of God keeps us and not our fidelity, yet God's power works through faith. Faith is our side of the matter. God is sovereign in exercising His power, and we are responsible as to the exercise of faith. Many are puzzled as to how to put these two things, God's sovereignty and man's responsibility together, and regard them as quite incompatible and irreconcilable. Yet here, in this fifth verse, they are found going hand in hand, preserving the believer to the salvation that awaits him in the last time. The salvation mentioned here is future. It is the final deliverance that awaits the believer at the coming of the Lord. That final deliverance is a certainty before us; yet we cannot await it with self-confidence, for nothing short of the power of God is needed to keep us, nor can we await it with carelessness, for God's power is effective through faith, on our side. How then do we await it? Why, with exultation, yet tempered with the heaviness of many trials, as verse 6 declares. The coming glory shone brightly before the faith of these early Christians and filled them with great rejoicing, so that they were like ships with sails set and filled with heaven's breezes. On the other hand they had plenty of ballast in the shape of heavy trials. These trials are permitted in love, for they only come "if need be." In one way or another we all do need them. If we try to rejoice in the world and its pleasures we need trials to dislodge us from the world by stirring up the comfortable nest we would fain build below. If we are exulting in the coming glory we need them as sobering and steadying ballast, lest our exulting should overbalance us.

It is a great thing never to twist a single text of scripture to a doctrine. God is wiser than we are, and He has made no mistakes. I see people afraid of certain texts about certain doctrines, and I feel, therefore, that doctrine is not a settled thing with them. It is the same in effect in Romans: "Destroy not him with thy meat for whom Christ died" - destroy my brother for a bit of meat! The moment I see that the end of these things is death, and I am making my brother do one of them, it is plain at once that I am destroying my brother, and God's act to him would be in spite of me. It is quite true, that the moment I look at a believer in Christ, there is no "if," nor can be, as to his security; he is accepted in the Beloved, and there is no "if anything"; he is sitting in the heavenly places in Christ, and the whole matter is settled; but that is not all that God has chosen to do about him. He has chosen to put him through the wilderness when he has redeemed Him, and then we have "ifs" and "whens" without end: "If ye hold fast," in Hebrews; "If ye continue," in Colossians, and so on. But what we have along with it is, absolute dependence upon Another, and infallible faithfulness in Another. As I have sometimes said, I may be standing with my child on the top of a rocky precipice, and he is apt to run about foolishly, and I say to him, "If you tumble over, you will be smashed to atoms"; but I have not the slightest idea of leaving my hold of him, or of letting him fall. Now we are kept by the power of God through faith unto salvation. This shews we need to be kept; but on our side it is dependence on the power that does keep. You cannot confuse that with acceptance; but it is constant dependence upon God keeps my soul in a right state towards Him.

A. Always in Philippians salvation is looked at as with glory at the end. It was not the mere salvation of Paul's body in chapter 1:19. We always have that truth in that epistle founded on redemption; the cross has laid hold of me for the glory, but I have not yet laid hold of it, and what I ought to apprehend is that for which I have been apprehended. And God's way was when He laid hold of Paul to put him through the wilderness, and make him work out his salvation to the end. When I say God is keeping His people, I ask too, Why has He got to keep them? Because they want keeping, or they would fall. You have the two things in John 10: "They shall never perish" inwardly, nor be "plucked out of my hand." But this is not to weaken the plain positive passages which are given as warning, and meant to be as warning. You get the "ifs" in Hebrews and in Colossians 1: "If ye continue," and so on. Now suppose I believe that God is keeping His saints, and still I say to you, "If you continue to the end you will be saved." I get a Methodist who thinks and will say the same, but he thinks such an one might be lost after all, while I am perfectly certain that he will never perish, that is if he really has life at all.

As to perseverance, we may quote our author, on 1 Corinthians 1:8: "When he preaches a faithful God, he shews that He can be rendered false by no fault of ours. Therefore if He have called us by a just and efficacious calling, there is no doubt that He will perfect the work which He has begun, that we should be preserved by Him blameless in the day of our Lord (. …): however often, which is our infirmity while we live here, we may have fallen.

We are apt to think, even as saints, that there is something of ourselves on which we can rely, something that makes us independent of any outward support. We are apt to think, if we are believers, if we are saints, if we are children of God, we are beyond the reach of destruction. And this may be true, but it is sometimes not the truth as it is in people's minds. God will keep His own; but it is He who keeps them. True there is a sense in which they keep themselves, but they keep themselves by walking in dependence upon God. There is no inherent power in man, no matter who the man is, that can make him independent of God. We are kept by the power of God through faith (1 Peter 1:5), and that brings us into dependence upon God.