ASSURANCE OF SALVATION

CRUCIFIED WITH CHRIST

Assurance of salvation is not based on the quality of a person’s life but on the truth that salvation is totally dependent on what God accomplished for the believer in and through his Son, Jesus Christ.

Paul’s letter to the churches in Galatia addressed an error that was robbing Christians of their assurance of salvation by binding them to a law-based relationship with God.

Paul says of this false teaching:

It is ‘a different gospel – which is really no gospel at all’ – 1:6,7.

It is a perversion of the gospel – 1:7.

It replaces the freedom that we have in Christ with slavery – 2:4.

It ‘set aside the grace of God’ teaching that ‘righteousness could be gained through the law’ – 2:21.

If it is true, ‘Christ died for nothing’ – 2:21.

It makes assurance of salvation depend on ‘human effort’ – 3:3.

It puts people ‘under a curse’ – 3:10.

It negates the promise of God – 3:18.

It puts a person back under what Paul calls ‘the basic principles of the world …weak and miserable principles’ – 4:3, 9.

For the person who has been impacted by it, it, as they understand it, nullifies the grace of God in Christ Jesus – ‘Christ will be of no value to you at all …you have been alienated from Christ; you have fallen away from grace’ – 5:2, 4.

When a person sees their on-going salvation as dependent on their personal law-keeping, they have, in their own minds, put aside the grace of God. In their minds, they have severed themselves from Christ and his death. And that is, for them, the reality in which they live. Even though it is actually not true.

Although that is the reality in which these Christians live and by which they relate to God, it is not the way that God relates to them: he still relates to them as those whom he has united to Christ by his Spirit. God is still relating to them always, ever and only ‘in Christ’, even though they, deceived by the false teaching, relate to him on the basis of their own law-keeping.

Paul affirms the true status of the believer’s relationship with God through Christ:

We are ‘not justified by observing the law, but by faith in Jesus Christ’ – 2:16.

We, in the death of Christ our substitute, ‘have died to the law’ – 2:19.

In that death we ‘have been crucified with Christ’ – 2:20.

We ‘live by faith in the Son of God’ who loved us and gave himself for us’ – 2:20.

Christ has ‘redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us’ – 3:13.

We ‘are all sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus’ – 3:26.

We have clothed ourselves ‘with Christ’ – 3:27.

To those who believe that salvation is either gained or maintained by keeping the law, Paul gives this urgent command:

‘It is for freedom that Christ set us free. Stand firm then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery’ – 5:1.

He is not telling us that we are free to sin. He is telling us, rather, that by the death of Christ we have been set free from the separation from God that results from our sin.

The central issue in the Galatian heresy was the false teachers’ insistence that Gentile believers had to be circumcised to be saved. That same issue was the controversy faced by the Council of Jerusalem in Acts 15. There, Peter summed the issue up in this way:

‘Now then, why do you try to test God by putting on the necks of the disciples a yoke that neither we nor our fathers have been able to bear? No! We believe it is through the grace of our Lord Jesus that we are saved, just as they are’ – Acts 15:10, 11.