Episode 129: 4TH Sunday of Easter, Year C
Explore whether Jesus’ words in John 10:27–30 teach eternal security. Dr. Karlo Broussard examines the biblical evidence and explains why Catholics reject “once saved, always saved.”
Readings: Click Here
Looking for Sunday Catholic Word Merchandise? Look no further! Click Here
Hey everyone,
Welcome to The Sunday Catholic Word, a podcast where we reflect on the upcoming Sunday Mass readings and pick out the details that are relevant for explaining and defending our Catholic faith.
I’m Dr. Karlo Broussard, staff apologist and speaker for Catholic Answers, and the host for this podcast.
In today’s episode, we’re going to highlight a few apologetical details in the second reading and Gospel reading for this upcoming 4th Sunday of Easter, Year C. The second reading comes from Revelation 7:9, 14b-17 and some of the details relate to conversations about “soul sleep” and whether the saints intercede for us, along with the topic of the pre-tribulation rapture. The Gospel reading is taken from John 10:27-30 and the whole passage relates to the apologetical topic of whether a Christian can lose his salvation.
Let’s start with the second reading, again, taken from Revelation 7:9, 14b-17. John records,
I, John, had a vision of a great multitude,
which no one could count,
from every nation, race, people, and tongue.
They stood before the throne and before the Lamb,
wearing white robes and holding palm branches in their hands.
Then one of the elders said to me,
“These are the ones who have survived the time of great distress;
they have washed their robes
and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.
“For this reason they stand before God’s throne
and worship him day and night in his temple.
The one who sits on the throne will shelter them.
They will not hunger or thirst anymore,
nor will the sun or any heat strike them.
For the Lamb who is in the center of the throne
will shepherd them
and lead them to springs of life-giving water,
and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.”
The first detail that I want to briefly focus on is John’s description of these heavenly beings being “from every nation, race, people, and tongue.” This tells us that these are human souls.
Now, the significance for our purposes is that this group of human souls constitutes the fourth concentric circle that comes out from the throne of the lamb, which is compared to the 24 elders in Revelation 5:8. As I pointed out in last week’s episode, this signifies that the 24 elders in Rev. 5:8 are human souls, since the two circles are compared in rank. And given that the 24 elders are human souls who presented the petitionary prayers of the Christians on earth to Jesus in the form of incense, we have biblical revelation of the intercession of the saints. Again, you can listen to last week’s episode for the 3rd Sunay of Easter, Year C, or you can just read about it in my book The Saints Pray For You.
The second detail is John’s description of these human souls worshipping the lamb: “For this reason they stand before God’s throne and worship him day and night in his temple.” Why is this apologetically significant?
Well, some Christians and quasi-Christian sects, like Jehovah Witnesses, believe in what’s called “soul sleep”—the idea that souls in the afterlife don’t engage in any sort of intellectual activity. This is often appealed to as a counter to the Catholic belief in and invocation of the intercession of the saints. If the saints in heaven are “sleeping”—not engaging in cognitive activity, then it would be futile to make our requests known unto them.
But the passage for our second reading from Revelation proves this idea false. The human souls in heaven are clearly cognitively active: you can’t worship the lamb without engaging the intellect and will.
The last detail that I want to focus on is John’s comment about who these souls are:
Then one of the elders said to me, “These are the ones who have survived the time of great distress; they have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.”
This is significant for conversations about the pre-tribulation rapture. As you may know, some Christians believe in the idea that before the anti-Christ comes and makes the final push of evil, Jesus will come and snatch true believers off this earth to spare them the last persecution.
Now, embedded in this logic is the idea that God wills true believers to be spared of suffering and persecution. But this doesn’t fit with what John is told about these saints. They were martyrs.
It’s true that the “great distress” probably refers to the first century Christian persecutions and not the great persecution at the end of time. However, why should we think that Christians are going to be snatched up and spared the final push of evil at the end of time when they weren’t spared the “great distress” in the first century?
This passage doesn’t disprove the pre-tribulation rapture view, since God could will in his providence that some Christians aren’t spared at one time in Church history but they are at another. But, the seeming motivation behind the pre-tribulation view isn’t consistent with this revelation from our second reading.
Okay, let’s now turn to the Gospel reading, which, again, is taken from John 10:27-30. Here’s what we read:
Jesus said:
“My sheep hear my voice;
I know them, and they follow me.
I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish.
No one can take them out of my hand.
My Father, who has given them to me, is greater than all,
and no one can take them out of the Father’s hand.
The Father and I are one.”
Some Protestants appeal to this bible passage as evidence for the belief that once we’re saved, then we’re always saved, a doctrine known as eternal security. If Jesus says that no one shall snatch Christians out his and the Father’s hand, so it’s argued, doesn’t it follow that we are eternally secure?
The late Norman Geisler makes this argument in his essay “A Moderate Calvinist View” in the book Four Views on Eternal Security (pg. 71). Protestant author Michael Horton makes the same argument in his contribution to the same book.
What can we say in response?
I address this argument in my book Meeting the Protestant Challenge: How to Answer 50 Biblical Objections to Catholic Beliefs. What I share here you can get in written form in the book.
Our first response is that Jesus’ promise to protect his sheep is on condition that his sheep remain in the flock. It doesn’t exclude the possibility that a sheep could wonder off, and thus lose the reward of eternal life.
The condition for being among Jesus’ sheep, and thus being rewarded with eternal life, is that we continue hearing Jesus’ voice and following him. Jesus teaches this motif of continued faithfulness a few chapters later with his vine and branch metaphor in John 15:4-6:
Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit by itself, unless it abides in the vine, neither can you, unless you abide in me. I am the vine, you are the branches. He who abides in me, and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing. If a man does not abide in me, he is cast forth as a branch and withers; and the branches are gathered, thrown into the fire and burned.
Just as we the branches must remain in Christ the vine, lest we perish, so too we the sheep must continue to listen to the voice of Jesus the shepherd, lest we perish.
Even the verbs suggest continuous, ongoing action by the sheep and the shepherd, not a one-time event in the past. Jesus doesn’t say, “My sheep heard my voice, and I knew them.” Instead, he says, “My sheep hear my voice, and I know them” (v.27). His sheep are those who hear his voice in the present.
Secondly, Jesus only says that no external power can snatch a sheep out of his hands. He doesn’t say that a sheep couldn’t exclude itself from his hands.
The passage says that no one shall snatch—take away by force—Christians out of the hands of Jesus and the Father. This doesn’t preclude the possibility that we can take ourselves out of Jesus’ protecting hands by our sin. A similar passage is Romans 8:35-39, where Paul lists a series of external things that can’t take us out of Christ’s loving embrace. But he never says that our own sin can’t separate us from Christ’s love.
Like Paul in Romans 8:35-39, Jesus is telling us in John 10:27-29 that no external power can snatch us out of his hands. But that doesn’t mean we can’t voluntarily leave his hands by committing a sin “unto death” (1 John 5:16-17). And if we were to die in that state of spiritual death without repentance, we would forfeit the gift that was promised to us: eternal life.
Our third response is that there is abundant evidence from Scripture that Christians do in fact fall from a saving relationship with Christ due to sin.
The Bible teaches that sheep do go astray. Consider, for example, Jesus’ parable about the lost sheep whom the shepherd goes to find (Matt. 18:12-14; Luke 15:3-7). Sure, the shepherd finds the sheep (Jesus never stops trying to get us back in his flock). But the point is that the sheep can wander away.
The same motif is found in Jesus’ parable about the wicked servant who thinks his master is delayed and beats the other servants and gets drunk (Matt. 24:45-51). Notice that the servant is a member of the master’s household. But because of his failure to be vigilant in preparing for his master’s return, he was found wanting and was kicked out with the hypocrites, where “men will weep and gnash their teeth” (v.51). Similarly, Christians can be members of Christ’s flock and members of his household, but if we don’t persevere in fidelity to him we will lose our number among the justified.
That Christians can fall out of Christ’s hands due to sin is evident in Paul’s harsh criticism of the Galatians:
Now I, Paul, say to you that if you receive circumcision, Christ will be of no advantage to you…You are severed from Christ, you who would be justified by the law; you have fallen away from grace (Gal. 5:2,4).
If some of the Galatians were “severed from Christ” and “fallen from grace,” then they were first in Christ and in grace. They were counted among the flock, but they later went astray. Not because they were snatched, but by their own volition.
Peter also teaches this in 2 Peter 2:20. Concerning those who “have escaped the defilements of the world through the knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ”—that’s to say, born- again Christians, Peter says they return back to their evil ways: “They are again entangled in them and overpowered” (2 Pet. 2:20). Peter identifies their return to defilement as being worse than their former state, saying, “The last state has become worse for them than the first. For it would have been better for them never to have known the way of righteousness than after knowing it to turn back from the holy commandment delivered to them” (v.20-21). He adds salt to the wound by comparing their return to defilement to a dog returning to its vomit (v.22). Clearly, Peter didn’t believe in the doctrine of eternal security.
So, John 10:27-29 doesn’t teach the doctrine of eternal security. Jesus ensures that his sheep will have eternal life, but that assumes we remain members of the fold.
Conclusion
Well, my friends, that does it for this episode of the Sunday Catholic Word. The readings for this upcoming Fourth Sunday of Easter, Year C, provide us with a few but important apologetical details:
- The souls in heaven worship the Lamb and thereby refute the doctrine of “soul sleep,”
- The martyrs in heaven give a Christian reason to pause and re-think whether the pre-tribulation rapture belief is consistent with the Bible’s teaching on God’s faithful and suffering, and
- Jesus’s teaching that nothing will snatch his sheep from his hand doesn’t teach the doctrine of eternal security.
As always, I want to thank you for subscribing to the podcast. And please be sure to tell your friends about it and invite them to subscribe as well through any podcast platform that they use. You can also access the archived episodes of the Sunday Catholic Word at sundaycatholicword.com.
You might also want to check out the other great podcasts in our Catholic Answers podcast network: Trent Horn’s The Counsel of Trent, Joe Heschmeyer’s Shameless Popery, Jimmy Akin’s The Jimmy Akin podcast, all of which can be found at catholic.com. And if you want to follow more of my own work, check out my website at karlobroussard.com
One last thing: if you’re interested in getting some cool mugs and stickers with my logo, “Mr. Sunday podcast,” go to shop.catholic.com.
I hope you have a blessed fourth Sunday of Easter, Year C. Until next time, God Bless.