Catholic apologist Joe Heschmeyer joins Cy Kellett to tackle a thought-provoking question about salvation and the possibility of losing it. Drawing from Scripture, including 2 Peter and the story of Simon in Acts, Joe provides insightful biblical examples to clarify the Catholic understanding of salvation and the importance of repentance.
Transcript:
Caller: I recently went to a Baptist service with my husband, and the pastor had mentioned in his sermon about, you know, that you can’t lose your salvation. This concerns me. I know there are a lot of verses in the Bible, you know, that talk about this, but I found the verse in Second Peter Chapter Two about the angels, and God cast them in hell. I was just wondering if that may be a verse I could use with him to show that, you know, you can lose it. Not that you will, but that you can.
Joe: I would look at that entire chapter, and I’ll get into why I would use the entire chapter. But you are dead on. You’re right on the money. I’m going to give you a couple other passages that are worth using as well. One is to take concrete examples. So, for instance, in Acts Chapter Eight, there’s a man named Simon who believes and is baptized. Now that is the formula for being saved in the Bible, Matthew 6, or, excuse me, Mark 16:16, whoever believes and is baptized will be saved.
But then Simon commits the sin named after him, Simony. And Peter responds to him after he tries to buy the gift of confirmation. “Your silver perished with you because you thought you could obtain the gift of God with money.” So notice he’s pronouncing a curse of damnation on him, is what it really is. Your declaration, I should say, of damnation on him that he’s spiritually dead. He says, “You have neither part nor lot in this matter, for your heart is not right before God. Repent, therefore, of this wickedness of yours and pray to the Lord that if possible, the intent of your heart may be forgiven you. For I see that you’re in the gall of bitterness and in the bond of iniquity.”
So notice what he doesn’t say. He doesn’t say, “I guess you never really believed,” or “I guess you were never really baptized,” and those are the two easy excuses you could come up with. Instead, he treats it as him clearly falling away. So now he’s back in the gall of bitterness and the bond of iniquity, and his heart is no longer right, and he needs to be forgiven of that sin. This is different than just, “You need to believe Jesus is Lord.” He doesn’t say that. He already knows Jesus is Lord. Simon actually says in the next verse, “Pray for me to the Lord that nothing of what you have said may come upon me.”
So Simon knows who Jesus is. He believes in him. And he even, you know, even like the sin he committed, he said, “Give me also this power that anyone on whom I lay my hands may receive the Holy Spirit.” So clearly, even as he’s committing the sin of Simony, he believes in the Christian message because otherwise he wouldn’t believe in a Holy Spirit or the power of confirmation in the first place. So he’s not having a crisis of faith. You can’t say he didn’t really believe. That doesn’t make any sense. He clearly believes, has clearly sinned in a way radically contrary to the Gospel, and is now in a place where his soul is imperiled. And he is praying that if it is possible, God will forgive him and restore him.
That’s the first where it’s just so abundantly clear that unless you are committed to not accepting what the Bible says there, it’s clear what is being said.
The second is a little bit more of a confusing passage because it takes a little bit of working through, but it’s worth having in your back pocket. It’s Hebrews Chapter Six, where it says, “For it is impossible to restore again to repentance those who have once been enlightened,” that’s an early term for baptism, “who have tasted the heavenly gift,” the Eucharist, “and have become partakers of the Holy Spirit,” that’s confirmation, “and have tasted the goodness of the Word of God and the powers of the age to come.”
So these are people who are fully sacramentally initiated and they’re well formed in the faith, who then, verse 5, “if they commit apostasy, since they crucify the Son of God on their own account, and hold him up to contempt.”
“For land which has drunk the rain that often falls upon it and brings forth vegetation useful to those for whose sake it is cultivated, receives a blessing from God; but if it bears thorns and thistles, it is worthless and near to being cursed. Its end is to be burnt.”
This is explicitly talking about those who were believers, who had the sacraments, were well formed in the faith, who had received repentance and then rejected God and embraced apostasy. Now, the reason I say you have to be a little careful with that one is because there was an early Christian misunderstanding of it that said, literally, if you commit a mortal sin after you’re a Christian, you can never be saved. That’s not what Hebrews 6 is saying.
Hebrews 6 is warning that if you accept Christ and then fall away, what can we tell you that you don’t already know? Like, you seem lost, just because there’s not some new information that’s going to come your way. Whereas like a pagan who’s never heard the good news can hear the good news and convert, you’ve heard it, know what’s on offer, and then have rejected it. So it is harder for such a person to be saved. It’s not impossible at the grace of God. But that’s the second passage I’d point out is Hebrews 6.
Then the third one is the passage you mentioned, Second Peter 2. In 2 Peter 2, St. Peter says, “False prophets also arose among the people, just as there will be false prophets among you who will secretly bring in destructive heresies, even denying the master who bought them, bringing upon themselves swift destruction.”
So right there in verse one, we’re told these evil teachers or false teachers were, number one, ransomed by Christ. He was the master who bought them. Number two, Christ is their master or was their master. And number three, they have rejected him by embracing heresy. And it’s not only the evil teachers that have to be worried about this, but also the people among whom St. Peter is writing to who might fall into the trap. Because remember, he says, “These false teachers will arise among you.”
And then it says in verse two, “And many will follow their licentiousness, and because of them the way of truth will be reviled, and in their greed they will exploit you with false words.” So he’s warning the people to whom he’s writing that they are not immune from falling away. And who’s he writing to? He says in 2 Peter Chapter 1, that he’s writing to those who have obtained a faith of equal standing with ours and the righteousness of our God and Savior Jesus Christ. Even those people can fall away and embrace destructive heresy instead.
And then he gives this laundry list to show that you can’t just rest content in this life. And the critical example is exactly the one you pointed to in verse four. That if God did not spare the angels when they sinned, but cast them into hell and committed them to pits of nether gloom to be kept until the judgment, then it follows that he could do the same thing to you, that if the angels were able to fall, you’re also able to fall.
So “once saved, always saved,” pretending like it’s impossible to fall. How’d that work out for the devil? Not so great.
So I’m going to jump a little bit forward now towards the end of the chapter, because he goes through a lot of examples like this. But down in verse 20, towards the end of the chapter, after they’ve escaped the defilements of the world through the knowledge of Our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. So they know Jesus, and not just in an intellectual way, they know him in such a way they’ve escaped the defilements of the world. They are again entangled in them, the defilements of the world, and overpowered. 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.” So they didn’t just know about it, they were on the right road and then turned back. It’s right there. It’s explicitly there.
And then finally, in the very last verse, it has happened to them according to the true proverb, “The dog turns back to his own vomit and the sow is washed, only to wallow in the mire.”
So anytime you hear someone preaching “once saved, always saved,” just present them with these passages and say, “Well, how do you explain Simon in Acts 8? How do you explain this explicit warning against Christian apostasy in Hebrews 6? How do you explain this entire chapter of 2 Peter 2?” And don’t tell me we are different than the angels, because Peter’s point is you should learn from what happened to the angels because it could happen to you as well.
Cy: What do you think? Angels are in heaven with God and they…
Joe: Yeah, exactly. They didn’t have the full beatific vision, but before, they rebelled. But they had more than we have here on earth and still rebelled. Right.
Caller: Okay. So I just want to make sure that that would be an appropriate verse to show him or chapter that I could show him regarding that issue.
Joe: I guess I could have just said yes. Yeah, that’s a great one.
Caller: Thank you so much!