Hebrews 6:1-6 seems to imply that if someone who was once genuinely converted loses that salvation they are not able to repent and return once again to the Christian faith, but how does that fit with stories of apostasy and restoration from Scripture and from the real lives of many Christians? Peter, for instance, confesses that Jesus is the true Messiah, denies him immediately before his death, and then returns to become a pillar of the earliest church. What then, does the Hebrew text mean?

The answer has to do with the historical context: threatened with persecution, at least some Christians in the church, who received the epistle of Hebrews, have been tempted to return to the safety of the currently-legal Jewish synagogue. The preacher of Hebrews warns them that by returning to an expression of faith that denies the salvific reality of the death of Jesus, they cut themselves off–however devout their synagogue worship will be–from that salvation, and by doing so they implicitly confess that the one-off sacrifice of Jesus was not good enough and that God must provide a different sacrifice. If they want to experience the grace of God, they must confess instead that Jesus is the God-man crucified for the sins of the world.

In other words, the text does not deny that those who apostasize are forever cut off from grace, but it does teach that those who apostasize can only return to God’s grace by believing in the crucified and risen Jesus.

Hosts: Aaron Mueller and Chuck Rathert

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A common urban myth about Christian origins sometimes gets passed around when people talk about the Bible is that no one can really know what the Bible says since the translations we have now are just translations of older translations. The Bible says that all of scripture is “breathed out” by God, but does this mean that our English translations can equally lay claim to this divine origin?

Chuck and Aaron talk about how translations work and about the decisions scholars must make as they try to the best of their ability to communicate ideas written in one language into another language without changing those ideas. The different theories of how this is done - whether literally or as a dynamic equivalent - are all in pursuit of communicating as faithfully as possible the message God has in his word. In doing this, the translators do not translate from previous English translations but from the oldest and best Greek and Hebrew manuscripts we have available to us.

Hosts: Aaron Mueller and Chuck Rathert

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To comment on this episode, visit https://saintjamesglencarbon.org/cacg-ep0146.

The Bible teaches that at the end of this current age, when Jesus returns, God will finally and eternally judge all people. But what is the actual basis of that judgment? What does it have to do with our lives right now? And how can we know where we stand?

For Protestants who believe that salvation is by grace through faith alone, it may come as a surprise that every time the final judgment is described in Scripture, it is done on the basis of works. In other words, on that last day, believers will be revealed by the way they lived in Jesus’ name, while those who do not know Christ will be revealed by the works they failed to do.

So, how does this final judgment shape our reality today? By pulling the justification which we receive at the judgment seat of Christ into the present, faith allows us to know right now that we are not guilty before God. This divine declaration—that we have infinite value because we are united to Jesus—forms the Christian’s identity now, assuring us of who we really are. Join us as we look at how the final judgment allows us to hear the Lord say face-to-face what He has already promised in His Word: “Well done, good and faithful servant.”

Hosts: Aaron Mueller and Chuck Rathert

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To comment on this episode, visit https://saintjamesglencarbon.org/cacg-ep145.