Questions & Answers

People who have been born can die. People who have been born again can die again. The Bible speaks often of people who have fallen from faith. The Bible says both that people can fall from faith and that God will keep us safe. We have to let both of these truths stand.

Among the many passages about this are Galatians 5:4 and Matthew 13:18-22. These passages do not say that the people who fall are just out of fellowship for a while, it says they have fallen from grace. We have to remain with what the Bible says, not with what our theory requires. See also Hebrews 6:4-6.

Thanks for your question. This is not so much a disagreement in doctrine as a misunderstanding of the purpose of Christ's words.

As strange as it may sound when we first hear it, "Keep the law of God perfectly and you will obtain eternal life" is and always has been a valid and true statement. The obvious problem is that since the fall of mankind into sin, no person is capable of fulfilling this requirement. So it is and will remain a totally hypothetical or theoretical invitation. Jesus mentioned it to the "expert in the law" in Luke 10 to get him to realize his inability to be perfectly obedient to God's moral demands for us creatures. In other words, Jesus was preaching Law to the man to bring him to the point of confessing his need for another way to be reconciled to God and enjoy eternal life. For that same reason Jesus then told the Parable of the Good Samaritan, clarifying that loving our neighbor from God's perspective means loving our enemies as well as our friends, and serving them at a cost to ourselves and not only when it is convenient. So the truth remains: You and I would earn or win heaven IF we obeyed God perfectly in our nature and conduct.

Thanks be to God that he has graciously provided another way, one that is not merely hypothetical or theoretical, but sober reality and truth. Jesus is the way and truth and life. That is, he earned heaven by his perfection but did so on our behalf and gives us credit for his perfect obedience to divine law. And he removed our guilt and paid the penalty for our disobediences to divine law. As the Holy Spirit brings us to rely on Christ and look to him alone for the solution to our problem, we enjoy the gift of life and salvation. This, of course, is precisely what you are referring to in your question. This is the way to heaven that we need and that we have provided for us by our loving God.

Bottom line: Sure, we can honestly speak of two ways of obtaining eternal life with God. We can speak of earning it by an absolutely perfect life -- a way that we cannot and will not benefit from, ever. To speak of it is to emphasize the demands of the law and highlight our moral failures. And we can speak of receiving it as a gift based entirely on Christ's earning it for us -- a way that God has provided for us that we may rejoice in. To speak of this --and to tell others about it -- is to share the gospel so the Holy Spirit may bring them to believe and rejoice with us.

The Bible says nothing directly or explicitly about dementia and Alzheimer's. Ironically, the strong majority of references to the aged, a frequent target of these diseases, view old age as a blessed time of life. The subject of the loss of mental capabilities through diseases like dementia and Alzheimer's does not surface in the Scriptures. I have heard the words of Jesus to Peter in John 21:18 applied to people suffering from this kind of malady, but in context the words refer to physical martyrdom, not disease or a loss of physical or mental capabilities.

Your primary concern is the really important one: do these diseases rob a believer of saving faith in Jesus Christ or give us cause for concern about their faith-life until death? Here we happily report that saving faith is not at all the same as mental knowledge, or the ability to memorize and articulate information about the Savior, or even the power to memorize and repeat truths about Jesus to other people. Faith is ultimately the product of the Holy Spirit who creates and maintains reliance on Jesus Christ in a person's heart.

Usually this work of the God involves the accompanying use of a person's mental and emotional abilities, as in the study and learning of the Word of God. The Holy Spirit uses the written and spoken gospel to give and sustain saving faith. But he is also fully able to work saving faith in infants and small children through the instrument of Baptism; and this divine, gracious working is beyond our ability to comprehend. It is also beyond our ability to discern or recognize with our senses. But because God promises that infants and little children can indeed be brought to saving faith (see Matthew 18:6,10 and Acts 2:38-39) we take him as his word and entrust the little ones to his care. Similarly, we do the same with those who have been rendered unable to express themselves or articulate their Christian faith as they once could.

Our convictions and comfort rest on divine promises rather than empirical evidences that this is so. God is faithful and will not abandon his people despite the ravages of disease.

You are asking a question that is often asked and that fills us all with strong emotions. And perhaps the reason why it is so often asked is that the Bible does not explicitly give us an answer, and we then end up emotionally dissatisfied. We rejoice at every mention of people being baptized and receiving the promises of faith and forgiveness and hearing the gospel and being brought to trust Jesus and becoming citizens of heaven. We also grieve because so many in this world do not enjoy these blessings and feel particularly bad when we could not apply the gospel to some people like miscarried or stillborn children.

Regarding miscarried children we must affirm that they, like everyone else, were conceived in an inherited sinful condition and need forgiveness to be saved. We also affirm that Christ is the only revealed Savior for all mankind, regardless of the specific circumstances that prevail from person to person. On the basis of clear Scripture, then, we understand that they need faith in Christ and that faith in Christ is given by God through the Gospel. In saying this we do not wish to be understood as saying God could not create faith in people's hearts aside from the gospel (recall the amazing work of the Holy Spirit with John the Baptist when he was still a fetus, Luke 1:41-44), or could not have devised other ways and means for doing it if he had seen fit to do so. We merely report that God throughout Scripture reveals that he works through the gospel to create faith and that this faith is necessary for personal salvation.

It would be presumptuous for us to assume that miscarried children are nevertheless headed for heaven. This idea is not based on Scripture. It is quite popular and emotionally pleasing, of course, and we fully understand the motives in adopting such a position. However, we bind ourselves to Scripture alone for doctrine and simply say that there are things we do not fully understand and cannot fully explain -- and this subject is one of those. To say it bluntly, here we are in the realm of the unsearchable judgments of God. That is where we should leave this kind of speculation.

We are given the assurance that God is a compassionate God, whose judgments are fair. "The Lord is compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in love. . . . He does not treat us as our sins deserve or repay us according to our iniquities. For as high as the heavens are above the earth, so great is his love for those who fear him" (Psalm 103:8-11). We make this the basis of our convictions about what is fair or not fair; whatever God does is fair and right, and good. What "seems fair" to our limited minds and emotions is not to be made the standard of truth.

The way a person seeks to respond to a question like yours tells us a lot about how that person does theology. If we limit ourselves to Scripture alone, we do not have a lot to say. We will stress what God has graciously revealed to us and admit our limitations. And we will recommit ourselves to witnessing and the support of mission work. But if we are willing to manufacture other answers that strike us as reasonable or emotionally satisfying, lots of ideas are possible. I sincerely pray that we never take that route, but commend these issues to the gracious Lord who will answer our questions when we get to glory. "For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when perfection comes, the imperfect disappears. When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me. Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known." (1 Corinthians 13:9-12).