72. Salvation Cannot Be Forfeited
Salvation Cannot Be Forfeited
Adam ruined the race spiritually, for “in Adam all died” spiritually. And yet, since grace now reigns, it is because we were ruined by the first Adam that it is now possible to be rescued by the Last Adam. For since ruin came through no fault of our own, rescue can now come through no merit of our own. Therefore since our ruin by Adam was so complete that we can do nothing to undo it, our rescue by Christ must be so complete that we can do nothing to forfeit it, else merit comes into the transaction and grace is banished.
It was not what we did to ourselves, but what we received from Adam, that wholly ruined us. So it cannot be what we do for ourselves, but what we receive from Christ, that fully rescues us, else His promise of rescue is worthless. For then the grace of Christ which rescues would be less powerful to save than was the sin of Adam which ruined, and that would put God’s power to save in such a light that no one could trust Him. For it was only a man who ruined us; shall we then admit than an omnipotent God cannot completely rescue us from that ruin, unless we do something to help Him complete the rescue? Does He have less power to rescue than Adam had to ruin?
Paul tells us that the “free gift” that rescues us is not to be measured by the magnitude of “the offence” that ruined (Romans 5:15), for its magnitude is “much more” abundant, and that would be untrue if the rescue was not as totally wrought by God as the ruin was by Adam. To get the meaning of grace more into the clear, there are two forces competing for the souls of men—death and life. Death has so completely won its onslaught on man that the whole race has been born dead.
Now Life, which is not merely a force, but a Person, and that Person the Creator Himself in His Son (1 John 5:11-12; Colossians 3:4), confronts death and him who has the power of death, and offers life from the dead to all who will take it as a gift. The question therefore is, Can Life do at least as much to rescue men as death has done to slay them? Is the destructive power of Adam, a mere man, greater than the recovering power of the Creator Himself? Shall the God who first created man and breathed into him the “breath of lives,” both of body, soul and spirit, be unequal to the work of bringing him back from death to life?
Death can be ended only by life taking possession and driving it out, as light drives out darkness. Is the Creator who gave man life by an outright creation in the first place unable, through possessing us by Him who is Life itself, to dispossess death by accomplishing in us a new creation? Who could trust Him if He could not do at least this much? But we can trust Him, for He does offer us just such a life, telling us that it is eternal life, and therefore “incorruptible” by sin and death (1 Peter 1:23), and that we therefore can “never perish” (John 10:28).
Put in that light, reason answers that though the power of death brought in by Adam was sufficient to end life for all who are in him, the power of the life brought in by Christ must be “much more” abundantly sufficient to give a life that cannot be ended, to all who are in Him. Otherwise grace would not be able to reign, for it would have to yield the throne to death and destruction, since it would be dispossessed by death, as being more powerful.