Question 87: Can someone be saved who neither thanks God nor repents, nor turns from his ways and returns to God?

 

Question 87: Can someone be saved who neither thanks God nor repents, nor turns from his ways and returns to God?

Answer: No. The Bible teaches us that the unclean, idolaters, adulterers, thieves, drunkards, liars (slanderers), robbers, and the like will not inherit the kingdom of God.

When the Apostle Paul was Saul, he was a legalist who led the persecution and murder of Christians. He believed in God, but he believed in his own version of the God the Jews envisioned. He denied Christ, the Messiah, and branded Jesus the leader of heresy. How evil these actions were in the eyes of God!

However, contrary to human expectations, Jesus met him in Damascus and chose him. Jesus described Saul as a chosen vessel. Acts 9:15, "The Lord said to him, 'Go, for he is a chosen vessel of mine to carry my name before the Gentiles and their kings and the children of Israel.'"

Even those who are considered beyond salvation by humans can be seen as those chosen by God before the foundation of the world, as Paul shows. Ephesians 1:4 says, "Just as God chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him in love." And those chosen after the foundation of the world are those who enter into Christ.

God gives a special calling to those chosen before the creation of the world, enabling them to fulfill that calling. However, after the creation of the world, He selects from among those called those who enter Christ and clothes them with the garment of salvation.

Of the twelve disciples of Jesus, with the exception of Judas Iscariot, these were chosen by God before the creation of the world. Jesus chose them and made them his disciples before his death on the cross, but they all fled in the face of death, and Peter, in particular, denied Jesus three times. However, the resurrected Jesus sought them out and entrusted them with a mission: to feed his sheep.

 

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