By Geoffrey Grider
“For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, Nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 8:38,39 [KJV]).
One of the most amazing things about be born again in the Church Age is that God has given us eternal security by faith in Jesus Christ. When we accepted His payment on the cross as the payment for our sin personally, and put our trust and faith in His death, burial and resurrection, God forgave all of our sins past, present and future. Certainly, we could sin after salvation and temporarily break our fellowship with the Lord, but never for a single second would our salvation be in jeopardy. The apostle John gives us the remedy for restoring our fellowship with Him when the Holy Spirit had him write this:
“If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:9 [KJV]).
John was writing not to lost people in that passage, but to saved people, and the context is fellowship and not salvation. Eternal security is never a ‘license to sin’, and sin and backsliding should always be repented of, but the doctrine to the Church Age Christian is quite clear. There is nothing we can say or do to lose our salvation because not only did we not work to get it, and not work to keep it, there is also a third aspect to why we can never lose it. Here it is:
“That we should be to the praise of his glory, who first trusted in Christ. In whom ye also trusted, after that ye heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation: in whom also after that ye believed, ye were sealed with that holy Spirit of promise, Which is the earnest of our inheritance until the redemption of the purchased possession, unto the praise of his glory” (Ephesians 1:12-14 [KJV]).
At the moment of salvation, the Holy Spirit SEALED US IN by the power of God, and Paul declares that that ‘seal’ will remain INTACT until either we are 1). taken up in the Rapture of the Church, or 2). die and go to be with the Lord.
“Therefore we are always confident, knowing that, whilst we are at home in the body, we are absent from the Lord: (For we walk by faith, not by sight:) We are confident, I say, and willing rather to be absent from the body, and to be present with the Lord” (2 Corinthians 5:6-8 [KJV]).
So now you’re probably wondering what eternal security for Christians in the Church Age has to do with the Mark of the Beast in the time of Jacob’s trouble. Well, the answer is quite simply and wonderfully revealing.
Continue reading here.