"Earning" Heaven?

Theology
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After posting on Pater15’s thread elsewhere, I said something that he responded to with the following:

Many here (including me) would ask you to explain what you mean by “earning the right to go to heaven.” Salvation is a free gift, so it’s the claim that we somehow earn it that would be problematic.

I referred specifically to the fact that salvation from sin and eternal life are not the same thing, but I do realize that false Calvinistic doctrine has crept into the mainline church, so I will explain. Calvinism treats salvation from sin and eternal life as one and the same thing, when they are not, and this is why they claim that all you need to do in order to make it to the consummation of eternal life in heaven, is to simply believe in Jesus.

Salvation and eternal life are treated in Scripture as two completely different, but intimately related, doctrines. Part of the confusion comes into play because many times Paul uses these terms as metonyms for one another, and so throws people off who do not recognize linguistic genres in Scripture. Furthermore, salvation from sin and eternal life are different in their nature’s and purposes; salvation from sin is a one time, singular historical event in the life of a believer, just like if you were saved from drowning at 16, we do not keep saying you are saved from drowning, we say you are alive.

In direct contradistinction, eternal life in Scripture is portrayed as a conditional state of being in some passages, while in other passages it is covenant terminology for one being in covenant relationship with God (such as John 17:3); and in other passages, eternal life is addressed as making it to heaven where we will have eternal life codified.

This is why one can get saved in the past and still end up in eternal fire when they die, because contrary to false teachings and doctrines, salvation is not for the purpose of taking you to heaven, and heaven is not guaranteed just because one gets saved. This is why John says:

John 3:36*
Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life, but whoever does not obey the Son shall never see that life: because the wrath of God continues to remain upon him.

The purpose of salvation from sin is to qualify us to enter into God’s very presence so that we can engage Him in personal relationship; it is that relationship that takes a man into heaven, not salvation. Salvation from sin is based upon the same laws of atonement that God gave to Moses, the only difference is that Christ is our sacrifice and we do not need to sacrifice an animal every time we sin.

Blessings.

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@BlueDragon I think your thesis creates a false dichotomy that breaks the organic unity of the Gospel. They Are Inseparable. In the New Testament, “being saved” and “inheriting/having eternal life” are used interchangeably to describe the same state of redemption.

In Mark 10:17–26, a rich young man asks, “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” After he walks away, Jesus tells the disciples how hard it is for the rich to enter the Kingdom. The disciples respond in shock: “Who then can be saved?” Mark records Jesus and the disciples treating “eternal life” and “being saved” as identical concepts.

Romans 5:9–10 links them directly:

“Since, therefore, we have now been justified by his blood, much more shall we be saved by him from the wrath of God. For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, now that we are reconciled, shall we be saved by his life.”

Eternal Life is the direct result of Salvation from sin. Salvation is not merely a “transaction” that drops you at the doorway of relationship. According to Romans 6:22–23, deliverance from sin is what yields eternal life:

"But now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves of God, the fruit you get leads to sanctification and its end, eternal life. For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord."

I think you use John 3:36 to argue that salvation doesn’t guarantee heaven unless you add works of obedience. However, in Greek, John contrasts “he who believes” (pisteuōn) with “he who does not obey/disbelieves” (apeithōn). The disobedience John speaks of is the refusal to believe/accept the Son. Saving faith and biblical obedience are two sides of the same coin.

Yes, true, living faith inevitably bears the fruit of obedience (James 2:17, 1 John 2:3–4). You cannot separate genuine saving faith from an obedient heart. You claim salvation is a one-time past event that “qualifies us” to try to earn entry to heaven via relationship. Scripture, however, teaches that eternal life begins the moment you are saved. Jesus says in John 5:24:

“Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life. He does not come into judgment, but has passed from death to life.”

Eternal life is a present possession for the believer, not a future reward you earn after qualifying.

Be blessed.

Peter

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Can we be happy in heaven if we don’t have peace of mind? So how do we achieve peace of mind? Does Matthew 4:17 give us a clue?:

From that time Jesus began to preach, saying, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.”

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Part 2…

Yes, true, living faith inevitably bears the fruit of obedience (James 2:17, 1 John 2:3–4).

This is not what Scripture teaches. In Mat. 3:8 and like passages, you are the one commanded to bear fruit (ie. do actions of righteousness, walk in obedience), the verbs are always in the Active voice, meaning that you are the one doing the works. If they just came automatically because you are saved, then they would all be in the Passive voice.

You cannot separate genuine saving faith from an obedient heart.

This is not according to the real world. I have known plenty of people who had genuine salvation experiences, who later fell away from God for one situation or another. They were saved individuals, but later fell away, just like Scripture affirms can happen.

You claim salvation is a one-time past event that “qualifies us” to try to earn entry to heaven via relationship. Scripture, however, teaches that eternal life begins the moment you are saved. Jesus says in John 5:24:

“Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life. He does not come into judgment, but has passed from death to life.”

Yes, indeed…but we cannot interpret covenant Scripture divorced from covenant; it is not the new testament, it is the New Covenant Scriptures. Covenant principles of operation, by God’s ordination, says that you only continue to have what God has given to you as a covenant gift, as long as you continue to abide in that covenant. This completely destroys the false notion of once saved always saved, and that false notion only came about because the Reformers knew nothing about covenant aside from the word itself.

Eternal life is a present possession for the believer, not a future reward you earn after qualifying.

Be blessed.

Eternal life is addressed in Scripture as both a present possession and your future reward. You are a man, not a god; you have no parity with God, He makes the rules, not us. Any relationship with God automatically implies obedience on the human part, and as Scripture affirms, if there is no obedience on a man’s part, then there is no eternal life.

I John 5:11-12 tells us that we only have eternal life if we have the Son, but how do we have the Son? I John 3:23-24 tells you: “whoever obeys God’s commandments abides in Him, and He will remain abiding in them.” To have the Son, you must walk in obedience to Him, otherwise you do not have Him in you and you are not in Him. Heb. 5:9 tells you the same thing, as do many other passages. If we ignore or explain away what these passages tell us to our faces, then we are not truth seekers, we are only here to protect out biases, and that always ends badly.

Blessings.

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I would say that we have peace of mind as we walk in obedience to God, because Mal. 3:18 still applies today:

“You will again make the distinction between the righteous and the wicked; between those who obey God and those who do not obey God.”

God says there is no peace to the wicked.

Let us continue to strive to walk in obedience to God, and we will have peace of mind.

Blessings!

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I will have to answer in two posts…

@BlueDragon I think your thesis creates a false dichotomy that breaks the organic unity of the Gospel. They Are Inseparable. In the New Testament, “being saved” and “inheriting/having eternal life” are used interchangeably to describe the same state of redemption.

Not at all, as I stated, while salvation from sin and eternal life are used metonymically for one another, that does not mean they are the same thing. As an example, in the sentence, “Your considerations are subordinate to the crown,” the crown is used as a metonym for either the king, or the kingdom, but the crown is not the king or the kingdom. Just so, salvation from sin and eternal life are not the same thing. They are intimately linked, just as being born and living are, but being born and living are not the same thing.

In Mark 10:17–26, a rich young man asks, “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” After he walks away, Jesus tells the disciples how hard it is for the rich to enter the Kingdom. The disciples respond in shock: “Who then can be saved?” Mark records Jesus and the disciples treating “eternal life” and “being saved” as identical concepts.

Actually, neither Jesus nor the disciple treat them as identical. And you can only see them as such if you read them as identical. The Biblical concept of salvation stems directly from the atonement as given to Moses by God, and salvation has only one purpose, and that purpose is not to take anyone to heaven. Before you can have personal relationship with God, you must have your sins dealt with, no one can have relationship with God (eternal life) if he has not been born again (directly resulting from salvation from sin) first.

Birth – living…salvation (born again) – eternal life. Salvation begins the state of eternal life, just as you continue to live (if you do not die) after being born.

Romans 5:9–10 links them directly:

“Since, therefore, we have now been justified by his blood, much more shall we be saved by him from the wrath of God. For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, now that we are reconciled, shall we be saved by his life.”

How so? Justified can mean salvation, sure…but there is no mention directly or indirectly in this text of eternal life. Furthermore, as far as “saved by him from the wrath of God,” when we apply the principles of Biblical interpretation, in particular the Covenant Principle, one who has been saved from the wrath of God only continues to be saved from that wrath as long as he remains abiding in Christ, the living New Covenant of God. If he ceases to remain abiding in Christ, then he is once again a subject of that wrath.

Eternal Life is the direct result of Salvation from sin.

Agreed.

Salvation is not merely a “transaction” that drops you at the doorway of relationship.

Agreed, but that is not what I implied. Salvation is the ticket that gets you through the door into God’s presence, but that fact does not count as engaging Him in relationship. It is like teenagers buying their ticket to the dance, and then standing upon the wall the whole night, failing to engage the opposite sex in dance, which was the purpose for getting the ticket in the first place.

According to Romans 6:22–23, deliverance from sin is what yields eternal life:

"But now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves of God, the fruit you get leads to sanctification and its end, eternal life. For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord."

Yes…the gift of God (which is not free, the word free is not in the Greek, nor implied in the text at all) is eternal life “in Christ,” which many people fail to understand (not saying you do, speaking generally). One only has that covenant gift as long as he remains abiding in Christ, if he ceases to abide in Him, then he forfeits all that God makes available to us in Christ. In this case, eternal life.

I think you use John 3:36 to argue that salvation doesn’t guarantee heaven unless you add works of obedience. However, in Greek, John contrasts “he who believes” (pisteuōn) with “he who does not obey/disbelieves” (apeithōn). The disobedience John speaks of is the refusal to believe/accept the Son. Saving faith and biblical obedience are two sides of the same coin.

Nope, according to the Greek and its grammar, apeithon in this text means does not obey because it is in the Dative of person. The text speaks for itself…you can believe in Christ and gain eternal life (covenant relationship), but if you do not practice walking in obedience to Him, then your belief is made moot and void. No obedience, no eternal life; Scripture is replete with passages that all say the same.

Part 2 coming up…

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Yes, I think obedience to God brings us peace of mind.

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Salvation, biblically, captures the fullness of the Divine rescue project. It is impossible to divorce the act of God forgiving us of our sins, Christ’s defeat over the powers of sin, death, hell, and the devil, and the reality of eternal life. These are all interconnected realities.

We do not earn heaven, we do not earn eternal life; we inherit eternal life as a result of Christ’s finished work: His righteous life, passion, death, and resurrection. Because eternal life is the life of Jesus Christ, the life He Himself has. We receive the life of Christ as a pure gift, even as He received unto Himself our death. Christ took our death, and gives us His life. That’s what eternal life is. That is why Christ is the firstborn from the dead and firstfruits of the resurrection, He is the resurrection and the life, and whoever trusts in Him shall not die, and even should he die, yet shall he live.

The call of obedience is what the life, abiding in Christ, is shaped lie–by the gift, power, and working of the Holy Spirit molding and shaping and conforming us into the image of God’s Son. God has freely, on account of His only-begotten Son, called us sons by His grace through adoption; and now He is calling us to act like it.

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Jesus knew me, before I knew Him.

When I did come to know Him, I also knew, He gave me the eternal gift of His love.

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Yes, they are all interconnected, but not the same thing.

Actually, you do earn eternal life, and we earn it by walking in obedience to God, just as Scripture clearly teaches…

1 John 3:23-24 And this is his commandment, that we believe in the name of his Son Jesus Christ and love one another, just as he has commanded us. (24) Whoever keeps his commandments abides in God, and God in him. And by this we know that he abides in us, by the Spirit whom he has given us.

If you do not walk in obedience to God, then you are not in Him, and He is not in you…which means you do not have eternal life, or anything else that God provides for us in Christ…because you will not be in Christ.

Hebrews 5:9*
And being made perfect, He became the source of eternal life to all who obey Him.

And again…

John 3:36*
Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life, but whoever does not obey the Son shall never see that life: because the wrath of God continues to remain upon him.

These all confirm (or rather, are confirmed) by principle 4 of ancient near eastern covenanting, which the New Covenant hails from:

4. The terms, stipulations, promises, blessings, benefits, and gifts of the covenant are only applicable to those who are participants in that specific covenant. If a covenant partner for some reason ceased to keep his covenant obligations, thus terminating his covenant relationship with the other, then he forfeited all covenant rights, terms, stipulations, promises, blessings, benefits, and gifts accorded to him in, and by, the covenant.

For far too long people have interpreted the NT Scriptures as if they are only letters; they are not, they are covenant documents, and they are to be read as covenant documents. When we fail to do this, we misinterpret what they say.

Yes, indeed…“through adoption” and that adoption is through the new covenant in Christ. Unlike Roman adoption that Calvinists consistently claim, Jewish adoption does NOT prevent one from being cut off. Everything from God comes through the new covenant, and they are only given to those who abide in that covenant, and we abide in it through obedience to the Law of Christ.

Blessings

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@BlueDragon I appreciate you taking the time to detail your stance, but several of your grammatical and lexical claims do not hold up under closer examination of the Greek text: the grammar of John 3:36 is a present active participle in the Nominative case, not a “Dative of Person.” The text contrasts the one who believes with the one who rejects/refuses to be persuaded by the Son. Furthermore, 1 John 3:23 explicitly defines God’s primary commandment as believing in the name of His Son, Jesus Christ.

Romans 6:23 and ‘Free Gift’. The word translated as gift is chi \acute{\alpha}\rho \iota \sigma \mu \alpha (charisma), derived directly from chi \acute{\alpha}\rho \iota \varsigma (charis — unmerited favor/grace). Paul deliberately contrasts grave{\omega}\psi \acute{\omega}\nu \iota \alpha (opsōnia — wages you earn through labor) with chi \acute{\alpha}\rho \iota \sigma \mu \alpha (an unmerited gift of grace). To claim that ‘free’ is not implied in charisma misses the core distinction Paul is making between earned wages and divine grace.

Active verbs vs. divine source: The use of the Active Voice in commands to bear fruit (e.g., Matthew 3:8) simply identifies the subject acting; it does not mean the action is fueled by autonomous human effort. Scripture consistently teaches that active human obedience is the fruit produced by God working in the believer (Philippians 2:12–13, John 15:5). In John 17:3, Jesus defines eternal life not as a future reward earned after passing a probationary period, but as knowing the Father and the Son right now. According to John 5:24, the believer already possesses eternal life and has already passed from death to life.

Peter