What Happens If They Stop?

3 November 2026

“Whoever believes in Me has everlasting life.” That’s what Jesus said (John 6:47). So if you believe–follow me closely here–you have everlasting life. Have – present tense. It doesn’t say that if you believe now, everlasting life will be shipped to you at a later date. Everlasting life doesn’t start when you die; it starts the minute you believe.

“But what if I stopped believing?” someone wants to know. If we’re going to approach this biblically, then our very first answer should be “Let’s not find out! Why would you wanna do a dumb thing like that?” There’s just no good excuse for abandoning the Lord who bought you.

But some people do. For a lot of us, this is not just a theoretical question. We have friends and loved ones who have walked away from the faith. How do we think about that?

One common position is that the promise applies to believers; stop believing, and the promise no longer applies to you. In fact, they say, if you stop believing, then you move from John 3:16 (“whoever believes in me”) to John 3:18 (“he who does not believe is condemned already”).

The idea has some common-sense curb appeal, doesn’t it? It’s not salvation by works simpliciter; the factor that matters is not your works, but your faith. If you believe, you have life; if you never believed, you never had life; if you once believed but don’t anymore, then you once had life but you don’t anymore. As simple and appealing as some folks find this line of thought, it’s not what John actually teaches, as a careful look will reveal.

The first point I’d make here is in the saying of Jesus we’ve already been looking at: “Whoever believes in Me has everlasting life.” How long does “everlasting life” last? There’s an argument over the translation of αἰώνιος, the Greek word translated “everlasting” (or “eternal,” depending on your translation), but any reasonable translation ultimately leads back to this point. Even if you read it as “the life of the age to come,” the age to come never ends and there’s no death there. If the age to come lasts forever, then the life of the age to come lasts forever. Well, friend, if it lasts forever, and you already have it now, when does it stop? It doesn’t. Everlasting life lasts forever; it’s right in the name.

But there’s more to say than that. The claim that if you stop believing, “whoever believes in Him” no longer applies to you over-reads the present-tense force of the expression. In other words, this claim wants to read it as “whoever keeps believing and never stops” as opposed to “whoever believes now, regardless of what happens later.” (For the Greek readers among us, this is an argument about how to interpret the present participle; by all means check the examples below for yourself.)

One way of testing a hypothesis like this one is to read other places where the same grammar appears, and see if our preferred way of interpreting renders those instances absurd. With the “you have to keep believing or the promise doesn’t apply to you” hypothesis, absurdities certainly result. Consider the following examples (the verbs in bold italics are all present participles in Greek):

  • Mt. 2:20 – “those who seek the life of the child are dead” – being dead, they’ve certainly stopped seeking the child’s life, haven’t they? It’s not talking about what they’re continually doing forever, but what they were doing once, and yet it’s a present participle, just like “whoever believes on Him.”
  • Mt. 5:32 – “whoever divorces his wife for any reason except sexual immorality causes her to commit adultery” – again, talking about an event that happens at a point in time.
  • Mt. 15:4 – “the one who curses father or mother will surely be put to death” – Imagine cursing your mother, being hauled into court on charges, and your defense is “But I’ve stopped cursing her now, so the penalty no longer applies to me!” Do you think that’s going to work?
  • Jn 4:13 – “everyone who drinks of this water will thirst again” – the picture isn’t that they sit by the well drinking forever. It’s a prediction of the future about someone who drinks the water in the present: they drink, and go away, and get thirsty. Similarly, see John 3:16 for a prediction: “whoever believes in Me…will not perish.” In both cases, present participle.
  • Jn 11:26 “whoever lives and believes in Me shall not die in eternity” isn’t much of a promise if you have to keep staying alive for the conditions to apply to you.

There are more examples, but these will do. The point is that the same grammar is operating in John 6:47, the passage we’ve been considering. It’s the same, famously, in 3:16: “For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have everlasting life.”

But what of the person who is condemned? How does that happen? We only need to keep reading. Two verses later, in John 3:18, we find John’s own explanation: “The one who does not believe is condemned already,” John says. Well and good; isn’t that the same present participle we’ve been talking about? Yes, it certainly is. But why does John say this person is condemned? He continues: “…because he has not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God.” Not “because he is not presently believing” but because “he has not believed.” John’s own account of the unbeliever’s condemnation directly points at the unbeliever’s history, not just his present. (Perfect tense, for the Greek readers.)

If you don’t read Greek, feel free to skip this paragraph and go on to the next one, but for the Greek readers among us, see Wallace for an extended discussion of time in participles. Wallace’s own evidence makes the case well that the present participle used as a substantive is generally functioning as an agency noun, as in “a sower went out to sow” (Mt. 13:3) or “fear fell on all the hearers” (Ac. 5:11). In my view, he special-pleads his way back out of that for—of all things—πιστεύω in soteriological contexts in particular, and then tries to read his special pleading back into his view of the participle. It’s an interesting case study in losing your nerve on the verge of the grammar forcing you to change your theology. Go thou, and do un-likewise! But as I say, that’s my interpretation. He would say that the present participle can lose its aspectual force if the context requires it (about which, see below, because the context does, in fact, require it.)

Let’s look a little more closely at what John teaches us about everlasting life, and what happens when someone acquires it. For this, we go to John 5:24: “The one who hears My word and believes Him who sent Me has everlasting life, and will not come into judgment, but has passed from death into life.” Don’t miss the historical and future facts that John plainly spells out here. The person who hears and believes: certain things are now true of that person. He has passed (Gk. perfect tense) from death to life. That’s his history; it’s already done. He will not come into judgment; that’s his future. What if he believed, but now he doesn’t? Can that change the historical fact that he already passed from death into life? No. Does it empty Jesus’ promise that he will not come into judgment? How could it? The notion that changing the present somehow changes the past is positively Orwellian, and entirely foreign to Scripture (not to mention being full-throated logical nonsense).

To be fair, I want to admit that this feels weird for a lot of people. “Do you really mean to say that some guy can have a moment when he’s 9 years old where he believes the gospel in Sunday School, and then grow up and live like the devil himself, and somehow that guy is saved?”

That does seem weird, doesn’t it? There are two reasons it seems weird, one good and the other not. On the good side of the ledger, the incongruity makes us uncomfortable: if this guy’s really a child of God, then he oughta live like one! He ought to act like it, and look like it. Amen! So he should. The incongruity ought to make you uncomfortable, and it will make the person in question uncomfortable, because he’s made in the image of God and indwelt by the Holy Spirit, who is hard at work in his heart even if you can’t see it. Quenching the Spirit is a tragic reality, and it really is incongruous. But the way we resolve that incongruity is by bringing the lost sheep back to the fold, not by airily deciding that if he was really a sheep, he never would have wandered off to start with. That is the reasoning of the lazy and stupid hireling, not the Good Shepherd. Let’s don’t be that guy.

The second reason it seems weird is because the freeness of God’s grace offends our sensibilities. We’re supposed to be past this, but many Christians aren’t. We’re ok with God forgiving us our sins and failures, but the minute He goes and forgives someone who’s “worse” than we are (whatever highly idiosyncratic definition of “worse” we’re using at the moment), we get offended. How is it possible for that guy to get away with that sin? It can’t be! But this is just self-righteous claptrap. It’s the reasoning of the Devil himself, accusing the brethren before the throne night and day. Don’t do his job for him. Trust in the grace of God; it’s there the ones that need it most.

…that’s us, by the way.

1 Comment | Exegesis | Tagged: , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

Salvation by Grace: Person or Proposition?

13 July 2009

For something over a year now, I have been saying that I needed to update my response to the Free Grace Food Fight.  But what with one thing and another, the controversy hasn’t been hitting my immediate fields of ministry in a way that called for a written response, nor has anyone bothered to attack me lately in a way that I felt compelled a response.  Other matters were more pressing, so here we are, a year later, and I still haven’t written anything.

Which is not to say that the time has been wasted.  In the interim, the controversy has been the subject of numerous private conversations, and in the lull in public activity, God provided me with time for some much-needed reflection and growth.

I still have some things to say publicly, but I’m much better equipped to say them than I would have been a year ago.  Those things, alas, will not all get said in this post.  But I’m going to make a start.

Let’s start with this:  Salvation is not by any form of works, including theological study, correctness, or acumen.

We are saved by a person, and that person is Jesus Christ.  God requires of us that we believe in that person, as we see in John 9 when Jesus talks with the man born blind:

Jesus heard that they had expelled him, and meeting him, He said to him, “Do you believe in the Son of God?”

He answered, “Who is he, sir, that I may believe in Him?”

“You both have seen Him, and He is the one talking with you,” Jesus said.

“Lord, I believe!” he said, and worshiped Him.

I used to say that “believe in” always boils down to some sort of proposition about the person, a position I adopted from Gordon Clark. While Clark went to some lengths to demonstrate this idea, and clearly held it strongly, it always got him into trouble.  Having argued that saving faith is faith in a saving proposition, obviously he needed to identify that proposition, and he couldn’t.  In a chapter toward the end of Faith and Saving Faith, Clark admits — with, it seems, some embarrassment — that there appear to be multiple saving propositions in Scripture.

Some Free Grace folks have correctly observed that John’s Gospel is addressed to unbelievers — and that it is the only such book in the New Testament.  This narrows the search a little bit.  Although we would not be surprised to find the saving proposition in, say, Romans (a book addressed to believers), we really want to see how the saving proposition is put to an unbeliever, and in John, God presents Jesus to an unbelieving readership.  It’s an ideal place to look for a saving proposition.

Only problem is, it seems to vary there, too.  Jesus tells the woman at the well that He is the Christ (but doesn’t mention “Son of God”); He tells the man born blind that He is the Son of God (but doesn’t mention “Christ”).  He often mentions eternal life — but not always.  Taking away sins is mentioned sometimes — but not always.  There’s a raft of “believe in Me” or “believe in Him” statements — woefully unclear!  Clark would be no happier with the multiplicity of answers that arise from John than he was with the multiplicity of answers arising from Scripture as a whole.

I have come to believe that the entire proposition-hunting endeavor is fundamentally wrongheaded.  When Pilate asked Jesus, “What is truth?” he missed the whole point.  Truth is not a ‘what,’ it’s a ‘who’: “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life.”  And likewise for eternal life: “I am the Resurrection and the Life.”  To have eternal life is to have Jesus; to know the truth is to know Jesus, not simply a proposition.  The matter is irreducibly personal.

Don’t get me wrong.  Propositions are necessary in order to tell the story and introduce the person to Jesus.  But they’re tools to an end, not the thing itself.  The message is Jesus, the Living Word of God, and He can be introduced by a story, by propositions, but not reduced to a proposition.

Salvation is not a substance, a thing you can put in your pocket.  Salvation is living relationship with the Person Jesus Christ. Faith in the real Jesus, however defective in some of its propositional details, is saving faith. (We can see this with the disciples, who believed in Jesus, but doubted His death, and then His resurrection.)

On the other hand, faith in the correctness of one’s propositions, however accurate they might be, is a threadbare attempt to earn God’s favor through theological acumen, an attempt God will honor as much as He honors other salvation-by-works schemes: “Depart from Me, ye that practice lawlessness; I never knew you.”

We are meant to look through the propositions as through a window, and see the Person standing behind them. When we just look at the propositions — whichever propositions — we’re getting caught up in staring at the window glass itself, preoccupied with every bump and bubble and speck of dust.

To the extent that the big food fight is about which part of the window glass to stare at, there’s not much to pick from on any side.  And to the extent that anyone’s conduct shows hatred for his brothers and his neighbors — certainly not true of everyone, but there’s a lot of it going around — he is plainly not walking with Jesus, so why should anyone listen when he talks about Him?

21 Comments | Bare Minimum Gospel Foolishness, Controversies, Meditations, Person/Proposition, Speaking as God Speaks, The Free Grace Food Fight | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols