Easy-Believism: Who Gets The Glory?

In thinking more about Decisionalism or Easy-Believism salvation, the plague that has infected Evangelicalism, I began to wonder just who do these proponents of this error think they are glorifying in teaching that “God has done His part, now it is up to you to do your part?”

With the Bible being crystal clear that salvation is “not of yourself lest any man boast,” just how do they explain this? Are these Easy-Believism advocates saying that when you get down to brass tacks, it is man's fallen volition, a will that is dead and enslaved to sin, that is the final determiner in bridging the gulf that separates God and man?

I would suggest that this is straight from the fallen will of man. It is a direct response from man's hideous total depravity to say, much less think, that man has some island or spark of righteousness left in him that enables him to respond favorably to the Gospel of Jesus Christ. It is an attempt to glorify himself. It is taking away from God the glory when He acts to save His people or His elect.

In discussions with Easy-Believism proponents, I have actually been told that the reason someone is saved while his neighbor is not is that the saved one made the right decision. If that is so, then is it not of works that a professing believer comes to faith and trust in Christ? Is it not then the result of a good work that the professing Christian is saved? To believe unto salvation certainly is not a non-work or a bad work, is it? Therefore, in the minds of those who believe this error, that which makes the difference between them and their lost neighbor is that they make the good and right decision whereas their lost and hell-bound neighbor did not.

"For by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God, not of works, lest anyone should boast."(Ephesians 2:8,9)

I can't begin to count how many people have told me they are “born-again Christians” and yet they are very publicly ensconced in lives that would, in some cases, make the Devil cringe. A young man who is on his second or third sexual lover told me he is a born-again Christian. His mother told me the same thing about herself, that she is “born again,” and she lies every time she opens her mouth, pirates satellite signals for free, and makes sexual advances toward men other than her husband. A woman in our church is 44 or 45 years old and tells everyone she is 27. She makes no connection between her profession of the Gospel and telling the truth.

This horrid and damnable false doctrine creates the idea in the heads of its advocates that to have forgiveness of sin they think their volition wrought for them means that there is no obligation to obey the commandments of God. This horror creates in their minds a license to sin and to sin freely.

I was listening to a YouTube video in which a famous Reformed Baptist preacher was telling the story of one of his parishioners who admitted to him in a counseling session that she was involved in a long-term sexual affair with a married man. She herself was also married. She saw nothing wrong with this. The preacher told her she would go to hell if she did not stop this. Her response was that she was heaven-bound and that God had to forgive her of this sin because of the decision she made twenty years prior. “Once saved, always saved” is what she chanted to him.

Some take 1 John 1:9 as a kind of permission to sin and get away with it. They have chronic sin practices in their lives but believe as long as they confess it they can get it forgiven and get by with it.

“In the Bible, to know someone includes close communion and love. To “know Christ” means to keep His commandments. This knowledge of Christ is called a “perfected” love of God (v.5), not because it makes us perfectly sinless, because it is irrevocably established in those who live by it. Anyone who presumes to have received forgiveness from God but spurns the gift of obedient love as unnecessary is a “liar.” Instead of receiving “Jesus Christ the righteous” as Savior, such a person manufactures a false christ , a savior who is indifferent to righteousness.”¹

Easy-Believism glorifies man's totally and absolutely depraved nature. This theological system is man-centered and makes man's fallen will the final determiner in salvation. It is not the salvation of the Bible and is, in the long run, rank and file heresy.

1  New Geneva Study Bible; NKJV; Nelson Publishing; pg. 1987; 1 John 2:1-6 footnote

Of Repentance Unto Life and Salvation - 1689 LBC - 2

This saving repentance is an evangelical grace, whereby a person, being by the Holy Spirit made sensible of the manifold evils of his sin, doth, by faith in Christ, humble himself for it with godly sorrow, detestation of it, and self-abhorrency, praying for pardon and strength of grace, with a purpose and endeavour, by supplies of the Spirit, to walk before God unto all well-pleasing in all things.
( Zechariah 12:10; Acts 11:18; Ezekiel 36:31; 2 Corinthians 7:11; Psalms 119:6; Psalms 119:128 )

  As repentance is to be continued through the whole course of our lives, upon the account of the body of death, and the motions thereof, so it is every man's duty to repent of his particular known sins particularly.
( Luke 19:8; 1 Timothy 1:13, 15 )

Such is the provision which God hath made through Christ in the covenant of grace for the preservation of believers unto salvation; that although there is no sin so small but it deserves damnation; yet there is no sin so great that it shall bring damnation on them that repent; which makes the constant preaching of repentance necessary.
( Romans 6:23; Isaiah 1:16-18 Isaiah 55:7 )

Do We Have a Reliable Word of God or a Bible Fully of Holes?

In 1973, after high school graduation, a buddy and I drove from Kansas City, Kansas to spend the summer in San Bernardino, Californian at the then Arrowhead Springs Headquarters of Campus Crusade for Christ. We had enrolled in their Institute of Biblical Studies summer program and would spend most of the summer there studying before heading off to the pursuit of our academic degrees at the University of Kansas.

I can still remember the shock my friend and I both felt when we got to the point in the theology course when the doctrine of Biblical inerrancy was discussed. The instructor made a statement to the effect that, “Only the original autographs or manuscripts were inspired and without error and that the copies of the Greek and Hebrew texts and subsequent translations we have today are not.” I felt like I had been slammed with a brick. After the class I thought that a nice cot with an attending nurse was in order. So did my friend. We, however, survived.

The facts, we would learn, is that only the originals, that which was God breathed to the Apostles and Prophets, from the Old Testament through to the New, had the promise of inspiration and to be without error. The guarantee of 100% inspiration and without mistakes applies to the originals and not to the copies of the originals and translations. The self-attesting verses in the Bible to its accuracy applies to the original autographs. My “just-out-of-high school” reaction was a bit justifiable as I thought: “If the Greek and Hebrew texts from which all translations flowed were not without error and given by inspiration of God, then to what was I committing my life to as a believer? If I am commanded in Scripture to obey God’s Word, walk by faith and not by sight, then are the commandments I am to obey reliable or not?” –a dilemma worth considering.

I would go on to learn that through the seemingly endless copies of the original texts of Scripture something called “copyist errors” have most certainly crept into the Greek and Hebrew manuscripts that exist today. However, these so-called mistakes, as well as other alleged “errors” do not affect the doctrine or history of redemption presented in the context of the passages in which they occur. A classic example is the numbering of King Solomon’s horse stalls in I Kings 4: 26 and in II Chronicles 9:25.

In the I Kings passage it is recorded that Solomon had 40,000 horse stalls while in II Chronicles it is stated that Solomon had only 4,000. Which is correct in this apparent contradiction? An answer commonly given is that I Kings records a different time than II Chronicles. At the beginning of Solomon’s reign he had 40,000 horse stalls while at the end of his reign he had in II Chronicles only 4,000. While convenient, it is more likely than not that this is a simple “copyist’s error.” There are issues other than “copyist errors” that creep into discussions on the inerrancy question.

Some alleged “discrepancies” might occur in situations in which details of an event might vary. In other words certain details in a biblical event might not be mentioned in another author’s account of the same event. What comes to mind are the following texts that seem to present a problem: 1) The account of Mary Magdalene and the Mary the mother of Jesus meeting one or two angels at Jesus’ tomb (Luke 23:55-24:9;John 20:1-2). And, 2) The blind man or men—two or one?—healed by Jesus at Jericho (Matthew 20:29-34, Mar10:46-52, and Luke 18:35-43).

But the point of the real existence of so-called and alleged “errors” exiting in copies of the originals is: Is what we have today reliable or so corrupted that it should be, as some have done, thrown out in the trash? The short and long answer is, no!

None of what constitutes discrepancies in the Bible constitute a contradiction. It is not like a writer of Scripture says in one place, “Christ rose from the dead,” while another writer in yet another places says, “Christ did NOT rise from the dead.” What we are talking about is something that appears to be an “error” and the explanation is not known. It is an “error” that can be explained, an “error” that is a simple leaving out of a zero or two, or an “error” that is simply a mystery that may or may not be explainable, ever. The solution to coming to a comfort zone with this is in the Science of Textual Criticism.

The discipline of Textual Criticism is one in which scholars are able to compare the copies with one another to determine the meaning of the original autographs. In the New Testament, for example, there are an amazing 24,000 copies entailing almost complete manuscripts to fragments. Through the painstaking process of comparing these copies to one another it could be discovered, for example, that one copy differs so greatly from the other thousands that scholars make the determination that a scribal addition was made to the text warranting an alert to study the variation more closely.

Another point in Textual Criticism is that in spite of the massive manuscript evidence of the New Testament so-called discrepancies are not what or as extensive as one might think. The difficulties generally are mere misspelled words, word order, some changed, added, or missing words. Depending on the source, scholars estimate a 99.5% accuracy rate to the originals found in the Greek manuscript copies. The alleged problems do not affect doctrine in the Old or New Testaments. And, the variations in the Greek or Hebrew manuscripts are mostly recorded in footnotes. This is also true in the better translations of the Bible.

We should take seriously the Doctrine of Biblical Inerrancy because as in any book, the Bible reflects the thoughts and intentions of its author. We can have confidence in the better translations we have from the Greek and Hebrew manuscripts, even though we do not have the originals, that we have The Word of God. Scoffers would have us believe the texts of Holy Scripture has been so corrupted so as to be unreliable. This is hardly the case.

“Though inerrancy applies only to the original autographs, it does also apply to the Greek and Hebrew texts in this sense: the vast majority of verses in the Bible are not disputed…The vast majority are undisputed, the rest we're just unsure which one is the right reading (but no doctrine is changed in any case). God has indeed preserved His Word!” (Joseph A. Vusich; M.Div, Master’s Seminary)

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