By saying this you are saying you cannot know now that you are saved. There are two judgment days coming. One for the saved and one for the lost. You will either be at the one or the other. Judgment deciding who will be saved is in the Present for each person who hears the Gospel and makes their decision either for Jesus Christ or rejecting Jesus Christ.
i gave you this Scripture, the very words of Jesus Christ Himself, and you either disregard it or totally ignore it or do not believe Jesus...
"He that believeth on the Son hath everlasting life: and he that believeth not the Son shall not see life; but the wrath of God abideth on him." (John 3)
steaver,
I will get to your other comments as soon as possible. But I'd like to point something out here that I think lies at the heart of this problem. As I see it, you understand salvation according to a particular paradigm. Catholics have their own paradigm. It seems as though a Catholic view on salvation and judgment doesn't exactly line up nicely with the terms of your paradigm. That doesn't, however, mean that a Catholic view is incoherent, unBiblical, or wrong at all. What it means is that our respective paradigms must be considered in order for us to move ahead fruitfully. And this particular passage just so happens to be a passage which may shed a lot of light on our differences. Let's consider it.
"He that believeth on the Son hath everlasting life: and he that believeth not the Son shall not see life; but the wrath of God abideth on him."
Consider this: I could have "eternal life" and then lose my possession of that "eternal life" by means of apostasy. For the word "everlasting" or "eternal" here should be understood as a quality of the life I possess in Christ, and not as a description of the duration of time during which I am guaranteed to have it.
Believing upon the Son is what brings about one's possession of that "eternal life" which accompanies belief. However, were one to turn his back upon the Son, he would then lose that "eternal life" which he once possessed.
For nothing in that passage says "He that believes on the Son has eternal life
eternally..." So it is that I may, for a time, have eternal life through belief in the Son yet at some later time lose that eternal life through apostasy.
I heard someone explain it this way: If I had an "eternal battery pack" which was an unlimited source of energy for my phone, I could say "Look, I possess eternal power." Then, if I lost that battery pack I would say "I lost my eternal battery power." The fact that I have something with a particular quality (eternality) doesn't mean I will have that something for eternity. So it is that one could believe in Christ and thereby possess eternal life. Through sin and selfishness, though, that person could stray from Christ and come to deny Him altogether. In such a case, that eternal life in which that person once had a share, is now lost to him. He has, therefore, lost the "everlasting life" which came about through "belief in the Son." In his case, then, he had "everlasting life"
for a time... But lost it. Just as I may have "everlasting power" (in a battery) for a time... only to lose it.
What you see as verses which support your paradigm are, to a Catholic, understood to contradict the position you're presenting.
What do you think? (and again, I'll get to your other comments as soon as time allows).
In Him,
Herbert
