John Bookman is worried. Very worried. A person he loves and trusts informed him that he's in danger of losing his salvation and he quoted John 3:16 to Bookman to prove it. Because of this, John B. is losing sleep.
His pastor, Pastor Goodpasture, said so, right from the pulpit last Sunday as he was telling everyone about Nicodemus the Pharisee, and his conversation with the Lord Jesus as recorded in John 3. John Bookman was taking notes on the sermon, and almost dropped his blue-ink Bic pen when Pastor Goodpasture said, "And the Greek verb of this text is present tense, "whosoever keeps on believing in Him shall not perish, but have everlasting life."
The pastor leaned over the pulpit, and with his bony hand pointing straight at John, said, "So, brethren, if you don't keep on believing everyday in Jesus, you've lost your salvation. So, my advice, just in case, is to keep on renew your belief in Jesus everyday, or you'll lose your salvation."
Mr. Bookman started to worry about his salvation before going to sleep night after night; he would wake up and then tell God he was trusting Christ again for salvation that day. He worried about what happened when he sinned; he figured that was a sure sign he'd lost it all.
Then one day, after he'd finished his watching NASCAR on TV and after boring everybody to tears talking about the race, he picked up his Bible and started reading at John 4, the chapter just after Jesus' conversation with Nicodemus.
He noted again, as he well knew, that in this chapter Jesus was speaking with someone who was the opposite of Nick the Pharisee. First off, the person in Chapter 4 is a female, a Samaritan, a serial monogamist, and someone who, to say it euphemistically, was a bit of a neophyte in her biblical knowledge.
As Jesus skillfully and persuasively turns the conversation from the secular and toward the spiritual and to eternal life, He draws on a common real-life illustration. Since she was daily coming to the town well to draw water, Jesus compares trusting in Him for eternal life to taking a drink of water, then He says, "“Everyone who drinks of this water will thirst again; but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him shall never thirst; but the water that I will give him will become in him a well of water springing up to eternal life.”
"Wait a minute," John thought, "this is saying one drink and that's it. Once a person trusts Christ alone for his salvation, it's done, and done forever.
In the margin of his Bible was a cross reference to Numbers 21, so Mr.Bookman turned to that text and saw immediately that it was the account of the fiery serpents let loose on Israel and the brazen serpent lifted up on a pole by Moses. He read the story he'd heard a bazillion times and noted that God provided the antidote to the venom: "that if a serpent bit any man, when he looked to the bronze serpent, he lived."
If any man looked to the bronze serpent once, he lived.
John found no reference to a person's need to keep on looking, so it was one look and he lived; there was no command that he had to look more than once, much less a command to "keep on looking at the brass serpent."
Then John remembered that in John 3, Jesus had referred to this account in Numbers 21 as being a type of Himself, when He would be lifted up on the cross.
He reread the Numbers account and then went over to John 3:14-15 and read, "As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up; so that whoever believes will in Him have eternal life."
"Since Jesus is paralleling "the look" in Numbers 21 with "believe" in John 3:14-16, it must be that one look in faith alone to Jesus as the Son of God who died for my sins and rose from the dead seals it all," John rightly reasoned. "One drink, one look; that's it."
John Bookman slept well that night and resolved that he would take the lead and free his family from the false teaching they'd been hearing from Goodpasture.
Although Pastor Goodpasture used the present tense of the verb to "prove" his case of a person's needing to "keep on believing," he either didn't know or he conveniently omitted the fact that just because a present
tense is used in John 3:16 does not mean that one must
continuously believe in order to be saved.
Other pertinent facts of which Goodpasture was unaware of or deliberately omitted are:
In Acts 16:31 Paul used an aorist (a past) tense to tell the
Philippian jailer, "Believe on the Lord
Jesus Christ, and you shall be saved. So, the present tense of "believe" isn't always employed by the New Testament in a gospel context.
The present tense in Greek must not and cannot be translated as "keep on" (a continuous
action) in some cases, or the verse becomes nonsense. We see this in John 6 where Christ uses a present tense verb to say that He had come down from
heaven (vv 33, 50). He
clearly did not mean that He was continuously coming down from
heaven.
The present tense can
refer to an action that only occurs once, as in Acts 9:34: "Aeneas, Jesus the Christ
heals you." Matthew 26:2 uses the present tense: " . . . the Son of Man is handed over for crucifixion." That cannot possibly mean, ". . . the Son of Man keeps on being handed over for crucifixion."
We must always remember that no doctrine in the Bible hangs only on the tense of a verb.
The formation of true doctrine depends on context and all the Scriptures that speak to the subject. To take the present tense of "believe" and formulate the idea that a person must "keep on believing" in order to be saved contradicts Numbers 21, John 4, Romans 8:31-39, and Ephesians 4:30, (et al.) as well as the context of John 3:14-16.
Let's look at it this way: if you're going to write an invitation to
"believe" in Christ which will be an invitation for 2,000+ years, the
present tense would be the one to use to show that anyone, at anytime in
history, who trusts Christ will be saved; the present tense is the way
to go, don't you think?
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