Saying it doesn't make it so.
Is Paul wrong when he calls us believers Christ's body?
It's a metaphor. We are members of body of believers called "the Body of Christ". We are not literally Jesus' body parts.
Your question implied it (at least potentially so). We do not add anything to God, nor is God diminished by our absence. God, by His very nature, cannot be added to or taken from in the sense your question implies.
Duh... Paul does that quite a lot. That does not change what the metaphor means.
Then my point stands.
Quite the contrary. It is THE point!
Do you think that Satan is a believer in Christ? i.e., trusts in Christ for eternal life?
That was precisely the point of bringing Satan up, RD! You and Way 2 Go are the ones couching this in terms of "believer" and "unbeliever". The point of bringing up Satan was precisely about pointing out that there is more than one way such terms are used.
I know that you are personally aware of what I'm about to say here but for the sake of thoroughness...
The words "believer" and "unbeliever" are being treated as if they describe a single, simple state. They do not. The sort of "belief" we are talking about here implies love, trust, submission, and fellowship. Or to put it into a single word, we are talking about allegiance to God. Satan knows that God exists but it this allegiance that is missing.
I am saying that if, over the course of a person's life, one's love for God is turned into hatred and their allegiance shifts in favor of evil rather than good then, when that person finds themself standing before God then their allegiance toward God may be renewed
and it may not be. God CANNOT force allegiance. Not because He is weak but because doing so is a contradiction.
You know very well what I mean when I say "believer" and Satan is clearly not in that group.
What I know or don't know isn't the point. The disagreement on this issue has stemmed almost entirely from mischaracterizations of the position, large chucks of which have sprouted from the misuse of terms. In such situations, being explicit is valuable. Thus, the point was to force clarity.
I cannot possibly be irrelevant, RD. It is precisely the whole point!
You've said it before and so have I, it's NOT our continuing behavior that determines our eternal destiny. ONCE we TRUST IN CHRIST, we are SAVED. It's non-revoke-able.
It is the seal of the Holy Spirit that is non-revokeable. WHY? Paul tells us why. It is because that seal was put in place as an earnest payment. God would have to forfeit Himself if the transaction is not completed. Paul says explicitly that we are sealed unto the day of redemption. Why does he say that? He doesn't say that we are sealed for eternity, he says we are sealed unto the day of redemption.
When we trust in Christ, that is not forced upon us. That is the choice that we make... NOW.
True!
You are trying to force "unto" to mean "until".
That is precisely what it does mean except that it's more than merely a point in time, it is a specific event and we will be delivered safely to that event with our salvation fully intact.
I assumed that Bob must have taught you this idea.
If you can refute it, I'll hear it gladly!
Based on reading the scripture, #4 seems like the right one.
Well why stop with that single sentence?! Make the argument!
Again, where in the scripture does this idea come from? The Bible seems to give assurance of eternal life the moment that a person trusts in Christ for their salvation.
And rightly so!
You understand that I am not suggesting that it would be common place for people to reject their salvation at the day of redemption. I would expect that the overwhelmingly vast majority will respond to being in God's presence with profound humility and with ineffable grief over the evil they allowed to persist in their lives and with the deepest gratitude for the eternal life they have been given in spite of that evil. The exceptions would serve only to prove the rule, not negate it.
I reject Calvinism, but the truth is that we do not know who is saved and who is not. So it's entirely possible that some people that we think are saved... are not.
Of course!
I dispute your "millions of counter examples"
You said that the "choice" comes on the "day of redemption"... which has NOT yet come. So you have NO counter examples whatsoever and no scriptural support of this "choice event".
I cannot find this "choice" in the scripture. I do see judgments. One for believers and one for the rest.
By "counter examples" I had in mind all the people you just admitted exist. Those that we think are saved but are not actually saved. I also had in mind people such as Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Pete Buttigieg, all of whom believe themselves to be Christians and who may well have had a saving faith in Christ at some point in their lives but who now hate everything good and love everything evil.
Hillary Clinton identifies as a Methodist. Today, she is as evil a person as can exist on Earth and has been for decades, but do you know for a fact that she never made a profession of faith when she was a young woman? I don't!
For the sake of argument, let's suppose that she did. Assume Hillary Clinton made a genuine profession of faith at some point in her life and was saved under Paul’s gospel, sealed by the Holy Spirit, and will be delivered to the day of redemption. On that day, one of three things will happen...
Option 1: She joyfully embraces God as He truly is
If this is your answer, then you're conceding my core point without realizing it.
By taking this option, you'd be effectively admitting that what matters is not the profession alone, but whether the will ultimately aligns with God’s righteousness once truth is fully revealed. That means the decisive factor is what one loves when the truth is known.
Option 2: She hates God’s righteousness and rejects Him
This answer would explicitly endorse my position by acknowledging that a person can be sealed and delivered, but still refuse fellowship with God when confronted with who He actually is. At that point, the only remaining question is whether God forces eternal fellowship on someone who despises Him...
Option 3: God forcibly alters her will so that she embraces Him
This is the option that I think most Christians implicitly assume without ever admitting it.
This option is the equivalent of saying that love, allegiance, and worship are manufactured by divine fiat, not freely given. That reduces heaven to a kind of moral reprogramming, not a real relationship.
Options 1 & 2 acknowledge my position, either tacitly or explicitly. Option 3 denies free will, which collapses the concepts of love, relationship, righteousness, faith, allegiance, etc. and turns God into either a kidnapper who holds people against their will or
I am reasonably certain that those three options exhaust every rational possibility but, as I said, if you can refute it or show me another option then I'll be happy to read all about it.
