Salvation & Mathematics

Today I gave a fellow amateur radio operator (ham) a manual he'd been needing and he wrote me an email of thanks. In his message he wrote, "I'm a Methodist pastor..." (etc.)
That struck a chord with me because I am very angry at pastors and preachers in general. We lay people turn to them for guidance because they are the qualified, trained experts on God. In truth, very few of them know even the basics of the subject they purport to champion!

Perhaps I was a bit harsh (or not enough?) but this is the letter I sent back:

I’m glad to be able to help you out as one ham to another ham. I wish I could help you out as one man to another man. So you are a minister. That’s too bad. I say that because it has been my experience that about 99.5% of Christian ministers are purveyors of heresy. (The old idiom, “The road to Hell is paved with good intentions.”) While I’m very genuinely concerned for your salvation, I am very much more distressed for all those you influence and offer the false hope of religion to their destruction.

I am not trying to insult you. A friend, one who I value and respect in many ways is also a Methodist minister. He is my former electronics teacher; an old navy radar man and a very principled person. Yet I tell him as I tell you, it has been my experience that ministers in general don’t have a clue as to the purpose of God or the requirements for salvation and are the least of men to explain such things to other men.

I was about 32 years of age when I began trying in earnest to learn how I could be saved. It took me approximately another 25 years or so to learn how. I knew very little about God or His Word. The things I was knowledgeable and proficient in doing had nothing to do with Christianity so I set about to find someone who was a qualified expert on God. I figured that most men who had devoted their life’s work to bible study should certainly know the basic requirements for salvation. What I learned is that in spite of their training and study, they know perhaps less than the carnal man of the subject of their expertise.

Over the years I’ve attended Church of Christ, Methodist, Mormon, Christian, Brethren, Methodist, Pentecost, Pilgrim Holiness, Wesleyan, American Baptist, Southern Baptist, Lutheran, Catholic, and a whole host of others in my quest for salvation.

There are perhaps as many recipes for salvation as there are churches and ministers. It is so overwhelming to a lost man seeking hope for his soul that he will ultimately fail without a display of incredible perseverance. To try to simplify it somewhat, we should break down the various Christian churches’ doctrine into groups:

A. Man is saved by faith.
B. Man is saved by faith plus works.
C. Select men are saved by God according to His divine pleasure.

One preacher told me, “The only way you can know you’re going to ‘make it’ is to keep striving to the end. Only those who finish the race will receive the prize. You and I will both fall short of perfection but that’s when Christ steps in and makes up the difference with His grace. But He only does this for those who have continued to strive.”

I went home and thought about that for a while. I said out loud, “Lord, I have to disagree with you. Your yoke is NOT easy and your burden is NOT light! I really don’t believe I can carry the weight much longer.” I decided there must be something more to salvation than what I was hearing and so I decided to start going to yet another church and seek yet another expert on the Word of God.

For a long time I listened to J. Vernon McGee’s radio program, “Through the Bible”. Like most preachers, McGee was hard to pin down. He was much like a slick used car salesman in his religious double-talk that still bewilders radio listeners. You need to listen to many broadcasts before you can determine his doctrinal stance on salvation. To cut directly to McGee’s assertion:

A. Man is saved by faith alone and sealed until the day of redemption without the
possibility of losing salvation.
B. Christian performance and holy living are indicative of salvation.
C. Without an adequate demonstration of B, then A is negated. The man was never saved.

With McGee’s doctrine a man must perform well, not to keep from losing his salvation, but to keep from disqualifying it altogether. Is that fine line a distinction between never having salvation and / or losing it? (See “Problems With Covenant Theology”)

There is no task in this life that’s more important to each one of us than to learn the truth about our personal salvation. It is reminiscent of an incident in algebra class.

I’d worked a particularly difficult problem and I’d arrived at an answer. (But I had no confidence that the answer was correct because the solution was unreliable. I’d work the problem again and again in frustration, finding other possible answers.) Finally, I called some of my peers who were taking the same class.

“Hey, have you done problem 4 in tomorrow’s assignment yet? What answer did you get?”

Various students got various answers so that wasn’t much help. A few decided it was more trouble than it was worth and opted to take an “F” on the question. Most of them took a consensus and they chose the answer that a couple of particularly good student had chosen. Even the ones who’d given up on the problem wrote down the popular answer.

This is the same idea in church that there is safety in numbers. “What’s he going to do; flunk the whole class?” (God said the way is narrow and few will find it.)

Personally, I didn’t believe the other students had it right. They had chosen to stand together with their wrong answer and to defend it as best they could. I doubted my answer was right either. Did I hear you say “two wrongs don’t make a right?”

I went back to the book and started over. Finally I saw that one statement could be misconstrued to indicate more than one method of resolution but only one was right. The light clicked on! Each statement in the solution was true and correct and I understood why. All doubt was erased and replaced by confidence. I called my friends to tell them I had found the right answer but they preferred to go with the crowd.

"How can you be right and all 18 of us wrong?" (Well, 16 of them were relying on the word of two trusted leaders.)

They resented me for not writing down the popular answer. (If nobody got the correct answer, the problem was obviously at fault and the teacher might disqualify it.) They were satisfied with their choice and weren’t interested in going back to do problem 4 over again. It was too much work and they’d already laid that issue to rest. They had already invested so much labor that they were unwilling to throw it out to learn the true laws of mathematics. Some of them might go on to be math teachers.

That is the nature of people. Sadly it is also their destruction. Just like the fighter squadron, when the squadron leader miscalculates and flies his plane into the ground, his wingman and all the other disciplined pilots follow him in.

Johnny (BOC560)