The Believer's Conditional Security

   It was sometime over a year ago that I finally bought and read Dan Corner's The Believer's Conditional Security. It tells all you need to know to refute the false doctrine of Once Saved Always Saved. There are hard and soft versions of OSAS, of course, but I'm mainly talking about the hard form here, which holds that there are absolutely no moral limits to the sin one commits and still get into heaven. 

 I have read much by Dan Corner before, mostly online, and agree with almost everything he says in the book. Corner seems not to believe in Penal Substitutionary Atonement, or the doctrine that Christ was a substitute that paid the legal penalty for our sins. Corner does not deal adequately with Isiah 53, however, and though I was also had some problem with penal substitution, I now believe that whatever exactly occurred at Calvary, when He died for our sins, it was near to the penal theory than to anything else. 

In spite of what I may have written in previous posts on this blog, it seems that C. S. Lewis was mostly, if not entirely wrong in regard to the Ransom Theory of Atonement. Carefully reading the Biblical passages, I've come to the conclusion that we could not have been ransomed to Satan, only to God. Ad much as I might dislike the idea personally, there are just too many passages supporting that God is indeed the judge and he DOES quite literally sand people to hell. Yes, you do in way, "send yourself," by the choices that we all make. But God is indeed our judge when it comes to which way we go. There MAY be something to the idea that hell may not be eternal (for humans, though not for Satan), but there is little evidence to actually prove this. 

As you can see, my views have shifted conservative over the past years of becoming a Christian. This begs the question a bit though; just what was Satan's role in the crucifixion of Christ? Did he really think he had the Son of God defeated, as Lewis suggests in Lion, Witch, Wardrobe? Was Satan anything like Mel Gibson depicted him in Passion of the Christ? There must have been some part he played in the drama of our salvation, but what it is, we don't yet know for sure.