Q&A
----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Question: What is repentance--the same as faith? How do you explain its absence in John 3:16;
5:24; 6:47; Galatians; Acts 16:31, etc.? You have written in An Urgent Call to a Serious Faith,
p. 223, that those "living in sin" have no right to assurance of salvation. Is assurance based
on behavior or on the objective promises of God's Word? Please clarify where you stand on
"Lordship salvation," which ties salvation and assurance to faith and repentance as conditions
for eternal life.

Answer: Faith is the only condition of salvation: "Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and thou
shalt be saved." To be saved, one must only believe the gospel. That is the promise of God's
Word.

As for repentance, I agree that the word is not in the Gospel of John, nor in Paul's definition
of the gospel in 1 Corinthians 15:1-4, etc. But Paul did preach "repentance toward God and
faith toward our Lord Jesus Christ" (Acts 20:21); and Jesus said, "Except ye repent, ye shall
all likewise perish" (Lk 13:3). Yet to overemphasize repentance could lead the unsaved person
to imagine that he somehow must reform his life before he is acceptable to God and can be
saved.

Jesus didn't ask the woman at the well to repent, nor did He ask repentance from the woman
taken in adultery, or from Nicodemus, or from any of the disciples that He called to follow
Him. But He brought them to repentance. It is innate in the publican's guilty cry under
conviction of the Holy Spirit, "God be merciful to me, a sinner" (Lk 18:13 )! In believing the
gospel and thereby accepting Christ as Savior in His sacrifice for sins, one is admitting to
being a sinner worthy of God's judgment, to being sorry for his sin and desiring deliverance
from its penalty. In that very act of faith in Christ for dying in one's place, there is
repentance and turning from sin to the Savior.

Your question reworded what I wrote. I didn't say that those living in sin "have no right to
assurance of salvation." I said, "We offer no comfort or assurance to those living in sin; we
don't say, 'You're okay because you once made a decision for Christ.' Instead we warn, 'If you
are not willing right now to live fully for Christ as Lord of your life, how can you say that
you were really sincere when you supposedly committed yourself to Him...in the past?' And to
all, we declare with Paul, 'Examine yourselves, whether ye be in the faith...' (2 Cor 13:5)."

In that section of the book, I refute the ideas that one must be baptized, speak in tongues,
etc., in order to be saved. I specifically say, "Are we not then saved by our works? Indeed,
not....Good works bring rewards; a lack of them does not cause loss of salvation. The person
who hasn't even one good work (all of his works are burned up) is still 'saved; yet so as by
fire' (1 Cor 3:13-15). We would not think such a person saved at all....Yet one who...has no
good works...if he has truly received the Lord Jesus Christ as his Savior, is then 'saved as by
fire'...."

What I wrote is certainly not a promotion of "Lordship salvation"-the idea that if one is not
living in complete obedience to Christ as Lord, then one is not saved. I don't believe that
John MacArthur, who is accused of teaching this doctrine, means that good works save. Rather,
he is saying that works are an indication of whether a person is saved or not. Scripture
declares that not everyone who says, "Lord, Lord," is saved. It is not only what one says, but
what one believes in the heart-and the heart is deceitful. Jesus himself warns that many,
calling Him Lord, will claim to have done great works in His name and yet have never been saved
(Mt 7:21-23).

Many "make a commitment for Christ" and later turn away because they had not been sincere. The
person who has fallen into sin and would like to turn from that sin, but it has a strong hold
on him, may be a Christian. But the person who is living in sin, doesn't care, and claims he is
saved because he once made a "decision for Christ" was probably never saved. It would be wrong
to comfort such persons with, "You believe in Christ, so you can't be lost no matter how you
live."

Neither you nor I know anyone's heart. People stand before witnesses, swear their undying love,
then divorce the one to whom they made the vows. Did they really understand the seriousness of
the vows they made? In their hearts, did they really intend to keep them? So it can be with
those who claim to receive Christ or to believe in Him. For some, these are just words they
repeated. The faith and conviction has not touched their hearts. God alone knows the heart. But
a good indication of whether or not one's faith ever was real can be found in present attitude
and actions.

In my book I did not say (nor have I ever) that if a person is not living for Christ, he is not
saved. I said then, as now, that one's attitude of heart and actions are a good indication of
whether one ever really understood and believed the gospel. Those who are not living for Christ
but claim to be saved ought to be warned to repent, as many scriptures declare.

Question: TBC has referred to the rebuilding of the temple in which the Antichrist will sit,
etc. Has no one noticed that the verse reads, "He will sit in the temple of God..."? If the
Jews rebuild the temple...will it be the temple of "God"? I don't think so....It seems more
reasonable that the Antichrist will make his way into the Church, from which he will demand to
be worshiped.

Answer: You raise a good question and your argument has some appeal to human reason-but it is
not supported by Scripture. Jerusalem was still called "the holy city" even when unholy people
in it practiced unholy things (Mt 4:5; 27:53). Jerusalem never ceased to be the "city of God"
(Ps 46:4; 87:3), in spite of being trodden underfoot by the Gentiles through the centuries (Lk
21:24). It will remain "the holy city" during the Great Tribulation, though still trodden
"under foot" (Rv 11:2).

You question whether a temple rebuilt by unbelieving Jews with Antichrist's blessing could
still be the "temple of God." The temple in existence during Christ's day was built by Herod
the Great. He was an Idumean, a most ungodly, wicked tyrant, murderer of John the Baptist and
of countless others. Yet the Bible called the temple Herod built, "the temple of God" (Mt 21:
12), and Christ calls it "my Father's house" (Jn 2:16). In further contradiction to your
thesis, the temple that will be rebuilt by the Jews under Antichrist during the Great
Tribulation is called "the temple of God" (Rv 11:1).

When Solomon built the temple, it was indwelt by God, who manifested His holy presence in the
cloud of His glory (1 Kgs 8:10-11). This "temple of God" was on the summit of Mt. Moriah, now
known as Temple Mount. It was defiled, destroyed, and rebuilt. And in each rebuilding, it was
still the temple of God.

Paul's statement that Antichrist will sit "in the temple of God," (2 Thes 2:4) cannot mean, as
you claim, that "Antichrist will make his way into the Church, from which he will demand to be
worshiped...." The church is the body of Christ with no physical location wherein Antichrist
could take a seat for this declaration-but the rebuilt temple will provide such a place.

Question: In the September 2004 Q&A, you responded to criticism of your claim that Adam was the
only one created in God's image. Could you please clarify this: 1) Are you saying that Eve was
not created in God's image; 2) how do you explain 1 Corinthians 11:7 in light of Genesis 5:3?
Are we ALL created in God's image or were Adam and Eve the only one's created in God's image?
What is God's image? What does it mean?

Answer: We can only go by what the Bible says. We are told, "So God created man...in the image
of God created he him; male and female created he them" (Gn 1:27). "And the Lord God formed man
of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a
living soul....And the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam...and he took one of his
ribs, and...the rib, which the Lord God had taken from man, made he a woman, and brought her
unto the man" (2:7,21).

Adam, made in the image of God, lived for some time alone except for his animal friends-a
friendship that lacked real under-standing and satisfaction-before God made Eve out of one of
his ribs. She was created by God in His image just as Adam had been, though the manner of her
creation was different. In contrast, their children, grandchildren, et al., did not come into
existence by a special creative act of God, but by natural procreation. They were in the image
of their parents-an image that had been marred by sin and death. As this natural procreation of
birth and death continued, the human race gathered an increasing gene pool of disease and
deformity as the moral decay worsened. We are pitiful creatures compared with what Adam and Eve
were at the beginning.

Jesus declared, "God is a spirit" (Jn 4:24). Therefore, "in God's image" does not refer to
physical qualities, for God has none. The image of God in which Adam was made can only be moral
and spiritual, giving man the capacity to know, love, and commune with God-and to know in his
conscience when he is disobeying God and is thus alienated from Him. All mankind inherited the
"image of God" in which Adam and Eve were made-not in its original perfection, however, but
corrupted and distorted by sin, which the Bible defines as coming "short of the glory of God."

Being made in the image of God gives man the ability to form conceptual ideas and express them
in words. This places man on the other side of a chasm that separates him from animals-a chasm
that no evolutionary process (even if there were such) could ever cross. This impassable
barrier was referred to by Mortimer J. Adler in his 1967 still-in-print book, The Difference of
Man and the Difference it Makes. At that time, Adler, a University of Chicago philosophy
professor, co-founder of the Great Books of the Western World, and an editor of the
Encyclopedia Britannica, was an agnostic. He later became a professing Christian. Such
reasoning in the search for truth is only possible because man was made in the image of God,
who says, "Come now and let us reason together" (Is 1:18).

The Berean Call Ministry