You Just Like to Argue

Yes, in a way, but it isn't the arguing itself, it is the importance of what I'm arguing. I wouldn't argue with you about sports or sports teams, who the greatest all time NFL quarterback or whether Barry Bonds deserves to be considered the home run king if he breaks the record. I don't care that much whether you argue the North or the South were right for the Civil War. I like having my beliefs challenged in a way that makes me think. My beliefs. My convictions. If I can't prove my point, then I should lose the argument and take the other person's position. It's probably the truth.

I'm assuming Mr. Hafley is reading based on things he's said. Last night after the debate, we talked for the first time. Well, we talked during the debate too, if you want to call it that. He's much different in one-on-one conversation. I do wonder what's the difference. The audience. No audience when we're just talking. I asked him if I believed differently than he originally thought. He said 'yes.' I told him that Charles Stanley has a book on eternal security and that we would be different than Stanley; our position isn't represented by his book. I told him that I could see how that the conditional sentences in Scripture seemed to be a key area where we differed. It is. They mainly take their position from implications of conditional clauses (the "if" clauses). He sort of agreed and we didn't talk about that.

Then I asked him what caused someone to lose his salvation. He referred to a chart he had shown, one that had Adam and Eve, one sin--out of the garden, Ananias and Sapphira, one sin--dead, and then one other example that I can't recall. His point was: one sin. See, his group believes that salvation (basically baptism in his group) washes away past sin. When you sin after that, well, you've got to, I think, confess it, and you get saved again. I asked him if any sin would cause someone to lose it. He said something like, "It must be a sin related to salvation." OK. I wondered what would one of those be. We couldn't finish that. I asked basically, "So what about a man lusting after a woman in his heart or 1 Peter 2 where it says 'fleshly lusts which war against the soul'?" He paused, halted, and it seemed like a hard question. That's about how the conversation ended. They don't think the death and shed blood of Christ covers future sin. They don't see salvation as past, present, future, that is, ongoing. The Bible teaches that, but they don't believe it.

I'll keep you updated. In the meantime, it's not that I just like to argue. I'm not even going to argue with you about it.