He Knew Who He Was Saving

His theory is that God got the wrong man, and he has been living inside it for a year and a half without ever putting it into a sentence.

It runs like this, and it is entirely coherent, which is why he has never caught it.

When he came to Christ at thirty-eight, he was at his best. Genuinely. He had been through a hard stretch and it had produced the version of him that his sister calls the good Ignacio: humbled, honest, up early, gentle with his mother. That man walked into a church and prayed a prayer, and it was real, and he does not doubt it.

Then, over four years, the other Ignacio came back. Not dramatically. Piece by piece, the way a man returns to his own furniture. The impatience. The way he is with his brother. The thing he does when he is embarrassed, which is to become cruel about somebody who is not in the room.

And then eighteen months ago there was a week, and in that week he did something that the good Ignacio would not have done, and he has never told anyone, and it has settled the matter for him.

His conclusion is not that he lost his salvation. His conclusion is subtler and it is worse. He believes God saved the man who turned up that day, and that God has now met the actual man, and that the whole thing was entered into under a misunderstanding which has since been cleared up.

He would not say that out loud at this table, under the vine, with the jug going round. He would laugh and pass the bread. But that is the theory, and he has been living in it, and it makes him quiet in a way his sister has noticed and put down to age.

If you have your own version of that theory, then the question is simple and it is worth taking slowly. When exactly do you think He was told?

Read the condition He acted under

For if, when we were enemies, we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, being reconciled, we shall be saved by his life.Romans 5:10

Look at the word Paul chooses for the state we were in when it happened. Not when we were struggling. Not when we were at our best after a hard stretch. Enemies.

That is the condition under which the reconciling took place. Not a flattering account of a man on a good day. The worst available description, chosen deliberately, and applied to the people the reconciliation was for.

So the theory collapses at the first clause. God did not reconcile a good Ignacio and later discover a bad one. The reconciling was done on the express understanding that the party being reconciled was an enemy, and that assessment was made by God and written down.

You were reconciled while the description on file was enemy, and it is already done under that description, and nothing you have found out about yourself since was news to Him. I am not being generous with a man at a family table. It is written in Romans 5:10, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries a hard word like enemies into a courtyard as the best news a man has had in eighteen months.

The structure of the argument is much more

Now look at what Paul does with that, because the shape of his reasoning is the answer to Ignacio's whole year and a half.

He is arguing from the harder case to the easier one. If God did the difficult thing, reconciling enemies at the cost of His Son's death, then the easier thing, keeping the reconciled by His life, is not in doubt. Much more.

Ignacio's theory has the argument running backward. In his version, God did the hard part under a misapprehension and will now decline the easy part having learned the truth. Paul says the opposite: the hard part was done with full knowledge, and therefore the rest follows with more certainty rather than less.

You are inside a much more, and it is already the direction the argument runs, and the difficult half was the half that is finished. Scripture says much more, being reconciled, we shall be saved by his life, and the Holy Spirit is the one who turns an argument the right way round in a man who has been running it backward at three in the morning.

Nothing here excuses the week

And I am going to say the other thing, because Ignacio would not trust a man who did not.

What he did in that week eighteen months ago was real, and this article does not turn it into nothing, and God is not indifferent to it. There are people it touched and there is work to do about it, and a message that skipped straight to comfort would leave him a man who is reassured and unchanged, and that is not what we are for.

But the work to do about it is the work of a son in his father's house, not the work of a stranger trying to re-establish a claim. Those two men do the same tasks and they are not the same man, and one of them can actually finish.

You are a son doing repair work and not a stranger making a case, and the position is already settled while the work is still ahead. It is written that being reconciled we shall be saved by His life, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets a man take a hard thing seriously without treating it as a verdict on his belonging.