Objection 48

From Sovereign Grace and the Scope of Election: A Comparative Examination of Attainment Theology and Grace Theology, with Particular Attention to the Question of Whether God's Elect Are Found Among All Nations and Religions

Even if I cannot answer every argument here, striving is the safe course. If your doctrine is true, my striving loses nothing. If mine is true, your resting loses everything. Wisdom stays on the ladder.

Answer. The wager deserves respect, because it is the honest reasoning of a careful soul, and it deserves a careful audit, because it miscounts both columns.

Count first what the striving purchases. Not assurance, for the system itself forbids assurance at every rung: the believer who has repented may yet fail to overcome, the overcomer may yet fall from sanctification, and the ladder has no top on which a living man is permitted to rest. The "safe" course therefore pays its premium every day and pays out nothing but the fear this study began by describing. A policy that can never mature is not insurance.

Count next what the resting is alleged to lose. The wager assumes that resting produces less holiness than striving, and that assumption has been answered (Objection 10, Part X): grace does not subtract one prayer, one fast, or one act of obedience; it changes what they are made of. The child who cannot be un-adopted does not love less than the servant on probation. He loves more, and "we love him, because he first loved us" (1 John 4:19).

Count last what the wager itself is, doctrinally, for it is not neutral. To keep striving for what Christ is said to have finished is to treat the finished work as insufficient security, and Paul has priced that exactly: "if righteousness come by the law, then Christ is dead in vain" (Galatians 2:21). Obedience offered as a hedge is not obedience to God; it is negotiation with Him. The truly safe ground is the only ground Scripture ever calls safe: the "two immutable things, in which it was impossible for God to lie," given "that we might have a strong consolation" (Hebrews 6:17-18). The ladder offers no such oath. The wager, honestly counted, runs the other way.