Ray

[Mex Asher @Thatnsukkaboy_]

To become a partner,
If the Lord is leading you, kindly use this link.

https://t.co/w4JFLPGZab.

[Mex Asher @Thatnsukkaboy_]

A CALL FOR KINGDOM PARTNERS

Dear Friends,

For almost two years (We will be 2 in 2 Weeks), The Bridging Church has taken the Gospel beyond the walls of a conventional church—to people living under bridges, in prisons, on the streets, and in schools across Lagos.

By God's grace, we have witnessed remarkable transformations. We have seen lives restored, prisoners discipled, families supported, addicts find freedom, and many come to faith in Jesus Christ.

But the work has grown beyond what we can sustain alone.

Every week, we respond to medical emergencies, provide welfare support, feed vulnerable people, visit correctional facilities, disciple new believers, and help people rebuild their lives. Yet there have also been heartbreaking moments when we could not respond quickly enough because of limited resources.

One of those moments was the loss of a newborn child from a family we were trying to relocate from a flood-prone slum. We had raised most of the funds needed but couldn't complete the relocation in time. That experience reinforced our conviction that ministry is not only about preaching—it is also about preserving lives, restoring dignity, and giving people hope.

Today, it costs approximately ₦2,948,000 every month to sustain the work God has entrusted to us. At present, we receive an average of ₦400,000 monthly, leaving a funding gap of about ₦2,548,000.

We are trusting God to raise 100 Kingdom Partners who will stand with us every month. If just 100 people commit to giving consistently, regardless of the amount, we can continue reaching the forgotten and expand the work God has begun.

Whether you can give ₦5,000, ₦10,000, ₦25,000, ₦50,000, or more each month, your partnership will make a real difference.

As a Kingdom Partner, you will receive regular ministry updates, testimonies, prayer requests, and reports so you can see the lives your generosity is helping to transform.

If the Lord is laying this ministry on your heart, we would be honoured to have you stand with us.

To give:
Bank Name: Providus Bank
Account Name: The Bridging Church
Account Number: 1307710155

Bank Name: United Bank for Africa
Account Name: The Bridging Church
Account Number: 1028351338

https://t.co/M8XSB5MqJX

Thank you for praying, believing, and partnering with us.

Together, we can bridge the gap between the forgotten and the family of God.

Rev. Emeka Eze
Lead Pastor
The Bridging Church
https://t.co/ErgnRZdBxr.

[Ray @OfLight_]

This would be the reason I always give a more listening ear and receive AGO’s teaching above a lot of teachers. He stays true to the text of Scripture, even when what the text is saying is utterly uncomfortable…rightly dividing the world of truth.

[Gideon Odoma @gideonodoma]

And while you are at it, stay with the text. The TEXT! Centre the text, and employ other things as complements: systems, systematizers, philosophy, philosophers, illustrations, etc. Let the text be loud. Let it be the uncontested Thing at the centre.
Stay with the Text.

[Ray @OfLight_]

Definitely worth the read!

[Mex Asher @Thatnsukkaboy_]

What Does the Bible Actually Say About Evanescent Grace?

There has been a lot of back and forth on this topic over the past few days on this platform. Most of the heat was generated by people on both sides feeling misrepresented, and honestly, I understand the frustration on the Reformed side.

When a doctrine gets caricatured as "God dangling salvation in front of people He never intended to save just to watch them fail," that is not a fair representation of what careful Reformed thinkers have actually argued. The tweets defending the position made that clear, and those defenses deserved a serious hearing.

But feeling misrepresented is not the same thing as being right. And the question I kept coming back to, even while trying to understand the strongest version of the doctrine, was a simpler one. What does the Bible actually say?

I have been buried in the texts since Thursday, which is why I am only now getting to respond. I did not want to shoot from the hip on something this important, so I sat with Hebrews 6:4-6 and Matthew 13:20-21, the two passages that almost everyone in this debate was pointing to, and I worked through them carefully using the grammatical-historical method, and letting the passages speak on their own terms before drawing any theological conclusions. What I found was more interesting and more complicated than either side in this debate seemed willing to admit.

First, let us define what we are actually talking about.
Evanescent grace is not simply the observation that some people start well and fall away. Most Christians across most traditions would agree that happens. The doctrine makes a much more specific claim.

In its classical Calvinist form, as articulated by theologians like Elias Grebenetz, Louis Le Blanc, and Girolamo Zanchi, and as referenced by @Mohsule_ , evanescent grace means this: God sovereignly and intentionally grants certain non-elect persons a genuine experience of grace that is real, temporary, non-saving, and destined by divine design never to lead to salvation.

The experience is not fake. It is not mere hypocrisy in the ordinary sense. It is a genuine work of what Reformed theology calls common grace, elevated to a significant level in certain individuals, but deliberately distinguished from the special saving grace given to the elect. The failure of this temporary faith to endure is attributed ultimately to the creature's resistant nature, but the grant of the experience itself is attributed to God's sovereign design.

The modern Reformed variant of this, which several people like @SammieSaliu I think, were defending, holds something similar in outcome but is less uniform in how it explains the mechanism. Some in this group speak of temporary faith, others of covenant participation, others of common operations of the Spirit. The details vary, but the shared core claim is that people can have genuine and significant spiritual experiences that were never saving to begin with, and that this is consistent with a Reformed understanding of grace and election.

This matters because the doctrine is not just describing what happens to certain people. It is making a claim about what God was doing when those experiences occurred.

Now, what do the two passages actually say?
Both passages describe something real. I want to be clear about this because one of the most common errors in this debate, is the attempt to shrink the experiences described in these texts down to something manageable. They cannot be shrunk.

In Hebrews 6:4-6, the people being described were genuinely enlightened. They genuinely tasted the heavenly gift. They genuinely shared in the Holy Spirit. They genuinely tasted the powers of the age to come. I checked the Greek word for "tasted" (geuomai) in BDAG, the standard academic Greek lexicon. There is no legitimate lexical basis for reading that word as "merely sampled from a distance." The same word appears in Hebrews 2:9 where the author says Jesus tasted death for everyone. Nobody argues Jesus only sampled death superficially. The word means genuine, full experience. The author of Hebrews chose extraordinarily strong participation language, and reducing it to casual exposure is not exegesis. It is a theological preference being imposed on the text.

The same is true in Matthew 13. The rocky soil hearer actually receives the word. The Greek word for "receives" (dechomai) throughout Matthew's Gospel consistently means genuine acceptance, not passive exposure. The joy (chara) is real joy. Matthew uses the exact same word in the same chapter, at verse 44, to describe the joy of a man who finds hidden treasure and sells everything he owns in response. Nobody reads that joy as fake. The temporary endurance is real enough for Jesus to mention it. Something genuine is happening in both passages, and any reading that denies this is not being honest with the text.

But here is where the doctrine runs into serious problems.
When I worked through both passages carefully, the doctrine of evanescent grace requires several specific claims that are simply not present in either text.

The doctrine requires that the subjects were non-elect persons.
Neither passage says this.

Neither author uses the words non-elect, reprobate, or passed over.

The election status of the people described is not addressed in either text, in either direction.

The doctrine requires that God intentionally granted these experiences as a form of temporary non-saving grace by divine design.
This is the heart of the doctrine.

And this claim is completely absent from both passages.

Hebrews 6:4-6 tells us what these people experienced. It tells us what they did afterward. It never once tells us why God permitted or granted those experiences, what divine purpose they served, or that God designed them to be temporary from the beginning.

The author is entirely silent on the question of divine intention behind the experiences.

Matthew 13 gives us more information, but not that information.
Jesus tells us the rocky soil hearer had no root in himself. Working through the Greek grammar with Wallace, the tense of that verb "does not have" (ouk echei) is present tense, meaning the rootlessness existed simultaneously with the joyful reception. It was not a later development. Keener's background commentary was illuminating here: Palestinian rocky ground was not soil full of stones. It was a thin layer of topsoil sitting directly over solid limestone bedrock. The bedrock was always there. The rapid germination happened precisely because the soil was shallow. When the heat came, it did not create the problem. It revealed what was always underneath.

So Matthew does suggest a structural incompleteness that was present from the beginning, not a loss of something previously possessed. But even here, Matthew never says God intentionally designed this experience to be temporary. He never identifies the hearer as non-elect. He explains the mechanism of failure, but he does not give us the theological architecture behind it.

This is the gap the debate has been missing
There is a real difference between a text describing a phenomenon and a text explaining God's intention behind that phenomenon. Both passages describe the phenomenon: real spiritual experiences that did not lead to perseverance. Neither passage reveals what God intended by permitting those experiences.

Evanescent grace is fundamentally a claim about divine intention. It says God deliberately gave certain people a taste of grace He never planned to complete.

That may or may not be true as a broader theological proposal, but it is not what these two texts teach. It is what a particular theological system proposes as an explanation for what these texts describe.
Those are two different things, and treating them as the same thing is where this debate has consistently gone wrong.

To be precise about what the exegesis showed: the two passages do not establish the doctrine, do not prove it, and do not directly support its defining claims. They describe a real phenomenon that the theological system of evanescent grace then attempts to explain. But the explanation itself, specifically the claim about God's sovereign intention to grant non-elect persons temporary non-saving grace, comes entirely from that theological system. It does not come from these texts. The passages give you the data. The doctrine is one tradition's interpretation of that data. These are two different things, and this debate has consistently treated them as one.

There is also an important asymmetry between the two passages that nobody in this debate seems to have noticed. Matthew 13 fits the evanescent grace framework more naturally than Hebrews 6 does, because Matthew's syntax actually supports the "never had the real thing from the beginning" reading.

Hebrews 6 never makes that move. Hebrews never names a prior hidden deficiency beneath the experiences it describes. The author of Hebrews gives no internal diagnosis. He simply describes profound covenant participation followed by decisive apostasy. Importing Matthew's hidden root diagnosis into Hebrews goes beyond what the Hebrews text itself says. If you are going to argue for evanescent grace from Scripture, Matthew 13 is your better witness. Hebrews 6 is considerably more complicated.

A word about the methodological errors in this debate
Working through both passages also made three recurring errors very visible, and I saw all three arguement from the reformed defence.

The first is what scholars call category importation. This is when a theological concept that is not present in the text gets introduced and then presented as though it came from the exegesis. The categories of non-elect persons, temporary grace, and God's intentional bestowal of non-saving grace are not in Hebrews 6 or Matthew 13. They have to be brought in from outside. That is not automatically wrong as theology, but it needs to be presented honestly as what it is: a theological inference, not an exegetical finding.

The second error is argument from silence. Several arguments in this debate went like this: Hebrews 6 never calls these people regenerate believers, therefore they were not regenerate believers. That logic does not hold. The text's silence about regeneration is not evidence that regeneration was absent. Silence proves nothing in either direction. By the same standard, the text's silence about non-election is not evidence that these people were non-elect.

The third error is proof-texting, which means pulling verses out of their context and using them as self-contained doctrinal statements.

Hebrews 6:4-6 was quoted repeatedly in this debate without reference to Hebrews 5:11-14, which begins the argument, or Hebrews 6:9-12, where the same author immediately says "we are persuaded of better things concerning you, things that accompany salvation." That context matters enormously. The warning is embedded in a pastoral structure that moves from rebuke to exhortation to warning to illustration to reassurance. Reading the warning in isolation from that structure produces a different text than the one the author actually wrote.

Similarly, Matthew 13:20-21 was quoted without Matthew 13:10-17, where Jesus explains that understanding the kingdom is a divine gift, and that this gift is the very thing that distinguishes fruitful hearers from all the others. That framing is not optional context. It is the interpretive lens Jesus himself placed over the parable.

What the passages are actually doing
When you read Hebrews 6 in its full context, you find a community of Jewish believers who had already paid a serious price for following Jesus. Keener's background commentary shows what that cost looked like in the first century: public humiliation, the loss of property, exclusion from the synagogue community, family and economic consequences. These were not people on the margins of Christianity. They were people who had suffered for it.

The author's warning is severe because the temptation they were facing was severe: walk away from all of this, return to the relative safety of non-Christian Judaism, and escape the cost. The warning exists because the author believed they could and should persevere. It is not a clinical description of what happens to certain non-elect people. It is a pastor fighting for his congregation.

Matthew 13 is doing something different. Jesus is explaining to his disciples why his own ministry is producing such mixed results. The chapter comes immediately after a sustained season of rejection described in Matthew 11 and 12. The question in the air is: why does the same message, from the same person, produce such radically different outcomes?
The parable answers that question by locating the explanation in the condition of the hearer. Matthew 13:10-17, the section Jesus inserts between the parable and its interpretation, makes this even more explicit: kingdom understanding is a gift given to some and not to others. The four soils are read through that lens. And notably, the only soil explicitly described as understanding the word is the good soil that bears fruit.

So where does this leave us?
If you hold to evanescent grace as a theological position, the honest thing to say is that these two passages do not establish your doctrine. They describe a real phenomenon that your system attempts to explain. Your explanation may be coherent within a broader Reformed framework. But it does not come from the exegesis of these texts. The passages give you the data. The doctrine is your system's reading of that data. Anyone claiming these passages directly teach evanescent grace is making a stronger claim than the texts will support.

If your argument against evanescent grace has been that it makes God untrustworthy or malicious, then you have been arguing against a caricature. The serious Reformed presentation of the doctrine, is not about divine caprice. It is a sincere attempt to account for a real biblical phenomenon within a particular theological framework. That deserves to be engaged honestly rather than dismissed.

I have exegetical notes from both scriptures, and a cross cluster synthesis of both scriptures for those who feel like reading it, let me know, and I'll share the link.

[Ray @OfLight_]

@Thatnsukkaboy_ It’s important to accurately explicate and understand the positions of the arguments being made so they can be engaged with fairly and so readers can draw informed conclusions. You’ve done that well here.

Thanks again. I’ve followed you, and congratulations on your ordination!

[Ray @OfLight_]

@Thatnsukkaboy_ Naahhh, Thank you for this thoughtful. From what I’d seen on the TL, many of the debates seemed to misconstrue the Reformed position, which distracted from the subject matter being discussed.

[Rasine Irem @RasineIrem]

If you hold on to Unconditional election you hold on to double predestination by implication.

You cannot eat your cake and have it.

If you believe a God who predestines people to damnation is not the God of the Bible, then you should wholly reject any framework forcing you to uphold unconditional election.

God’s foreknowledge is the foundation of his predestination per Romans 8:29 and 1 Peter 1:2.

[Gideon Odoma @gideonodoma]

I go de quote bible, you go de throw tantrum in the name of logic say one thing na christology wey be soteriology.

Make I use una illogic sef. So, tell me, why una de vex say we de call Christians to purity, Christians o? If grace plenty for your side, why you no wan show receipts? Holy living na one sure proof of grace (Titus 2:11,12), but, once we say make you no de practice sin, especially sexual immorality, and especially if you wan be pulpit minister, una go de vex.

If no be fake grace wey una de advertise, why una no like make we shout about holiness sef? Grace wey de allergic to righteous living na the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be dat?

[Ray @OfLight_]

@drjoshagunbiade @ElvisOkhifo Dr. Josh o, I’m fairly new to CT, but one thing I’ve noticed is that as long as you’re explicit and clear, it’s best to let go of any alternative interpretations people make —tempting as it is to address them, people will always have them. I see AGO do this a lot, lol. And u too

[Ray @OfLight_]

We don’t follow God’s word because it’s convenient or easy; we follow it precisely because it is God’s word

[Ray @OfLight_]

I think now is a good time to repost this for CT and ever so often come back to it to remind ourselves to keep the peace even if we aren’t meant to “manufacture” the peace

[Gideon Odoma @gideonodoma]

CT Naija... JUST LEARNING & RANTING

What I can not deny is the desire and zeal I see by believers on everyside to represent what the bible teaches as best as they see it and understand it. This is why I still think it is worth it, the CT back and forth, and I won't retire.

Yet, the smirk condescension laced with intellectual sophistry but posturing as dispassionate clamour for doctrinal rectitude or as advocacy for historical fidelity would be amusing were it not incrementally caustic. This is my observation from the sidelines in this season. And if it is even remotely representative of reality, we could be edging into the region of needless offence.

Sometimes, these problematic (condescending) dispositions sip out unintended and unnoticed, unnoticed by its perpetrator, when we get tired or are exasperated with the sort of back and forth that characterize CT exchanges. And even the best amongst us may not be immune from it if we don't take occasional breaks to regain perspective and clarity.

There are a plethora of issues arising everywhere. And I mean, everywhere on all sides.

For instance, how do we read? You see, what a person says can be rightly understood as meaning slightly or significantly different things, for a number of reasons.

Not all the time, but many times, and on a forum like CT, the meaning you choose to recognize and run with tells more about your assessment of a person, an interlocutor, than it is an objective appraisal of the text under consideration. Fact is, if you consider the interlocutor to be doctrinally faithful, you would ascribe the most charitable meaning to his post. However, if you consider him suspicious, or doctrinally compromised, or unsophisticated, or unfaithful, you'd be moved to infer the less charitable meaning from his post.

So, in the end, your prior opinion, assumptions and judgement of an interlocutor becomes a significant factor in how you assign meaning to what is said.

Think of it. What do we mean by: "The Supernatural" or "The Gospel" or "Accidents" or "power" or "altar"... and so forth. These words have some latitude in how they can be used and understood.
So, you see, you can easily make words and phrases mean a range of things, and quite justifiably so, even if your chosen meaning is marginal or is simply constitutive but not focal in context.

Again, if meaning were neccesarily on the surface of what we write, there would be no need to ask the often valid question – "what do you mean?" when we read what someone has written. This is why perception of the character of a writer is quite critical many times when we interact with people here on CT. A key issue then is, what do you think of THE PERSON whose piece you are reading. Do you think him doctrinally faithful or at least, do you think him worthy of a benefit of the doubt OR not?

Many times, this issue of perception colours how you read what people write here on CT, at least. And this is neither a good nor bad thing in itself, simply because it is inevitable and even proper. The big issue then, is our own biases. For, we see through them. Which is why we need to be intentional about being charitable towards those on the other side of the Isle, however that applies per time.

Finally, both in scripture and in our feeble literary ventures as mortals, meaning can be elusive to the reader, despite the writer being lucid. It could be for the reasons advanced already or because the reader, with the best of intentions, still misses the point for any number of other reasons.

I have seen these things play out here on all sides.

And I am learning...
And learning CRYpto too

[Ray @OfLight_]

@lufthansa No I am not sending you a private message!! I have not had a response from you in 5 hours in the DM @AirPassRightsCA @CTA_gc

[Ray @OfLight_]

@lufthansa we called your official number on [phone]. And one of your agents gave us a fraudulent number to call on [phone] (I can’t find this anywhere). Please note we opted to have this recorded, so we will be requesting this in a report to @CTA_gc.

[Ray @OfLight_]

@lufthansa Why are you trying to move a flight scheduled for today to Sunday when there are available flights to the destination today? Will you reimburse lost time, hotel bookings, and other expenses caused by what is clearly your error?

[Ray @OfLight_]

@lufthansa @AirCanada @CTA_gc @AirPassRightsCA

[Ray @OfLight_]

The best teachers of the Bible are the ones who question it the most. Their search to understand things that are seemingly ambiguous brings more revelation by the Holy Spirit. I have seen this pattern over and over.

[Ray @OfLight_]

Finally found how to get rid of suggested tweets and topics!

[Ray @OfLight_]

Yes YouTube, I’m still listening. Stop pausing my music.

[Ray @OfLight_]

@_estherrr__ Someone said Brentford thinks they’re playing Norwich because Man U wore a touch of yellow 🤣