Recently, someone sent me an article by Scott Severance in which he states. “Belief is a function of the will. No one can force a person to believe. He or she must choose to believe.” While that may be the dominant belief in the American church today, the problem with this position is that it makes a person more powerful than God. If I can choose to not believe when God wants me to believe, then I am more powerful than God. If God wants me to continue to believe and I can choose to stop believing, then again, I am more powerful than God. I can override His desire. Yet Scripture clearly teaches that God is all-powerful. He is omnipotent. No one is more powerful than God and therefore no one can act contrary to His will.

Jesus states in John 10:27–29 (NASB95): ²⁷ “My sheep hear My voice, and I know them, and they follow Me; ²⁸ and I give eternal life to them, and they will never perish; and no one will snatch them out of My hand. ²⁹ “My Father, who has given them to Me, is greater than all; and no one is able to snatch them out of the Father’s hand.”

Since Jesus is God the Son, it is absolutely certain that what He says is true. Jesus teaches that once someone is in His hand, because He is God, it follows that person is therefore also in the Father’s hand. Because God is omnipotent, no one can snatch them out of His hand. That includes the person, anyone else, Satan, and not even God Himself because God does not change His mind. This being the case, Jesus is necessarily teaching that once a person is truly saved, they are eternally saved.

The popular belief that “No one can force a person to believe. He or she must choose to believe”, necessarily makes man more powerful than God. If God wants to save someone and they choose not to believe, His will is then frustrated by their more powerful will. If a man must first choose to believe (seek after God), how do we deal with verses such as Romans 3:9–12 (NASB95)? In those verses, speaking of the state of men before the saving act of God, Paul condemns ALL men as sinners, both Jews and Gentiles. He states, “⁹ What then? Are we better than they? Not at all; for we have already charged that both Jews and Greeks are all under sin; ¹⁰ as it is written, “There is none righteous, not even one; ¹¹ There is none who understands, There is none who seeks for God; ¹² All have turned aside, together they have become useless; There is none who does good, There is not even one.”

Scripture clearly teaches that all men after Adam are born as sinners with a nature that has been corrupted by sin. Every thought of every unsaved heart is against God. Unsaved men are in bondage to their sinful nature; their sinful will. While we may see unsaved men doing great things like building hospitals and giving fortunes to churches, they are not doing it to the glory of God. Because of their sinful nature, men may truly believe they are doing great things for others, but in reality, they are doing those things for their own glory. Scripture teaches that the sinful heart/will of man must be changed. When God allots to each a measure of faith (Romans 12:3), He gives us a new heart, we are born again, we put on the new man. The person who chooses to become a Christian has already had his (or her) heart/nature changed by God through His gift of faith. Since our sinful nature has been changed by God, we can now make right decisions under the influence of the Holy Spirit and choose to do good for God. We can do the good works that God has prepared beforehand that we should walk in them (Ephesians 2:10).

Scripture clearly teaches that man does not choose God because God has already chosen those whom He will save. Ephesians 1:3–6 (NASB95) teaches “³ Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ, ⁴ just as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we would be holy and blameless before Him. In love ⁵ He predestined us to adoption as sons through Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the kind intention of His will, ⁶ to the praise of the glory of His grace, which He freely bestowed on us in the Beloved.”

Notice that it is God Who chose us “before the foundation of the world.” While we and others may not see the results of God’s saving choice until He changes our nature by His gift of faith, the biblical fact is that we were predestined before the foundation of the world, by His gracious choice, to be adopted into the family of God.

Since it is God Who chooses; since God is more powerful than man; since God never changes His mind (if He changes, He would not be perfect), the one who is truly saved is always saved. Contrary to the belief of many in the church today, the one who “rejects God, Christ and the church, and (renounces their) belief” in God, was never saved. They may have been a “professing” Christian, but they were never truly saved.