Who Gets to Say

A man comes to the door and asks if I know where I'll be tomorrow.

I know what I believe. I know God is real. I trust that He is faithful. I believe He can deliver even me. And I believe He has told me what to do with the life I have now: abide in Him, love God, love my neighbour, and let everything else come out of that.

What I cannot give him is a yes or a no.

Not because I am hedging. Not because I doubt God. The difficulty is that the question is about me, and I am not the one who gets to give the verdict.

Paul put it in a way I keep coming back to. Not “I know that I am saved,” but this:

2 Timothy 1:12 · KJV

For the which cause I also suffer these things: nevertheless I am not ashamed: for I know whom I have believed, and am persuaded that he is able to keep that which I have committed unto him against that day.

He knew the Person. He trusted the keeping. He did not file a report on himself.

Which is why a thing I heard in a hallway has stayed with me. Six men standing together after a baptism, and one of them said, quite naturally, that it was good to know she was saved. Everybody meant it kindly. It was a good day.

But I kept thinking: how did we come to know that?

Except Christ says it

That is the strange part. Seven times in the Gospels He says it to somebody's face. So it plainly can be said. The question is not whether the words may ever be spoken.

The question is who gets to say them.

Before deciding whether those six men were entitled to, there is something simpler to do first: look at what Scripture actually means when it says saved. The word appears in a lot of different rooms. A woman forgiven at dinner. A blind man getting his sight back. Sailors in danger of drowning. A crowd mocking Christ at the cross. The word on its own does not settle which kind of saving a passage is about. The context does.

So here is every verse anybody brings to this, quoted whole and sorted by what is happening in each one. Read the verses. The sorting is only there to keep them in order.

And here is what I went looking for and could not find. There is no shortage of passages where Christ declares somebody saved, or where an apostle tells a church what God has done in them, or where a believer is told to be confident. What is surprisingly hard to find is an ordinary believer looking at another individual and stating, as settled fact, that man is saved. The one passage that comes closest is Philippians 4:3, and even there the oldest reading of it is a judgment of charity rather than knowledge.

1. Said to the person, about the person

Christ, and always to their face.

Luke 7:50 · KJV

And he said to the woman, Thy faith hath saved thee; go in peace.

Luke 8:48 · KJV

And he said unto her, Daughter, be of good comfort: thy faith hath made thee whole; go in peace.

Luke 17:19 · KJV

And he said unto him, Arise, go thy way: thy faith hath made thee whole.

Luke 18:42 · KJV

And Jesus said unto him, Receive thy sight: thy faith hath saved thee.

Mark 5:34 · KJV

And he said unto her, Daughter, thy faith hath made thee whole; go in peace, and be whole of thy plague.

Mark 10:52 · KJV

And Jesus said unto him, Go thy way; thy faith hath made thee whole. And immediately he received his sight, and followed Jesus in the way.

Matthew 9:22 · KJV

But Jesus turned him about, and when he saw her, he said, Daughter, be of good comfort; thy faith hath made thee whole. And the woman was made whole from that hour.

One Greek word behind all seven. The King James writes “saved” where sin is in view and “made thee whole” where a body is. Luke 18:42 is “Receive thy sight,” and the thing just given is eyesight. So the clearest case of Christ declaring somebody saved is the woman at the dinner party whose sins He had just forgiven, and not the queue of healings.

Though it is not only bodies, and Luke settles that himself. Read these two together.

Luke 17:14 · KJV

And when he saw them, he said unto them, Go shew yourselves unto the priests. And it came to pass, that, as they went, they were cleansed.

Luke 17:19 · KJV

And he said unto him, Arise, go thy way: thy faith hath made thee whole.

All ten were cleansed on the road. Only the one who turned back got the second sentence. He was given something the other nine were not, and it cannot be his skin, because they all had that.

The thief is the case everybody reaches for first.

Luke 23:43 · KJV

And Jesus said unto him, Verily I say unto thee, To day shalt thou be with me in paradise.

Even there the verb is future. A promise about tomorrow made to a dying man, not a ruling announced to the crowd below.

And why any of it is His to say is not a matter of manners.

John 5:22 · KJV

For the Father judgeth no man, but hath committed all judgment unto the Son:

The verdict belongs to the Judge.

2. Said to a church, about itself

Second person, every time. These are the verses usually produced against a page like this one.

Ephesians 2:5 · KJV

Even when we were dead in sins, hath quickened us together with Christ, (by grace ye are saved;)

Ephesians 2:8 · KJV

For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God:

1 Corinthians 6:11 · KJV

And such were some of you: but ye are washed, but ye are sanctified, but ye are justified in the name of the Lord Jesus, and by the Spirit of our God.

1 Thessalonians 1:4 · KJV

Knowing, brethren beloved, your election of God.

Hebrews 6:9 · KJV

But, beloved, we are persuaded better things of you, and things that accompany salvation, though we thus speak.

Every one of them is spoken to the people it is about. Paul tells a church what God has done in them. He does not turn to somebody else and file a ruling on a man across the room.

3. Said about a third party

One verse in the whole New Testament.

Philippians 4:3 · KJV

And I intreat thee also, true yokefellow, help those women which laboured with me in the gospel, with Clement also, and with other my fellowlabourers, whose names are in the book of life.

Third person, named men, and a stronger word than saved. It sits alone, and it deserves a real answer rather than a shrug. John Gill gives one, and nobody can accuse Gill of going soft on this:

“now the apostle's knowledge of these persons being written in this book, did not arise from any special revelation… such persons in a judgment of charity, which hopes and believes all things, he concluded were in this book of life; and the same judgment, faith, and hope, ought all believers to form and entertain one of another, nothing appearing contrary to it, in their faith and conversation.”

John Gill, on Philippians 4:3

So a judgment of charity is not the problem, and Gill says we ought to make them. We may judge charitably without pretending to judge infallibly. Such a judgment is formed from a life you have watched, it hopes the best, and it can be revised, because it is about fruit and not about a heart. Paul had that with Clement after years of work beside him.

The test is simple enough. If she walked away next year, would you have to admit that what you said had been a judgment and not a revelation? If so, it was always a judgment, and it should have sounded like one.

4. Not about eternal standing at all

The same word, used of a body mended or a life spared. This group is bigger than people expect.

Acts 27:20 · KJV

And when neither sun nor stars in many days appeared, and no small tempest lay on us, all hope that we should be saved was then taken away.

Acts 27:31 · KJV

Paul said to the centurion and to the soldiers, Except these abide in the ship, ye cannot be saved.

Matthew 8:25 · KJV

And his disciples came to him, and awoke him, saying, Lord, save us: we perish.

Matthew 14:30 · KJV

But when he saw the wind boisterous, he was afraid; and beginning to sink, he cried, saying, Lord, save me.

James 5:15 · KJV

And the prayer of faith shall save the sick, and the Lord shall raise him up; and if he have committed sins, they shall be forgiven him.

Matthew 27:42 · KJV

He saved others; himself he cannot save. If he be the King of Israel, let him now come down from the cross, and we will believe him.

Storms, drownings, a sickbed, and a crowd jeering at a cross. All of it the same word.

And one more, which is the one to watch, because Peter says it of a named man standing in the room.

Acts 4:9 · KJV

If we this day be examined of the good deed done to the impotent man, by what means he is made whole;

Acts 4:10 · KJV

Be it known unto you all, and to all the people of Israel, that by the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, whom ye crucified, whom God raised from the dead, even by him doth this man stand here before you whole.

Acts 4:12 · KJV

Neither is there salvation in any other: for there is none other name under heaven given among men, whereby we must be saved.

The Greek in verse 9 is the same finished form Christ uses. But watch where Peter takes it. He asks by what means, argues back to the Name, and only then reaches the full word. He uses the healing to preach Christ. He never gives a verdict on the man.

5. Not finished, or not ours to time

Future, conditional, still going on, or with God named as the one doing it.

Romans 5:9 · KJV

Much more then, being now justified by his blood, we shall be saved from wrath through him.

Matthew 24:13 · KJV

But he that shall endure unto the end, the same shall be saved.

1 Corinthians 1:18 · KJV

For the preaching of the cross is to them that perish foolishness; but unto us which are saved it is the power of God.

Acts 2:47 · KJV

Praising God, and having favour with all the people. And the Lord added to the church daily such as should be saved.

Paul says “we shall be saved” of men he has just called justified. “Us which are saved” is a present participle, being saved, still going on. And at Acts 2:47 it is the Lord who is doing the adding.

Whatever anyone concludes about how permanent that salvation is, and Christians have argued about it for centuries, the grammar by itself does not hand an ordinary believer a warrant to announce somebody's final standing. That argument belongs on another page. What matters here is narrower: the cross is finished and we are not.

Philippians 1:6 · KJV

Being confident of this very thing, that he which hath begun a good work in you will perform it until the day of Jesus Christ:

A work still being performed is not over.

Two cautions on my own argument

The five groups above are a way of seeing the texts. They are not a rule Scripture states anywhere. I sorted them, and somebody could sort them differently and should feel free to. So the point is not that the hallway sentence failed a test the Bible set. It is that when you lay the passages out and look at what is happening in each one, the thing we say so easily turns out to be the thing nobody in the New Testament quite does.

And nothing here means you cannot know where you stand with God. It means the knowing was given to you about yourself, and to Him about everybody. If it is your own standing that is keeping you awake, this is the wrong page, and Greater Than Our Heart is the right one.

It has to work in both directions

Here is the question I would put to the sentence, and to myself first. We would object at once if somebody announced that a man was certainly lost because of something he did yesterday. But when the announcement is a happy one, we forget to ask how the conclusion was reached. It is the same act in both directions: an invisible standing inferred from a visible event. A test that gives you a confident answer whichever way you point it is not a test.

Jude sets the ceiling about as high as it goes.

Jude 1:9 · KJV

Yet Michael the archangel, when contending with the devil he disputed about the body of Moses, durst not bring against him a railing accusation, but said, The Lord rebuke thee.

The circumstances there are peculiar and I will not make the verse carry more than it can. But it is a striking picture of what restraint looks like in a creature standing under the authority of God. Michael, arguing with the devil himself, does not hand down his own verdict. He says, The Lord rebuke thee. And restraint does not get easier because the answer we want to give is a kind one.

The oldest version of this I have found is Bede's, on Solomon's question, “Who can say, I have made my heart clean?”

“Solomon did not say that no one is clean of heart and pure from sin, but that no one can say, ‘My heart is clean, and I am pure from sin’… because those very ones who are clean cannot know this for certain, nor have any infallible testimony of their own justice.”

The Venerable Bede, quoted by Bellarmine, On Justification III.4

People are clean. What nobody has is the infallible testimony of it, about himself or about anybody else.

Thirty souls last weekend

All of which matters more in the casual version than in the careful one. He's saved, she's saved, thirty souls were saved at our event last weekend. That last one is the hallway sentence made wholesale, about people whose names the speaker mostly does not know, and turned into a number that can be compared with last year's.

Scripture does count, so this is not an argument against counting. Look at what gets counted.

Acts 2:41 · KJV

Then they that gladly received his word were baptized: and the same day there were added unto them about three thousand souls.

Acts 4:4 · KJV

Howbeit many of them which heard the word believed; and the number of the men was about five thousand.

Acts 5:14 · KJV

And believers were the more added to the Lord, multitudes both of men and women.)

Acts 6:7 · KJV

And the word of God increased; and the number of the disciples multiplied in Jerusalem greatly; and a great company of the priests were obedient to the faith.

Acts 11:21 · KJV

And the hand of the Lord was with them: and a great number believed, and turned unto the Lord.

Baptized. Believed. Added. Disciples. Turned. Every one is something a person can be seen doing, and a man with a notebook could have got the figure right.

The repair is not to stop counting. It is to count what Luke counted. Thirty were baptized. Thirty came forward. Thirty gave their names. All true, all checkable, and nobody has had to read an invisible state off a visible event to say it.

Where this lands

So nobody gets a certificate. What you get instead is a Person to trust and a vine to stay in.

John 15:5 · KJV

I am the vine, ye are the branches: He that abideth in me, and I in him, the same bringeth forth much fruit: for without me ye can do nothing.

When the man at the door asks whether I know where I'll be tomorrow, the honest answer is not yes and it is not no. It is Paul's. I know whom I have believed. I am persuaded He is able to keep what I have committed to Him.

None of which is a discovery, and I take no pleasure in it. It is likelier that we have been speaking with more certainty than we were ever given, about her and about ourselves, and that humility here is not saying “I might be wrong.” It is declining to claim a kind of knowledge God did not hand out.

I would rather be held by Someone able to keep me than hold a verdict I was never given.

Related: Greater Than Our Heart, The Security of Salvation, Every Warning, Gathered, No Man Plucks Them, Judging, and The Three Tenses of Salvation. Scripture from the King James Version, quoted whole and linked to the Study Bible. Greek from the Berean interlinear. John Gill from the public-domain commentaries in our library; Bede from our own translation of Bellarmine.