Interesting Concept #2: Were the Disciples Saved?
And taking the twelve, he said to them, “See, we are going up to Jerusalem, and everything that is written about the Son of Man by the prophets will be accomplished. For he will be delivered over to the Gentiles to be mocked and shamefully treated and spit upon. And after flogging him, they will kill him, and on the third day he will rise.” But they understood none of these things. This saying was hidden from them, and they did not grasp what was said.
Luke 18:31-34
Okay, interesting concept #2. Were the disciples saved? They evidently left everything to follow Jesus, trusting Him with their lives. But this scripture passage leads us to believe that the Gospel had not yet been revealed to them. They didn’t get it, even after hearing it. In our culture today, we sometimes group this with a possibly unregenerate heart. So, if the disciples were following Jesus, were they eternally secure even if they didn’t get what Jesus was going to do, and furthermore, we are led to believe the Spirit had not unblinded them to the Gospel. It seems easy to say they were ‘saved’, if you will, and I go with that. Obviously, can’t judge a heart, but whether they were or weren’t, the prospects of them either trusting Christ with saving faith and being remaining Spirit-purposely blinded to the Gospel, or following Christ with everything and not believing in the Gospel are both puzzling.
- On one hand, we have a regenerate Christ-follower who surprisingly doesn’t and can’t believe the Gospel.
- On the other, we have an unregenerate Christ-follower who, logically, can’t understand the Gospel, but has given up everything to follow Jesus.
Thoughts?
-Riley
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about 11 months ago
As someone who denies any single moment of salvation, I’m not sure the question really makes sense. I’d say the disciples were “saved” in the same way that I believe Abraham, David, and Elijah were saved. Abraham knew nothing of Jesus, but I believe the Gospel was revealed to Him through God’s promise. Abraham never really “understood,” but he went anyway. And God went with him.
about 11 months ago
I guess the question then becomes what does it take to be a Christian. If we extend that logic, one doesn’t need knowledge or belief in the Gospel at all to follow Jesus.
Then why is the Gospel necessary? If following Christ and eternity with the Creator just takes blind faith, why do we even need to know anything about the Gospel or preach it to anyone? We just need to tell them to follow Jesus. (Yoda voice) Interesting questions this poses.
about 11 months ago
Well, this may sound not logic-y/backed up enough to you, but I mean, it makes sense to me that for those who were alive before the Gospel unfolded in our world, God gave special grace to be “saved” in spite of not “knowing”/”understanding” the “Gospel”.
As to “what does it take to be a Christian?”: Well, since Christian means ‘little Christ’, I’d say an obscene amount of Grace. But that’s not really what you were asking…
about 11 months ago
I completely agree with you, Trey.
But the disciples did hear the Gospel. They had heard the prophets. They had heard the words straight from Jesus’ mouth. And they didn’t and couldn’t understand. That’s what confuses me. It seems like they’re just the kind of people Paul would have described as ‘being without excuse’ to its fullest extent.
about 11 months ago
I would note here, as a completely unrelated comment, that Paul would consider (according to Romans 1) even the pagans of the totally unreached Amazonian tribes to be “without excuse”. Just saying.
And so with that I’ll just let it go, hoping that no one notices that I haven’t even tried to answer the question, and doesn’t figure out that I have absolutely zero answer. Whoops, I just gave it away.
Somebody, please hit up an APJ.
about 11 months ago
Well, for all intensive purposes, the gospel hadn’t happened yet, right? So technically I would hazard to guess that sins were still atoned for through sacrifices? How can you be saved of your sins by Christ’s death on the cross if Christ hasn’t yet died on the cross to save them in the first place?
Also, am I incapable of not asking rhetorical questions in this comment?
about 11 months ago
I think Zach has the right idea. I think “knowing the gospel,” entails knowing the full story. Not just that Christ came, not just that he came and died, but that he came, died and rose again. The disciples couldn’t possibly know that, yet (I’ll defer you to N.T. Wright, here, as my knowledge of 1st century Judaism is nominal). Even if they understood it fully, the sacrifice hadn’t been made, right?
If the question is, “If one of the disciples had dropped dead in the middle of Jesus’s ministry, would he be justified in the sight of God?” then I would use my first answer, that they were justified by faith the same way Abraham was. Whether that means they go to Heaven, a place of waiting, or whatever, I can’t say. They would not, I think, go to Hell.
Interesting discussion.
about 11 months ago
@Zach: Well, I would argue (and have, in a rather lengthy essay, sort of on Psalm 51) that people under the Old Covenant were still saved by Jesus’ blood. I’ll hit you up with my full argument via email, for you to read or ignore, whichever you prefer.
@Zach and Andrew collectively: I think what Riley’s getting at is not so much what they could or couldn’t have known, but the fact that they seem to be “blinded…to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ” (II Cor. 4:3). If I understand Riley correctly, what concerns him is not that they didn’t “know the Gospel”, but that their hearts appeared to be hard and their minds darkened–signs of unregeneration (made up word, I know).
about 11 months ago
Trey,
I see your point, but this passage is referring to Jesus’s death and resurrection, and I don’t know that not understanding that means they were necessarily unregenerate. As I said earlier, even if they understood and believed Jesus when he said to them that he would die, they could not possibly have understood the resurrection as literal, because to a first century Jew, there was no context for that at all (again, I’ll have to defer to N.T. Wright).
I’m not willing to make the jump and say that they weren’t “saved,” mostly because the Gospel hadn’t been accomplished, and also because I still think they would have been covered under the Old Covenant.
I think it’s important to remember that even after Jesus said these things, the disciples followed him anyways. Even if they were blinded, they went by faith. When Pharaoh’s heart is hardened, he doesn’t listen and makes no positive action towards God. Had the disciple’s hearts been truly hardened, I think they would have stopped following. That they went, and that the Bible places so little emphasis on intellectual understanding says a lot to me, and I don’t think the explanation that they weren’t covered under any sort of covenant makes any sense.
about 11 months ago
I totally concede anything that has to do with Jewish context, as I know next to nothing of that. And I agree with everything else you said too. I think that does a good job of answering Riley’s question.
about 11 months ago
This is interesting to me too! To me, this goes along with what I was asking this summer about Mark 1 (it was at a Throwdown… I think Jeremy, Trey, and Chino may have heard my questions) about the usages of the phrases/words “baptism of repentance”, “gospel”, etc., mostly because at the time it was hard for me to comprehend how the gospel could be preached without it all being fulfilled. I still don’t exactly understand, so I guess this paragraph could just be adding to the noise
.
BUT… whenever I was reading through the comments, one of my first thoughts was about the instances when Jesus declared people saved in the Gospels. I could look up a bunch of examples… but for time’s sake right now I won’t. What I mean, though, is whenever, for instance, the woman touched His garment, He said that her faith made her well. And there are a thousand more examples of this in the Gospels. What this has to do with this particular discussion, I’ll have to think about. Maybe someone else could connect the dots for me.
Basically, I’m trying to think of it all on a grander scale, with all these instances somehow connecting. If that makes sense. John the Baptist baptized people, declaring it was for repentance and the forgiveness of sins. Jesus proclaimed the gospel of God, and that the kingdom of God is at hand, asking people to repent and believe in the gospel. The disciples left everything and followed him. In John 2 Jesus did not “entrust himself” to even the people who “believed in his name when they saw the signs that he was doing”. Peter makes a declaration of faith in Matthew 16, and Jesus called him Blessed, for the Father revealed it to him. SOMEHOW… this all connects.
about 11 months ago
To all:
Definitely. haha.
I think what puzzled me most was that the disciples didn’t understand the Gospel even when they were saved by faith in Christ through the Old Covenant (which is the case). Not that knowledge of the gospel and belief in it saved them (because the Gospel hadn’t been accomplished yet, obviously) but the fact that their faith, supposedly looking forward to the death of Christ, didn’t recognize the message when it was clearly said to their faces.
It would be similar to Abraham, who was justified by the same faith the disciples would have to be justified by to be ‘saved’, seeing the fulfillment of his saving faith and hearing the glorious plan of that person and not being moved at all, in fact being blinded.
To me it still doesn’t make sense. It’s not a huge issue, since obviously it doesn’t apply to us. But it really begins to dig deeply into the Old Covenant. Obviously, the disciples did not have the Holy Spirit indwelling in them yet (and for that matter neither did Abraham), which would mostly explain their lack of understanding, but it still confuses me because I tend to think on a one-track mind of the New Covenant: lost, unrepentant, misunderstanding blindness to regenerate, repentant, understanding light. For the disciples to be regenerate but without understanding or spiritual sight perplexes me.
about 11 months ago
It would be similar to Abraham, who was justified by the same faith the disciples would have to be justified by to be ’saved’, seeing the fulfillment of his saving faith and hearing the glorious plan of that person and not being moved at all, in fact being blinded.
My point is that the disciples were moved. They went. In John’s gospel, Thomas says, “Let’s follow, that we might die with him,” when Jesus predicts his death.
I mainly give the disciples a pass here because nobody understood what Jesus was talking about when he started predicting his death, and even if they did, they obviously didn’t think it was going to happen soon, and a first century Jew would have no context for bodily resurrection.
It’s a very human reaction, which even the best Christians have, and often. If the person you’d given everything up for started telling you one day that he was going to die a very brutal death, would you believe him? Would you understand why he was telling you that?
I guess I don’t see regeneration necessarily leading to understanding and spiritual sight right away, or ever on this earth. I sure don’t have it most of the time. I know many of the heroes of the faith didn’t always have it (look what Elijah did after his victory at Mt. Carmel). I think it just goes back to our being human. God is trying to explain something marvelous to us, and we’re trying to understand, and sometimes, with his help, we get glimpses of it, but we’re still children, and we still miss most things.