Who Can be Saved?
Matthew 19:16-20:16
Joe Fauth
The Presumption of Salvation
- Just look at the way that Matthew tells the story, this man came with an assumption…a presumption even. What was that?
- That Jesus was just a good teacher
- That he was a good man.
- You know why He had a wrong and insufficient and unsatisfying view of salvation? Because He had a wrong view of and hence use of the Law. The Law condemns it doesn’t justify. But this man was trying to use the Law in a way that it was never intended to be used! Like me using tools wrongly.
- “The Law drives us to the Gospel to learn how to be saved, and the Gospel drives us to the Law to learn how to live” (John Owen).
The Prevention of Salvation
- Here is the “big reveal”. He had “great possessions”. Here is a man who had lots of possessions. He was a leader probably in a local area synagogue.
Jesus identifies for him what he was missing. He’s identifying the unsatisfying part of this man…it was his love for his riches. He loved this more than he loved the Lord. This is what he really loved most. Your God is the person or thing for which you would rather lose everything else and hold on to that than lose. But salvation is for people who despair of their own efforts, who realize that, in themselves and by themselves, they are hopelessly sinful and incapable of improving. Salvation is for those who see themselves as living violations of His holiness and who confess and turn from their sin and throw themselves on God’s mercy. It is for those who recognize they have absolutely nothing good to give God, that anything good they receive or accomplish can be only by His sovereign, gracious provision in Jesus Christ (MacArthur, p. 192).
The Power of Salvation
- How can this be? With man it is impossible but it is possible with God.
The Principles of Salvation
Principle of Equity
- This parable is not a parable about the differences in rewards, rather this parable is about one primary truth: the equality of salvation. In other words, a genuinely redeemed person will always receive the same quality and blessing of eternal life. There are no second-class Christians.
Believing tax collectors, prostitutes, criminals, and social outcast will have the same heavenly residence as Paul, Augustine, Luther, and Wesley (MacArthur, p. 215).