ROMANS # 389, God's promise: You cannot lose your salvation. Ephesians 2:8-9 (1-16-25)

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The Bema Seat and Rewards (3:10–15)

This teaching on three classes of men is often cou-pled with the next passage, 1 Corinthians 3:10–15. What is often asserted within the carnal Christian teaching is that there will be a separate judgment for believers, where their works are evaluated and they will receive rewards. The usual assumption is that those who were spiritual will receive a reward, those who were carnal will be saved “as by fire.”

“The teaching on 1 Corinthians 3:10–15. (1) It is a unique judgment for Christians; (2) It focuses only on Christian service or good works; (3) It is only a matter of reward or loss of reward. This teaching fits in neatly with the carnal Christian teaching. The idea is that a person could live life with little or no works, and at this special Christian judgment would still get to heaven, without any rewards.

These doctrines have been used to instill in people the notion that they can have true faith and yet be carnal and fruitless. The worst thing that can happen to such people is that they lose out on millennial rewards. This is not a hypothetical observation; it is one that I have heard many times over the years. A presumptuous laziness can creep in, making people comfortable with their carnality and fruit-lessness. What makes this so dangerous is that it gives ground for people to think they are converted, when in fact they may well be unregenerate and hell-bound.

There is a more profound way than is usually recognized, this opening issue is the most crucial factor in the letter, not because their ‘quarrels’ were the most significant error in the church, but because the nature of this particular strife had as its root cause their false theology, which had exchanged the theology of the cross for a false triumphal-ism that went beyond, or excluded the cross.

The Apostle’s criticism of the Corinthians is that although they claimed to be spiritual, they were not acting like it. In fact, they were acting “as carnal” people, that is, people of the flesh, people of this world. Their behavior was not only worldly, it was infantile. This is brought out by the derogatory “as babes in Christ.” They claimed to be “mature” but the hard fact was that they were infantile, childish. In our vernacular, they were “acting like babies.”

The argument of 2:6–16 implies that for Paul the gospel of the crucified one is both “milk” and “solid food.” As milk it is the good news of salvation; as solid food it is under-standing that the entire Christian life is predicated on the same reality- and those who have the Spirit should so understand the “mystery.”