Eternity Past to Eternity Future
The golden chain of salvation--foreknowledge, predestination, calling, justification, and glorification--are interconnected and inseparable. This chain reaches from eternity past to eternity future. Foreknowledge and predestination occurred in eternity past. Calling and justification occur within time. Glorification will occur in eternity future.
Those whom God foreknew in ages past are the same ones He will glorify throughout the ages to come. The group with which God began in eternity past is the same group with which He will conclude in eternity future. He looses none, there's no dropouts along the way. None will slip through the cracks.
The final glorification of all God's elect is so certain to occur in eternity future that Paul described it in the past tense, glorified, as if it had already occurred.
"Scripture is unambiguous in teaching that every person who is genuinely saved is eternally saved. We can never be in danger of losing the spiritual life given to us by God through Jesus Christ. Romans 8:29-30 is perhaps the clearest and most explicit presentation of that truth in all of God's Word. In these two verses Paul reveals the unbroken pattern of God's sovereign redemption, from His eternal foreknowledge of a believer's salvation to its ultimate completion in glorification." --John MacArthur, The MacArthur New Testament Commentary, Romans, 1-8(Chicago, IL: Moody Press, 1991),489
Created 12 months ago
