Nuggets from "An Urgent Call to a Serious Faith" by Dave Hunt | thebereancall.org

TBC Staff

Nuggets from “An Urgent Call to a Serious Faith” by Dave Hunt

Biblical salvation is by faith, and faith necessarily involves that which is unseen. It is not faith to believe in that which is present in visible form. Faith reaches out to the unseen world of the spirit and the eternal. And right here we encounter a major problem with ritual and sacraments: they attempt a moral rescue of the unseen and nonphysical spirit and soul of man with physical and visible ceremony. That won’t work.

The grave error of sacramentalism persists even among a majority of those who call themselves Christians. They imagine that through participation in the visible, and thus temporal, sacrament, they receive invisible and eternal spiritual benefits. Clearly, this is impossible. The Bible declares, “Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen (Hebrews:11:1). Salvation, because it necessarily involves the eternal and invisible, not that which is seen and is therefore temporal, must be by faith, not by physical works or ritual.

Furthermore, ritual and sacraments have nothing to do with either justice or punishment and therefore cannot possibly pay for sin. One might as well imagine that some ritual could satisfy a court of law in paying the penalty prescribed for a major crime as imagine that God would accept sacrament in payment of the infinite penalty He has prescribed for breaking His law.