Many evangelical churches (my own included) teach eternal security, otherwise known as once saved always saved or perseverance of the saints. I’ve been thinking about this teaching recently and came across a dilemma. I hope someone can help resolve this for me.
Eternal Security basically says that once you have been saved, you can’t be unsaved. Once God has adopted you into his family, nobody, yourself included, can undo that.
Now it is also my understanding that what Christ did was to make it possible to undo Adam’s act and return man to his original state of sinlessness, to become regenerate. So by accepting Christ and being saved we have the opportunity to become like Adam before he sinned. Hence Christ is spoken of as the second Adam.
So if being saved eventually takes us to a pre-sin state like Adam. What is to stop us from making the same decision that Adam took in his pre-sin state in the Garden of Eden by choosing to separate himself from God? In other words, if we take on the same state that Adam had in the garden, why could we not then make the same decision he made to eat the forbidden fruit?
My guess is that typical answers to this question will center around the concept of predestination. What this leads me to is that God predestining me to be saved presupposes that I was at one point lost. In other words, in order for me to be predestined to be saved, I also had to be predestined to be lost. Logically then (assuming the doctrine of original sin), Adam and Eve were predestined to sin. Did God predestine sin?
