I was reading your article about the nature of post-rapture salvation. The Holy Spirit will be removed from the earth, and everyone will be responsible for maintaining their own faith in God in order to be saved.
However, I am confused as to how this works (and I suppose this question applies to Old Testament believers, as well); what would be the “threshold”, so to speak, at which one loses salvation? How could that be measured? How would temple sacrifices play into that? And one could “lose” his/her salvation and then “regain” it later?
And one must believe in man’s need for a savior and that Jesus Christ is that savior?
Of course, being church-age believers has left us with no need to worry about these issues – because the Holy Spirit is sealed within us, we’re forever saved in spite of what we do after. That’s why the concept of maintaining your own faith in order to be saved sounds strange to me.
One last question – does a post-rapture believer simply have to maintain faith, or would they have to “behave” as well? If such a person sinned profusely during the day (which is another idea I’m confused about…sin is sin and there’s not really any “measure” of it) but genuinely confessed and asked for forgiveness every night (and still truly believed in Christ anyway), would the person be saved?
A correction first. I didn’t say the Holy Spirit would be missing from Earth. I said He would no longer be sealed within believers, but would revert to His Old Testament role in the world.
That said, I wrote everything I know about post church salvation in the article. The Bible doesn’t say any more. As it always has, salvation will still come from one’s belief that only Jesus can provide it. My guess, and it’s only a guess, is that a person will also have to be very diligent to avoid sinning and very prompt to confess after each failure. (In Rev. 16:15 the reference to clothes is symbolic of righteousness.) Unlike Old Testament believers, Tribulation saints won’t even have the advantage of a structured sacrificial system to help them.
Most critical of all, I think, will be the ability to maintain their faith that the Lord is coming back in the face of incredible evidence that evil has triumphed. We in the Church have no idea of what it will be like, and I’m thankful every day that we won’t have to find out.