Does 2 Peter 1:9 describe a believer who fails to add virtue to his faith and loses his salvation?
A viewer asks whether 2 Peter 1:9 describes a believer who did not give diligence to add the listed attributes to his faith and therefore apostatizes and loses his salvation, as against the free grace claim that this is simply a person who forgot his moment of belief but remains saved and only loses rewards.
Answer
This is another place where the free grace movement is off. Every passage they do not like, the ones that talk about losing something or being punished, they designate to the reward category instead of salvation. That is how a man can say there are hardly any passages in the New Testament that even talk about salvation: they have reassigned them all to rewards. So they say you are already saved by one act of belief, and if you do bad things you only lose a personal reward you would have received in heaven. That is a total lie. The passages they lean on, 2 Corinthians 5:10, Romans 14:12, Romans 2:6 to 8, all treat heaven itself as the reward for works, not an extra reward on top of a salvation you already possess. And in 2 Peter 1:9, where it says he has forgotten that he was purged from his former sins, that is biblical language for a man who has lost his salvation. Saying he 'forgot' it means it no longer means anything to him, because he has gone off and pursued the world. Do not get mixed up with the free grace people; in fifty years I have never seen anything so convoluted.