Believe On The Lord Jesus Christ Series

Now I phrase it that way for a very specific reason. A good deal of the confusion about what is required to be saved comes from a view known as “Lordship salvation.” Those who believe in Lordship salvation misunderstand what the lordship in the New Testament means.

Their position is that say that before you can be saved, you must come to a place of total surrender to Jesus as LORD, which they say primarily means master or boss. For instance, commenting on Romans 10:9 where Paul says, “That if you will confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and believe in your heart that God has raised him from the dead, you shall be saved”, one writer says that trusting Christ as Savior is “contingent on obedience to His Lordship”—because of the use of the title “Lord” in this passage.

But this is based upon a faulty misunderstanding of what the title “Lord” means. The Greek word is kurios, which has several meanings, including the idea of a master who has servants, which, of course, implies authority and thus submission from those under him.

The question is, is that the primary way in which the word kurios is used in reference to Jesus?—Actually, no, it’s not. The Bible does indeed speak of Jesus as our personal ruler and master, but only when speaking to believers in discipleship. Whenever used in reference to the Gospel and the Gospel message, kurios is uniformly a designation for Jesus’ DIVINITY.

The primary Old Testament word for “God” was Yahweh, which is found 6823 times in the Old Testament. When the Hebrew scholars translated the Old Testament into Greek, called the Septuagint, they translated Yahweh as kurios about 90% of the time, or 6156 times.

The reason they chose the word kurios to translate Yahweh is explained by the venerable scholar, J. Gresham Machen:

…the fact that the Greek word “kyrios” in the first century…was, wherever the Greek language extended, distinctively a designation of divinity….[T]he word still expressed the relation which a master sustained toward his slaves. But… had come to be a characteristically religious term, and it is in a religious sense, especially as fixed by the Septuagint, that it appears in the New Testament. (J. Gresham Mechen, The Origen of Paul’s Religion” (New York: The MacMillan Company, 1921), 308.)

So to “confess Jesus as Lord” in Romans 10:9, and elsewhere, was to confess belief in His DEITY.

William G.T. Shedd, commenting on the word Lord in Romans 10:9 says,

The word kurios is the Septuagint rendering of Jehovah, and any Jew who publicly confessed that Jesus was “Lord,” would be understood to ascribe the divine nature and attributes to him. It is also the Old Testament term for the Son of God, and the Messiah….” (William G.T. Shedd, Romans. (New York: Scribner’s, 1879. P. 318).)

Which is what John was trying to establish: He said “These things have I written to you that you might believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God.”

2. Second, John wrote so that we might BELIEVE in Him and thereby have eternal life.

…NOT that we would hear these truths and surrender to the Lordship of Christ; or that we would hear them and resolve to live for Christ with all our hearts; or that we would hear them and take up his cross and follow Him.