Does continuing to sin after conversion cost you your salvation?
ContestedTexts of equal or higher authority genuinely pull both ways — SAM names both sides.
The text genuinely pulls both ways at the highest tiers: God directly states (Ezekiel 18) that a righteous person who turns fully to wickedness dies in it, while Jesus states (John 10) that his sheep will never perish and no one can snatch them from his hand. The key distinction the texts themselves draw is between habitual, defining, willful apostasy and ordinary ongoing sin — but the texts do not fully resolve how those categories interact, making this genuinely contested.
A Tier 1 text (God speaking in Ezekiel 18) and a Tier 2 text (Jesus speaking in John 10) pull in opposite directions on the question of whether a person who was once righteous can lose their life through turning to sin — and neither text explicitly resolves the tension the other creates.
The unresolved tension: The text does not resolve whether a genuinely converted person can make the kind of complete, willful, permanent reversal described in Ezekiel 18 and Hebrews 10 — or whether John 10's security promise ("no one will snatch them") applies to voluntary departure as well as external threat. The related question of whether the warning passages describe people who were ever genuinely converted is also unresolved by the text.
…and 22 more verses weighed in the full analysis.
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SAM answers from primary-source texts only, weighing each verse by its authority tier. Every quotation is verified word-for-word. How the method works →