Questions raised during the session, with answers drawn from the teaching.
Q: If Christians still sin, what actually dies at conversion?
This is the session's central question, and the answer requires a precise distinction.
The sinful nature has not died — Christians still sin, and something dead cannot compel anyone to do anything. What has died is the flesh's governing power over the spirit. Before conversion, the flesh was driving the entirety of human life; there was no real alternative to its compulsions. At conversion, the spirit is made alive in Christ and the flesh is severed from its position of control. The influence of the flesh remains, which is why the pull toward sin is still felt, but the compulsion is gone. There is now genuine choice.
This distinction matters enormously in practice. If a person believes the sinful nature is completely dead and then experiences sin, they face an immediate crisis: either God failed, or they were never truly saved. Satan presses into exactly that gap with shame and condemnation. Understanding that the flesh still influences without controlling resolves the crisis at the root and removes the foothold condemnation needs.
Q: Do we have eternal life now, or do we have to wait until the resurrection?
We have it now. Jesus defines eternal life in John 17:3 as knowing God and Jesus Christ — present tense, intimate relationship, not a future state to be received at death. When a person comes to Christ, the spirit that will eventually be resurrected is, at that moment, connected to God. Eternal life has already begun.
What awaits at the resurrection is the inheritance — a resurrection body, and an unfettered face-to-face relationship with Christ. As Paul writes, now we see dimly, as through a glass; then we will see face to face. The relationship is a present reality. The inheritance is the future completion of what is already underway.
Q: Does "born of water" in John 3:5 mean water baptism is required for salvation?
No — and the passage itself provides the interpretation. Jesus clarifies his own statement immediately in verse 6: "Flesh gives birth to flesh, but the Spirit gives birth to spirit." He ties "born of water" directly to the birth of flesh — ordinary human birth, entering this world as every person enters it. "Born of the Spirit" is the second birth he is describing. Nicodemus was confused because he was thinking about physical reentry into his mother's womb; Jesus uses natural birth as one side of a comparison, not as a prerequisite alongside baptism.
The consistent pattern of New Testament salvation confirms this. The thief on the cross received no baptism. The household of Cornelius received the Spirit before they were baptized. Baptism is an outward declaration of an inward reality — a public mark of what has already taken place — not the mechanism by which that reality is produced.
Q: Can someone truly walk away from salvation after genuinely receiving it?
The session's answer is that the union established at genuine conversion is not breakable — but with a critical qualifier. The harder question is whether the faith was genuine in the first place.
The parable of the sower describes people who appear to receive the gospel, respond with enthusiasm, and fall away. Jesus' own interpretation is that the seed in those cases never truly took root — the condition of the soil meant genuine, lasting growth never happened. Similarly, when Jesus tells the crowd in Matthew 7 "I never knew you," the word carries the weight of genuine intimacy: if he never knew them, there was no real relationship to begin with, regardless of what they claimed or demonstrated outwardly.
Those who genuinely belong to Christ are held in his hands. Romans 8:35–39 catalogs every possible force that could separate a believer from God's love — and Paul's conclusion is declarative: none of them can. The security of the relationship does not depend on the believer maintaining it. It depends on the one who established it.
Q: Does "neither Jew nor Greek" in Galatians 3:28 mean God is finished with Israel as a distinct people?
No — and Paul addresses this directly in Romans 9–11, which will be the subject of the next session. Galatians 3:28 is not making a statement about the covenants God made with Israel or his ongoing purposes for the Jewish people. It is making a statement about standing before God within the body of Christ: in that relationship, no hierarchy of ethnicity, social status, or background exists. All believers stand on exactly the same footing — sons and daughters, heirs according to the promise.
That is a statement about unity in Christ, not a cancellation of anything God promised Israel. Collapsing those two things produces Replacement Theology — a position Paul's own argument in Romans 11 directly contradicts. He will address it at length in the next session.
Q: Are Christians required to follow the Old Testament law?
No — not because the law was bad, but because it has been fulfilled. Jesus said he came not to abolish the law but to fulfill it. The Mosaic Law served a specific and limited purpose: governing the nation of Israel and making sin's character explicit until the Seed came. Now that Christ has come, the custodian has done its work.
Christians are not under the Mosaic Law. They are under the command of Christ, which Jesus articulates explicitly: love one another as I have loved you, and believe in his name. What he commanded governs the new covenant people — not what Moses commanded. This does not make the Old Testament irrelevant; it makes it fully interpretable through its fulfillment. The same God who gave the law is the God who gave the command to love, and his character runs through both.
The parable of the Good Samaritan makes the same argument in narrative form. The priest and the Levite on their way to Jerusalem were technically correct in their religious observance — touching someone wounded or dying would have made them ceremonially unclean and unable to perform their duties. They did the religiously compliant thing. The Samaritan, despised and classified as unclean, stopped and showed mercy. Jesus used a priest, a Levite, and a Samaritan precisely to illustrate that religious compliance without love is not righteousness. Love always conquers the religious impulse that treats duty as an end in itself.
These questions were raised during the session and are preserved here as a record of what came up in the room. They are a companion to, not a replacement for, the main chapter notes.