The biggest contradiction in the Bible that’s not a contradiction

There was a time when I would get so jacked up about supposed contradictions in Scripture.

Whenever I would run up against an alleged inconsistency in the Bible (and there are plenty of websites that gleefully catalog them), my faith in biblical inerrancy would get challenged, and I’d feel less confident in Scripture being 100% true. So, I armed myself with resources like Norman Geisler’s When Critics Ask, Walt Kaiser’s Hard Sayings of the Bible, and Gleason Archer’s The Encyclopedia of Bible Difficulties, all of which do a great job of harmonizing supposed discrepancies in the Bible.

However, what helped me more was understanding the truth that nowhere in Scripture will you find glaring, black-and-white major divergences, such as one book stating Jesus was raised from the dead and another stating He wasn’t. Small apparent contradictions (see my article, What if the Bible Has Errors for a discussion of them), like Matthew writing Peter will deny Jesus “before a rooster crows” (26:34), but Mark saying the denial will happen before “a rooster crows twice” (14:30) never challenge a single core biblical doctrine of salvation or the validity of Christianity.

And, as one person puts it, it’s not the discrepancies in the Bible that bothered him but rather the clear, undisputed, and life-changing content found in Scripture. That’s the big takeaway anyone challenging the veracity of the Bible needs to understand.

But that said, there is one big thematic battle that does seem to rage within the pages of Scripture, which has caused implicit battle lines to be drawn up between believers. It’s the issue of whether the life-saving promises of God are conditional or unconditional on us being “good” in some way; if God will bless us no matter what, or whether His blessings are contingent on us adhering to an expected set of behaviors, with hit-and-miss obedience eventually casting us outside His salvation’s reach.

The difficulty is that you see both everywhere in the Old and New Testaments, making it the biggest supposed contradiction found in the pages of the Bible.     

Not either or but both and

Scripture talks about God’s grace towards us throughout its pages, but it also consistently seems to threaten both temporal and eternal consequences for disobedience. A good representative of the latter is found in the Old Testament book of Ezekiel: “The soul who sins will die. But if a man is righteous and practices justice and righteousness … he is righteous and will surely live,” declares the Lord GOD … The person who sins will die … But if the wicked man turns from all his sins which he has committed and observes all My statutes and practices justice and righteousness, he shall surely live; he shall not die. All his transgressions which he has committed will not be remembered against him; because of his righteousness which he has practiced, he will live” (Ezek. 18:4, 9, 20-22).

These and lots of other passages (yes, they’re in the New Testament also) sure seem to telegraph the idea that a person self-directs, in some sense, their salvation experience with God through their own effort, and that the Lord’s salvific gift to us is somewhat conditional on obedience. So, this begs the question of: are God’s salvation promises to us conditional or unconditional?

The answer is, yes.

It’s 100% true that Scripture says the blessings of God depend on us meeting His righteous conditions. Taken alone, they appear frightening. John MacArthur puts it like this: “Holiness knows nothing of forgiveness; the law of God, nothing of forgiveness. Holiness speaks against sin and knows nothing of excusing it. Righteousness speaks against sin and knows nothing of excusing it. The law of God speaks against sin and knows nothing of excusing it.”

That’s the conditional side of the story. But that is paired with the unconditional aspect of God’s plan and becomes the story behind all other stories in the Bible; it’s the overarching motif and plotline behind everything else.   

You see the unconditional side first in Genesis 15 (vv. 9-17) when God makes His covenant with Abraham and lays out a path between dismembered animals that represented what would happen to those participating in any covenant if each didn’t hold up their side of the agreement. But then, only God passes through the pieces in the passage, indicating He alone would be torn apart if either side were unfaithful.

Being God, He would always meet His conditions for the covenant and be Abraham’s substitute if Abraham failed to meet the covenant’s standards.

You also see it in the Passover story when God sends the destroyer to Egypt to kill the firstborn son of every household. No matter how “good” or “bad” those were on the inside of the home or the degree of the sins they had committed, the destroyer would not enter the house if he saw the blood of the substitute applied to their door — the saving condition that God had set forth.  

The same happens with us today when we fail like Abraham did, but stand behind the blood of Jesus, our substitute, who met all of God’s conditions, which is applied to us.

In his excellent message on the subject, Tim Keller dissolves the supposed contradiction of God’s unconditional and conditional blessings to us when he says, “On the cross, Jesus fulfilled the conditions of the law so that God could love you unconditionally.”

The reality of this leads to what Keller calls “paradoxical obedience.” We don’t obey out of the fear of damnation because of our sinful shortcomings, but rather out of overwhelming gratitude for Jesus’ sacrifice and God’s unconditional blessings that He earned for us.

This truth also leads to a strong assurance of salvation, one that isn’t threatened when we fall short of God’s unconditional standards. On that, MacArthur says: “You will never have subjective feelings of assurance unless you comprehend the objective truth of the Gospel.”

I don’t know about you, but for me, that’s 100% true in my life.  

Someone who had that was Paul, which is why he wrote: “For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other created thing, will be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom. 8:38–39).

Notice Paul was “convinced” about his salvation. Not hopeful, wishful, or anything similar, and sure not thinking it depended on him hanging on to it the best he could.

So, again, are God’s salvation promises to us conditional or unconditional? Yes. But it’s no contradiction — it’s what the Gospel is all about.