Dear Friends,

It is sad to see that some teach that Christ’s sufferings were not enough to save us but that when we die we must spend many, many, many years in fire suffering for our sins so that, purified, we can enter heaven. The only option that they offer is the purchase of indulgences, a falsehood which led Luther to post his 95 statements of faith leading to the Protestant Reformation. Today’s devotional shows that the one verse sometimes appealed to in support of this doctrine cannot be appealed to. Read and arm yourself and continue to sing with joy, “Jesus paid it ALL, ALL to Him I owe, sin have left a crimson stain, He washed it white as snow!” God bless you.

Because of Calvary,

John Janney

I Corinthians 3:10-15

“Romanists found their doctrine of purgatory on tradition rather than on Scripture. They are glad, however, to avail themselves of any semblance of scriptural support, and therefore appeal to this passage to prove that men are saved through fire. But… Paul is here speaking of ministers and of their doctrines, and not of believers in general…. Paul does not say, the man is to be saved by being purified by fire, but simply ‘with difficulty,’ as the expression ‘so as by fire’ familiarly means.” [Charles Hodge, A Commentary on 1 & 2 Corinthians, (London: The Banner of Truth Trust, 1857, 1859), p. 58]

“That the Apostle does not intend any purgatorial fire by this expression will appear from the following considerations. (1) Fire is here simply regarded as a destructive agency. There is no trace here of the idea of refining or purging, an attribute elsewhere given to it, as in Malachi iii.3, though even there the prophet seems to speak of purging the whole nation by destroying the wicked, not of purging sin in the individual man. (2) The whole image implies a momentary effect and not a slow, continuous process. The Lord shall appear in a flash of light and a flame of fire. The light shall dart its rays into the innermost recesses of the moral world. The flame shall reduce to ashes the superstructure raised by the careless or unskillful builder. The builder himself shall flee for his life. He shall escape, but scorched and with the marks of the flame about him.” [J. B. Lightfoot, Notes on The Epistles of St. Paul from Unpublished Commentaries, (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 1895), p. 193]

“As Godet so clearly shows, no support for the Romish fiction of purgatory can be claimed from this passage. ‘This is to forget, – 1. that the fire is allegorical like the building; 2. that it is only teachers who are in question; 3. that the trial indicated is a means of valuation, nor of purification; 4. that this fire is lighted at Christ’s coming, and consequently does not yet burn in the interval between the death of Christians and that advent; 5, that the salvation of the worker of which Paul speaks, takes place not by, but in spite of the fire.’” [Geoffrey Wilson, 1 Corinthians, (Edinburgh: The Banner of Truth Trust, 1978), p. 57]

“There is surely here no allusion to purgatory… The reference is to teachers in particular and not to all believers, and the purpose of the fire is not to purify (as in purgatory) but to test and to judge.” [John R. W. Stott, Basic Christian Leadership, (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2002), p. 86-88]