<p>12:52 <i>For from now on in one house there will be five divided, three against two and two against three</i>- Salvation, as Robert Roberts so frequently said, is an individual matter. It is not a collective affair. Compare two passages within the Lord&rsquo;s teaching, which each use the same Greek words: &ldquo;I am come to give&hellip; division. From henceforth there shall be five in one house divided, three against two, and two against three i.e. sometimes they would be 2:3 and other times 3:2- there would be a series of disagreements over various issues... a house divided against a house falls&rdquo; (Lk. 12:52,52 cp. Lk. 11:17). What are we to make of this? Every divided house or Kingdom will &ldquo;fall&rdquo;, i.e. be condemned at judgment day (s.w. Mt. 7:27; Rom. 14:4; 1 Cor. 10:12; Heb. 4:11; James 5:12). And yet Jesus inevitably divides &lsquo;houses&rsquo;. Surely the Lord is teaching that every Kingdom and family will fall, because it will be divided, and therefore the only hope of salvation is purely individual. This was radical thinking in first century Palestine, where the destiny of the extended family was held to be uniform; i.e., you would end up in the last day wherever your extended family did. But the Lord is cutting through all this, and teaching that salvation is a personal matter. No single extended family will, as a unit, avoid being divided by the result of the judgment. The Lord&rsquo;s teaching surely has some relevance to some Christian cultures which can likewise give the impression that large, well established Christian families will almost automatically all be saved.</p>