Throughout the centuries there has been a multitude of differing versions as to what exactly the Gospel is. There has been a seemingly unceasing array of opinions as to which doctrines actually make up the Gospel of God and which doctrines do not. Some have included not only doctrines but also a standard of obedience that must be adhered to so that one can get saved and/or stay saved. Others have been much more accommodating to man’s sinful nature by making the Gospel, that which must be believed for anyone to be saved, a simple matter of knowing some general truths about the existence of God and what happened to His Son, or only one or two specific doctrines. Many say that the entire Bible is the Gospel, while others at the opposite end of the scale claim that no one knows what the Gospel actually is. Others claim belief in the historical facts that Christ, the Son of God, has died, was buried and is resurrected, is all one needs to know and believe in order to evidence a saved state. One opinion pertaining to what the Gospel is that has recently been brought to my attention is that which says the Gospel only contains one doctrine. Only one doctrine that a person must believe in order to be justified before God. Only one doctrine that a person needs to be aware of and have right knowledge of in order to safely say that one is in a justified state before God. And that doctrine is: the righteousness of the Lord Jesus Christ. According to this butchered version of the Gospel, the only doctrine one needs to know and therefore be accurate about at the outset of one’s Christian life is the righteousness of Jesus Christ, because it is this which makes a man righteous before God. The ground of salvation has therefore become the whole Gospel, according to some. The other doctrines, such as election, the quickening work of the Spirit of God etc., which Scripture teaches are all part of the Gospel for they all deal with grace in salvation, have been relegated to a subgroup of doctrines. A group of doctrines that are said must also be believed or a true salvation has not taken place, but strangely are not included in the Gospel of God. These doctrines, which are said to be essential to salvation but not essentials of the Gospel, have been reduced to being the mere fruit of being justified, or the fruit of believing the righteousness of Christ. Belief in them is seen as the natural consequence of rightly believing the Gospel, which is exclusively about the righteousness of Christ, rather than them actually being part of the Gospel Message. The premise is that as Christ’s righteousness is the ground of salvation, no other doctrine is necessary to be believed at the outset of one’s Christian life, but also that none are Christian who fail to believe the other doctrines which they say are essential to salvation but not part of the Gospel! So, is this right? Is the Gospel, that which must be believed for a person to be saved, made up of only one doctrine and are all those others which deal with issues to do with grace and salvation the mere fruit of salvation and not the very seed of it? This booklet will not only investigate these claims, but more importantly, will provide the reader with clear Bible teaching on what exactly must be believed, and why, in order for a man to be saved, and what the qualification is for a teaching to be part of the Gospel of the Grace of God.

Many have wondered why God did not simply list the doctrines which form His Gospel, the Good News of salvation by grace, in the Bible so that all the ‘confusion’ and conjecture of what exactly the Gospel is made up of would have been avoided. For many, the Gospel is not something definite, a set group of doctrines which cannot be mistaken by God’s people as that which God requires belief in for a person to rightly be said to be converted, but an almost indefinable thing that varies depending upon whom one talks to. But the confusion lies only in the minds of the unregenerate. Because of this perceived confusion, many who are under the impression that they are Christians have taken it upon themselves to judge a person’s lifestyle as the ultimate determining factor that shows whether one is a Christian or not. Belief in a set of doctrines, or a doctrinal system, is important to many but not the standard by which people like to judge saved and lost. The fact that those who believe the Gospel shall be saved and that those who do not believe it shall be damned is too cold and restrictive for most people and very few are able, or willing, to accept the fact that God would damn a person because they were ignorant of, or did not believe in, all but one or two teachings. That the matter of certainty, of what the truth is and of what the Gospel is made up of, is to many a debatable one is evidenced by the many and varied versions of what the Gospel is and how a person ‘reaches’ a saved state. The question that arises out of all this is: ‘How can one know for certain that a doctrine is part of the Gospel, that which must be believed for a person to be saved?’ The glorious truth concerning all this is the fact that saving knowledge of the Gospel is not something a man has to determine for himself, but is something which is brought, or revealed, to him by God. Man must study and dig for truth but this truth is discovered at the time appointed by God and comes only by revelation from God, and not through any intellectual achievement on the part of man. God reveals Himself in and through His Gospel to His people and the regenerated person sees, knows and believes all that Gospel, which talks of Who God is and how God saves. But for many the confusion remains because there are so many people who look and act like Christians, but their beliefs are poles apart. People are judged saved according to lifestyle despite their widely differing views on what God is like and how God saves and what His Gospel is all about. This is a prime reason why many consider the matter of doctrine to be some second class and often irrelevant issue. Never should one place the cart before the horse and never should one place how a person acts above what they believe. All God’s people, for whom the whole salvation plan has been laid out and performed and who actually believe in that plan alone in its entirety, are all of one mind when it comes to what the Gospel is. But in practical terms, there must surely be some guideline which God has set that confirms to His people what exactly His Gospel is, how they can know what the doctrines are that are in it, and why, where it starts and where it ends, and by which they can teach others and pronounce aright the teachings of the Gospel of the grace of God? Well, to begin with we can be certain that God would never have left the matter of what the Gospel is to the opinions and theological extrapolations of men. He would never have placed His people in a position of having to take a person’s word for it that what they say the Gospel is, is in fact what the Gospel is. The religious world is confused about what the Gospel is, but the people of God have not been left in such confusion for their eyes have been opened and they have been delivered from doctrinal darkness into the Light of the glorious Gospel itself. The Gospel is not hid from them for they are not among the lost. (see 2 Cor. 4:3,4).

It is God’s Word that the Lord draws our attention to and it is God’s Word that His people place their trust in: "For the hope which is laid up for you in heaven, whereof ye heard before in the word of the truth of the Gospel" (Col. 1:5 cf. Psa. 119:42). The words of men are just that, the words of men, and unless those words agree with the Word of God they are simply the worthless opinions of men. One is just as good as another and just as weak as another. The crucial element of any equation is the answer. Just as a teacher would not abandon his students in the middle of a class leaving them to work out the answer to a mathematical equation but never returning to tell them the correct answer, God has not, and would never, leave His people to work out for themselves what the Gospel is, but reveals the Gospel He gave His apostles to all His people the moment they are regenerated, and has confirmed what that Gospel is by His perfect Word. God only has one Gospel, so the Gospel which must be believed is the exact same Gospel God gave Paul the apostle. Anything which differs to this is rightly branded another gospel and those who hold to it as accursed (see 2 Cor. 11:4 & Gal. 1:8,9). The very fact that one must believe the Gospel, and that God’s people are also commanded to preach the Gospel, shows that the Gospel is a very definite and knowable thing that has not been left to the conjecture and speculation of men, even God’s people, but is something real and tangible that is revealed and taught by God. There is nothing ambiguous about it. As with its Author, there is no shadow of turning in the Gospel for it is the very Light of God (see Jas. 1:17; 2 Cor. 4:4). The Gospel was never meant to be something that means one thing to some people and another thing to others. It does not come in various forms and guises, for just as with God, it is the same yesterday, today and forever. God does not have several versions of His Gospel in order to suit the various intellectual capabilities of mankind, but only one version, the one and only true version: His version! If the Gospel were not a specific set group of doctrines, or teachings, that which must be believed would be open to opinions of men rather than being that which has been determined by God and which comes forth from the mouth of God. One would hear a different version of the Gospel in one’s travels from ‘church’ to ‘church’ and one would have to accept each version as true. Moreover, contrary to what God has said in His Word—that any who bring a gospel which differs in any way from His is a false gospel and those who preach and believe it accursed—belief of any gospel regardless of how it differs, or by how much it differs, from God’s original Message, would be enough to save people. To know the Gospel is to believe the Gospel is to preach the Gospel, and every facet of the Gospel is clearly spelt out in the glorious Word of God. One can be certain that if God has commanded that His Gospel be believed to the exclusion of all others—those which carry even the most minute error—He has defined His Gospel clearly in His Holy Word for all His people to see. Again, there exists no confusion in the Scriptures as to what the Gospel is, but only in the minds of the lost.

When one’s eyes are opened to the Word of God, one realises that God in fact did not need to list the various doctrines which form the Gospel. The very fact that salvation is by the grace of God, something which God has made very clear throughout His Word, is all the ‘clue’ that is needed to learn, know, prove and be absolutely certain as to what the Gospel of salvation is all about. To know what the doctrines are that a person is to trust in and have faith towards in order to be saved is a life and death issue, and all that has to do with salvation is revealed in the Gospel that teaches the glorious grace of God in the salvation of His people. Most, if not all, the groups that claim to be Christian agree that salvation is by grace. Now what exactly each group means by ‘grace’ is entirely another matter. Grace is a very misinterpreted and misunderstood word in the religious world. Some include works when they speak of grace, which are necessary, they say, not in getting a man saved but in keeping a man saved. One must attain to a certain level of obedience and then maintain that degree of compliance with the laws of God in order to be sure of being saved. Others believe grace is given so that a man can perform the works they say are necessary in acquiring salvation or which keep a man in a saved state. It is quite surprising that those who believe such nonsense fail to see how they have conditioned salvation on what a man does and not solely on what God has done. They are guilty of the same sin of the Pharisee in Luke 18. (see the author’s article ‘The Pharisee and the Publican’). They claim to believe in grace—what God has done—and yet make salvation at least partly dependant on one’s own personal obedience to God. Notwithstanding this, it is generally accepted by all that salvation is by the grace of God, and that whatever people’s interpretation of ‘grace’ might be, it is agreed that one cannot be saved without it. The principal verse bearing this out is found in Ephesians 2:8, which says in part: "...by grace are ye saved..."

As the Gospel is the Good News of salvation and salvation is, and can only be, by the grace of God, it stands to biblical reason that the Gospel of God is made up of the doctrines, or teachings, which define what God has done through that grace by which He saves. God has promised to save His people from their sins, and the Gospel of the grace of God explains how He does it. To believe anything different, to believe in anything that falls short of the whole Gospel of the whole grace of God, is to believe in that which is NOT the Gospel of God. Some might say, ‘But what does it matter whether one believes doctrines are in the Gospel or not? Isn’t it enough that those doctrines are believed? Well, quite frankly, it isn’t enough, for God has called those doctrines that deal with salvation ‘the Gospel’. They are the doctrines that He has decreed must be believed if one is to be saved, for they are the Good News of salvation. If one does not have those same doctrines in one’s gospel then one has another gospel different to, and therefore opposing, the Gospel. You cannot say, ‘This is the Gospel’ when God has said, ‘That is the Gospel’. A person is saved believing what God says His Gospel is, not what they believe it to be. Christ said that those who believe the Gospel shall be saved. Anyone, therefore, calling themselves saved before believing the doctrines of the Gospel as the Gospel, disagree with what Christ said and so remain lost. We must go by God’s Standard, we must believe His Gospel—what He says the doctrines of salvation are—and not make up one of our own. The apostle Paul says in Acts 20:24, "...so that I might finish my course with joy, and the ministry, which I have received of the Lord Jesus, to testify the Gospel of the grace of God." "A study of Paul’s ministry and his proclamations will show that he was a great expounder on the grace of God. The first eleven chapters of his epistle to the Romans are given to an exposition of justification by grace. The first three chapters of Ephesians set forth the doctrines of grace." The above verse could easily, and just as accurately, have referred to the Gospel as the Gospel of salvation according to the doctrines of the grace of God. To believe the Gospel of grace is to believe everything that grace has to say about how God saves. Any gospel that has gagged grace, muffled its voice so as to render part of it inaudible, prevents it from saying its piece, and is one that can never truly reflect all that it took to save the people of God. To believe the Gospel is to trust in everything God has done to save His people from their sins. To truly and savingly trust in God for salvation, one must believe ALL that His Gospel of His grace has to say about how He saves. This cannot be emphasized enough, for a gospel that comes short of the whole message of grace is one that leaves room for man to think there is something he must do, something he must contribute, to either getting himself saved or keeping himself saved. Such a gospel does not lead a person to wholly trust in God alone for salvation, but ‘God and...’ Salvation is about trusting totally in God, and believing the Gospel of God which reveals all of the grace of God is the only way one can absolutely and completely trust in God for salvation leaving no room for a man’s works. Failure to believe all His grace is failure to believe Him.

The Gospel is the Good News of grace! So, as salvation is all of grace, one must place all one’s trust in all that grace says about salvation. Failure to do this is a sure sign that one is believing in a false gospel which allows room for a man to boast in his works. Therefore, a gospel which falls short of revealing the whole of the grace of God can never be called the Gospel of the grace of God. For it to be the Gospel of grace, it must be the Gospel of the whole grace of God, with no part of it missing for whatever reason. NO ABRIDGED VERSION OF THE GOSPEL CAN SAVE ANYONE! Let me make it quite clear that THERE IS NO BIBLICAL REASON OR PURPOSE FOR THE EXCLUSION FROM THE GOSPEL, WHICH HAS BEEN GIVEN TO REVEAL THE SAVING GRACE OF GOD IN THE SALVATION PLAN OF GOD, OF EVEN ONE DOCTRINE WHICH DEALS WITH GRACE IN SALVATION. Salvation must have been all of grace, all of God, for there to not be any room or reason for a man to think to himself that something he must do or has done contributes in any way to getting or keeping him saved. Therefore the Gospel of salvation MUST contain everything that fully teaches salvation by grace. Salvation short of any part of grace would be no salvation at all, and a gospel short of telling the whole of what has been done through grace to save would be no gospel at all but a very, very poor copy. Everything grace has to say about salvation is contained in the Gospel of God and not one word of it gives any reason for anyone to believe that man has any cause to boast of what he has done or what God has empowered him to do. To the thinking person, this clearly gives testament to the fact that any gospel which does not reveal all of the grace of God, for whatever reason, which is necessary to the salvation of His people, is a FALSE gospel which cannot save.

The Gospel is called many things in the Word of God, but verses such as Ephesians 2:8 and Acts 20:24 describe for us the foundational truth of what the Gospel is all about: the grace of God, by this it is understood that Scripture speaks about the whole of the grace of God and not merely a portion of it or even most of it. If a man is saved by the grace of God, and there is nothing in the scriptures that would suggest that this grace is in any way qualified or restricted, then it must be that a man’s salvation is all by grace. Therefore, no part of the grace required in the salvation of a man, could, or should, ever be missing from the preaching of God’s eternal Gospel. To call that which must be believed in order for one to be saved The Gospel of the grace of God is to make reference to all of the grace that was necessary in the salvation of God’s people from its inception to its completion. Those who claim that only the doctrine of the righteousness of Christ is in the Gospel, by their own admission, say that there can be no salvation without belief in the other doctrines which deal with salvation but which their gospel does not contain. But how can one have doctrines that are essential to salvation not in the Gospel of salvation? How can one say they are essential to salvation knowledge but not essential to the Gospel, which is God’s chosen vehicle that reveals that knowledge? Surely, if a doctrine is essential to saving faith it must be essential to salvation and therefore essential to the Gospel of salvation! The word grace could never be a reference to one or two aspects of grace, but by every law of reason must be referring to grace as a whole and not as anything less than that. What kind of gospel would we have if salvation had to be all of grace but the Gospel of that grace, the Good News of that grace, was not a full and complete rendering of what was done by grace to secure and ensure the salvation of God’s people? To those who claim that the Gospel of grace is only about Christ and who arm themselves with scriptures which talk of grace being from the Son (Gal. 1:6; Rom. 5:15) fail to realise that grace is also said to be from the Father (2 Cor. 1:12), and that it is the Father Who has "...called you into the grace of Christ..." (Gal. 1:6). "The fact that ‘grace’ is received both from the Father and from Christ is a testimony to the Deity of Christ." It should never be taken to mean that saving grace is only about the Savior and His Work, or that saving grace comes only from the Savior, primarily because there would not be a Savior for mankind were it not for the grace of God. It is by the grace of God that any are in Christ: "...OF HIM are ye in Christ Jesus..." (1 Cor. 1:30), and none would be in fellowship with Christ were it not for the Father: "God is faithful, BY WHOM ye were called unto the fellowship of His Son Jesus Christ our Lord" (1 Cor. 1:9). Yes the Gospel is referred to several times in the Bible as "...the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God" (Mk. 1:1), "...the Gospel of His Son..." (Rom. 1:9); "...the Gospel of Christ..." (Rom. 1:16; 15:19); "...Christ’s Gospel..." (2 Cor. 2:12), "...the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ..." (2 Thess. 1:8), but in order to show the full extent of what the Gospel is and to show His people that the Gospel of the Good News of salvation is not exclusively about the Person and Work of the Savior but includes within it the Father and the Holy Spirit—Who They are and what They have done—the Gospel is also called "...the Gospel of the Kingdom..." (Matt. 4:23; 9:35), "...the Gospel of the Kingdom of God" (Mk. 1:14), "...the Gospel of God" (Rom. 1:1; 15:16), "...the Gospel of peace..." (Rom. 10:15; Eph. 6:15), "...the Gospel of the circumcision..." (Gal. 2:7), "...the Gospel of your salvation..." (Eph. 1:13), "...the glorious Gospel of the blessed God..." (1 Tim. 1:14) and "...the everlasting Gospel..." (Rev. 14:6). But the underlying theme of the whole Gospel, that which the work of the whole Godhead comes under and has been made possible, is GRACE. This is why the Gospel is called "...the Gospel of the Grace of God" (Acts 20:24). The Gospel is about the Lord Jesus Christ but not at the expense of all the other grace doctrines which have made such a thing as the salvation of sinful people possible. You cannot dissociate Christ from the Godhead, you cannot segregate the doctrine of Christ from the other doctrines of the Gospel of the grace of God. Christ is most assuredly in the Gospel, in fact the doctrine of the Person and Work of Christ is the centrepiece of God’s salvation plan, it is the central tenet of the Gospel, no one can be saved without Christ, but the Gospel is not something which deals only with what was done by grace through Christ but what was done by grace through the Person and Work of the Father and the Holy Spirit also. The Person and Work of Christ justifies, the Father has elected those people Christ justifies and the Holy Spirit awakens or quickens those people the Father has elected and the Son justifies. The plan is complete. It is not to be restricted to One Member of the Trinity because it can only be the complete plan of salvation by grace, and therefore the Gospel of salvation by grace, when the whole Work of the whole Trinity is preached and believed. The word of God says that He "...hath saved us, and called us...not according to our works, but according to His own purpose and grace..." (2 Tim. 1:9). Election was due to God’s purpose and grace, and, so too, is every other part of salvation. Christ’s work, His atonement and imputation of righteousness, was all due to the purpose and grace of God, as was the regenerating work of the Holy Spirit. No part of salvation could have occurred without the grace of God, therefore James tells us that salvation is wholly of the will of God "OF HIS OWN WILL begat He us with the word of truth..." (Jas. 1:18 cf. Rom. 9:11,16). So, whatever part of salvation is due to God’s will, purpose and grace, we know must be in the Gospel and therefore must be believed if any are to be saved. All of salvation = all of grace = all in the Gospel = must be believed.

The very reason for the existence of the Gospel, that which has made the Gospel what it is, indeed at all possible, is the grace of Almighty God. And therein lies the key to understanding and determining what the doctrines, or teachings, of the Gospel are. Therein lies the key to understanding what must be believed, as well as why all of the doctrines, which deal with the grace of God in salvation are in the Gospel, and why they must all be believed. Grace not only distinguishes which doctrines are in the Gospel but also tells us why they are in the Gospel. The exposition that follows will not only do away with the false gospel mentioned in the introduction, but with every false gospel ever devised by the mind of man or Satan. You see, the Gospel is a foolproof system of doctrines that teach the whole of the grace of God by which God saves, and, what is vitally important to a proper understanding of how God saves, and what it means to wholly and truly trust in Him for all of salvation. It leaves no room for man to boast in what he is or has done or to even think that he must do something to either get saved or stay saved. This is all the Gospel of grace could have been, for if every jot and tittle of salvation were not covered by grace, there would be room for a work of man’s to be woven into the fabric of that salvation plan. Yes, the Gospel of the grace of God does not allow room for a man to even think that salvation is in some way conditioned on what he does, for the Gospel of the grace of God fully and rightly taught shows that the whole of salvation, from election to glorification, is covered by the whole of the grace of God. If formulating the plan of salvation necessitated the dispersion of grace to every corner of that plan in order to make it a grace plan, how could the teaching of the Gospel of salvation be without even one particle of saving grace? And if this is so, how could the Gospel not tell of every part of that grace plan? The Gospel conveys the message of salvation by grace. The Gospel of the grace of God must, for it to truly and fully manifest the total grace of God, include within it every doctrine that deals with grace in salvation. If even one of these grace teachings that highlights the indispensable work of the Triune God in salvation is missing, if it is in anyway said to be essential to salvation but not actually part of the Gospel for whatever reason, then one has a gospel that allows room for man to think that he must do something to either get or stay saved. This is because salvation is by grace and therefore the Gospel which reveals how a man is saved is the Good News which reveals the whole of the grace of God, all of what it took for God to be able to justly save a man. Man had to be elected by the Father solely according to grace, man had to have a Savior obey the law for him and atone for his sins, establishing and imputing unto him a perfect righteousness, and man had to have the Holy Spirit regenerate him. No salvation could have taken place without these three elements and therefore no true Gospel could have been formed, preached, and believed unto salvation, were it not for these three elements. Those who say that there are essentials to salvation which are not actually part of the Gospel are saying that they are not to be preached as the Good News (Gospel) of salvation! One would have a hard time convincing anyone that something was essential to salvation but not essential to the Good News of that salvation.

The Gospel is such a perfect system of doctrines making manifest the totality of the grace of God in salvation that only the God of the universe could have ever produced such Good News. Therefore, to recognize a false gospel is not a difficult thing at all. A false gospel is that which, despite its being called a gospel of grace, includes within it something man must do to either get saved, be saved or remain saved, or one which fails to teach every aspect of grace, which is everything God has done to save His people from their sins, which would naturally imply that salvation is at least partly conditioned upon a work of man’s. Has someone presented you with a gospel that, whilst not overtly denying a grace doctrine, does not include it in their gospel? Then you have been taught a false gospel. Whether or not such a person denies that their gospel teaches that any part of salvation is conditioned on man, a gospel that does not include all of the grace it took to save a man is a gospel that has left itself open to being biblically labelled a gospel of works. A gospel that does not include every grace doctrine which deals with salvation, is one that naturally lends itself to doctrines which condition some of salvation on man. More on this later. Paul the apostle says that if election unto salvation is all by grace then it cannot be by any works of man, therefore if election unto salvation left room for any work of man’s, it could not be by grace at all (see Rom. 11:6). Has someone presented you with a gospel that in any way, to any degree, conditions salvation on what you do, even if they attribute your doing it to the grace of God? Then you have been taught a false gospel. FLEE from such people and FLEE from such gospels!! Those who believe and teach such lies are neither competent nor qualified to teach the Gospel, for they are bearers of a false gospel and are therefore not saved, they are not ministers of His grace, they are not God’s people.

Throughout the pages of the Bible we are constantly reminded of the great contrast between grace and works, and the great gulf that exists between the Gospel of grace and gospels which allow room for a man to boast. We see that the work of God is always contradistinguished with the works of man. In no verse of Scripture will you find the work of man coupled with the grace of God as that which either gets a man saved or which keeps a man saved. Far from being co-conspirators in the salvation of man, the Word of God teaches that grace and works immediately cancel out one another any time one attempts to bring them together in partnership. The words ‘grace’ and ‘works’ are used as mutually exclusive terms in the Bible. Anything outside of that which God has done in the salvation of man is said to be that which nullifies or frustrates the grace of God. One cannot have anything other than grace in the Gospel of salvation, so it stands to biblical reason that it must be the whole of grace in salvation that is in the Gospel. It must completely shut out anything a man is or anything a man does as that which has motivated or demanded his salvation. Paul the apostle says, "I do not frustrate the grace of God: for if righteousness come by the law, then Christ is dead in vain" (Gal. 2:21). Paul is saying here that he in no way neutralizes or violates the principal of grace by looking to anything he is or was or that which he has done as gaining or maintaining his salvation. Paul kept his eyes on all of what the Savior has done through the grace of God. Indeed, a gospel which does not include within it the whole of the grace of God necessary to save a man is a gospel which does not teach grace, but frustrates grace. It neutralizes and violates the grace principal, or law of grace, because it fails to reveal the whole of grace it took to save, which the whole of the Gospel of God is all about. It takes only one sin for a man to come short of the glory of God, and it takes the exclusion of only one grace doctrine to make a gospel fall short of, and thereby revealing itself as anything but, the Gospel of the grace of God. A gospel is not fit to be called the Gospel of grace except that Gospel which reveals the entirety of the grace that it took to save God’s chosen. A gospel calling itself the Gospel of the grace of God, but which falls short of teaching all of what grace has done to save, is like someone calling any number that falls short of the right answer to an equation the correct answer. It would be like saying the right answer to 3 + 3 is 1 as long as you add another 5 to it! This is synonymous with saying ‘This is the Gospel, but you also have to believe these other doctrines to be saved.’

In Romans 11 the apostle Paul makes it clear that the works of a man, that is, his attempts at obedience to God in an effort to recommend himself to God, is that which cancels out any possibility that he is properly, biblically pinning his hopes of salvation solely on the grace of God. A man who believes that any part of salvation is conditioned upon his own personal obedience to the laws of God, or that he is one of the elect because God foresaw that he would believe, or that it is he who comes to God, is a man who has not heard or does not believe that ALL of salvation is ALL by grace. In other words he is a person who has either not heard the full Gospel of the grace of God, of how He saves only by what He has done from election to final glory, or has heard it but flatly refuses to believe all of its blessed doctrines. No man has the right to expect the grace of God to save him who believes his own works play any part in his salvation (see Gal. 5:2-5). And no man who believes that anything short of believing all the doctrines that present the whole message of grace, which God’s Gospel of salvation is about, can expect the grace of God to save him, seeing that he does not believe that all the doctrines of all the grace of God in the salvation of His people are contained within the perimeters of the Gospel. A man is judged saved by what he believes the Gospel to be, and not by the extras he claims must be believed in addition to it. To deny any grace doctrine, which deals with salvation, its rightful place in the Gospel is to deny its necessity in God’s plan of salvation.

"And if by grace, then is it no more of works: otherwise grace is no more grace. But if it be of works, then is it no more grace: otherwise work is no more work" (Rom. 11:6). From these Holy Spirit-inspired words of the apostle Paul we see and learn that no work of man’s, no effort at obedience on the part of man, can possibly be added to that which contributes to the salvation of man. It stands to reason, then, that if no work of man’s is in the Gospel, then the Gospel must be filled with the grace of God in salvation. No man was ever either elected or saved based on anything he has done. Therefore, any gospel that fails to include within it the fact that the saved were all elected by God according to His grace and not their works (see Eph. 1:4-7 cf. 2 Tim. 1:9), a gospel which fails to state that it is purely by the obedience of ONE that a man is made righteous (Rom. 5:19 cf. Rom. 4:6), a gospel which fails to state that it is only by God that a man is made alive, or born again (Col. 2:13; Jas. 1:18), is a false gospel for it does not condition, and specifically attribute, all of salvation exclusively upon grace. The moment one has a gospel whose ‘grace’ fails to cover every aspect of salvation, one has a gospel that leaves room for a man to think that salvation is in some way dependant on what he must do or refrain from doing. The above verse is one of the clearest and most corroborative statements in all of Scripture to the fact that the entire Gospel of salvation is about the whole of the grace of God necessary for His people to be saved from their sins. If no work of man’s is said to be that which is necessary to his own salvation, then we must conclude that the whole of salvation is by the whole of grace. And, therefore, the whole of the Gospel Message must be that which includes every work of grace in the salvation of a man, leaving no room for a work of man’s to gain a foothold. If salvation can be by nothing that falls short of the whole of the grace of God, then equally, the Gospel cannot fall short of, and therefore is about nothing but, the whole of the grace of God in salvation. The Gospel is the Good News of salvation. ALL of salvation is ALL by the grace of God. Therefore, what else could the Gospel of salvation be about, what else was it meant to teach, but all of that very grace by which God saves.

If all this is so, and it is easily and biblically verifiable, what justification could any man have for not including every doctrine that teaches grace in salvation in the Gospel? An example of such nonsensical thinking follows: If a hammer is something used to drive a nail into wood, why would anyone, in describing what a hammer looks like, proceed to describe a hammer only by what its head looks like? ‘A hammer is a metal head.’ Who would be so stupid as to describe a hammer in such a way? Why not include the handle of the hammer in one’s depiction? What could justify its absence from the description? Imagine a person asked to paint a picture of a hammer only drawing the head! Would this be a proper portrayal of what a hammer looks like and is? Of course not. Even if one was in possession of a head of a hammer, one could not rightly describe it as a hammer, but only as the head of a hammer. The handle of a hammer, on its own, could also never rightly be described as a hammer, but only as the handle of a hammer. Only when the two parts of the hammer are joined together can it be rightly called a hammer. Even though the head of the hammer is the only part of the hammer that actually makes contact with the nail, driving it into the wood, the handle is an essential part of the hammer and something that the head needs in order to properly do its job. No sane reason could be offered to justify not including the handle of the hammer in a full and proper description of what a hammer is, and therefore looks like. So too, any gospel which fails to include every doctrine that teaches grace in salvation, cannot but leave a man under the false impression that God requires him to do something before God will save him. To describe the righteousness of Christ as the Gospel, or any of the other grace doctrines alone as the Gospel, is entirely wrong. Only when ALL the doctrines which teach salvation by grace are present does one have what God calls the Gospel.

Any claim that the Gospel contains only one doctrine, such as the righteousness of Christ, and that the other grace doctrines which are not included in the Gospel but are said to be essentials to saving faith, is self-destructive for to say that a doctrine is essential to saving faith one is saying that what that doctrine teaches HAD to occur for salvation to be made possible. Therefore if it is essential to salvation, it is essential to faith, and must by its very nature be essential to the Gospel. To say ‘the Gospel’ is to say ‘that which must be believed to be saved’ (see Christ’s words in Mark 16:15,16). So to say ‘Gospel’ and then add that other doctrines outside the Gospel must also be believed for one to be saved, is a nonsense! If one believes there are doctrines that lie outside of the Gospel which must be believed to be saved, one could never say with Christ, ‘Believe the Gospel and you shall be saved’. It is a concept so absurd, so utterly bereft of any logic, as to not be worthy of presentation to even the most ignoble of persons. It is most convenient, I must say, for those who believe that the Gospel is only made up of one doctrine, the righteousness of Christ, to say that the other essentials will automatically be believed as well. And to claim that a person who fails to believe those ‘non-Gospel’ doctrines reveals that they did not rightly believe in the righteousness of Christ in the first place, is just a cop out. The grace doctrines ALWAYS travel together. You will never find one without the others. To fully, properly and biblically believe in salvation by grace, one must know all the grace doctrines, for as all these doctrines are essentials to saving faith, each doctrine is necessary to a proper, biblical understanding of the others so that one may see how, and therefore fully believe why, all of salvation is all by grace, and as a consequence, why they are all essentials to the Gospel message.

Salvation is all of grace, for by grace are ye saved. One must believe that salvation is all by grace from election to glorification. The doctrines of the Gospel of grace are what must be believed. Therefore the Gospel is that which must teach all of the grace that was necessary in the salvation of God’s people. IF IT IS NOT ESSENTIAL TO SALVATION THEN IT IS NOT ESSENTIAL TO THE GOSPEL. To leave any part of grace out of the picture of salvation is to paint a picture without a background, or a landscape without a sky. The Gospel of God has not been taught if any of the doctrines of salvation by grace are bypassed or neglected. Regardless of whether or not they are said to be essentials to salvation, it is no Gospel of God’s if it does not include within it the whole grace story. Doctrines which talk about salvation are not footnotes to the Gospel, but are all inherently, and therefore essentially, part of the Gospel. As we have seen, the qualifications for a doctrine to be in the Gospel are that it must teach grace, or point to grace, and it must have to do with salvation. The moment one leaves out a grace doctrine from the Gospel, or tries to add a work of man’s to the grace of God, grace just disappears and all one is left with is a gospel that leaves room for the sickly, sin-riddled works of man. Paul the apostle writes of the Jews that they did not attain to the law of righteousness "...because they sought it not by faith, but as it were by the works of the law..." (Rom. 9:32). He bore record to the fact that the Jews had a zeal of God but that their zeal was not according to the right knowledge of God—Who He is and how He saves—as it is revealed in the Gospel of grace. Consequently, the Jews who did not believe in the Gospel of the grace of God because they held to a gospel, a salvation message, which allowed room for them to think that their works were a necessary factor in their salvation, failed to submit themselves unto the righteousness of God, for they stumbled around in a spiritual darkness attempting to establish a righteousness of their own by their own works (see Rom. 10:1-4). The law of grace declares that not only is there nothing man should try to do in order to get, or keep, himself saved, but that also there is nothing man can do that could get, or keep, him saved. A man truly saved by grace, who has had preached to him, and believes in, the whole Gospel of grace, will never look to who he is or what he has done as that which inspired God to choose him, or as necessary to the attaining or maintaining of his own salvation, or to himself as in any way a co-savior with Christ, or believe that he made a free-will decision to come to God, because the Gospel he believes has revealed to him that ALL of salvation is by all of the grace of God. The Gospel that such a man believes does not have any room in it, or leave any room, for any man to think that there is even one thing he must do to secure his salvation. So whether one believes in only some of the doctrines of grace, or if a person claims to believe in them all but does not include them all in the gospel they believe, is a person who has fallen for another gospel that has not been authored by God and countersigned by grace. Such a message that fails to speak of all the grace it took to save is a grace-less gospel, it is a God-less gospel. The only rightful, biblical place for a doctrine that deals with grace in salvation is in the Gospel. It does not fit anywhere else, it does not belong anywhere else. Each piece of a jigsaw puzzle has on it a portion of a picture and belongs nowhere else other than in that particular puzzle which portrays that particular picture. Any time you leave out even one piece of a puzzle you are left with an incomplete picture. Each grace doctrine, each ‘piece of the puzzle’ if you will, of salvation only fits the ‘puzzle’ that portrays the full picture of God’s Gospel of salvation. Each piece is connected to the big picture, and therefore must be joined with the other pieces to produce that big picture for if any are left out, or if anyone tries to form two separate pictures with them, all they will have is two distorted pictures, two failed attempts at creating one perfect picture. No piece of the salvation ‘puzzle’ will fit, or find a place, in any other ‘puzzle’ than the one whose big picture reveals God’s picture of His great salvation plan. Such doctrines do not reside anywhere else but in the Gospel for they deal with exactly what the Gospel of God is all about: GRACE!!! Grace is that which all the Gospel doctrines have in common, so why shouldn’t they all be included in that one Gospel which is about the grace of God in the salvation of man! ONLY THE WHOLE GOSPEL OF THE WHOLE GRACE OF GOD SHUTS OUT ANY POSSIBILITY THAT ANY PART OF SALVATION IS CONDITIONED ON THE WORKS OF A MAN. Only THAT Gospel can be rightly and biblically referred to as the Gospel of the grace of God. Therefore, the Gospel, or Good News of salvation, teaches all of the grace of God in the salvation of man. If it failed to teach even one doctrine that speaks of salvation, it would reveal itself to be a counterfeit gospel for it would fall short of preaching the whole message of the grace of God and would, consequently, leave room for man to boast. Just as there would be no salvation without everything necessary to salvation, no gospel that fails to articulate all the elements of what it took for salvation to become operational, could be the Gospel of that salvation. This is the very essence of what the apostle Paul spoke about in his warning to the Galatians. If anyone, be it an angel from heaven or even if Paul and the others with him were to return to them at a later date bringing with them a gospel which differed in any way, shape or form from the one he had already given to them, they were to count such gospels as false and those who preached them as accursed people (see Gal. 1:8,9). The only thing that can spoil the Gospel of God, and therefore leave one with a false gospel, is that which either adds a work of man’s to it, or one which leaves out any of its doctrines that reveal every part of that glorious plan of salvation which is according to grace and which shuts out any possibility that any person could ever think that any part of salvation is conditioned on what a man does. Either adding to, or taking away from, the doctrines of the grace of God’s Gospel will always leave a man to presume that some part of salvation is conditioned on him. No person can rightly and biblically claim to be a believer if they have not been born out of the Gospel of the glorious grace of the blessed God. And no true believer would ever turn his back on any doctrine of grace as being an essential, and therefore permanent, fixture of the Gospel of God which teaches that salvation is all by grace and that all of grace is necessary to salvation. And it is this very element of necessity, of essentialness (which no one is disputing) that is the surefire evidence that, along with grace, entitles a doctrine to its rightful place in God’s Gospel of salvation. If it is essential to salvation, it is essential to the Gospel of salvation.

Salvation is wholly dependant upon the grace of Almighty God and no part of that salvation relies on what a man does. This reveals to us the state, or spiritual condition, every man, including the elect prior to their salvation (Eph. 2:1-3), is in by nature. Not only does the Gospel of grace say that man must not try to do anything to get or remain saved, it shows that salvation can only take place through the grace of God, and only through the grace of God. It shows that grace was needed in the salvation of man, not to merely make up for man’s shortcomings in failing to recommend himself to God by his works, but as that which alone can save him and does save him from beginning to final glory. Therefore the doctrine that teaches the total depravity of man by nature, or total inability of man ever being able to come to God or even to desire Him, of his own accord, is also an essential to the Gospel of grace. If there is nothing man can or must do to be saved or stay saved, then it shows that man must be utterly dead to God in that he cannot ever make any headway in gaining acceptance with God or even in approaching God. The Gospel of grace cannot do without the teaching that establishes the fact that man can do nothing to save himself, or contribute to his salvation. The Bible in fact tells us that "...the world by wisdom knew not God..." Therefore no man, by nature, understands or even seeks the true God (see Rom. 3:10-12), Who saves totally and exclusively by His grace, so how anyone can think that salvation is in the least bit conditioned on man is rather a mystery. "By grace are ye saved" (Eph. 2:8)  saith the Scriptures, therefore the Gospel is about the grace of God in the salvation of His people. And if God has done everything to save His people, what else could His Gospel of their salvation be but a full explanation of how He has specifically done this miraculous act? How could the Gospel of the grace of God fail to teach every facet of that saving grace which was necessary to save His people from their sins? What right has anyone to think for a moment, who claims to believe in salvation by grace, that the whole of that grace which God’s entire salvation plan is in accord with, and by which God saves, is not part of, and therefore taught by, the vehicle of the great Gospel of God? We have seen that the Gospel is referred to as "the Gospel of your salvation" (Eph. 1:13), so coupled with "by grace are ye saved" (Eph. 2:8) and "the Gospel of the grace of God" (Acts 20:24), it is obvious that according to these three verses the Gospel is all about salvation and all about grace. Grace, salvation and Gospel are eternally inseparable. Grace and salvation are spoken of in the Gospel; salvation and the Gospel are all about grace; and grace and the Gospel are all about salvation—the former makes it possible and the latter proclaims it! Clearly then, the Gospel is about the grace of God in the salvation of man. Therefore, how could the Gospel be anything but a doctrinal manifestation of the whole of the grace of God in the salvation of His people? In light of this, can anyone imagine in their wildest thoughts that God would leave any part of the grace it took for Him to save His people out of the Gospel He Himself has called The Gospel, or Good News, of His grace? Or that God would view any part of His saving grace as not worthy of, and therefore not essential to, His great and glorious salvation plan as specified in and by the Gospel of grace? Any gospel which omits any grace doctrine, or which says that any doctrine of the grace of God in salvation has no place in the Gospel, which was given to reveal how God saves, is a false gospel and all those who believe it stand accursed.

To properly understand why it is that the grace of God is the only way God saves, one must believe in the doctrine that reveals that all of salvation must be all by grace: the total and utter deadness of man in sin and to God. To believe in salvation completely by grace, one must believe that man is utterly unable to come to God or even seek God. No gospel failing to teach this fundamental truth about the natural, fallen and lost spiritual state of all mankind, can claim any right to a salvation which is wholly by the work, or grace, of God. There would be no reason to have a Gospel like this, for if it is not specified that man is dead in sin and dead to God, one would automatically presume that one can, and therefore must, do something to attain salvation. A Gospel of salvation wholly by grace would have no basis! The doctrine that teaches the total, complete depravity of man, his inability to do anything that could place him in good favor with God, that would attract God to him, is the very launching pad of grace. Any gospel that does not include this teaching which plainly lays out the spiritual condition of all men by nature, thereby revealing that no part of salvation could be by the obedience of a man but totally, completely and absolutely by the grace of God, is a false gospel. For if one does not have this teaching, one has room for man to glory in what he can do. Absence of this doctrine precludes any man from saying with Paul, "...in me (that is, in my flesh,) dwelleth no good thing..." (Rom. 7:18 cf. Rom. 3:26-28). The true Gospel of the grace of God reveals that no part of salvation could ever be reliant upon what a man does, and thus that all of salvation is conditioned on the grace of God. The whole reason for a salvation plan that had to be completely conditioned on grace, which included sending a Savior to the earth, was that no man could do anything to save himself (Matt.19:25,26). All of salvation, from election to final glorification, is conditioned solely upon the grace of God. Therefore any gospel which fails to talk about and cover every area of salvation and show that all the requirements for salvation have been adequately dealt with by grace, is a false gospel. Those who do not believe the fact that man is dead to God and therefore without hope in this world, believe and promote Satan’s lie to Eve that she would not surely die, for they say ‘we are not surely dead.’ One who denies the spiritual death of all mankind (see Rom. 5:12) is in agreement with Satan himself, who authored the lie that man would not die if he disobeyed God in the Garden, and who is therefore the father of the lie that man is not dead in sin. Such a person cannot rightly lay claim to believing that all of salvation is wholly conditioned and solely dependant upon the whole of the grace of God, for nothing can be construed from the lie that man is not dead in sin and dead to God other than there lies within every man an innate ability to seek, understand and come to God. There would not be any need for a Gospel that promotes all of salvation is all by grace if man were not utterly dead in sin. None of the grace of God would have been required if man were able to recommend himself to God by his own obedience.

According to Romans 11:6, no one who believes that man is not dead in sin can possibly believe in a Gospel which is completely dependant on grace. On the contrary, they would have every reason to believe that at least part of salvation is conditioned upon the works of a man. If you have a gospel which fails to include every doctrine that reveals the grace of God in the salvation of His people, you have a message that gives you ground to believe that you have to, and therefore have the ability to, do something to get or remain saved. The sole purpose behind every gospel which teaches that man is not completely dead in sin is to instill in the minds of its hearers the theological perversion that man can and must do something to get, or remain, saved. Such a corruption of the truth is nothing less than a direct attack upon the only thing by which a man can be saved: the grace of God. If man could be saved by what he does, then grace would not be required at all in the salvation of a man and Christ’s sacrificial death would have been in vain (see Gal. 2:21). From the lie that man is not dead in sin comes the equally spurious teaching that he can, in and of his own free will, make a conscious decision to choose God. This in turn has produced a cavalcade of false teachings, one of which promotes the idea, which is the devilish doctrinal offspring of man’s not being utterly dead in sin, that teaches salvation is an offer, and that the Gospel must be preached to every individual as a personal promise to them. This act of ‘free will’ reveals the teaching that man is not, as the Bible teaches, hopeless without God but that God is hopeless without man, that He has no hope of saving anyone unless they make the decision to choose and accept Him. Salvation would therefore not be by the will of God, as the scriptures say (Jas 1:18), but by the will of man. For the Good News of grace to be preached, we must show the reason for the need of grace in the salvation of a man, indeed the need for salvation at all. This can only be done by a proper and biblical exposition of the spiritual state every man is in by nature: dead in sin and dead to God (see Eph. 2:1,5). We see an example of this in Paul’s introducing us to man’s depraved state in the opening three chapters of Romans before launching into grace.

It is important to remember that the whole of salvation is covered by the whole of grace. No part of that which is required in the salvation of a man has failed to be dealt with, entirely and comprehensively, by the grace of God. Therefore, there are absolutely no grounds for anyone to build a biblical argument for the Gospel of salvation failing to be that which embodies all the doctrines which teach the grace of God in salvation. There is no part of salvation that does not require the grace of God in the salvation of His people. No part of salvation is conditioned on man, but every square inch of it is conditioned on the grace of God. And the vehicle through which God teaches the individual doctrines which deal with grace in salvation is the Gospel. The Gospel cannot be anything short of this and it cannot be anything else but this. The whole of the Gospel is about the whole of salvation, which is about the whole of the grace of God. If it had to happen for salvation to exist, then it must be believed for salvation to be experienced. Put simply, when it comes to salvation, if God had to do it then man must believe it! If man must believe it then it must be in the Gospel of salvation, for Christ says that to believe the Gospel is to be saved. Consequently, to be saved is to believe the Gospel: all that God says had to be done to save His people. Yes, there is only one ground of salvation: the righteousness of Christ, but this is incontrovertibly linked to the other acts of the Trinity in the salvation of man. If it is essential to salvation, it is essential to belief; If it is essential to belief, it is essential to the Gospel; If it is essential to the Gospel, one simply cannot be saved without it and without belief in it. The resurrection of Christ does not save us, but we cannot be saved without it and therefore without belief in it (see 1 Cor. 15:14,17). Therefore the resurrection of Jesus Christ is most worthy of being a Gospel doctrine. To biblically speak of Christ is to speak of the risen Christ. If there can be no salvation without it, if one’s preaching and faith are all in vain without it, it must be necessary to salvation and therefore must be a Gospel doctrine. Election does not save us, but none can be saved without it. In order for men to be saved, an election by grace was essential, for without it, who would Christ have died for and who would the Holy Spirit have regenerated? The fact that Christ did not die for everyone, coupled with man’s outright inability to understand, seek and therefore choose God, proves an election by God through grace was an absolute necessity for anyone to be saved. Election, then, is also most worthy of being a Gospel doctrine, for there could be no salvation without it and therefore is something which must be believed if a man is to evidence a saved state. The quickening work of the Holy Spirit, alone, is not what saves us, but one cannot be saved without it. What good would it have done for God to elect a people, and Christ to die for those people, if all these remained unregenerated, if they all remained in an unregenerate state? Therefore regeneration is also worthy of being a Gospel doctrine, for there could be no salvation without it.

The Gospel is about Christ the Savior, it is about the sovereign election of an all powerful all-knowing God, it is about the quickening work of the Holy Spirit, but all these things that have been done to save a people for God come out of, and each Member of the Holy Trinity have worked through the means of, the glorious grace of God. Salvation is by grace, and as this carries with it no qualification, we must understand that all of salvation is all by grace. No part of salvation comes by means of anything else but the grace of God, and therefore a gospel that does not cover the whole of grace cannot be the Gospel which comes from God. It takes the whole of the grace of God to cover the whole of salvation. It takes the whole of the grace of God to save a man and therefore a man, to be truly saved, must believe in the whole Gospel of the whole grace of God. IF IT HAD TO BE DONE, IT HAS TO BE BELIEVED, AND IF IT HAS TO BE BELIEVED IT MUST BE IN THE GOSPEL! Man must see and know all that it took to save him and he must believe that every requirement for salvation was fulfilled, and could only have been perfectly fulfilled, by the whole of the grace of God. It does a man no good to believe that the ground of salvation is the righteousness of Christ if he has not heard of, or does not believe in, the election of grace which gave Christ the people He was to die for (see the author’s booklet, ‘Those Whom Thou Hast Given Me’). Any claim to believe in the righteousness of Christ is rendered null and void if one does not believe in election by grace, for to believe in the righteousness of Christ aright one must know who He died for, which reveals what He has done. Yes, "...believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved..." (Acts 16:31), but what is it to believe on Jesus Christ? Is it to remain ignorant of who He died for? How then would one know, and believe aright, what lies at the heart of the Gospel’s central tenet, what Christ has done? Some say, ‘The righteousness of Christ is all that the Gospel is about but one cannot be saved without knowledge of election and regeneration etc.’ They say these doctrines get preached to a person after they have believed in the righteousness of Christ. But how can these grace doctrines, especially election, be preached later and not as part of the Gospel, when they are the very things that define what Christ has done and for whom He has done it? Scripture says that to trust in Christ is only possible "...AFTER that ye heard the word of truth, the Gospel of your salvation..." (Eph. 1:13). To trust in Christ one must know what He has done and for whom He has done it. How this could be done without knowledge of election, that God gave His Son the people He was to die for and impute His righteousness to, is beyond me. How can one speak about what Christ has done and yet remain silent as to whom His Work pertains to? How can one speak about who Christ has died for, and established a perfect righteousness for, whilst remaining silent on election? Essential, then, to the preaching of Christ is what He did and who He did it for. How can one talk about Christ establishing righteousness without mentioning who Christ died for and that the Father elected these ones from before the foundation of the world according to His grace? How can one talk about what Christ has done and who His righteousness was established for, and imputed to, without mentioning those whom the Father has elected? It is as impossible as a man coming to God by his own free-will.

There can be no room for ambiguity when it comes to the preaching of the Gospel, especially the central doctrine of the Gospel: the righteousness of Christ. Imagine speaking of Christ’s death but not mentioning what He did by that death! What is a man supposed to believe about it? That He just physically died one day on a cross? Imagine, too, the preaching of Christ without any mention of exactly who He died for. Are we to simply say, ‘He died for hell-deserving sinners.’ Which sinners? Everyone? No? Then how praytell can we preach the Gospel truth that Christ ACTUALLY ATONED FOR THE SINS OF THOSE FOR WHOM HE DIED!!! What would we do with the words of God Himself Who said, "...for the transgression of MY people was He stricken..." and "...My righteous Servant (shall) justify many; for He shall bear THEIR iniquities" (Isa. 53:8 & 11). How can one keep the salvation truth that Christ was stricken for the sins of God’s people, and no others, from the Gospel? And how can one find biblical ground to rationalise hiding the truth of Christ’s justifying righteousness being connected with His bearing the sins of God’s elect people? Christ died for God’s people and they shall be justified because HE BORE THEIR SINS!!! Keep this from the Gospel and you have no Gospel. Keep this from your preaching of the righteousness of Christ and you have no righteousness! No preacher of God’s Gospel will withhold this most vital of information of what Christ did and who He did it for from those he proclaims the Gospel to. Why would he? Why withhold the very glory of Jesus Christ from the Gospel of Christ? How could one withhold what Christ did—actually accomplish atonement—from the Gospel by refusing to divulge the fact that the people Christ died for were the people God had elected and given to Him? How can you rejoice in what Christ has done without knowing who He has done it for? How could this possibly serve the hearers and how could such preaching be a service to the Lord? Why, none can even mention the name of Christ without alluding to what He did and who He did it for, for the Savior was named Jesus "...for He shall save His people from their sins" (Matt. 1:21). So much for those who want to keep who Christ died for secret from the ungodly, but insist that knowing who He died for is essential to salvation.

In order to see whether or not a doctrine is part of the Gospel, one must ask oneself, Could there be salvation without it? Could there be salvation if God had not elected a people from before the foundation of the world? How could there be? Who would Christ have died for and who would the Holy Spirit have regenerated, and how could anyone be drawn to God if they had not first been predestinated? Could there be salvation had Christ not lived a perfect life and atoned for the sins of the one’s God entrusted to Him? How could there be? Who would have benefitted from what Christ did if God had not elected a people for Him to do it for? Don’t tell me people would have chosen Him and accepted Him, for if this could have occurred, if people could have come to Him in and of their own free-will, there would have been no need for an election of grace. What use would there be for the Holy Spirit to regenerate people if their sins had not been atoned for and a perfect righteousness established? Could there be salvation if the Holy Spirit did not quicken people, open their eyes to, and grant them faith to believe, the truth? How could there be? What would have been the use of God electing a people for Christ to die for, if all remained in their spiritually blind state and thus could never see and understand and believe what had been done for them? From all this we see how very necessary the work of the Trinity is to salvation, and therefore how essential it is to believe what the Trinity did in the salvation of man. That any of these doctrines could even be thought of being left out of the Gospel is in itself a travesty.

Only the doctrine of election according to grace can bring to light how those Christ died for got to be the ones He died for. This is vitally important, for to not be taught rightly about how one got to be who Christ died for is to be left with only two alternatives: (1) Christ died for everyone and one’s decision for Christ is what makes the difference between those who go to heaven and those who go to hell, or (2) one’s acceptance of Christ was foreseen and was, subsequently, the basis for Christ’s dying for that person. How the ones Christ died for got to be the ones He died for is crucial to knowing what He did on that cross. For to not speak of election is to not speak of those Christ died for, which is to not speak accurately of His righteousness, making it impossible to speak honestly about what He has done. Therefore the righteousness of Christ makes no sense if it is not accompanied by the other grace doctrines which make up the Gospel of God. The Gospel does not leave anything unexplained. No part of what grace had to do in the salvation of God’s people leaves anything to the imagination. The Gospel is about what God had to do and what the people have to believe. That God elected His people in eternity is just as important as Christ dying for those people in history. From this we see that election is very much a part of the Gospel and no mere footnote. One man has stupidly said, ‘Election did not die on the cross therefore election is not in the Gospel.’ Well, I dare say righteousness did not die on the cross either but does this mean that righteousness is not in the Gospel? Of course not!! The Father did not die on the cross either but this cannot rule out what the Father did as being essential to a grace-based salvation knowledge. The Holy Spirit did not die on the cross but does this automatically rule out of the Gospel the essentiality of what He has done in the salvation of a man? Of course not. Regeneration did not die on the cross, neither did resurrection, or sanctification, or repentance, or faith but no one can be saved if even one of these salvation elements is missing. This kind of thinking has been borne out of the flawed notion that the ground of salvation, Christ’s righteousness, is the entire Gospel. Nowhere in the scriptures is this taught. The Gospel reveals the righteousness of Christ but is not exclusively about the doctrine of the righteousness of Christ, for it is termed the Gospel of the GRACE of God. It is the Gospel, or Good News, of what the entire Godhead has done and not simply One Member. The Father elected His people unto righteousness, the Holy Spirit regenerates those people to receive that righteousness and Christ has actually produced that righteousness which is imputed to them. Some who hold to the ‘righteousness only’ gospel say that election must not be preached to the ungodly, that only the righteousness of Christ should be preached, and once a person ‘believes’ this then one can preach election etc. If election must not be preached to the ungodly, and one is not saved who has yet to believe in election and the other grace doctrines, and if it can be preached to one who ‘believes’ in the righteousness of Christ, are we to understand that those who believe in only the righteousness of Christ as the Gospel are godly but not saved? Perhaps the ‘evidence’ for such a claim is ‘found’ in some of Paul’s writings. Because Paul wrote about election, our spiritual depravity and the quickening work of the Holy Spirit etc. to those who were already believers, in passages such as Ephesians 1 & 2, it could be gleaned that they were saved prior to learning these truths, while ignorant of them in fact. This is a perfect example of eisegesis, interpreting a biblical text using one’s own ideas, in other words reading into the scriptures what is simply not there, for the same can be said about Christ’s righteousness, the ground of our salvation (see Rom. 3-5). Paul also wrote to believers about this, but does that mean we are to assume that one does not have to believe, or even know about, the righteousness of Christ before one is saved? Of course not. Are we to assume that because Paul wrote to believers about redemption and even the fact that they are saved by grace (see Eph. 1 & 2), this means they were ignorant of these Gospel essentials yet saved? Hardly. Then we have Paul’s preaching to the men of Athens, in Acts 17, where neither election nor the righteousness of Christ are mentioned. Are we to glean from this that neither doctrine is essential to Gospel preaching? Of course not. Now, our enemies will say, ‘But Acts 17;18 says that Paul preached Jesus unto them, so he must have included righteousness.’ This is true, but if Paul preached about righteousness he must also have spoken about the fact that Christ’s death was for all the elect of God, for to preach Christ aright one must speak about what He has done and to rightly elucidate what Christ has done, one must speak about those for whom He has done it. One man has said, ‘You can preach the Gospel all day and never mention election.’ Of this I have no doubt, for there are many who preach false gospels all day long who do not mention election, as if embarrassed, or even ashamed, of such a teaching. You cannot speak about righteousness without specifying who that righteousness was established for and imputed to. To separate who Christ died for from the righteousness He has established, is to draw a line between what He has done and those for whom He has done it. More on this later. All of what it took to get God’s chosen ones from a lost state to a saved state, from election to final glorification, must be believed. The Gospel is all about grace and salvation, therefore all such doctrine that deals with grace and salvation is Gospel doctrine.

The belief of the truth of the word of His Gospel does not take an age to complete, it does not come slowly and gradually, but the whole Gospel is believed at the outset of one’s being born again, for no spiritual birth can occur without the seed of the whole Gospel of God. No spiritual birth has occurred without belief in all of the grace necessary to ensure and secure salvation. The Gospel is the Seed of grace, and the Body of Christ is the product, or fruit, of that grace, and none can be saved who know not what that Seed of grace, the Gospel, is. A seed is not sown in the ground after the tree has begun to grow. No part of a seed is withheld in the sowing stage and only added as an afterthought once growth, or life, is evident. The whole seed is that which must be sown and then, and only then, comes the life. The Seed of God is the whole Gospel and not merely part of it. "Being born again...of incorruptible (seed), by the Word of God....And this is the Word which BY THE GOSPEL is preached unto you" (1 Pet. 1:23,25). From the Word comes the life; from the Gospel, which is preached to you, or sown in you, comes the life. Therefore a man is born again when he is born of the whole Gospel, the whole Seed of God, and not just part of it. Relevant to this is the fact that if one plants a whole apple seed, an apple tree will result. But if any part of that apple seed is cut off, even if it receives the slightest nick, it is corrupted and nothing will grow from that seed! Nothing in the physical world used symbolically in the Scriptures to represent a spiritual truth will conflict with its spiritual counterpart. If a man could be saved by believing part of the Gospel, there would be room for him to believe wrongly about the part he remains ignorant of. And this would reveal his gospel as nothing but a false gospel, for none can say that the Gospel of God, the only Gospel which saves, contains or could contain any falsehood whatsoever. Having a faith which believes in only a few salvation doctrines and not all, is to have a faith which is indistinguishable from the faith that is common to all men, by which God has never saved anyone. Each grace doctrine is part of that Gospel Seed, and not one of those doctrines stands alone as the Gospel of God and relegates the others to mere fruits. No one is born again who remains ignorant of any part of salvation. The Gospel is the Seed of God, therefore the Gospel of the grace of God is the Seed of God which gives birth to His eternal offspring. This is due in part to the fact that there must be no room, when it comes to the salvation of a man, for man to boast in any of his works as that which contributes to a man’s salvation. No one claiming to be saved by the grace of God could possibly be ignorant of what the Gospel of that grace teaches. They cannot either knowingly or ignorantly deny any of the grace doctrines, all that it took for God to save His people by His grace, or the rightful place each of these doctrines have in the Gospel, thereby changing what the Gospel is and what they must believe at the outset of their Christian lives.

From all this, it is not difficult to see that the Gospel of the grace of God could never be made up of only one doctrine, no matter what it is. For no one doctrine can cover, or was meant to cover, the whole of the work of grace in salvation. I can immediately hear the enemies of the cross say, ‘But there is only one doctrine that is the ground of salvation, therefore only belief in one doctrine is necessary at the outset of a believer’s life.’ My response is: How can you preach about what Christ did if you do not mention those whom He did it for, and therefore election? How will you preach Christ’s death, and imputation of righteousness, if you do not mention the chosen generation? You cannot say, ‘Christ died’, for whom did He die for? You cannot even say that ‘Christ saves’, without explaining how He saves, which will reveal who He saves. Can you begin to see that the doctrine of Christ’s righteousness does not stand alone, and therefore cannot be preached without the other doctrines which explain saving grace? No one Member of the blessed Trinity did all that was necessary to save God’s people from their sins, but rather the entire Godhead was needed and necessary for the salvation of God’s elect. Yes, Christ had to die for a people to establish for them a righteousness by which God could pronounce them just, but there would have been no people for Christ to die for had the Father not elected a people based on His purpose and grace. Imagine leaving out the Father’s work from the Gospel or that of the Son’s! Imagine the Gospel of salvation without the Almighty Holy Spirit! Or imagine Christ saying to His people, ‘You don’t have to believe that what My Father did or what the Holy Spirit did in salvation is in the Gospel, just believe what I did. You don’t have to believe that I atoned for the sins of My people, those whom the Father gave Me, just believe that I atoned for sins. You don’t have to believe that My righteousness is imputed to God’s elect, just believe that My righteousness is imputed.’ What a way to proclaim the glorious Christ and the fact He has died for God’s chosen, whom the Holy Spirit quickens. Christ could not have done what He did if He were not given the people He was to die for, and all of this would have been pointless if the Holy Spirit did not quicken each one of those people that they might believe with the faith of God. This is why Christ came to the earth after God had elected the people He was to be a Substitute for, just as the High priest performed his sacrifice after he had been directed by God to do it for His people. In light of all this, it is made clear that you cannot separate the doctrines of grace for they enhance one another and justify each other’s very existence. To rightly believe one is to know and believe the others.

NO ESSENTIAL TO SALVATION EXISTS OUTSIDE THE GOSPEL. Each Gospel doctrine, each act in the salvation of man, made the subsequent act possible which in turn confirmed the necessity of the one which preceded it. For instance, there could have been no atonement if there was no election whereby those whose sins were to be atoned were determined. Therefore, election made atonement possible and atonement confirms that those whose sins were atoned for had to have been previously elected by grace unto salvation. Likewise, there could be no regeneration if Christ had not done what He did for the people God chose. Therefore, if God had not chosen a people for Christ to die for, there would have been no need of, and no purpose for, regeneration for all would have remained in their sin. If one cannot separate what Christ did from what the Father has done and what the Holy Spirit does, then surely these great acts cannot be detached from the Gospel message. To separate the grace doctrines which make up the Gospel, in any way and for any reason, is to split the Trinity. It is to cause division within the Triune Godhead by saying that one doctrine is more important than the others or that one Member of the Trinity is more important than the other. It would be pointless to say ‘Christ established perfect righteousness’ if there had not been a people for Him to establish righteousness for and impute it to, and if these one’s were never made alive to God, and therefore His salvation truth. To cause division within the Trinity is to say that one can be saved without the work of the Father or the Holy Spirit but by the Son alone, or without the work of the Son or the Father but by the Holy Spirit alone, or without the work of the Son and Holy Spirit but by the Father alone. It is to say that the work of one or more Persons in the Trinity is not an essential and irrevocable part of the Gospel, of God’s salvation plan. Again, when speaking of salvation, if it had to be done it must then be believed. If it had to be done to save, then it must be in the Gospel that saves, and if it is in the Gospel that saves it must be believed for one to be saved. It is nonsensical, blasphemous, and of the highest heretical order, to cause the doctrines of the Gospel of the grace of God, which deal with salvation, and therefore the Trinity itself, to be in competition with each other. Salvation is a work of the WHOLE GODHEAD!! Salvation is a work that took all of the grace of God to make perfect and is something that can never be, if there is any part of it missing. If one is ignorant of any part of the grace it took to save a man, or knowingly refuses to believe in the whole of grace as that which is necessary to save a man—that which Scripture calls The Gospel—one is destitute of the truth and remains an unjustified sinner.

Choose any doctrine of the Gospel of God’s grace as that which alone must be believed in order for a man to be saved and you will immediately see the gaping holes which are left which can only leave a man to think that he must perform certain works in order to make his salvation complete, or that He was chosen because of something God foresaw he would do, or that regeneration comes after one has made his ‘choice’ for God. Any ‘Gospel’ that demands the belief of anything lying outside of it, such as who Christ actually died for and their election according to grace, as essential to salvation, which does not already have these teachings encapsulated in it, reveals itself as an incomplete gospel, a powerless gospel, a gospel which simply cannot save. Such a concept is foreign to all that the Scriptures teach. In other words, a gospel that requires supplementation of any kind, even if that supplementation is made up of right doctrine, before one can be pronounced saved, is a gospel that God has not authored, it is not the Gospel of salvation. For it to be the Gospel of salvation, it stands to biblical reason that belief in all that is in the Gospel is enough to save. For it to be the Gospel of salvation, it stands to biblical reason that everything to do with salvation must be in that Gospel. Some may argue, ‘But we are not supplementing the Gospel because the things we speak of are all to do with salvation, and we don’t take away from those doctrines because we insist that one must believe them to be saved.’ THEN WHY AREN’T THEY IN THE GOSPEL!!! And if they are not in the Gospel, why must they be believed? What have you turned the Gospel into if one remains lost whilst believing it? How can you say that there are doctrines which are essential to salvation, but not part of the Good News of salvation? The Gospel is what a person must believe to be saved (Mk. 16:16). Once you believe the Gospel you evidence a saved state. So to say that there is anything one must believe in addition to what Christ Himself has said is essential to, and therefore sufficient for, salvation, IS adding to God’s Word. Believe the Gospel and you shall be saved is God’s declaration. To say that one must believe anything outside of that Gospel to be saved is to say, ‘Believe the Gospel and you will not be saved until you believe these other things which are not part of what you must believe to be saved. It is sheer and utter nonsense. "If one can be saved whilst being wrong or ignorant of a grace doctrine, how then can it be essential to one’s salvation?" No one can prove or show from the Word of God that there exists anything outside of the Gospel itself that is an essential to the salvation of a man. Christ says that those who believe the Gospel "SHALL BE SAVED" and those who don’t believe the Gospel—who fail to believe all of its doctrines, or even all but one of its doctrines—"shall be damned" (see Mk. 16:16). So we see that whatever the Gospel is, once you believe its teachings, you evidence a saved state. Therefore there can be nothing outside of what the Gospel teaches that can be said to be essential to salvation, for Christ pronounces you saved upon your belief of His Gospel. Belief of the Gospel shows that God has regenerated you, made you alive, to see and believe all that it took to save you and that it is all due to the grace of God, which His Gospel teaches. Failure to believe all that the Gospel says and is, is to reveal a lost state. There are things over which not all Christians are in agreement, and things that all Christians agree are not part of the Gospel, but rather the fruit of believing it. But every Christian believes the same doctrines of the same Gospel of the grace of God. No one can say, after reading these words of the Lord Jesus Christ, that there is anything essential to salvation which lies outside of the doctrines of the Gospel of the grace of God. In light of this, how can anyone fall for such a lie and say that a doctrine dealing with grace in salvation, which is therefore an essential to a right and saving knowledge of God, Who He is and how He saves, is not part of the Gospel of the grace of salvation?

Gospels that do not cover the whole of the grace of God leave a man with nothing else to conclude but that salvation is partly conditioned on what he does rather than on all of what God has done to save him by His grace. The Gospel is that which must be believed if any are to be saved. The reason for this is that the Gospel articulates what God has done to save His people from their sins. It shows what it is that God has done, and by what means He has done it, that a man must place his trust in and look to for the whole of his salvation and not some of it or even most of it. The doctrines of the Gospel of the grace of God must all be believed, for salvation is based on what a man believes, what he trusts in. TO TRULY TRUST IN GRACE, ONE MUST BELIEVE IN GRACE, THE WHOLE OF GRACE. Salvation is by grace through faith. Therefore, as there can be no salvation without the whole of grace, there can be no saving faith unless it is that faith which believes in the whole of the Gospel of the whole of the grace of God. Faith is given so that grace might be believed, so that salvation can be evidenced. There is no salvation evident unless all the doctrines of the Gospel of the grace of God are firmly and unremittingly believed. If one does not trust in the true God and the only way He saves, which is totally by grace, one cannot be said to be a true believer, for it is obvious that one has not received the faith of God, by the grace of God, to believe exclusively all of what He has said must be believed if any are to be saved. If one is to believe in and hope in and trust in that whereby God saves His people, one must believe in all that God has done, not just one part of it, via His great plan of salvation, which plan is revealed in His Gospel. If one holds to a gospel which does not reveal that whole plan of salvation by grace, one simply does not have the Gospel of God. Whether your gospel is made up of one doctrine, or all but one doctrine, you have not the Gospel of God unless you have ALL the doctrines that have to do with grace and salvation. One can be assured that God’s Gospel teaches all of the grace it took to save all of His people from their sins. It leaves nothing to the imagination. It needs, and therefore leaves, nothing to be added to it. There is nothing you must believe subsequent to the Gospel in order to be saved, or ‘more saved’.

Before we proceed any further in our study of what qualifies a teaching as part of the Gospel of salvation, before we look any further into that which actually defines, and therefore that by which God has determined the doctrines of the Gospel, let us spend some time looking more closely at the claim of those who insist that the Righteousness of Christ is the only doctrine that must be preached and believed, and therefore what the Gospel of God is about, in order for a person to show they have been justified by God. Of particular significance is the fact that coupled with this teaching there exists an unwarranted yet quite concentrated attack on the doctrine of election. It is said that election, though a true and very real part of essential salvation knowledge, must never be preached to the ungodly! The reason for this, according to some people, is that if election were mentioned it would prevent the Gospel being preached as a sincere promise to every individual ever born, and so would cause people to wonder if they were elect rather than concentrating on what Christ has done. There are some of those in the ‘Calvinist’ camp who say that election is the Gospel. That once one has preached sovereign election, one has preached the Gospel of God. This is as ignorant a statement as that which says that once one has preached the righteousness of Christ one has preached the whole Gospel of God. Let me make it quite clear that election is NOT the Gospel but there can be no Gospel, no complete Message of the grace of God, without it. The same can be said about regeneration. Regeneration is not the Gospel but there can be no Gospel, no complete salvation message, without it. If the righteousness of Christ is the heart of the Gospel, then its soul is the election of grace: God electing the people to whom Christ’s righteousness would be imputed. Again, this unwarranted attack on the beautiful, love-motivated, grace-based doctrine of election as part of the Gospel is based on the teaching that one cannot preach the Gospel as a sincere promise to all, reprobate included, if election is part of that Gospel. One cannot say to an individual or to a crowd of people that ‘God has chosen you’ or ‘Christ has died for you’ and so election is left out. But where in the Scriptures is the Christian directed to preach to anyone that ‘God has chosen you’ or ‘Christ has died for you’? "Moreover as God wants to save all and offers Christ to all in the preaching, the Gospel is reduced to a crippled truncated version of itself. You cannot under the offer preach the doctrine of election as good news for sinners that, ‘all that the Father giveth Me shall come to Me’ (Jn. 6:37). This goes into the theological closet. Likewise, since faith, repentance and conversion are the conditions man must fulfill to receive the proffered salvation, they also can no more be preached as the glorious work of God, the effectual fruit of the atonement. They too must go into the theological closet. The Gospel is reduced to a truncated word about the cross, without its efficacy, design, power and purpose. That by ‘one offering He hath perfected forever them that are sanctified’ (Heb. 10:14) belongs in the closet, it is too definite. Soteriology and the saving efficacy of the cross in Christology, likewise join God’s Sovereignty in the theological closet, especially on the mission field. Instead an unfruitful divine desire to save all men must be preached." This election-less preaching to the ungodly is the flip side of the coin which promotes the spurious teaching of the Primitive Baptists that Christians are to only preach the Gospel to the elect! But how can one know who is elect prior to their hearing and believing the Gospel of God? How one can recognise an elect person before their belief of the Gospel is a mystery none can solve. Equally mysterious is the claim that one cannot preach the Gospel to people if election is part of that Gospel. But how can it be preached that Christ died to save His people from their sins but not that God elected those people according to His glorious grace? Were this claim found to be true, we would also have to say that one could not, in the preaching of the Person and Work of Christ, preach what He actually did on the cross for this would reveal who He had done it for. To speak of who Christ died for is to instantly speak of a select group of people and not every individual ever born. That this could be done without mention of election by grace is an impossibility. How could, and why would, anyone want to freely talk about the act of grace of Christ’s dying for His people but not mention the act of grace that elected those people whom Christ was to die for? If you do not agree with this, try and preach Christ and Him crucified to yourself and see if you can do it without mentioning what He did, who He did it for, and why He had to do it. Any preaching of Christ and what He has done that is not as specific and definite as what He did, will always lead to some form of universalism. The angel in Matthew 1:21 declared election when he said of the Lord Jesus, "...He shall save His people from their sins"; and Christ also preached election when He proclaimed, "I am the Good Shepherd: the Good Shepherd giveth His life for the sheep"; and "...I lay down My life for the sheep" (Jn. 10:11,15). Christ had no problem speaking of election to His disciples and the unregenerate: "Jesus proclaimed the election that is of grace and the Gospel of grace before large congregations of lost people. He did not try to hide the elective grace of God. To a large crowd of more than 5,000 He declared, "All that the Father giveth Me shall come to me...and this is the Father’s will which hath sent Me, that of all which He hath given Me I should lose nothing, but should raise it up again at the last day" (Jn. 6:37-39). On another occasion Jesus was speaking to a congregation of people among whom were lost folk. He said to some of them: "...ye believe not, because ye are not of My sheep..." (Jn. 10:26). He then proceeded to say unto them: "My sheep hear My voice..." Jn. 10:27)." Those who frown upon the preaching of the doctrine of election to the lost, who condemn us for preaching the election of grace as part of the Gospel when the lost are present, are obliged to condemn the angel’s declaration in Matthew as well as the preaching of Jesus and the apostles, for they never kept the light of the Gospel of grace hidden away in some sanctified corner. As we have seen, election is a doctrine of grace that the Gospel of grace cannot do without and therefore it MUST be preached as part of that Gospel.

Various ones, even some so-called reformed folk, have gotten it into their heads that the Gospel is to be preached as a personal promise to everyone, that it is an open and free ‘offer’ of salvation to all. Because of this, some claim that nothing should be part of the Gospel but the ground of salvation: the righteousness of Christ. This ‘free offer’ is the essence, the very heart, of Arminian teaching that has spawned the doctrinal monstrosity known as universal atonement, and scores of other perverted doctrines! Where, it may well be asked, does the Word of God say that the Gospel is to be preached as a promise to all? Of a certainty, anyone who believes the Gospel will be saved, but this is a far cry from what is taught by the enemies of the Gospel, that the Gospel must be preached as a personal promise to all who hear it. "Nowhere in the Bible does God make an offer of salvation to anyone. He doesn’t even offer the Gospel to His elect! The Bible never uses the word ‘offer’ or ‘proffer’ in connection with the Gospel. The word(s) that is used in conjunction with it is ‘preached’", (which can mean proclaim or publish), or ‘declare’ (1 Thess. 2:9; Heb. 4:2; 1 Cor. 15:1). "Salvation through Jesus Christ is to be proclaimed," it is to be announced and published "throughout the world, but never is an offer to be made to accept Him or for salvation (see Matt. 24:14; 26:13; Mk. 6:12; 16:20; Lk. 4:44; Acts 8:5; 9:20;13:5; 14:7; Col. 1:23)." The only offer the Bible alludes to when speaking of Christ is that which He has made to the Father in offering Himself up as a perfect sacrifice for those whom the Father has given Him (see Jn. 6:37). Paul told the Christians at Ephesus that Christ "...hath given Himself for us an offering and a sacrifice to God for a sweet smelling savour" (Eph. 5:2 cf. Heb. 7:27; 9:14; 10:10,14).

The Gospel is a declaration of what must be believed in order for one to be saved. The Gospel stipulates what the salvation of God’s people involved, and consequently what they all must, and will, believe. The Gospel cannot be preached to anyone as a personal promise, that ‘this is what God has done for you’, but only as a proclamation, a public announcement, of what it is that God has done to save, NOT EVERYONE, but His people from their sins. One cannot keep secret who salvation is for, just as one cannot be secretive about what has been done to save. How can one preach salvation without preaching what has been done to save and for whom salvation has been purchased? As we have already learned, one cannot even preach the name of Christ without alluding to those He would save. Matthew 1:21 tells us: "...thou shalt call His name JESUS: for He shall save His people from their sins." This verse of Scripture alone encapsulates the Person of Christ, the Work of Christ, and who He would die for—which tells us what He would do and in turn shows that He would be the Savior Who would save HIS people from their sins. You cannot preach Christ unless you speak of what He did and for whom He did it. Once believed, the Gospel becomes a personal statement by God to the believer that this is what God has done to save him from his sins. Words such as preached and proclaim teach us that the Gospel is never taught as "...an offer conjoined to that proclamation. Nowhere in the scriptures do we ever find the blasphemous idea that God is begging or pleading with sinners to ‘accept’ His Son....We are to just preach and proclaim the Good News, and God makes the application to those that He has predestined. This idea of the ‘offer of salvation’ comes from the belief that spiritually dead people can regenerate themselves by their own free will unto salvation." Verses like John 10:28 and John 17:2 show us that eternal life is given to God’s chosen ones and not something that is ‘offered’ to the world. "Salvation is applied to the elect, but never offered. It is preached to the world, but never offered. The offer destroys the authority, seriousness and power of the call of the Gospel by introducing an anaemic gospel of an impotent god. The very need for a Sovereign Savior of mere grace is destroyed, for God is said to offer that which was not purchased in the blood of Christ, to desire to impart to sinners that which Christ did not effect on the cross for them. It destroys the holiness, righteousness and truth of God. It sets God’s mercy against His own justice by overthrowing the principles of atonement. Jesus no longer actually saves, but only wants to if we will accept Him. It is demeaning to Christ crucified." The Gospel, therefore, is to be proclaimed as a heavenly statement that this is how God saves. The Gospel is intrinsically a declaration of how God saves and who God saves; that salvation is wholly of God and therefore wholly of grace and does not require even a single work of man’s to ensure its success. If the Gospel leaves no room for man to boast in what he has done, then it must be that grace covers all that was necessary for the salvation of a man, from election to glorification. If that grace in salvation is not what the Gospel of salvation is about, then someone had better rewrite the Bible! A Gospel that pronounces the spiritual deadness of man cannot expect, and therefore presume, to call on man to make a free-will decision to ‘accept’ Christ by making itself an offer to every individual. To properly offer the Gospel to every man, one must preach a christ who has died for every man. Otherwise one would have the absurd situation of Christ dying only for the elect, but what He did for them being offered to those for whom He did not die, upon the condition of their faith!! The Gospel of grace pronounces the deadness of man and then turns his attention to the grace of God as the only thing by which he can be saved.

Christ told His disciples to "...preach (not offer) the Gospel to EVERY creature" (Mk. 16:15). And one could not find a word further removed from the principle of what it means to offer, than ‘preach’! To offer something is to present something for acceptance or rejection. What Christ did does not become real upon a person’s acceptance of it, but upon the Father’s acceptance! Christ’s sacrifice was made for His people TO God. Christ is not on offer to men but is an offering to God, and it is God’s acceptance of Christ’s sacrificial offering which has validated and confirmed what He has done as that which takes away the sins of those He did it for (see Eph. 5:2; Heb. 9:12,14; 10:12). God promised an inheritance for His people and it was put into force by the Death of His Beloved Son, Jesus Christ. Therefore it was by means of Christ’s death, and not the ‘free-will’ acceptance of it, that put into effect His last Will and Testament (see Heb. 9:15-17). The receiving of this great gift of salvation is, in reality, not a work of man’s but the granting of a gift by God; it is the moment that God has appointed to open the eyes of one of His elect by His Holy Spirit through regeneration. Religion has always placed the emphasis on the moment (in time) when a man is saved, on man’s choosing God, on man assenting to the will of God, when in reality it is the granting and reception, by God’s grace, of a Gift—the Gift of salvation. It is a presentation by a loving God to a vessel made willing by Him to receive it (see Heb. 9:15,16; 9:22; Lev. !7:11). In terms of salvation being an offer to all, it would mean that salvation had been achieved for all, otherwise how could one offer that which has no basis in reality? How could a man both love his wife and simultaneously offer that love to another woman? His love is exlcusively for his wife and is not made available for any other woman. So too, Christ’s love is for His people, those whom God has given Him, and what He has done for them is not available or offered to anyone else (see Eph. 5:25). In short, Christ did not offer Himself to the world but to God (Eph. 5:2). "There was never a generalized atonement or sacrifice made on behalf of all men and nations. Abel’s sacrifice, a firstling of his flock, availed for himself but not for Cain. On the first Passover, each family’s firstborn was protected by their own, individual, specific lamb. There was no lamb slain universally, offered to Israelites and Egyptians alike, if they would only accept it. In the Old Testament, offerings were always offered to God. God is never presented as offering love, salvation, grace, a chance, or anything else to the sinner. The Gospel is not ‘Christ died for sins.’ It is not ‘Christ died for you.’ Nowhere does any prophet or apostle say indiscriminately, ‘Christ loves you,’ ‘God loves you,’ or ‘Christ died for you’ to a general audience. The Gospel is never ‘Christ died for your sins,’ but it entails exactly "...how that Christ died for OUR sins according to the Scriptures" (1 Cor. 15:3). WHOEVER IS INCLUDED IN THE ‘OUR’, ALONG WITH PAUL, MUST BE DEFINED BY THE OLD TESTAMENT SCRIPTURES OR IT IS NOT THE GOSPEL. Then, in order to have the true Gospel, (1) Christ, (2) died, (3) our and (4) sins must all be defined according to the Old Testament Scriptures. Man’s idealistic and often hypocritical ‘love for mankind,’ his desire to offer salvation to all, and his hatred of sovereign election are all part of a false and perverted gospel."

Atonement was not conditioned on a man’s choice, but was made by Divine appointment for those God had Sovereignly elected unto salvation. The Lord Jesus informed His disciples that those who hear Him and believe shall be saved, and that those who hear and do not believe shall be condemned, in fact, are condemned already (Mk. 16:16; Jn. 3:18)! This certainly would have prevented His disciples from ever thinking that anyone would be saved who ‘believed’ some of the Gospel doctrines, but not the whole Message, or that any were to be judged saved because of their character and conduct, despite their not believing the Gospel. Those who believe the whole Message of the whole grace of God shall be saved and those who do not believe any of it, part of it, or even most of it but not all of it, WILL NOT!! How can the Gospel possibly be preached as a promise to all, when Christ has died only for those God has given Him? The command is for it to be preached to all because we do not know who will believe. The command is for all to repent, but this is not because all can repent based on their alleged ‘free will’, it is simply a call to all types of men—poor, rich, good, bad—men of every nation, be they paupers or kings. All must repent, all must believe, if any are to be saved.

How could the whole Gospel ever be preached, and therefore how could salvation ever take place, if the great truth of Christ’s death for God’s elect, which contains within it what Christ has actually done, is hidden away in some dark corner? To clear up any misgivings one might have as to whether or not the Gospel is to be preached as a personal promise, or as an offer, to everyone, we turn to Acts 2:39 which states in no uncertain terms: "For the promise is unto you, and to your children, and to all that are afar off, even as many as the Lord our God shall call." Here the writer speaks of the promise of the Holy Spirit in connection with salvation. That this promise, that all who repented and believed would receive the gift of the Holy Spirit, was not only for the current generation but extended to future generations. Clearly, the promise is not to all, in terms of every individual, but to all whom the Lord shall call. God cannot and has not promised anything to anyone He has not done anything for! The promise of eternal life is to His seed, His people, and no others (see Heb. 2:16,17). Those who believe this, believe that God has elected a people to be saved, has elected a people for His Son to die for, has elected a people for His Holy Spirit to quicken. No one can be saved who does not believe this. The Scriptures say that salvation is of faith "...that it might be by grace; to the end the promise might be sure TO ALL THE SEED..." (Rom 4:16; cf. Isa. 45:17,25; 53:10,11; Rom. 9:1-8; Gal. 3:6,7,16-18,29). The promise of salvation is to all of God’s seed. As all the work of salvation was performed on the behalf of, and for the benefit of, the seed, how could one go about sincerely promising salvation to every individual, and then condition that salvation on their faith and repentance? How can one say to every individual, ‘Christ has died for you’, when the Scriptures make it clear that Christ has died for the elect and not for everyone? Any gospel that does not proclaim Christ’s death for God’s elect is a gospel that cannot detail what Christ has accomplished by His death. Any gospel that does not proclaim Christ’s death for the elect will always condition a person’s salvation upon their decision to accept what He has done. The Gospel is to be preached, proclaimed and declared, not promised based on a condition man can fulfill.

We have the Primitive Baptists in one corner preaching a gospel only to the elect, and in the other corner we have those who claim that for the Gospel to be preached at all, it must be preached without election so that it may be preached as an offer to all. Both schools of thought have arisen out of a carnal understanding of what salvation is and therefore what it is to preach the Gospel. The latter group believe preaching the Gospel is to preach it as a personal promise and free offer to every individual that hears it that God will save them if they would only believe. But how can one make such a grand promise as this when God has elected, not everyone, but a remnant from every nation according to the election of grace and given these ones to Christ to die for, and to the Holy Spirit to regenerate. To offer salvation to every individual is to lie and give false hope to those whom God has appointed not unto salvation but unto His wrath (see 1 Thess. 5:9). ‘Preach the Gospel of Christ’s death for God’s elect to all’ is the call of every Christian. A free offer/personal promise not only eliminates election from preaching, it completely does away with the doctrine of election altogether. What need was there for God to elect anyone when man can choose for himself? You cannot have predestination if you have a salvation which is conditioned on a man’s decision. Can you see how these teachings always put man first and God second, and that God is always bowing to man’s will and not the other way round? Obviously, election and the free offer cancel each other out. If one has election, the Gospel cannot be a free offer, and conversely if one has a free offer to all then one cannot have election. The biblical response to this is to not ‘preach the Gospel only to the elect’, for no one knows who the elect are until they believe the Gospel. The biblical response is not ‘preach salvation as an ‘offer’ to everyone’, for salvation has not been accomplished for everyone. All that remains is for one to preach the Gospel as God’s way of salvation, preach it as a declaration and herald it as a public announcement to every creature in every corner of the globe and rest assured in the knowledge that the Lord will apply it to the hearts and minds of those He has elected and appointed unto salvation. Hence the words of Christ "...preach the Gospel to EVERY creature" (Mk. 16:15). At once, preaching the Gospel to every creature precludes it from being a promise of salvation to all as Christ has died for only some, and from preaching it only to the elect or to any one group of people. Now of course, all those who believe the Gospel will be saved, but far from meaning that the Gospel is an offer to all, it simply means that any and all who believe it will be saved. Salvation is not exclusive to any one group based on which country a person was born in or how religious one has been or because one belongs to this religious group or not. Salvation is for those who believe the Gospel, and all believers have been predestinated to salvation through election by grace (see Eph. 1:4,5).

Not preaching election to the ungodly could never change the fact that the elect are the ones Christ died for, establishing a perfect righteousness on their behalf, and to whom His affections are drawn. God will save those who believe the Gospel, and these are they whom He elected unto salvation. It is of the utmost importance to know that one cannot rightly preach the Gospel, and therefore is forbidden to preach it, in a way that would leave a person under the false impression that Christ has died for them, for one does not know whether Christ has or has not died for them. And it is no small thing to say, or even imply, that Christ has done anything for any man, let alone shed His precious blood for them! This shuts out the erroneous belief that the Gospel is to be presented as a personal promise, or offer, to everyone it is preached to. The Gospel is not to be preached as an offer, but as a proclamation of how God saves. The Gospel is a declarative statement in regards to God’s saving His people by His grace. The Gospel is a defining statement of how God saves and who God saves. Every part of the Gospel, apart from the doctrine of the spiritual fall of mankind in Adam, talks about those people for whom salvation is prepared. God chose a people, Christ died and is risen again for those people, and the Holy Spirit quickens those people, and no others. Faith is given to them, repentance is given to them, they are the ones who are sanctified, they are the ones to whom is given everlasting life etc. Their salvation does not depend upon them, it does not await their decision for God, but is made possible by the grace of God via the ground floor doctrine of election, for Christ died for those people and the Holy Spirit regenerates those people. This is how God saves and if you believe this, you too will be saved. Your faith in this Gospel evidences your election, which guarantees your reception of the Gospel as the truth of God. There is no generality when it comes to the Gospel, no ambiguity, for every part of its message is speaking specifically about the elect. From election to Christ’s atonement to the quickening work of the Holy Spirit, all was performed for a particular people and not for every individual ever born. Why anyone would think that to preach that Christ died for the people God has given Him is to immediately place doubt in a person’s mind that they could be one of those people, is rather a mystery. There is nothing in such a teaching that even remotely suggests this. On the contrary, election immediately gives hope to the person who believes that all are dead in sin and dead to God. Every person who knows this knows that all they have to do is believe. Christ’s Gospel places the emphasis on believing, not on whether one is elect or not. PREACH THE GOSPEL TO EVERY CREATURE, TELLING THEM WHAT HAS BEEN ACHIEVED AND FOR WHOM IT HAS BEEN ACHIEVED. Anything short of this, any gospel that fails to preach the specifics of the salvation message, any gospel that shields its listeners from any part of salvation knowledge, is a false gospel. THE GOSPEL IS GIVEN TO REVEAL THE TRUTH, NOT OBSCURE ONE’S VIEW OF IT. In light of this, one can see in an immediate and absolutely conclusive way that the Gospel is not, and cannot be, something to be offered to people like some cheap product awaiting the public’s acceptance, but it is to be proclaimed as the way to salvation. To offer the Savior is to "...degrade the Savior and His salvation into articles of vendition offered at the cheap price of the sinner’s goodwill." To offer Christ suggests by implication that He cannot save anyone without a person’s consent, thus conditioning salvation upon a man’s will and not the will of God.

The truth of the Gospel of sovereign grace has always been under attack from the lie of universalism. This is principally due to the fact that universalism is a humanistic tenet. It places man first and God second in its theological order. "The student of Church history soon learns that the lie which preaches a universal love of God, sovereign-man and self-salvation is a chameleon, constantly changing its appearance in order to infiltrate...and gain control of the content and preaching of the Gospel. Augustine engaged this foe when he defended the Sovereignty of God’s grace against the rank universalism of Pelagius. The Reformers dealt it a mighty blow when they demolished Rome’s stronghold of semi-Pelagianism. The Synod of Dordt, when it condemned Arminianism, attained a glorious victory over it. Undaunted however, it assumed the even more plausible guise of Amyraldianism, but was again driven back by the Church of Scotland in the 18th century Marrow controversy. The old enemy has not abandoned the field, nor has it been idle. Having transformed itself yet again, it now marches under the banner of ‘common’ grace and a ‘well-meant’ offering. Its battle cry is that God loves and desires the salvation of all men in the preaching of the Gospel. It has finally gained the ascendancy and now vaunts itself in the Reformed churches as Reformed ‘orthodox’." One of Satan’s main aims is to get people away from the truth that Christ has died for the elect. If he can do this, he can limit the glory due unto God for salvation from being something that is wholly of grace and shift the focus to what a man must do, thus giving him a share in that glory.

This whole matter of the Gospel being a free offer to all was taught around the second decade of the seventeenth century by "...John Cameron in France and England and both then and later by his notable disciples Amyraud in France and Davenant, the British delegate to the Synod of Dordt. In its original form it was an attempt to join the Reformed and Arminian doctrines of election by teaching two distinct decrees of election, one an Arminian decree that God decreed to save all and every man in Christ on condition of faith, and the second semi-Calvinistic decree, that God decreed to fulfill the conditions and give faith to only some. Briefly, this is the notion that God wants to save all but wills to save only some (see the author’s booklet, ‘Not Willing That Any Should Perish’). It is a contradictory dualism, a two-track theology. Its universal election is conditional and Arminian, and in the light of the notion of a particular decree to save some, it is also only hypothetical." These views were condemned by those more orthodox believers in the grace doctrines, such as Frances Turretin and by John Owen in England. These views were popularized by Andrew Fuller and his system which attempted to harmonize Divine Sovereignty and human free agency. "This trend came together in the Marrow Controversy (17th century) in the Presbyterian Church of Scotland..." which was duly condemned as Arminian by the PCS. The term Marrow comes from a book first published by Edward Fisher in 1645 entitled The Marrow of Modern Divinity, which involved "a discussion about the relation of the Gospel to antinomianism and neo-nomianism." The Marrow men taught the rather curious belief that though Christ did not die for all, He is in fact dead for all! A more ludicrous, outrageous and completely untenable statement one would be hard-pressed to find. "...the Marrow men, while denying that they taught a universal atonement, nevertheless did exactly teach that the atoning work of Christ was universal in some sense. These men distinguished between a giving of Christ in possession and a gift of Christ as warranted men to receive Him. The former was limited to the elect; the latter was offered to all. In connection with this, they maintained that while the statement, ‘Christ died for all’ is clearly heretical, it is sound and orthodox to teach that Christ is dead for all." Did not die for all but is dead for all? How can one be dead if one has not died? Surely to be dead for all Christ must have died for all. If not, then how could it be that Christ has died for some but be dead for all? What could Christ possibly say to those He did not die for? ‘I did not do anything for you but if you believe on Me I will save you.’ What could Christ offer to such people? ‘I offer to you eternal life even though the Father has directed Me to give that eternal life only to those He has given Me.’ How ridiculous! Just as Christ’s death was for no one but those whom the Father had given Him, so too, there is nothing for the others but the ‘freedom’ they so love that keeps them in their sin and away from God. I have always found the popular phrase, ‘Christ’s death was sufficient for all but efficient for some’, rather a strange saying. How could Christ’s death be sufficient for all when His death was for the atonement of the particular sins of a particular people: God’s elect? It was never meant to be sufficient for all, but only sufficient and efficient for those for whom He died! Clearly, these Marrow men realised they could never say Christ died for all, admitting that such teaching was heretical and openly opposing what the Word of God says. So they came up with this dribble, this semantic and theological gobbledegook that says Christ did not die for all but He is dead for all. I mean, what kind of human being would take such obvious theological trash as this seriously? This does not require faith to believe but an extreme case of senselessness!! It is just as bad as the Roman Catholic heresy which claims that though Christ does not die again during each Mass, He is physically present to be offered again and again to the Father as a bloodless sacrifice on their altars. Of what use could a potential benefit be if it were not real? How could the Savior, Who did not die for all, possibly be of any benefit, real or potential, to those He did not die for? Allow me to illustrate: I have payed a debt on the behalf of another. How can my payment of one particular man’s debt possibly be viewed as something that could favor other men? I did not pay the debt for all, but everyone’s debt is paid for? How could my paying one man’s debt be taken and so twisted as to be turned into my having paid every man’s debts if only they will accept it? Its all just hypothetical claptrap! What madness is this? What could possibly be the underlying factor motivating such utter nonsense as this? Any teaching that the Gospel is to be preached as an offer to every individual will invariably bring with it a universal atonement. Christ being ‘dead for all’ is one of the most basic premises of Arminianism. If the Gospel is offered to all, then the only conclusion is that Christ must have died for all and man’s salvation becomes something which is conditioned on his free-will decision rather than on whose sins have been atoned for. If it is said that Christ did not die for all, then no one has any right to ‘offer’ what He did for God’s elect to the non-elect!! "...the Marrow men very clearly taught, in defense of a free offer, that the atonement of Christ, upon which the offer rests, is universal in some sense of the word. Thus the offer expressed God’s universal love for all and His desire to save all. The salvation which men receive, therefore, is a salvation dependant upon man’s act of faith." The Marrow men, and all those who have fallen for their lies, obviously taught a modified form of what the doctrines of grace have unfortunately come to be known as, Calvinism.

"The double track theology of the offer makes coherent preaching of the truth impossible. God wants what He does not want, intends what He does not intend. Authoritative proclamation of the truth of the Gospel can but cease. The unity of the truth is broken. By separating Christ as Mediator of the Covenant and as Head of the elect, even Christ’s Mediatorial Work is distorted, and obscured."

A book that has been written recently is not dissimilar to the teachings of the Marrow men, such as Thomas Boston, James Hog, Traill, Ralph and Ebenezer Erskine, who taught the Gospel as a free offer to all men. If I may digress for just a moment, it has been alleged by some of the supporters of the book that this author is not teachable because I have chosen not to read this book that highlights the free offer and insists that election is not part of the Gospel. This is rather rich, as the author of this book has refused discussion with me about his attack on election’s rightful place in the Gospel. Simply because a person chooses not to read a book does not mean he is ignorant of its contents. For instance, I have never read Mein Kampf but am familiar with its contents and the madness of its author. As far as the book in question is concerned, I have had some of the book’s contents shared with me by both those who defend it and those who do not believe its premise. Had I been unwilling to hear anything about what the book teaches, I would have a case to answer. But while I have not closed my ears to the gist of what is taught in it, I have neither the time nor the inclination to read literature that has been written opposing, and therefore denying, the doctrines of the Gospel, offering something else in its place. This does not leave me in ignorance of the contents of such literature, but is a decision based on the fact that I am well aware of the principles behind the doctrines in false gospels. I am not ignorant of ‘church history’ and of the various branches of erroneous teachings, especially those that have universalism at their heart. One would not have to read a book which teaches that man must do just one work in order to get or remain saved, to realise it is not Gospel-friendly but rather an enemy of the Gospel. One must not judge a book by its cover, but one can judge a book by its central tenet, and sometimes by its title alone, and realise that it is not a book which promotes the Gospel of the grace of God. Anything that attacks grace, anything that attacks the doctrines of that grace through denying their truthfulness or rightful place in the Gospel, is something that can be safely discarded as spiritual bunk. The enemies of the Gospel would call this convenient, but the Scriptures command it: "Cease, my son, to hear (or read) the instruction that causeth to err from the words of knowledge" (Prov. 19:27 cf. Rom. 16:17,18).

As far as the accusation of being unteachable goes, I fail to understand how this applies to one who already knows the truth. Would the apostles have rightly been accused of being unteachable because they refused to listen past the point where they recognised a message as another gospel, one that differed to the one they preached? Of course not. Could you honestly see God rebuking His disciples for not reading books that promoted the erroneous gospels of the ministers of Satan? Of course not. Could I rightly be accused of being unteachable because I refuse to waste my time reading a book by a Roman Catholic scholar which claims to disprove the grace doctrines, and therefore my Gospel? Of course not. To think this way, to reach such a conclusion, is simply nonsensical. Rather than showing up an un-Christian-like prejudice in us, this unfounded accusation reveals a rather childish insistence on the part of those who demand everyone read and believe what they say. If I was not teachable, I would never have submitted to the Gospel of God. To be truly teachable has a lot to do with what is being taught and who is doing the teaching. What would this teachableness have done for me if I did not remain loyal to the Word of God? Once one has seen the principal that salvation is by grace, and therefore the Gospel of grace must be that which teaches grace doctrine that has to do with salvation, what is there that one must remain ‘teachable’ on when it comes to what the Gospel is and how God saves? I dare say that there are many enemies of the Gospel who conveniently label as ‘unteachable’ those who believe it and so refuse to waste their time with erroneous teaching or who fail to be converted to their way of thinking. I might add, just for the record, that the author of the book in question failed to reply to my two emails to him wherein I gently expressed my concern over what he had written. And for that matter, the author of the book and our mutual associates failed to mention one word of the book and their beliefs to me until the book was completed. They all had me thinking that their prior comments about the excellence of my writings was real and sincere. Without my knowledge they had secretly believed differently. But why all the secrecy? Why all the whispers and lack of openness and honesty? I would much rather be ‘unteachable’ than unscrupulous!

What exactly does this word ‘unteachable’ mean anyway? What is it supposed to imply? That one who is not willing to read a book whose fundamental tenets are clearly understood, but not believed, is in some way lost or of dubious character? That he is closed-minded towards that which he recognizes as something contradicting the Gospel that has been revealed to him? When one discerns a teaching as error, and sees from the scriptures why it is error, why should one remain open to teaching that is clearly false? If one has read of a particular erroneous teaching and seen it for what it is, why should one waste time by reading a whole book on the subject? If one has been correctly taught that 3 + 3 = 6, is one to be labelled ‘unteachable’ if one refuses to sit and read a thesis claiming that 3 + 3 equals anything but 6, or anything as well as 6? Of course not. Would you read past a banner headline in a newspaper that read, ‘Mathematician Discovers 3 + 3 = 7' when you know FULL WELL that the answer is 6? Of course not. You would not waste your time with such obvious rubbish. Are you the uneducated or ignorant type if you refused to examine this man’s findings based on the fact that the issue of what 3 + 3 equals is a settled one according to every law and principle of mathematics, and therefore in your mind? Of course not. The only reason you might read the article in question is to see how silly the mathematician is who wrote it! Those who would read it in order to see if perhaps they have been wrong in concluding that the answer was 6, are those who cannot be truly convinced that it is. Every person saved by the grace of God is convicted by the Holy Spirit in his heart of what the Gospel is, and therefore believes only the Gospel of God and no other. They will not close their eyes and ears from hearing what others have to say, but once they recognize that what is being taught is not the Gospel but a false one, what further need is there to listen? Once one has been convinced by the Holy Spirit of what the Gospel is and why, one’s ‘search’ and investigation of what the truth is has ended. What is there left to be revealed? If one is to be condemned for this in the minds of others, of those who do not believe the whole Gospel, then so be it. If one is looked down upon and judged as narrow-minded, so be it. Does the fact that a person who has been convinced of one thing looks into another and believes that they have been wrong and that this new teaching is right, the kind of person we should all strive to be even if one changes from true teaching to false? Hardly. Just like the apostle Peter could not leave his Master because of his belief that He had the words of eternal life (Jn. 6:68), so too, a saved person cannot but believe the Gospel of God. A saved person recognizes, just as clearly as the apostles for he has the same faith (2 Pet. 1:1 cf. Titus 1:1), that the words of eternal life exist only in the Gospel of God and no other. He can never leave it, for he is convinced by God Himself no less, that what he believes is indeed the very Gospel of the grace of God. Now of course the enemies of the Gospel do not see it as truth, but claim something else as the truth. Such has been the case for thousands of years and will continue to be until the end of time. To be teachable in regard to what error says is to be unteachable in regard to what the Word of God says.

What kind of fool would you be if you were to take this teachableness, this willingness to be corrected attitude, to the extreme? Am I open to correction when it comes to what my name is? NO. Am I, and should I be, open to correction when it comes to what my son’s name is. NO. Am I open to what the gospel of the Mormons says? NO! Do I need to read book after book, OR EVEN ONE BOOK, by the Mormons so that I won’t be labelled ‘unteachable’? NO!! Am I open to the possibility that any other gospel in this universe could be the true Gospel? ABSOLUTELY NOT! God has revealed THE Gospel to me, so why should I insult the Living God by doubting that the Gospel He has given me, and which by His grace I believe, is the true one, entertaining the possibility that what I know is a false gospel is really the true one. Now, this in no way suggests that we should be unreasonable in our belief of the Gospel. A true believer knows what he believes, and has been given eyes to see what the scriptures are saying. Why so many people think that one cannot be convinced of the truth, of what the Holy Gospel of God is, just as much as one can be convinced that 3 + 3 = 6, is beyond me. How stupid would a person sound if they said, ‘I believe 3 + 3 = 6 but I am teachable on this, I am open to correction.’ I mean, you’d just walk away from such a person thinking they were a nut—and you’d be right! Its just foolishness. How arrogant it is for those who do not believe the Gospel to accuse those who do believe it of being unteachable, simply because they refuse to read a book that opposes it and teaches another gospel. Rather than wasting their time accusing others of being unteachable, perhaps these ‘dear ones’ should consider the possibility that it is they who are the unteachable ones, that it is they who are deceived, because it is they who have rejected the truth. Such people do not consider themselves unteachable, for many of them will actually read a book or listen to a sermon that preaches the true Gospel. But the fact that they never end up believing the true Gospel shows that they have unteachable hearts! Now, does anyone think that such people would be satisfied if I did read the book they have offered me, but still failed to believe what it teaches? Of course not. I would, in their minds, remain labelled as unteachable until the day I turned from what I believe and acquiesced to their false claims. No doubt every believer of every different gospel out there believes that those who do not hold to their gospel are unteachable because they refuse to believe what they believe. If to stubbornly believe the true Gospel makes me unteachable in the eyes of some, then may I forever remain ‘unteachable’. I stubbornly believe the Gospel, for I steadfastly WITHOUT WAVERING believe it!! The truly unteachable are those who are reprobate, who will never see or believe the truth, and not those who hold to the true and only Gospel whilst resisting all counterfeits. It is the reprobate who are "Ever learning, and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth" (2 Tim. 3:7). One who believes the truth can never rightly be labelled as unteachable or unreasonable, because what he believes is the truth and he has the full backing of Scripture. The unreasonableness, the unteachableness, falls squarely on those whose convictions are based on false teachings and perversions of the Scriptures. Those who bounce from one false gospel to another, or from the true doctrines to false ones, far from being teachable, far from commanding our respect, are simply among the deceived. The deceived do not know they are deceived. They are those that are blown about by every wind of doctrine, something that the true Gospel believer can never be guilty of for he is rooted and grounded in truth. When a person has the truth, he no longer needs to be teachable on the matter of what the truth is, otherwise we would have the very bizarre situation of a person being convinced that what he believes is the truth but forever remaining open to the possibility that it may not be! What kind of faith would this be? The kind which God gives? Hardly. This would mean that they would have to read every book and listen to every sermon that differed with what they believe, not to see the kind of errors which those who do not have the truth promote, but to read believing that what they believe may be wrong and what they are reading or hearing may be what is right. In light of all this, how do you think it would make God feel if He saw His people all claiming to believe, and have eternal love and allegiance towards, the Gospel He has given them the faith to believe, and yet remaining ‘teachable’ or ‘open’ to the possibility that they may be entirely wrong!! What utter nonsense! This would be like marrying one person and then entertaining thoughts of marriage to others. I do not remain teachable on the matter of what 3 + 3 equals because I have seen for myself, I have made the calculation and come to the irreversible conclusion, as has every other mathematically educated mind out there, that the answer could be nothing else but 6. Not only do I think I am right, I know I am right, because I am right! On this I am not teachable, as I, like all other true believers, am not teachable on the matter of what the Gospel is. I have seen for myself because God has given me the eyes to see, and ears to hear, and a mind to understand, and a heart that believes, and a mouth that confesses His Gospel as the everlasting Gospel and the only Gospel by which God saves. Anyone who claims to believe God’s only Gospel, but still holds to the possibility that they are mistaken and so read items or listen to ministers of other gospels to see if they are right, are double-minded people and unstable in all their ways. I have believed all sorts of false gospels but now know why they are false gospels, as I know why the Gospel I now believe and always, by the grace of God, will believe, is the true Gospel. I once wrote to around twenty so-called pastors, asking them to tell me what the Gospel is. (This was due to my desire to write a booklet on their replies etc). I read every one of their replies and had several ongoing discussions with some of them about what they believe, and challenged, yet did not doubt, the Gospel I know and love, and saw for myself that nothing of what they said came even close to disproving my Gospel. I did not write to these men because I doubted the Gospel I believe, but knowing that if there was anything I was not aware of, these men were the ones who would mention it. Am I ‘unteachable’ because I do not believe the false gospels of these men? Of course not! Am I unteachable because I do not, and will not, delve into their books or listen to their sermons to seek further explanation of what they believe and why? Of course not. I have listened to what they have to say, not because I doubted the Gospel I believe in, but to see what they say the Gospel is, and recognizing from their own words that their gospels were all false merely confirmed to me that I indeed had the true Gospel and that they had nothing new to say that I had not heard before. I listened to what they said in order to give them every chance I could, and also to present and address their ‘arguments’ in my booklet. Not that there were any doubts in my mind as to the veracity of the Gospel I believe, but to see for myself what so-called ‘church leaders’ excuses were for not believing it. I am not some johnny-come-lately, but one who has been around the religious world for over 20 years and am more than familiar with false gospels and their false foundations and principles, as well as the deceptive methodology of the enemies of God’s Truth who, "...by good words and fair speeches deceive the hearts of the simple" (Rom. 16:18). I, like other Gospel believers, do not have to read an entire book or listen to an entire sermon before recognizing what is being taught as either the Gospel or another gospel. This is not arrogance, but the discernment which comes by having one’s eyes opened to the truth. To be unteachable is to stubbornly refuse to investigate and believe the truth in the face of undeniable and documented fact. One can hardly be accused of being unteachable because one will not read, listen to or believe a lie. How can a person who believes the Gospel of God as it is revealed and defined in the Word of God, possibly ever be accused of being unteachable other than by those who believe a different gospel to the one outlined in the Holy Scriptures of Almighty God?

Now back to the issue of the offer. As I have already stated, the Gospel is not to be preached as a personal promise to anyone. Nor is the Gospel of God to be preached as an offer to everyone. Now, the Gospel does carry with it promises in terms of the consequences that await those that will believe it and those who don’t. Those who believe the Gospel shall be saved and those who do not believe it shall be damned (Mk. 16:16 cf. 2 Thess. 1:8,9). All those who believe the Gospel will be saved. That is guaranteed, just as all those who do not believe the Gospel are promised damnation. But the only ones who will believe the Gospel are those whom God has chosen before the foundation of the world, by grace, to believe it. This is why one cannot go about like the deluded Arminians promising salvation to every individual, whether it is intended or not. The promise of salvation for all conditions salvation on faith because such a message implies that Christ died for every individual. The Gospel is God’s declaration of man’s fallen spiritual state and of Who God is and how He saves. Those people who believe God’s declaration shall be saved and those who do not believe it shall be damned. Again, as a rebuke to those people who say that the Gospel should only be preached to the elect, and to those who have gone to the other extreme by saying that the Gospel should be preached to every creature but not include the doctrine of election, believing this would preclude it from being a sincere promise and being preached as an offer to the non-elect as well, Jesus the Lord says in Mark 16:15 that His people are to "...PREACH the Gospel to EVERY creature." Notice how this rules out any confusion as to who the Gospel is to be preached to. And at the same time it rules out any possibility that the Gospel is some free offer to every individual, even the reprobate, that if they accept it they will be saved. The Gospel is to be preached, not offered. How can the Gospel be preached as an offer, that whoever believes it will be saved, when the Word of God says that all are dead in sin and none by nature seek (crave, or desire) God (Rom. 5:12; 3:11). You cannot offer anything to dead people. This offer, in whatever guise it takes, is eternally connected to the false premise that a man can, of his own free-will, choose God, which comes from the lie that man is not dead in sin but merely sin-sick, struck down by sin, but not mortally. But none can accept the offer for all are dead (Rom. 5:12 & Gen. 2:16,17). Salvation comes when a man is made alive by God and given the faith to believe His Gospel. It is not something chosen, but given. Scripture says that the saved are a "...chosen generation..." (1 Pet. 2:9) not a generation of choosers. Therefore the Message preached is not an offer but a declaration. What good would it do to offer the Gospel when those who are saved are described by God, not as choosers, but as the chosen?

The whosoever spoken of in Romans 10 does not mean that anyone can believe the Gospel based on their decision to do so, it means that whether one is a Jew or a Gentile, if they believe the Gospel of God they will be saved: "For there is no difference between the Jew and the Greek; for the same Lord over all is rich unto all that call upon Him. For whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved" (Rom. 10:12,13). "The word ‘whosoever’ just designates individual people and its definition is defined by its usage." It does not mean that if a person does ‘this’ then ‘that’ will happen, but simply that those who do this, or will do this, are the saved, or as the case may be the unsaved. It is a declaration that those who believe will be saved, and should in no way be construed as an offer that any by their own free-will can accept. The Gospel is God’s declaration that He will save His people from their sins and how He will do it. Christ’s command in Mark 16 leaves no room for anyone to think that He meant the Gospel was to be preached exclusively to the elect, or as a sincere promise to the non-elect, and makes clear that the Gospel of the grace of God is to be preached to EVERY creature, not as a promise or offer but as a declaration! As not all will be saved and not all will remain unsaved, this Message is neither a promise or an offer but an announcement or proclamation. As no one knows who the elect are, or who they are who have been appointed unto wrath, the Gospel must be preached to every creature for the elect must hear it to believe it. Notably, the word ‘preach’ here means to proclaim or publish. It also means to herald (as a public crier). In all, the word ‘preached’ is used sixty times in the New Testament. The word offer appears only 27 times in the New Testament, but never in connection with the Gospel of salvation. Many times it speaks of a sacrifice to God being an offer, but never of salvation or the Gospel being preached as an offer to any. To ‘herald’ is to ‘announce publicly’, as distinct from secretly or in any way exclusively in one particular area or to one particular group.

With so many people confused by man-made issues, debates, and arguments, concerning the Gospel and the matter of election and the Promise and who the Gospel is to be preached to, or who it is not to be preached to etc., one quickly sees how this confusing and unnecessary mess is designed to deceive and prevent people from seeing the real issue which faces every man: what is the Gospel? I believe that all the satanically inspired lies and wresting of scriptures concerning these issues have been borne out of the mind of carnal man and are fuelled by his innate inability to see, understand and believe the truth. These lies, which some have turned into main issues, even THE issue, can all be seen for what they are through proper, biblical instruction as to not only what the Gospel of God is but why the specific doctrines of the Gospel are in the Gospel in the first place. The bottom line to every argument about what the Gospel is and what the Gospel could not be, is how does God save? For how God saves will instantly reveal what His Gospel is all about. How is salvation brought about? By the grace of God, of course. What then would the doctrines of the Gospel of salvation all deal with? The grace of God of course. If God saves by grace, and it is that grace which we are to trust in, and it is that grace by which he has done everything necessary to save, what else could His Gospel be about, what else could His Gospel be filled with, but the glorious grace of God? The Gospel is the Gospel of the grace of God. The Gospel is about what salvation is all about: God and His grace, without which no man can be saved. The Gospel, too, is what grace is all about: salvation. But to just say ‘salvation is by grace’ is not enough to preach the Gospel of grace. If we did not explore and study out what is meant by certain terms, we would have no real idea of what is meant by grace and therefore one interpretation would be as legitimate as another. For instance, according to Titus 3:5-7, God’s people are said to be saved according to His mercy and justified by His grace. So, is there no need to go into these terms and find out what is meant by them? If we are saved according to mercy, does this mean we are not saved by grace? If we are justified by grace, does this mean we are not justified by the righteousness of Christ? Of course not! One needs to look at what the whole of scripture is saying and not at some select verses. There are other scriptures that explain what these scriptures are saying, and failure to understand what those other scriptures are saying will result in failure to understand what the Gospel of salvation is. One must always seek the proper, biblical definition of terms. One cannot simply ‘believe’ in grace, for to truly believe in grace one must know and believe what was done by that grace to save.

The Bible talks about the grace of Christ (Gal. 6:18; 1 Thess. 5:28), so are we to understand that the grace whereby a man is saved comes only from Christ, or is only of Christ? No. There are other scriptures that speak of the grace of God (Acts 15:40; 2 Cor. 1:12) and the Spirit of grace (Heb. 10:29). The Bible talks about God’s people being in Christ: "...Peace be with you all that are in Christ Jesus..." (1 Pet. 5:14); "...in Christ shall all be made alive" (1 Cor. 15:22); "...if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature" (2 Cor. 5:17 cf. 1 Thess. 4:16). But can this doctrine be taught on its own? Are we to separate it from the other doctrines that speak of salvation? No. We must ask ourselves, ‘How did these people get to be in Christ?’ Was it through the Person and Work of Christ? Was it through their ‘free-will’ choice? How did these people get to be the ones Christ would die for? Scripture tells us plainly: "...OF HIM are ye in Christ Jesus, Who of God is made unto us wisdom, and righteousness, and sanctification, and redemption" (1 Cor. 1:30). Galatians 1:6 talks about "..Him that called you into the grace of Christ..." One needs to be in the grace of Christ to be saved, but equally important is how you get there. It is God the Father who has placed His elect ones in Christ to receive the benefits of Christ, for Christ is the Savior sent of God to redeem His people. Of a surety, the Christian is justified "...through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus", but this redemption is "...by His grace..." (Rom. 3:24), by God’s grace. The redemption that is in Christ could never have been were it not for the grace of God, and can therefore never be preached separately from that grace which is just as responsible for election and regeneration as it is for redemption. The following passage of Scripture shows clearly how the whole Trinity is involved in the salvation and preservation of the elect: "Now He which stablisheth us with you in Christ, and hath anointed us, is God; Who hath also sealed us, and given the earnest of the Spirit in our hearts" (2 Cor. 1:21,22). As with Paul the apostle, so it is with all God’s children: "...The God of our fathers hath chosen thee, that thou shouldest know His will, and see that Just One, and shouldest hear the word of His mouth" (Acts 22:14 cf. Jn. 10:27). Any Gospel that neglects to preach what the Father, Son and Holy Spirit have done in salvation, is a gospel that stands opposed to the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Just as "...without Him (Jesus) was not any thing made that was made" (Jn. 1:3), so too, without the Trinity there is not anyone saved who are saved.

  To preach grace is to preach the specifics of grace. Grace is not simply a word. It is that by which all that salvation required has been done: election, atonement, imputation, redemption, regeneration, justification, sanctification, faith, repentance etc., have all been made possible by and come by the means of grace. By grace ye are saved through election, atonement, imputation, etc. To preach grace is to preach all that was done by that grace in the election, salvation and preservation of God’s people. When one hears the term ‘Gospel’, one must remind oneself that the Gospel is the Good News of God. "Our English word ‘Gospel’ comes from a combination of ‘God’ which means ‘good’ and ‘spell’ which means ‘talk.’ The Gospel is ‘Godspell’ or ‘good talk.’ In the Scriptures it is the Message concerning the salvation of the people of Christ as it has been accomplished by the blessed Trinity." This good news comes in light of the bad news of the fall of man, that every man by nature is dead in sin and dead to God. Man’s condition is a hopeless one. He is without God and therefore, in this condition, is without any hope of salvation (see Matt. 19:25,26 & Eph. 2:12). Without the good news of God there is only bad news, which man has brought upon himself by his disobedience to God in the person of Adam (see Rom. 5:12). As man is now dead in sin, without God and without hope in the world, the only way any person can be rescued from this cursed spiritual state is by the glorious grace of God—all that has been done by grace. Grace is the key that unlocks the door to salvation. Grace lies behind everything that had to be done in the salvation of man. This is why the Gospel is called the Gospel of the grace of God. Whether we are talking about the work of the Father, the Son or the Holy Spirit in salvation, it is by grace that They did what has been done. Not one part of salvation is without the grace of God, and so a gospel that fails to include within it all of the grace that was necessary to save God’s people from their sins, is a false gospel, another gospel, and not that Gospel the Scriptures define as the Gospel of the grace of God. And this grace is the key to identifying which doctrines are in the Gospel—what it is that God, in His Triune greatness, had to do in order to save anyone. The Gospel of grace will take you from the very beginning of God’s salvation plan right through to its end, and covers everything in-between. Now, can you picture even for an instant the Gospel of God containing anything short of the whole of the grace of God it took to save His people? Why would, and how could, anyone leave out any part of the story of grace in salvation when proclaiming the Gospel that was ‘formed’ to define and make manifest the grace of God? No man can be saved without the grace of God, so it stands to biblical reason that no man can be saved without all of the grace of God. No man can be saved without the grace of God, so how can any man be saved who does not know or believe in that whole grace-based salvation plan? When God says by grace ye are saved, it is a given that He means ALL the grace of God, all that it took to save. No one can rightly deny that saved means totally and forever saved, so too, none can deny from a biblical standpoint the fact that grace means total grace. Total grace, the Work of God, shuts out everyone else’s work as necessary to salvation. So a gospel that does not do the same, a gospel which fails to articulate every last drop of the grace it took to get a man saved and keep a man saved, is a false gospel. WHY? Why must it be all of grace in the Gospel? Why not only Christ, as our enemies have contended, after all grace reigns through righteousness (Rom. 5:21)? The answer to the first of the above questions, Why must the Gospel be all of grace, is: anything to do with salvation that is not covered by grace, that is not preached and believed, leaves room for man to boast. It leaves room for man to glory in what he has done and not solely in what God has done. The second question, Why not only Christ, is a misleading assumption because, as we have seen, to fully and properly preach Christ one must preach what He did and for whom He did it, as these details define, and are therefore that by which we can identify, the true Messiah from the false. As the whole Trinity was involved in the salvation of God’s people, what the whole Trinity has done must be in the Gospel of the grace of God in the salvation of His people. As for grace reigning through righteousness, it did not only take Christ to ensure the salvation of His people. They had to be elected by the Father and regenerated by the Holy Spirit. The context of Romans 5:21 includes sin reigning unto death: "That as sin hath reigned unto death, even so might grace reign through righteousness unto eternal life by Jesus Christ our Lord." This means sin has produced death, or is the cause behind death. The words reigned and reign carry the same meaning. In light of this, we see that in like manner, grace reigns unto life, eternal life. Grace is the cause of life "...and this through righteousness by Jesus Christ our Lord, through the power and efficacy of Christ." Some think, ‘What good would grace have done if not for the righteousness of Christ?’ But they fail to realise that there would be no righteousness of Christ, indeed no Savior at all, were it not for the grace, will and purpose of God. His desire to save His people. It is grace which has effected righteousness, it is grace which has caused righteousness to be, by which the elect can be saved. It is grace that reigns supreme over all, for there would be no salvation without it. Our enemies say, ‘See, the Scripture does not say grace reigns through election.’ This is true, the Scripture does not say grace reigns through election, but neither does it say that grace reigns through regeneration or sanctification or repentance etc., but does this mean that one can be, or is, saved without these things? Does the fact that grace reigns through righteousness rule out the necessity of anything else in the salvation process? Can a man who has the righteousness of Christ be saved without being regenerated, or without first having been elected? What foolishness! A man who has the righteousness of Christ IS regenerated and therefore must have been elected! Does it mean that all one needs is righteousness, that one does not require election or regeneration or sanctification to be saved? That one is saved by grace through righteousness alone? That no other act was necessary in the salvation of a man? That righteousness did not first require a people to be elected so it could make them righteous? Or that righteousness can save a man without the act of grace that causes those people to whom it is imputed to be regenerated? Of course not! Righteousness is what puts a man in right standing with God, but how that man got to be one to whom righteousness would be imputed is just as vital as the righteousness itself. Righteousness is that which is given unto a man by grace that he might stand approved before God, but all those who receive this righteousness must first have been elected and regenerated. You cannot split righteousness from the other salvation doctrines; you cannot separate man’s standing blameless before God from the fact that he is also an elected and regenerated person. Righteousness is that whereby a man is justified, but don’t ever lose sight of the fact that righteousness justifies an elected people.

Nowhere in the Scriptures is it more clearly stated that the Gospel of God is "the Gospel of the grace of God" than in Acts 20:24, but there are many other passages where this is confirmed. Acts 14:3 (cf. Acts 20:32) refers to the Gospel as "the word of His grace" (see Acts 14:7 for a contextual confirmation that this word of grace is in fact referring to the Gospel). In Acts 15:7 we see "...the Word of the Gospel..." being spoken of, and grace is mentioned as that by which people are saved in Acts 15:11: "...we believe that through the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ we shall be saved..." As we have seen, the Gospel cannot only contain within it the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, but also includes the grace of God—His election of those Christ was sent to save, and the grace behind the regenerative work of the Holy Spirit without which none could be saved. From these verses in Acts 14 & 15 we see that the words Gospel and grace are often, if not always, synonymous terms. Therefore when one is talking of the Gospel, one is talking of grace in salvation, and vice versa. The fact that a man even believes the Gospel, is attributed to grace : "...which had believed through grace" (Acts 18:27). Romans 3:24 informs us that the saved are "...justified freely by His grace..." (cf. Titus 3:7). Election unto salvation is also all by the grace of God (see Rom. 11:5,6). The believer is "...called by His grace" (Gal. 1:15), while 2 Thessalonians 2:14 tells the believer that God "...called you by our Gospel..." Again, we see grace and Gospel used synonymously. The elect were chosen in Christ before the foundation of the world and were "...predestinated...unto the adoption of children by Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the good pleasure of His will, TO THE PRAISE OF THE GLORY OF HIS GRACE, wherein He hath made us accepted in the beloved" (Eph. 1:5,6). Ephesians 2:5 and 2:8 both state that "by grace ye are/are ye saved," while Paul, in Ephesians 1:13, calls the Gospel "...the Gospel of your salvation..." Paul teaches further on in Ephesians 3 of "...the dispensation of the grace of God...How that by revelation He made known unto me the mystery...as it is now revealed unto His apostles and prophets by the Spirit: that the Gentiles should be fellowheirs...and partakers of His promise in Christ by the Gospel" (Eph. 3:2,3,5,6). Here we see the dispensation of the grace of God being that which is revealed in and through His Mighty Gospel, hence the Gospel is of the grace of God and about the grace of God. Grace and the Gospel are also connected in Paul’s second letter to Timothy: Who hath saved us, and called us with an holy calling, not according to our works, but according to His own purpose and GRACE, which was given us in Christ Jesus before the world began, but is now made manifest by the appearing of our Savior Jesus Christ, who hath abolished death, and hath brought life and immortality to light THROUGH THE GOSPEL" (2 Tim. 1:9 & 10). Notice that the grace of God it took to call, or summon, His people is now made manifest by the appearing of Christ. "It is God Who both calls and chooses those who shall be saved" (2 Pet. 1:10). God calling and choosing His people is irrevocably connected to Christ Jesus the Lord, as this calling, according to His purpose and grace before the world began, is made manifest by the appearance of Christ. How is this calling made manifest? By the appearance of Christ. The Lord Jesus says "...Behold I and the children which God hath given Me" (Heb. 2:13 cf. Jn. 17:2). Christ is the very evidence of election, and what He did confirms that the benefactors of what He would do would indeed be those whom God had called and chosen! The very presence of the Savior in a world of spiritually dead people is testament to the fact that God sent Him and that God would save people from their sins. Which people? Why, the elect—those whom He has called and chosen according to His grace before the world began. Titus 2:11 talks about "...the grace of God that bringeth salvation." Without grace there can be no salvation.

Now what exactly is grace referring to in all these passages of Scripture? Is it, as our enemies claim, a reference to the Person and Work of Christ purely and exclusively, or is it referring to the outworking of God’s whole plan of salvation? If grace were only a reference to the righteousness of Christ, then salvation required nothing but the Second Person of the Trinity to be a perfectly fulfilled plan. Salvation, then, would not have required the grace it took to elect the people Christ was to die for. Salvation would not have required the grace by which the Holy Spirit quickens the hearts and minds of those elect ones. This type of thinking has led some to conceive a gospel so mangled, so twisted, so truncated, so perverted as to leave out the bulk of the work of grace in salvation. Subscribers to such warped thinking as this are partakers with those who have ransacked the Gospel of grace, leaving only one doctrine behind. They are left with a gospel that is only about the Righteousness of Christ, the belief of which establishes justification but not salvation. But the Scriptures do not call the Gospel ‘the Gospel of your justification’, but rather the "Gospel of your salvation" (Eph. 1:13). It is simple: believe the Gospel and you are saved. Now salvation, of course, includes within it justification, but to separate the two in terms of a person being justified but not saved, or saved but not justified, is sheer lunacy. Nowhere in the Scriptures will you read of anyone who is a justified but not saved, believing-in-the-whole-Gospel-of-the-grace-of-God, person. Those who are saved believe the whole Gospel and not just part of it.

Surprisingly, the word justification is used only 3 times in the entire Bible and is found in three verses from two chapters in the Book of Romans: 4:25; 5:16,18. Nowhere is the Gospel referred to as the Gospel of justification. Romans 8:30 talks about the elect being "...called...justified...and...glorified." Now can anyone honestly say that to be called, justified and glorified is not to be saved? Of course not. A saved person is a person who believes in the whole Gospel of the grace of God, which Gospel reveals the righteousness of Christ by which a man is justified. Justification is part and parcel of being saved, it comes by being saved. Justification and salvation are two sides to the same coin. Again, no one in their right mind could possibly concur with the silly belief that separates justification from salvation in terms of having one but not the other. To be justified IS to be saved and to be saved is to evidence a justified state. To be justified is the kernel, the very essence of being saved. If you are saved you have been justified and if you are justified you are saved. In the New Testament, the words justified (26 times), justifier (1), justifieth (2) and justify (4) mean to render (ie. show or regard as) just or innocent, holy, just, meet, righteous, to deem to be right. The word justification means righteousness and also acquittal. Justification "Denotes the act of pronouncing righteousness...signifying the establishment of a person as just by acquittal from guilt. Romans 5:18 ‘justification of life’ means ‘justification which results in life’ (cf. Rom. 5:21). That God justifies the believing sinner on the grounds of Christ’s death, involves His free gift of life." How can anyone walking around in such a state—innocent, acquitted from all guilt and possessing the free gift of eternal life—not be in a saved state? Justification by Christ can never be, whilst there is an absence of belief in the whole Gospel of grace. Justification by Christ can never be, whilst there is an absence of the grace that gives faith to His people to believe in the whole plan of salvation founded on grace, as it is revealed in the Gospel. One is not believing in Christ, one is not saved, if one is ignorant of, or mistaken about, who He died for—the elect of God—and therefore what He has done. As one cannot separate the person of Christ from the Work of Christ, so too, one cannot preach Christ’s Person or Work without specifying for whom He died, for this reveals what He has actually done, accomplished, in and by His death. You cannot separate Christ from His people: "For both He that sanctifieth and they who are sanctified are all of one..." Jesus says, "Behold I and the children which God hath given Me" (Heb. 2:11,13). To preach Christ aright we must declare what He has done, and to do this in a biblically accurate way, we must proclaim who He did it for and how they got to be the ones He would lay down His life for, and how they came to be the ones given, or entrusted, to Him. The doctrine of election teaches that God the Father chose, before the foundation of the world and according to His grace alone, those whom He would give, or entrust, to His Son to die for, to be a Representative of, to be a Substitute for, and that all of their salvation would be conditioned on His Son, Jesus. Absence of the knowledge of who Christ died for and what He did for those people is the conclusive evidence that Christ has not been fully preached, and therefore cannot be believed in to the point of being justified. To know and believe Christ is to know and believe what He has done to justify His people. To preach Christ aright is to preach the remission of the sins of His people and no others. Christ Himself said, "...repentance and remission of sins should be preached in His name among all nations..." (Lk. 24:47). This remission of sins is never preached in a general way so as to lead its hearers to think for one moment that all sins of all people have been dealt with by Christ, but only and always in a way that leaves the listeners in no doubt as to whose sins are being spoken about (see Isa. 53:8; Matt. 1:21; 1 Cor. 15:3; Gal. 1:4; Heb. 1:3; 1 Jn. 3:5; 4:10). The doctrine of Christ’s obedience unto death must be consistent with all the other grace doctrines, which are essentials to a right and saving knowledge of God. "With our justification God simultaneously performs the miracle of regeneration." If you have justification you are saved, and if you are saved you are in a justified state. To have one is to always have the other. A person is not justified and later saved, and a person cannot be saved and not be justified.

The teaching that one can be justified by believing Christ’s righteousness and then saved by believing the other grace doctrines, which, though essential to salvation, are not part of the Gospel, makes about as much sense as the claim that, while Christ did not die for everybody, He is dead for everyone. It is about as sensible as the statement: ‘Apart from not being round, that square looks just like a circle.’ To leave out any grace doctrine from the Gospel, which is the Good News of God’s grace in the salvation of His people, is to show oneself to be a spiritual buffoon. It does not take a genius to figure out that the doctrines which deal with grace in salvation ALL belong in the Gospel of grace!!! Where else could you put them? Why on earth would you not include them in the very thing which was set up to teach all about grace and salvation? Importantly, the fact that all these marvellous grace doctrines are in the Gospel does not mean each one is the ground of salvation, or that the ground of salvation is made up collectively of all these doctrines. To believe that God has elected people according to His grace and not their works is NOT the ground of salvation, it is not what justifies a man before God, it does not make a man legally righteous before God. But no one who does not believe in election by grace is saved, for being ignorant of, or knowingly rejecting, the fact that it took grace, through election, to get you to be one for whom Christ would die, shows that you believe in some other way. There is room to boast. Simply because a doctrine is not the ground of salvation is no reason to keep it out of the Gospel, for where is it said that the ground of salvation is all the Gospel is? The Gospel is that through which God speaks about His grace in the salvation of His people. Remember, that which is not in the Gospel is not essential to salvation. How can it be when Jesus the Lord said that belief of the Gospel is unto salvation! Doesn’t this prove that all that must be believed to be saved is in that Gospel? Of course it does. Therefore, those who believe the Gospel that speaks only of the righteousness of Christ, have no business in teaching that one must believe the other grace doctrines to be saved, for God says that belief in His Gospel saves. Therefore, any doctrine that must be believed in order for one to be saved MUST, by definition, be in the Gospel of salvation. Belief in the true God’s Gospel IS salvation!! There is nothing outside of its bounds that you must also believe to be saved. The ground of salvation is Jesus Christ—all that He is and all that He has done—but grace did not only have to provide a Savior, grace had to also choose those the Savior was to die for, and grace also had to provide the Holy Spirit Who would regenerate them. Surely one is not so foolish as to omit regeneration from the Gospel of salvation, or even election which provided the Son with a people to die for and the Spirit a people to make alive. The Gospel of God’s grace is all about God’s grace in salvation. It starts from election and ends with the glorification of all His chosen ones, to whom Christ has imputed His righteousness and whom the Holy Spirit has made alive.

The Gospel is the Good News of the grace of God in doing everything to save His chosen people from their sins, therefore no one has any biblical right to keep any doctrine that teaches the grace of God in salvation out of the Gospel. The ground of justification, that by which we are made, and presented to God, blameless and faultless, is the righteousness of Christ. Christ washes away the sins of His people and replaces them with His perfect righteousness so that there remains no condemnation for such people, their sins being forgiven and forgotten (see Rom. 4:6-8). They are pronounced innocent, and what’s more, entitled to heaven, which the righteousness of Christ they have had imputed unto them demands. As I said earlier, where some enemies of the Gospel have got it all wrong is their erroneous conviction that the whole Gospel should be about the ground of justification and so cannot include but one doctrine: the Righteousness of Christ! Their paranoid confusion dictates that if one adds any other doctrine to the Gospel, one is making belief in such a doctrine, or doctrines, part of the ground of salvation. But nowhere in Scripture does it say that the Gospel is the ground of salvation, just as it can nowhere be found that the Gospel is the righteousness of Christ. All those who savingly believe the Gospel know full well that the ground of salvation is the righteousness of Christ, but they also know that there would be no one to impute this righteousness to were it not for election, and all would have been in vain were it not for regeneration. One does not need to separate the doctrine of the righteousness of Christ from the other grace doctrines to avoid ‘confusion’ as to what the ground of salvation is, for the distinction is made by God when revealing His Gospel to His people. There are no Christians walking about who are in any doubt as to what is the ground of their salvation; none who think that election is the ground of their salvation or that their faith is. All know that the only ground of their salvation is the righteousness of Christ, but they are also aware of the fact that there could be no salvation without election or regeneration, and therefore belief of these Gospel particulars. The enemies of the Gospel of God say that the righteousness of Christ as the ground of salvation is the whole Gospel because this is where our faith must be initially directed. Surely the Scriptures say we must have faith in Christ, that it is He Who is our Savior, that it is He Who should have the pre-eminence, but why should this necessitate the obliteration of the other grace doctrines from the Gospel? One of the clinchers in all this that reveals such a teaching to be wrong is the fact that those who believe it insist that the other grace doctrines are essential to salvation. The fact that they cannot deny this truth, that they cannot escape this truth, is the root cause of their downfall. In doing this, they are obviously trying to have a foot in both camps. It is a case of wanting their cake and eating it too. You must believe the Gospel to be saved. If this meant that all you must believe in is the righteousness of Christ to be saved, then why are other doctrines said to also be essential to salvation? Who cares about any other doctrine! If I am saved by believing aright only the righteousness of Christ, without knowledge of, or correct belief in, the other grace doctrines which teach what the Father and Holy Spirit have done to fulfill the salvation plan, which completely shuts out any works of man from being in that plan, what does anything else matter? Believe the Gospel and you’re saved, so why not take an eat, drink and be merry attitude to anything else: what careth we for other doctrines!! The Gospel includes within it the ground of our salvation; the Gospel includes within it the righteousness of Christ, but is nowhere declared to be, or contain, only this doctrine. Anyone attempting to defend their belief that the Gospel is only the ground of salvation by saying, ‘But the Bible teaches that the Gospel is the Gospel of Christ,’ fails to realise that the Gospel is also called "...the Gospel of the uncircumcision..." and "...the Gospel of the circumcision..." (Gal. 2:7). Does this mean that uncircumcision or circumcision is the ground of salvation, or that Jews alone or Gentiles alone can be saved, that belief in such a doctrine is the ground of salvation? Of course not! The Gospel is also referred to as "...the Gospel of peace..." (Rom. 10:15). Does this mean that the ground of salvation is peace, whatever that might mean? Of course not. The Gospel is sometimes referred to as "...the Gospel of the Kingdom..." (Matt. 4:23; 9:35) and "...the Gospel of the Kingdom of God" (Mk. 1:14). Does this mean that the Kingdom of God is the ground of salvation? Of course not. Scripture also says, "...he that endureth to the end shall be saved" (Matt. 10:22). Does this mean that enduring to the end is the ground of salvation? Does "Thy faith hath saved thee..." (Lk. 7:50) mean that faith is the ground of salvation? Not at all. The Gospel includes within it the ground of salvation, the righteousness of Christ, for we are told that the Gospel reveals the righteousness of Christ, but is not exclusive to that one doctrine. "For I am not ashamed of the Gospel of Christ: for it is the power of God unto salvation...for therein is the righteousness of God revealed..." (Rom. 1:17).

Without the righteousness of Christ there would be no salvation. However much, and however accurately, one believed in the other grace doctrines, no one could be saved without the very thing that justifies a man, the righteousness of Christ. Grace could not be said to reign in a person’s life, one could not be saved by grace, without the righteousness of Christ. The righteousness of Christ is the capstone, if you will, of salvation. However, no one can be saved who knows and believes only the righteousness of Christ and yet remains ignorant of, or mistaken about, the other doctrines that spell out the whole work of grace in the salvation of man. Those who believe that the righteousness of Christ alone is the Gospel of God, and that anything included with this teaching as part of the Gospel makes those teachings part of the ground of salvation as well, fear that having these other doctrines in the Gospel is adding to the Gospel. But this cannot be the reality of the situation, as the doctrine which teaches the ground of salvation and the other doctrines which also have to do with salvation, are all doctrines of grace and they each have as much right as each other to be in the Gospel of grace. They speak of the Work of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit in salvation. They all deal with salvation and they all teach an aspect of the grace of God it took to enable the perfect plan of salvation to be fulfilled. That perfect plan of salvation is by grace through faith, and it can only be fully revealed by teaching all the grace doctrines that have to do with salvation. How can you have a salvation that is wholly by grace if one does not mention the fact that God has chosen those He wants saved purely by His grace? How can one have a salvation that is wholly by grace if one does not mention the fact that a man is made alive to God by His Holy Spirit? A gospel that does not specify these teachings, which immediately rule out the possibility that God chose a people based on anything concerning their character and conduct or that they managed to attract the Holy Spirit by some inherent goodness in themselves, is a gospel that fails to speak of total grace in the salvation of a man, thus leaving room for man to boast.

What is the righteousness of Christ? First and foremost, the righteousness of Christ is a grace doctrine. It is something that could not exist were it not for the grace of God. The doctrines that some say should not be in the Gospel, but at the same time are just as essential as the righteousness of Christ to salvation, are also doctrines that deal with grace in salvation and they are also things which could not be, but for the grace of God. All are said to be essential to saving knowledge, so what is the difference? Why should one, or some, of these doctrines be in the Gospel and the others not? If the doctrine of Christ’s righteousness is in the Gospel because it is primarily a grace doctrine, why would anyone exclude any other grace doctrine from being part of the Gospel when they all have the same qualification? How could any of these other grace doctrines which are, admittedly, essentials to a saving knowledge of God and which enhance the beauty of, and draw one’s attention to, that which is the ground of salvation, possibly be excluded from the Gospel of salvation? This brings us full circle to the flawed premise that the Gospel is solely about the ground of salvation. ‘A journey of a thousand miles begins with one step’, but if that step is taken in the wrong direction, the others can but follow. If one has a flawed premise, one that is without foundation, it comes as no surprise that subsequent teachings will also be wrong, because they are based on a misunderstanding or perversion of the Scriptures. Until a scripture can be produced that says the Gospel is the ground of salvation rather than the power of God unto salvation, because it reveals, not because it is, the righteousness of God unto salvation, such a notion will forever remain a flawed one because it is not based on truth, but on the ignorance of it.

Further to this false premise, that understanding the merits of Christ’s righteousness alone is to be justified, they say it is where "...all who are truly and savingly submitted to the righteousness of God revealed in the Gospel begin. They may be confused and unlearned in other areas, but this issue is settled in their minds and hearts." I dare say that to be confused in other areas, other doctrines which deal with God’s saving grace, one could never have a proper, biblical understanding, let alone belief, in the righteousness of Christ. How could one believe in the righteousness of Christ aright if one remains confused about, or ignorant of, the election of grace which is unto salvation? How can you know who Christ died for and therefore what He did if you are in unbelief towards, or ignorant of, the doctrine of election? How can you be preaching Christ’s atonement—what He has done in and through His glorious death—for example, if you have not specified that God, before the foundation of the world, chose a people to give to His Son to make atonement for? (see Jn. 17:2). How can one be preaching the righteousness of Christ aright without specifying for whom that Righteousness has been established and to whom it will be imputed? Election is essential to knowing what Christ did on the cross. What right had the Old Testament high priest to offer sacrifice only for the people of Israel and not for the whole world? The fact that God had directed him to do this! So too, what right had Christ to offer sacrifice to God for some but not all? The fact that God had elected a remnant and given them to His Son to save! The two doctrines, election and righteousness, are inseparable. Keeping this light under a bushel will keep a man from knowing, and therefore believing, that Christ’s death was an atoning death for everyone for whom He died and not something He did that can only become effective if people accept it. By not knowing who Christ died for, whether it was for some or for everyone, one could never know exactly what He actually accomplished by His death, which lies at the heart of the doctrine of the Person and Work of Christ, and the Gospel. What would, indeed could, Christ have done without election? Who would He have died for? Who would He have come to save? Obviously then, if Christ needed a people to be elected and given to Him so that He could fulfill His role as Savior according to the Scriptures, to neglect or reject such an important doctrine as election as being a Gospel doctrine, would be to remove its essentiality in God’s salvation plan, its vital role in the salvation of God’s people. Hence, these two doctrines, election and righteousness, are forever linked, for they belong to the same salvation plan, not separate ones. They belong to the same Gospel, not separate ones. They enhance each other, and they confirm each other as true and indispensable Gospel doctrines.

An outline of correct Gospel preaching will follow in the ensuing pages. For more detailed teaching, see this author’s other writings. Salvation. What does salvation mean and what is it to be saved? Can one be saved but not justified, or justified but not yet saved? Hardly. Can one believe the Gospel and yet not be saved? Can essential salvation doctrine exist outside of the Gospel? How can it? For Christ has said that if one believes the Gospel one is saved. If there is one thing we have learned, it is the fact that if it must be believed it must be in the Gospel. If this were not so, then we would have to say this: ‘God had to do it to save, but you don’t have to believe it to be saved.’ Or, ‘God had to do it to save, but its not in the Gospel of God that saves.’ If God had to do it TO save, you must believe it to BE saved and therefore it must be in the Gospel THAT saves!!! By definition the Gospel is what you must believe to be saved, and if you do believe it you are saved. Therefore everything that has to do with salvation, everything that you must believe about salvation, MUST be in the Gospel of salvation! Salvation is the fulfilment of God’s plan for His people. His goal is to save His people from their sins. His goal is to bring all His chosen ones into a saved state before Him, and in that saved state each and everyone of them is presented righteous by Him. Christ is said to save His people from their sins. How does He do this other than by justifying them by His blood (Rom. 5:9). Scripture says that the Lord’s chosen are "justified by the faith of Christ" (Gal. 2:16); "justified by Christ" (Gal. 2:17); "justified in the name of Jesus" (1 Cor. 6:11). How can anyone presume to think that a person in such a justified-by-Christ state is not a saved person? And how can anyone think that such a person is not aware of, and a believer in, what the word of God says about who Christ died for and what He did by that death! The two go hand in hand, as do all the grace doctrines that teach the various aspects of God’s salvation plan. Ignorance of one part of that plan, or failure to believe one part of that plan, evidences a faith that has not come from God, for He gives faith to His people so that they believe His whole grace Gospel without contradiction or error. The word salvation is used 45 times in the New Testament alone, and a total of 164 times in the whole Bible. The variants of salvation, save, saved, saving can mean rescue or safety, deliver, health, deliver or protect, heal, preserve, be (made) whole, acquisition (the act or the thing) preservation, obtain, purchased, possession. Such is the state of the saved, such is the state of the justified. To be saved speaks "Specifically of salvation from eternal death, sin, and the punishment and misery consequent to sin." Doesn’t this sound like the state of the justified man? Isn’t the justified man spared or freed from all punishment due to his sin, from the guilt and misery and torment due unto his sin, because he stands "...faultless before the presence of His glory..." (Jd. 24)? Of course it does. If Christ is the Savior, what else did He do but save His people from their sins, and how else did He do this but by His righteousness, which justifies all those whom God has given Him. "Salvation of the soul is deliverance from death unto life through Christ (Jn. 6:56; 14:20; Rom. 16:7; 1 Cor. 1:30; 9:1,2; 2 Cor. 5:17; Eph. 2:13)." This of course does not mean that there is only one doctrine, that of Christ, that one must believe in order to be saved, for we know that there are several doctrines in the Bible that deal with grace in salvation. Ignorance of any one of these doctrines precludes a saving faith in the righteousness of Christ. Righteousness saves, but who would it save without election? Righteousness saves, but who could it save without regeneration? A person cannot be saved if they are not elected, and a person cannot be saved if they are not also regenerated. Therefore, right and saving knowledge of the doctrine of Christ can never be whilst there is any abiding ignorance of all the grace/Gospel doctrines. Any doctrine that has to do with grace and salvation must be believed and is therefore part of the Gospel, for there is nothing essential to saving knowledge that can exist outside of the Gospel of God’s grace, for it is this very Gospel of grace that has borne these teachings and sustains their very existence. A doctrine that teaches God’s grace, which has to do with salvation, can only exist within the oxygen tent of the Gospel. Just as none can be saved who ‘believe’ in the righteousness of Christ without also believing in His resurrection, so too, none are saved who claim to believe in the doctrine of Christ’s righteousness but remain in ignorance of, or in error concerning, the other grace doctrines that deal with salvation. Christ saves, but that salvation is never accompanied by an ignorance of any of the doctrines of the Gospel of the grace of God.

We have already learned of man’s deadness in sin and therefore deadness to God, of his fallen sinful state and subsequent inability to even seek the true God. We have also learned that this is the launching pad of, indeed that which necessitates, the grace of God in the salvation of man. The Gospel not only proclaims salvation by grace, it tells you why one needs to be saved and why it could only be by grace. The doctrine of man’s total inability to come to God, or even seek God in and of himself before regeneration, is our introduction to the whole concept of a salvation all by grace. It is the prime doctrine that substantiates and validates the doctrinal truth that salvation can only be, and therefore must only be believed to be, by total grace. If one refuses to believe in the hopelessly sinful state of every man and woman to come out of Adam’s seed, then there is no way they will ever believe the complete Gospel of the total grace of God. Any teaching in regards to the fall of man, even if it is an angel from heaven teaching it, that does not clearly declare that man is DEAD in sin and cannot, and therefore will not, come to God, God’s Way, will lead a man to believe in a false gospel which proclaims that salvation in some way, and to some degree, is conditioned on man. Without this doctrine established in the minds of the hearers, grace just doesn’t make any sense, for why did God have to do everything in the salvation of a man if man has any innate ability to choose God by his own free-will or to find favor with Him according to his own good works. One cannot speak of grace without teaching the reason, and the necessity, for it. One cannot teach the glory of God’s goodness seen in grace, without the doctrine that teaches man’s utter hopelessness and helplessness without Him. Interestingly, God did not even speak about His glory without mentioning the fact that He "...will be gracious to whom (He) will be gracious, and (He) will show mercy on whom (He) will show mercy" (Ex. 33:19). God’s being willing to show mercy to some and not others is the foundation stone of election (see Rom. 9:16-20). Once having established from the Scriptures that man is dead in sin and therefore utterly dead to God to the point he cannot understand the true God, and therefore does not seek Him, the remedy for such a condition destitute of hope can be taught. Of course, that which motivates the grace of God is the love of God, which is all part and parcel of the purpose and will of God according to His mercy. For salvation to be all of grace, it stands to reason that ALL of salvation must be all of grace. Man’s Fall teaches that he cannot choose God but must be chosen of God; he cannot make up for his sins but must have them atoned for by a Savior; he cannot produce a righteousness that can present him blameless and faultless before a Holy God but must have that righteousness imputed to him by a Savior; and he cannot make a free-will decision for God but must be made alive to God by the Spirit of grace. No area, no issue, no matter that has to do with salvation can be without grace or have anything added to grace for it to be properly dealt with by grace. And the place where salvation by grace is dealt with, the place where salvation by grace is taught, is the Gospel of God. Grace must cover the issue of salvation like a carpet covers a floor: WALL TO WALL! There must be no gaps, or sections left uncovered. The doctrine of salvation cannot be properly, biblically taught if one of these aspects of grace is left out or deemed unnecessary to saving faith, and therefore does not feature in the Gospel.

The Scriptures which make all this perfectly clear, and which lay the very foundation for the Gospel as that which teaches the whole of the grace of God in salvation, and which in fact teach more than may at first be realised, are Ephesians 2:8 and 9: "For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: not of works, lest any man should boast." What wonderful Scriptures these are and how crystal clear they are when it comes to the matter of what it is that saves a man and what it is that does not, and cannot, save a man. It is the grace of God through the faith of God that saves a man. From that grace comes election; from that grace comes the Savior, all that He is and all that He has done; and from that grace comes the Holy Spirit Who quickens the minds and hearts of all those the Father has chosen to be His people. Again, election does not save anyone but one cannot be saved without it. Regeneration, alone, does not save anyone but one cannot be saved without it. Any gospel which forbids any part of this saving grace to be part of it, or which labels it as ‘non-Gospel doctrine’ or ‘extra-Gospel doctrine’, reveals itself to be a false gospel, for it leaves room for people to think that salvation in some way, and to some degree, is conditioned upon them. Whether a person is given room to think their obedience contributes to their salvation, or that God has elected them according to His foreseeing that they would choose Him, that they would be receptive to His call, such a one has been preached a false gospel. The true Gospel leaves a man in no doubt as to the why’s and wherefore’s of his salvation, and upon Who that salvation is conditioned, and upon what that salvation is based. The faith that God gives is placed solely and wholly on the grace of God and all that that grace entails. This does not mean that one’s faith is to be placed on election, or regeneration, or even one’s faith, for salvation, but it does mean that a true believer’s faith in the Savior is never without a wholehearted belief in the fact that those for whom Christ died and whom the Holy Spirit regenerates are all elected by God through the means of grace. The belief of, and faith in, the whole of the doctrines of the Gospel of God’s grace are believed instantly upon regeneration and is not a prolonged process that takes days, weeks, months or even years to complete. After the grace doctrines of the Gospel are taught, and at the appointed time God has chosen for a person to believe, one is regenerated by God and given the faith to believe all His Gospel which details the whole of His grace which was necessary, and made the whole of His salvation plan, possible and functional (see Acts 13:48 & Acts 2:47). Salvation does not come in steps. Nor is there any degree of a saved state reached by ‘believing’ one doctrine at a time, for no one could be in a saved, justified state whilst holding to any error concerning any of the doctrines which belong to the Gospel, for this would leave room for man to boast. No one could ever be saved whilst believing a gospel that conditions any part of salvation on a man’s works, or that leaves room for a man to think that at least a part of salvation is conditioned on what he does. A man is not first justified by believing one doctrine, and then saved by believing others. This would leave us with the dilemma of when exactly regeneration takes place, and with such questions as ‘Can a man be justified and regenerated but not saved?’ or ‘Can a man be justified but not yet regenerated?’

Grace, that whereby a man is saved, is not a work of man’s, nor is it something deserved or earned, but is a free gift of God. Salvation is not by works so that no man can boast that he has done anything to contribute to his own salvation, or anything he has done that has led God to favor him, which would naturally take away from the glorious grace of God. In fact, anything which takes away from the grace of God is that which completely does away with the grace of God (see Rom. 11:6). If one has works, even one work, one has not grace nor can one claim grace (see Gal. 5:3,4). Likewise, if one has a gospel that leaves out any grace doctrine dealing with salvation, one has a works gospel. If any part of grace is left out of the Gospel, that which must be believed for any to be saved, then salvation must be of works, or at least partly by works. You see, if grace doesn’t cover absolutely everything to do with salvation, there would be room for a man’s works, there would be room for him to boast. Seeing that the scriptures speak clearly on this, that man is saved purely by grace and not according to works, the Gospel of God must not have any room in it to give man’s works a foothold. If man were not, by nature, dead in sin then salvation would not be impossible for him to achieve in and of himself—there must be something he can do to get saved thus there is room to boast. If God had not elected a people by grace alone He must have done it according to respect of persons, or according to the works of a man, and so there would be room to boast. If righteousness did not have to come from another, then man’s own righteousness would have sufficed and so there would be room for man to boast. If man did not need the Holy Spirit to quicken him, to raise him up from his spiritually dead state, then it must be that man can do this himself and thus there is room to boast. If any of these things were true, the Gospel of God would not be a showcase of His glorious grace in salvation, but that which points to the ability of man to get himself out of the spiritual dilemma he is in. As this could never be the case with a God Who saves by grace alone, Who justifies His people by grace alone, it must be concluded that the Gospel is that whereby God teaches all His grace necessary in the salvation of His people. Every square inch of God’s salvation plan is covered by His grace, and so it stands to biblical reason that His Gospel must be the same. Neither the plan, nor that which announces it, leaves any room for man to boast in anything he is or anything he has done. If you’re gospel does, then you have a false gospel, a works gospel. A works gospel is one that conditions salvation on a man’s works, or even partly conditions salvation on what a man must do. A works gospel is one that does not teach all of the grace of God in salvation. Even a gospel that only teaches the righteousness of Christ and no other doctrine is a works gospel. Whilst not leaving its hearers in any doubt that one is justified by what Christ has done and not by their good works, such a gospel leaves room for a man to think that he is responsible for coming to God and choosing Him. As we have seen, this is exactly what the ‘righteousness only’ gospel is linked to, for it does not include election and is offered to its hearers, awaiting their decision to accept it. Any gospel which leaves you to think that you are among the saved because of your choosing God, or that you are saved by what you have done, or that you become saved because of any decision on your part, IS A FALSE GOSPEL!! It is obvious from the above scriptures that salvation, all of salvation, must give all the glory to God, and no part of the Gospel must even hint at the smallest amount of glory being attributed to man for anything he has done (see the author’s booklet, ‘To Whom Belongs the Glory?). All the glory for salvation belongs solely to God, so what else could the Gospel be, what else could the whole of salvation be reliant upon, than that glorious grace of God!! Only the Gospel of total grace rightly and fully elucidates the whole salvation plan of God. Anything short of this fails in what it claims to be: the Gospel of the grace of God. How could the Gospel be the Gospel of the grace of God if it did not teach all of the grace it took to save a man, from election to final glorification? There are no works of man involved in the Gospel of God, nothing a man can do to get himself saved or keep himself saved, for the Gospel—God’s message of salvation—is all about what God has done to save His people by His grace. The Gospel, rightly and fully preached, as the Lord Himself preached it, allows absolutely no room for a man to think, or be left under the slightest illusion, that any condition of salvation has been reserved for him to fulfill. If it did, it would not be the Gospel of grace, for it would not give all the glory to God for salvation as it would leave room for a man to boast and therefore to think that some of the glory for salvation is rightly and deservingly his. This is why all of salvation had to be all of grace because all of the glory belongs to God.

Hence, we see what the Gospel is all about: the grace of God. Not just some of the grace of God, not even most of the grace of God but ALL of the grace of God in the salvation of His people. If there is any part of salvation that was by the grace of God you can be certain you will find it in the Gospel of the grace of God!! If it must be believed it must be in the Gospel. Any gospel that fails to tell you the whole story of grace, or that teaches part of the story leaving the other parts well outside the confines of the Gospel, is a fake gospel. It doesn’t even deserve the ‘dignity’ of being called a counterfeit, for it is nothing but a worthless dud! The Gospel of grace is what man must believe to be saved, therefore it must be that which leaves no room for man to boast. If a man is saved by grace alone, then it stands to biblical reason that the Gospel he must believe tells him of all the grace it took to save him. If this were not the case, he would have reason to think that there is something he must do, or something he has done, that has contributed to his ‘saved’ state. The multitudinous arguments about what the Gospel is and what it is not all boil down to one question: what qualifies a doctrine as that which must be believed. The answer is simple: any doctrine which points to and teaches the grace of God and gives all the glory to God alone in the matter of salvation is a doctrine fit and worthy to be in the Gospel of God, and therefore must be believed from the outset of one’s being born again. But why is this so? Why is a doctrine which points to and teaches grace that which qualifies and identifies a doctrine as part of the Gospel? The answer is another simple one: grace has made salvation possible. In fact there can be no salvation without the grace of God. Likewise, there can be no salvation if any part of the grace that is necessary in the salvation of a man is left out of the Gospel which must be believed at the outset of one’s Christian life. At no stage during a Christian’s life does he believe that he was saved, is saved or will be saved, based on anything he has done, for he believes in a Gospel that has taught him that ALL of salvation is ALL by grace. If one is ignorant of any part of saving grace, one cannot rightly claim to trust in the grace that saves, and thus, be a Christian. We know from the words of Jesus that whatever the Gospel is, it must be believed, for one’s salvation depends on right and accurate belief of it, so it stands to reason therefore that whatever it is that must be believed MUST be in the Gospel (see 2 Thess. 2:13,14). Any omission of any part of grace leaves room for a man to think that salvation is in part dependant on what he does. Even if a man were not aware of this consequence, it would not change the fact that any omission of grace leaves room for a work of man’s, it would condition some part of salvation on man and not solely on the grace of God. Such a gospel does not give all the glory for all of salvation to God. It would leave some part of salvation independent, or free, from the work or grace of God. And a gospel being presented as an offer leaves a person with no alternative but to think that salvation depends on their free-will choice to accept what has been offered, that it is their ‘decision’ which makes the difference between heaven and hell rather than God’s alone (see 1 Cor. 4:7). This makes the ‘gospel’ being offered one which is based on works, and salvation as something which man chooses and not that which God gives to whom HE WILLS. Any gospel which fails to cover all of salvation by grace leaves room for a man to boast and is that which takes his eyes off God and onto himself. If you believe this to be an overly simplistic appraisal of what constitutes the Gospel of grace, may I alert the reader’s attention to the words of Paul the apostle: "I do not frustrate the grace of God: for if righteousness come by the law, then Christ is dead in vain" (Gal. 2:21); "Christ is become of no effect unto you, whosoever of you are justified by the law; ye are fallen from grace" (Gal. 5:4 cf. 5:2); "A little leaven leaveneth the whole lump" (Gal. 5:9 & Romans 11:5,6). The grace of God is diametrically opposed to the work of man, and therefore a Gospel which does not cover all the bases of salvation by the grace of God cannot but leave part of salvation dependant on what a man does. Seeing then that any absence of grace automatically means the presence of works—just as salvation by grace means no part of it could have been by works—the Gospel must cover with grace all that has to be believed, just as salvation itself had to be all by the grace of God. There is no such thing as a gospel of works and grace. It is either by grace or by works. Salvation is either by God or man and never a co-operative effort. If it is not all of grace, then it is works, and if it is of works, it cannot be by grace at all.

Seeing then that salvation is all of grace, it stands to biblical reason that anything which seeks to take away from that grace, or hinder one’s view of any part of that grace, which one’s zeal for God must be in accord with, is that which perverts the Gospel of God and leaves one with a false gospel which cannot save. To try and separate the doctrines of grace by including only some of them in the Gospel and leaving the others out, even if those others are said to be essentials to a saving knowledge of God, is to do the devil’s work. No matter how much one insists those other doctrines have to be believed for one to be saved, one would always have a gospel that could not save anyone, which is clearly not the Gospel that Christ spoke of in Mark 16. A gospel which insists that doctrines outside of it are essential to salvation, that salvation cannot be without belief in them, reveals itself as a gospel which cannot save anyone without them! What kind of a gospel is it that requires belief in something other than itself for salvation to occur? And of what use is a gospel that cannot save? CHRIST’S GOSPEL SAVES! It requires belief in nothing else for salvation to take place, for it is God’s Message on salvation. Its what God has to say about salvation. If I write a 3 page letter to someone, I do not send them only one sentence of it, saying, ‘This is my entire letter to you on the subject but there is more that you must know.’ Or think of it this way: a man has a full and balanced meal of meat and vegetables set before him. He separates the vegetables by placing them all onto another plate, calls the meat alone his meal, yet still wants to eat the vegetables, admitting that without them he has not had a proper balanced meal! The Lord has included everything He has to say on the subject of salvation by grace in ONE Gospel and there is nothing essential to saving knowledge that exists outside of God’s only Gospel, nothing outside that Gospel that one needs to believe to be saved. How could, and why would, any spiritually sane person want to separate the doctrines which define the Gospel of the grace of God? Isn’t it all Good News? What would make one grace doctrine better than another, or more necesssary than another, if all are said to be essential to one’s salvation? If salvation could not be if even one of these precious doctrines were missing? To despise one grace doctrine out of ‘love’ for another, or to look down on one grace doctrine because of one’s admiration and awe of another, is to bring strife and conflict among the doctrines that define saving grace. If believing all of them is essential to salvation, then no doubt what God has done through each individual act of grace in getting a man saved was essential to salvation. Now if the Gospel is that which must be believed if any are to be saved, and it is, if the Gospel is about salvation by grace, and it is, then how can any doctrine dealing with grace in salvation be left out of that which must be believed—God’s Gospel? "How can one be saved whilst not believing in, or not knowing, all the doctrines that are essential to one’s salvation?" On what scriptures would such a gross and deadly error as this be based? How could the Gospel of salvation, the Good News of salvation, be about anything less than the whole of salvation? WHAT WOULD ’GOSPEL’ MEAN IF DOCTRINES THAT ARE NOT INCLUDED IN IT ARE JUST AS ESSENTIAL TO SALVATION AS THOSE THAT ARE INCLUDED IN IT? We would have a case of the Gospel being about the essentials of salvation, but not including all of those essentials! What nonsense. The Gospel is the Good News of ALL of the grace of God in the salvation of His people.

By splitting justification and salvation, the proponents of the false gospel which has only the doctrine of the righteousness of Christ in it, have not merely shot themselves in the foot but have completely blown it off, for the Gospel is never called the Gospel of justification, but "...the Gospel of your salvation..." (Eph. 1:13). If the Gospel is the Gospel of salvation and includes within it the story of the Savior—Who He is, what He has done and who He has done it for—it must then include the doctrine of justification, for all that are saved are justified. The Gospel is made up of the teachings of God’s grace in the salvation of His people. This is what it was meant by God to be, so one can rest assured that every doctrine dealing with salvation is included in the Gospel of the grace of God including the doctrine of justification. No part of what it took to save God’s people from their sins by His grace could ever be left out of the Gospel God has Authored, and therefore no grace doctrine that must be believed can rightly be left out of the Gospel. To set the grace doctrines, the knowledge of which is essential to salvation, in competition with each other, or to segregate them in any way and for any reason, is the work of the Devil. To say that belief of one doctrine is more important than another Gospel doctrine, is to say that the hub of a bicycle wheel is more important than the spokes which connect it to the wheel. But the hub without the spokes would collapse just as quickly as the spokes would without the hub. The hub needs the spokes, as the spokes need the hub, and the wheel needs both if it is to be of any use at all. The gospel that teaches that only the doctrine of the righteousness of Christ belongs in it, but that the other doctrines which deal with salvation are just as essential, makes about as much sense as saying that wheels are an essential part of a car but should not be attached to it! Simply because the Person and Work of Christ is the ground of salvation, does not entitle anyone to think that this doctrine alone is the whole Gospel. There is nothing to such a teaching, especially in light of the fact that the grace doctrines left out of the Gospel are said to be as essential to salvation as belief in the righteousness of Christ is. If you cannot be saved without it then the Gospel cannot do without it. A person’s heart is a very necessary organ, for without it they would die. But needless to say, a body could not survive if other organs such as the liver, kidneys or lungs were not also in, and therefore part of, the body. So just as the body requires more than the heart to remain alive, the Gospel of God requires more than its central doctrine to be rightly and fully preached and believed. The Gospel of the grace of God is not made up of any one doctrine, but all the doctrines which cover the whole message of grace in salvation. If salvation took more than one act to be fully accomplished, then the Gospel must be made up of more than one doctrine. The Gospel is a doctrinal manifestation of all that was done to save God’s people. It stands to biblical reason, then, that every doctrine dealing with grace in salvation must be part of the Gospel of the grace of God. To omit, or to eject, any such doctrine from the Gospel is to play the Devil’s fool. To reject any grace doctrine as being part of the Gospel is such a black and evil thing, that only the deepest, darkest bowels of hell could be a fitting place for all those who have immersed themselves in the depths of such an heretical teaching. Crippling, or mutilating, the Gospel by removing most or even some of its doctrines that are agreed by all are essential to salvation, blasphemes the name of God and is an insult to His grace, and warrants an eternity of torment for those guilty of doing so. To preach and believe such a gospel, is to preach and believe another gospel, not God’s only Gospel. All who are guilty of such a crime are lost. The doctrines of the grace of God in the salvation of man belong in the same Gospel, for the Gospel is God’s Good News about His salvation plan according to His grace. This is not Calvinism, this is not Reformed thinking, this is nothing but the Word of the Truth of the Gospel of the grace of God!!

There are people in the world who believe in some very strange gospels. One of the strangest gospels is the one which says that as the work of Christ, His atonement and perfect obedience, is the ground, or basis, for a man being righteous in God’s eyes, this is the only doctrine which constitutes the Gospel. All the other grace doctrines are essentials to salvation, they say, but they are not to be included in the Gospel! But where in the scriptures is the Gospel of God ever defined as the ground of salvation? This is the fatal mistake made by such errorists. They have presumed that because the righteousness of Christ is the ground of salvation, the Gospel must contain only this single doctrine. They maintain that the inclusion of any other doctrine, even doctrines which they agree are essential to salvation, and that one cannot be saved if such doctrines are not believed in, would be adding to the Gospel. But aren’t these people the ones who are guilty of supplementing the Gospel when they say that there are doctrines outside of the Gospel which must all be believed for a man to be saved? Aren’t they saying that you must believe the Gospel and..., to be saved? And where in the Word of God does it say this? Doesn’t this contradict what Christ said about His Gospel—that belief in the Gospel shall save a man—and therefore there is nothing that needs to be added to it, or that could be essential to salvation that lies outside of it? As we have seen, the Gospel is the Gospel of the grace of God, it is not limited to any one doctrine but is made up of all that it took to save a man from his sins, from election to atonement to regeneration to final glorification. No one can deny that there would be no salvation, that the salvation plan would be incomplete, if any one of these acts were missing, so how can any say that not all have a right to be in the Gospel? Election cannot be the whole Gospel, for election only elects. Righteousness cannot be the whole Gospel, for righteousness only makes righteous; and, regeneration cannot be the whole Gospel, for regeneration only regenerates. A saved man is an elected man, a righteous man and a regenerated man and there can be no Gospel, no Good News of the salvation of man, without election or righteousness or regeneration. The Gospel does not only include what was done to atone for a man’s sins or the imputation of righteousness, but also teaches how those for whom this was done got to be those for whom this was done. The Gospel also includes within it the regenerating work of the Holy Spirit. If you could not be saved without it, then the Gospel cannot be without it. Those who believe they were chosen because God foresaw that they would choose Him, or that they would be ‘good’ people, are lost. As are those who believe one is regenerated after they make their ‘choice’ for God or after they have believed the Gospel. This alone makes these two doctrines, election and regeneration, very much a part of the Gospel, for any abiding ignorance or error concerning these doctrines shows a belief in a gospel that is not wholly based on grace, and therefore not consistent with grace. What good would it do for a man to believe in the righteousness of Christ if he thinks that he was elected based on God foreseeing that he would believe this. Or what good would it do a man to believe in the righteousness of Christ if he thinks that regeneration comes after one makes a ‘decision’ for Christ. Such a man would have salvation based at least partly on what he has done. He would believe that only the righteousness of Christ comes by grace, but that election and regeneration come by what he has done. This is further evidence that belief of election and regeneration according to grace is essential to salvation, and therefore essential to the Gospel. The Gospel is about the grace of God necessary in the salvation of His people and includes the mighty doctrine that teaches the Person and Work of the Savior Jesus Christ.

Election in particular is the doctrine that has been singled out for the roughest treatment by those who have forbidden membership in the Gospel to all but one of the doctrines of grace. It cannot and must not be preached to the ungodly, we are told, for this would make it impossible to preach the Gospel as a legitimate and sincere offer to the hearers. The error that the Gospel should be preached as a free offer, in its original form, "...was an assault upon the doctrine of election. It developed into an assault upon the...doctrine of the atonement. Under the influence of its promoters in England and Scotland the focus was shifted to the idea that one could preach that Jesus was dead for all but had died for only some. That is, hypothetically, Jesus’ death was...designed and intended to be available to all upon condition of faith and repentance. This was an attempt to marry the Reformed and Arminian doctrines of atonement, to teach a provision for all men in the death of Christ but an efficacy for only some. This trend came together in the Marrow Controversy in the Presbyterian Church of Scotland. This dualist conception of the atonement was condemned...as Arminianism....The theory of the offer belongs to a certain Arminian trend which has been present in the Reformed and Presbyterian community since the time of the Synod of Dordt. It was an attempt to marry the conditional universalism of Arminianism to the truth of Sovereign particular grace...perhaps the best description of this error is to call it hypothetical universalism." Let me make it quite clear that there is nothing hypothetical about the Gospel or Christ’s death. Something hypothetical exists only as an idea or concept in the mind of man and not in the real world of God. To say that Christ’s death was for everyone, or that His death was efficacious for some but sufficient for all, is to teach heresy. Now, had Christ died for everyone ever born, all would surely have been saved, for by the shedding of Christ’s blood there IS remission of sins (see Heb. 9:22 & 10:18,19). The act of Christ dying and offering His body to God as a sacrifice for sin, would have saved the entire world had He done this for everyone. But the reality is that He did not do it for everyone, but EXCLUSIVELY for those God had given Him. Christ’s death was not for anyone else but His people, those whom the Father had given Him (Jn. 17:2). So how could His atoning death be sufficient for all when He died only for the people God had elected? He was a Substitute for, and had represented only, those whom God had chosen (see Jn. 10:15; Eph. 5:25). How can one offer to others that which has been done only for some? How can one offer to others that which has not been purchased for them? How can my payment of someone’s bill at a restaurant possibly be of any benefit to anyone else? How could I offer my payment of their particular bill to anyone else? To say that Christ’s death was sufficient for all is to say that the high priest’s sacrifices in the Old Testament, which were a shadow of what the coming Messiah would do, though directed by God to be performed exclusively for the nation of Israel, were sufficient for the whole world! (see Lev. 16:34). Nobody ever preaches this, so why do people insist that the Messiah’s sacrifice could ever benefit those for whom it was not made. Why does carnal man insist that Christ’s sacrifice was sufficient for all but efficient for some? If ever there was a catch phrase belonging to those who claim to believe in a definite and particular atonement but have no courage to preach it, this is it! For ‘sufficient for all but efficient for some’ to be true it would mean that Christ died for every man’s sins but only effectively for the sins of some! There is no such thing as an inefficacious, directed-by-God, sacrifice in all of Scripture. There is simply no sense to such ‘reasoning’. If Christ’s sacrifice was efficient, if it in any way accomplished anything, then it must of necessity have accomplished it on behalf of all those it was done for. If it was at all efficient in atoning for sin, then it must have atoned for the sins of everyone it was done for. (For more on this see the author’s booklet, ‘Atonement For Whom?’). To mix the hypothetical with reality is to always end up with a fiction.

According to some who espouse a single doctrine Gospel, the Righteousness of Christ is all that needs to be preached, in fact, it is all that must be preached as the Gospel to the ungodly in order for them to be justified. Then, once they have accepted this teaching, the other doctrines such as election and the quickening work of the Holy Spirit, etc., may be revealed to them. All these doctrines, it is said, will be believed automatically if a person has rightly believed in the righteousness of Christ. These other essentials are the fruit of believing the Gospel, they say, and not part of the very Gospel itself. They have so separated justification from salvation, that they say one becomes justified believing in the righteousness of Christ, but not saved until the other doctrines, which are curiously not in the Gospel, are heard and believed. So there are people running about under the impression that they are justified but not yet saved!! I must say that I have heard some doozies in my time, I have met some weird people in my time, most of them from the religious sector, but I have never heard such ridiculous theology as this. Can you imagine God saying to a person who died believing in the doctrine of the righteousness of Christ, who has had that very righteousness imputed to him, but who died before hearing or believing the other doctrines one must believe to be saved, ‘I’m sorry, but though I justified you and imputed My Son’s righteousness to you; though there is no wrath of mine remaining for you, for My Son has borne it all on your behalf, I cannot admit you into My Kingdom because you are not saved.’ And if anyone should claim that, though righteousness is believed it is not imputed until the other grace doctrines are believed, then what reason could there be for not including those doctrines in the Gospel, and what would it benefit a man to believe in righteousness alone? Believe the gospel of righteousness, but it will do you no good until you believe the doctrines which lie outside of that gospel? ‘Asinine’ is too kind a word for such drivel. No man who is justified walks this earth, or has ever walked this earth, in an unsaved state, and no man who is saved can ever be said to be in an unjustified state. Anyone who fails to understand this or believe it, is not only seriously lacking in spiritual understanding but is, to say the least, mentally challenged. No man justified by the righteousness of Christ has ever walked a single moment on this earth without believing the other grace doctrines which are in the Gospel. Belief of each Gospel doctrine is not separated by years, or months, or even days, but the faith which God gives believes in the whole Gospel package as soon as one is regenerated. The Gospel of God is His Message of salvation, and this message includes within it all that justifies a man and all that was done, and needed to be done, on his behalf to get him to this saved/justified state. If this were not the case, then we would have the absurd situation of God having a main Gospel which justifies, and a separate ‘minor’ Gospel which saves. May I remind the reader that God has only one Gospel, one set of doctrines which must be believed for a person to be saved, and that Gospel includes everything that God did through grace to save His chosen people.

No matter what kind of positive spin is put on the grace doctrines that are left out of the Gospel, no matter how much the point is stressed that these doctrines are essential to salvation, we are left with a gospel that does not teach the whole of the grace of God in salvation. One would be hard-pressed to convince anyone who believes Christ when He said that belief in the Gospel is evidence of salvation, that these doctrines are essential to saving knowledge. Again, we must point out that the Gospel is referred to in Scripture as the Gospel of salvation, and it is understood by almost all who read the Bible that belief of the Gospel is synonymous with salvation. If the righteousness of Christ is that which justifies a man and it is the only doctrine in the Gospel, then we must conclude that belief in this doctrine alone will save a man (see Mk. 16:16). Yet strangely, the enemies of the Gospel do not say this. They cannot agree with Christ when He said that those who believe the Gospel SHALL BE SAVED!! They are at loggerheads with what the Messiah Himself has declared. They insist that the other grace doctrines, which they have seen fit not to include in the Gospel of salvation, must also be believed if any are to be saved!! But how can this be, when Christ has said that those who believe the Gospel shall be saved? As a consequence of the one-doctrine-gospel, one can believe whatever one likes about election, regeneration, sanctification etc., and still be justified. My question is, ‘How can one believe aright the grace doctrines essential to salvation if they are not all included in the Gospel, if they are not all taught a man before he is regenerated?’ Contrary to 2 Thessalonians 2:13, we would have a case of a man being chosen to salvation through sanctification and belief of whatever he believes the truth to be regarding the majority of doctrines essential to salvation! Can one imagine the Gospel of the grace of God being without even one of those grace doctrines? Do you think God would have, or could have, forgotten to mention even one of the grace doctrines when He was ‘drawing up’ His Gospel plan to save His people by His grace? Of course not. Cutting every grace doctrine out of the Gospel barring one, would constitute such a monstrous incision into the body of doctrines that are the Gospel it would constitute an amputation!! It would be like removing the head from a body and calling the head alone a human being. No one doctrine, not even the glorious doctrine of the imputed righteousness of the Lord Jesus Christ, is enough to cover all of the grace of God, which the Gospel is said to be about. As we have pointed out, the Gospel is called the Gospel of Christ several times in the Scriptures, but this can never deny the fact that the Gospel of Christ is the very Gospel of the grace of God. And that which ensures God’s people believe all of the grace doctrines essential to a saving faith and not merely one of them, is the fact that salvation by the grace of God does not only involve the Son of God but includes the work of the entire Godhead: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. To put it as succinctly as possible, one cannot biblically believe in Christ without right knowledge of, and belief in, the other doctrines that are essential to salvation. Any gospel, therefore, that is missing one doctrine of even one aspect of what it took to save a man, is not the gospel of God but a gospel of demons. Any gospel that does not include within it the work of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit in the salvation of God’s people is a false gospel. No gospel that takes away all or even some of the glory for salvation as being the sole property of God, can be that which God is the author of, but one that is written with the poison pen of man.

Let it be clearly understood by all that Jesus Christ is central to the preaching of the Gospel. Some have even dared to deny this! Nevertheless, it is by His Person and His work that a man is made righteous. This is what this ministry has taught from its inception and what it will always teach, but merely because the righteousness of Christ is the central doctrine of the Gospel, indeed the entire Bible, this does not give anyone license to exclude any other grace doctrine dealing with the mechanics of how God saves from the Gospel: that which Christ Himself said must be believed if any are to be saved. That which must be believed, the Gospel, shuts out every work of man’s and conditions the whole of salvation on the grace of God. A gospel which fails to do this is a gospel which cannot save, for salvation is all by the grace of God. To believe the Gospel of grace one must have no room for works, and to have no room for works one must have the only Gospel that teaches the whole of grace in the salvation of man. Though salvation is through the Person and Work of Christ Jesus the Lord, this does not take away from the essentiality of the other grace doctrines and therefore their rightful place in the Gospel. All are agreed that all the grace doctrines are essential to salvation, so why should any of them be kept out of the Gospel, which is the Good News of God’s grace in the salvation of His people! Has anyone stopped to think WHY these other grace doctrines are said to be essential to salvation, even by those who do not include them in the Gospel? Why must they be believed to evidence salvation? OBVIOUSLY BECAUSE SALVATION CANNOT DO WITHOUT THEM! HENCE THEIR INCLUSION IN THE GOSPEL—BECAUSE ANYTHING THAT DEALS WITH SALVATION IS SOMETHING THE GOSPEL OF SALVATION CANNOT DO WITHOUT!! Any error that takes away from, or leaves out, the fact that EVERY part of salvation is by the grace of God, reveals a false gospel and those who preach or believe it as accursed ones (see Gal. 1:8,9).

If all a man knew was that God elected a people before the foundation of the world according to His grace and not their works, one would not have the whole Gospel, one would not be saved. One would only be in possession of part of the Gospel, part of that which was necessary in the salvation of man. Election teaches, and highlights, the fact that those whom Christ has sacrificed His life for are those whom God has chosen and given to Him before the foundation of the world. Jesus spoke about it freely: "All that the Father giveth Me shall come to Me..." (Jn. 6:37). "...that He (the Son) should give eternal life to as many as Thou hast given Him..." (Jn. 17:2). One cannot preach the righteousness of Christ, which is made up of His great work of atonement and His perfect obedience established for, and imputed to, His people without teaching why Christ died, what He did in and through that death AND FOR WHOM HE DID IT! Once one has rightly, properly and fully spoken about the atonement of Christ, one has made clear that Christ’s substitutionary death was for a people, people the scriptures describe as "...the election of grace" (Rom. 11:5). Consequently, once one has fully preached the Gospel, one has preached more than simply the Person and Work of Christ but also the work of the Father in choosing those to whom Christ’s righteousness would be imputed and the Work of the Holy Spirit in making these people alive to the great truth that is the Gospel of the whole of the grace of God. These doctrines are not independent of each other, they do not stand individually, but are interdependent—they rely upon each other and each one leads to the other. "Not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to His mercy He saved us, by the washing of regeneration, and renewing of the Holy Ghost; which he shed on us abundantly through Jesus Christ our Savior" (Titus 3:5,6). The whole Trinity is involved in man’s salvation. If the Trinity is One, then what the Trinity has done in the salvation of man is as one. The whole of what has been done to ensure and secure the salvation of God’s people is like one continuous doctrine. The Gospel is the doctrine that teaches the grace of God in the salvation of His people. You cannot separate Who Christ is and what He has done from the people He has done it for, therefore you cannot separate Christ from the doctrine of election or the doctrine of election from Christ.

To ‘preach’ Christ, but not make mention of those for whom He died, the elect of God who have been entrusted to Him, is to be silent about what exactly Christ has done in and through His death. THE MERE MENTION OF CHRIST’S DEATH OBLIGATES THE PREACHER TO STATE WHO HE DIED FOR. A statement like ‘He died for sinners’ will not cut it, because a person can think that this means He died for everyone. Saying, ‘His death atoned for sin’, also falls well short of the mark of what it is to preach Christ and Him crucified—what Christ has done by His death—because it can leave the hearer to think that Christ has atoned for everyone’s sins and that salvation cannot take place unless a person makes his choice for Christ. The proper and only way to preach Christ aright is to state clearly that He died for the elect of God, that He paid the penalty for their sins that were imputed to Him, and that His righteousness is/will be imputed to them. Anything short of this is to NOT preach Christ! This is why the Gospel is a foolproof system of doctrines, drawing one’s attention to God and His grace. Any tampering with it is to always, always, always take away from it!! How can election according to grace not be preached to those who have been told they are all spiritually dead, without God and without hope in this world? Those who do not believe in election, and even many of those who do, are hellbent on keeping election out of evangelistic preaching. They see it as a hard doctrine, something that should not be preached to the uninitiated, but in reality it is the doctrine that inspires hope that there is salvation, even for a people who are dead in sin with no redeeming quality and no way of personally finding favor with God by anything they are or anything they have done. To not preach the spiritual deadness of man, his complete lack of understanding and utter inability to seek and therefore come to God, is to leave some basis for a salvation that is not wholly by the grace of God. One will always find the absence of the deadness of man coupled with a salvation that is in some way conditioned on man. Election is the hope doctrine. That though man cannot save himself, God has chosen some to be saved.

The Gospel is a set of doctrines which cannot be separated, for they are as one doctrine. The doctrines of the Gospel of the grace of God are like a circle, an unbroken circle. They flow into and out of one another. All the doctrines of the Gospel are connected, they are conjoined, and so to reject one is to reject them all. The Gospel cannot stand, it will not support you, if it does not have all the doctrines that God intended it to have. A gospel that does not contain all of the grace of God is one that has no foundation, no scriptural means of support and will, therefore, collapse. The Gospel is no Gospel of grace if there is any room in it for a man to think that salvation is in some way conditioned on what he does. Again, the Gospel is like a circle—all its doctrines are seamlessly joined, leading into and out of each other. If even one of those doctrines is missing or removed, one is left with a disjointed circle and a gospel that fails to fully distinguish every facet of grace required to save a man. It is to end the unity, the sequence, and the coherence of all that God has done to save His people from their sins. So, having seen that no one doctrine can be the whole Gospel, it stands to biblical reason that the Gospel is made up of more than one doctrine; that it took more than simply the work of one Person of the Trinity to save a man; that the salvation of God’s people necessitated the work of the whole Godhead; and that belief in what the whole Godhead has done to save is so necessary to saving faith that one is lost if one fails to know, understand and believe every doctrine of the Gospel of the grace of God. "The Gospel of salvation...should include every Divine undertaking of the Trinity to secure the salvation of those people whom God gave to Christ. It should include everything from eternity past to eternity future. It should include everything from God’s eternal purpose to lift undeserving sinners from the mire and corruption of their fallen condition to their being presented ‘...faultless before the presence of His glory..." (Jd. 24). This, is the Gospel of salvation!"

The following will not be an exhaustive commentary on what the doctrines of the Gospel are in terms of teaching why they are truth. For such exposition, I believe my other booklets have more than adequately covered the truth of each individual doctrine which makes up the Gospel. What I will proceed to do is to provide a biblical definition of the grace it took to save God’s people from their sins. The following doctrines should all be viewed as essentials to a saving knowledge of God and therefore as essentials of the glorious Gospel of the Grace of God.

In order to properly preach the Gospel of salvation by grace, one must include the doctrine that man cannot obtain any part of salvation by anything he does. In order to properly show that there is nothing man must do to get saved, one must show that there is nothing man can do to get saved. No doctrine teaches this clearer than that which proclaims that man is dead in sin and dead to God. Man, in his fallen sinful nature, cannot understand God and therefore does not seek God. Without God, the Bible says, man is utterly without hope in this world. The following scriptures are a testament to these facts: "And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, ‘Of every tree of the Garden thou mayest freely eat: But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die" (Gen 2:16,17); "...by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon ALL men..." (Rom. 5:12); "For ALL have sinned, and come short of the glory of God" (Rom. 3:23). God says, "...every man AT HIS BEST state is altogether vanity (unsatisfactory)" (Psa. 39:5); The best a man can do to recommend himself to God falls far short of the perfection that God demands: "...we are all as an unclean thing, and all our righteousnesses (good deeds) are as filthy rags; and we all do fade as a leaf; and our iniquities (sins), like the wind, have taken us away" (Isa. 64:6); "...there is none that doeth good, no, not one" (Rom. 3:12); "For there is not a just man upon earth, that doeth good, and sinneth not" (Eccl. 7:20). "...There is NONE righteous, no, not one: there is NONE that understandeth, there is NONE THAT SEEKETH after God. They are ALL gone out of the way, they are together become UNPROFITABLE; there is NONE that doeth good, no, NOT ONE" (Rom. 3:10-12 cf. Psa. 14:2,3). No one in their natural fallen/sinful state is aware of their complete deadness to God. Many people, even non-religious people, know full well that they are sinners, but none, by nature, know that they are completely dead to God and that nothing they can do, have done, or will do, will ever make up for their sin, none of their ‘good works’ will ever tip the scales of justice in their favor and nothing they can do will ever find favor for them with God. This is obvious, in light of the fact that every man-made religion out there promotes works as a necessary part of the ground of salvation. Thus we see that, in order to understand why salvation must be all by grace, and why only belief in a Gospel that teaches all of salvation is all by grace, the doctrine of man’s spiritual fall and consequent deadness to God must be preached. It must be in the Gospel for without knowledge of, or belief in, this vital doctrine, there is room for man to think that salvation is in some way conditioned on him. No gospel that allows this could possibly be the Gospel of the grace of God. The evidence for this lies in the fact that every false gospel that conditions any part of salvation on a man’s works, does not teach the utter deadness of man to God.

Seeing that no one in such a spiritually dead state could possibly seek God and therefore choose Him, the choosing had to be something God had to do. And, I might add, it was according to nothing but His grace, for what else could it have been according to when the people chosen were all filthy, unclean creatures with no redeeming quality. In accord with His desire to save some, which was borne out of His love, mercy, will and purpose, God, before the world began, elected a people from every corner of the globe, from every tribe, language and nation, to be His people. There was nothing these people would, or could do, during their life to attract God’s attention to them, thus causing Him to choose them to be His children based solely on His grace. He did not choose them based on His foreseeing that they would choose Him or that they would be ‘good’ people, but wholly according to His grace. "According as He has chosen us in Him before the foundation of the world...having predestinated us unto the adoption of children by Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the good pleasure of His will, TO THE PRAISE OF THE GLORY OF HIS GRACE..." (Eph. 1:4-6); "...be thou partaker of the afflictions of the Gospel according to the power of God; Who hath saved us, and called us with an holy calling, not according to our works, but according to His own purpose and grace, which was given us in Christ Jesus before the world began" (2 Tim. 1:9). So then, election must also be an essential part of the Gospel because it reveals that those who have been appointed to salvation, those for whom Christ would die and impute His righteousness to, those who would be sanctified by the Holy Spirit, were all elected for no other reason than God’s purpose and grace. Election unto salvation "...is not of him that willeth, nor of him that runneth, but of God that sheweth mercy" (Rom. 9:16 cf. Rom. 9:11; Titus 3:5). According to this teaching, we see that no effort on man’s part to get saved, to be made alive, to be brought back from a state of spiritual death to spiritual life, is necessary or even possible. It is God Who has chosen man and not man who has chosen God (Jn. 15:16).

These chosen people, those whom the Scriptures call the election of grace, and who are called by the Gospel (2 Thess. 2:14) are the ones for whom Christ Jesus the Lord was sent to earth to deliver (see Jn. 17:2 & Isa. 53:8,11). Why Christ was sent to the earth will determine for us what He did and, in turn, for whom He did it. If one does not specify why Christ was sent to the earth one is not preaching what He did or for whom He did it. Christ was sent to save sinners but which sinners? All or some? He was sent to save people from their sins, but which people? The answer to these questions is what lies at the heart of what Christ has done. It is what defines who Christ is and distinguishes Him from all counterfeits. If Christ died for every individual ever born, then what He has done does not actually ensure the salvation of any but its effectiveness becomes dependant on a man’s decision to accept what Christ has done. Seeing that all men are dead to God and cannot do anything in and of themselves to choose God, which is why the choice had to be God’s, evidenced by His electing by grace those for whom His Son would die, we must conclude that such a ‘decision’ is impossible and thus such a death simply could not be. If Christ died for the elect alone, it ensures that each and every one of them will be saved and that they will all receive Him (Jn. 6:37). This is the only thing Christ could have done that matches perfectly, complies with, highlights, and is true to, the very nature of atonement. Only this death, only this sacrifice, is a true reflection of that which foreshadowed what the Messiah would do, seen in the Old Testament sacrifices of the High priest. Only this death can truly be said to be the substance of the shadow. Christ lived a life of perfect obedience to God’s law during His 33 years of life on this earth, and then went to the cross to die for the people God had given Him. His death was a sacrifice, and importantly, an atoning sacrifice, for all the sins of all those people God chose by His grace for the purpose of salvation. Christ was a Substitute for them. He did what He did for them. These people were given to Christ and so it stands to biblical reason that all that Christ did was as a Substitute, a Representative, for those very people whom God had chosen and entrusted to Him. God resurrecting Christ from the dead was a confirming sign that He was satisfied with, and therefore accepting of, Christ’s work on their behalf. The righteousness of Christ, made up of His Person and Work which includes His atoning death and perfect obedience, is imputed to all those whom God has elected. This righteousness is the ground of salvation, that which makes a man legally righteous in God’s sight. It requires no work of man’s, but stands alone as that which makes a man righteous in God’s eyes. The obedience of Christ unto death is the sole righteousness that every one of God’s elect turn to and claim as that which rightly demands their acceptance with God and their entitlement to heaven. "...by the obedience of One shall many be made righteous" (Rom. 5:19). Not one of God’s people look to, or claim, any of their own righteousness instead of, or in addition to, the glorious and perfect righteousness of Christ as that which recommends them unto God. It neither gets them saved or keeps them saved. Together with Paul the apostle they say, "I count all things but loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord: for Whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and do count them but dung, that I may win Christ, and be found in Him, not having mine own righteousness, which is of the law, but that which is through the faith of Christ, the righteousness which is of God by faith" (Phil. 3:8,9). According to this teaching—the Person and Work of Christ having dispensed with the sins of God’s people and alone establishing for them a perfect righteousness which gains them acceptance with God—there is no room for any man to think for even a moment that any of his own feeble and imperfect attempts at obedience could ever be the ground, or part thereof, of his salvation or that his obedience is in any way necessary to the establishment of a righteousness that meets the demands of God’s law and justice. They do not seek to establish a righteousness of their own but believe they are saved by grace through faith in the righteousness of Christ. Now, again, this cannot mean that knowledge of, and belief in, only the doctrine of the righteousness of Christ is knowledge of, and belief in, the Gospel and enough to save, for none can believe, or have believed, aright in the doctrine of the righteousness of Christ who do not also know and believe in the other doctrines of grace which deal with salvation. All the people who are the elect of God, chosen by God before the foundation of the world according to nothing else but the grace of God, have had their sins washed away by the atoning blood of Christ and a perfect obedience established for them by Christ Himself, which is all due to the grace of God. These two doctrines are forever linked by the chain of grace, for they are eternal links in that chain.

To every one of these people, the Holy Spirit of God comes and quickens—He makes them alive unto God and the truth of God to the point they see, understand and believe the whole of the Gospel of God, that for which God’s faith is given, that they might be converted: "...when He, the Spirit of truth, is come, He will guide you into all truth..." (Jn. 16:13 see also Rom. 4:17; 1 Cor. 2:9-12; Eph. 2:1,5). Not one of these people will reject any doctrine of the Gospel, or claim to hold fast to any essential grace doctrine but not confess that they are all part of the Gospel, once the Holy Spirit is sent to open their eyes and minds so that they savingly believe the Gospel. Just as no person sitting in a room with no windows, doors or light switch cannot but see the light once the light is turned on by an independent source. This teaching of the regenerative work of the Holy Spirit also rules out any possibility that the seeing, understanding and believing of the Gospel of the grace of God is something a man can do independently of God, without God’s presence in a man’s life, or without the gift of faith used by the Holy Spirit to make a man see, believe and love only the truth. The Word of God says, "Blessed is the man whom Thou choosest, and causest to approach unto Thee..." (Psa. 65:4) and "Thy people shall be willing in the day of Thy power..." (Psa. 110:3). The regenerative work of the Holy Spirit ensures the belief of every doctrine that has to with grace in salvation. Regeneration cannot be separated from the faith that is given to believe the whole Gospel the instant one is made alive.

So, thus far we have seen that man is dead in sin and dead to God and therefore plays no part in his being chosen of God and that being part of the saved ones is in no way left up to some free-will decision on man’s part to be one of those saved ones. None can seek God, so how can one choose the true God whilst in one’s natural unregenerative state. Therefore none of the glory for this part of salvation work is due unto man but totally unto God alone, for it is by grace. Only doctrines of grace direct, and give, all the glory for salvation to God, for grace is a work of God and not man. Therefore a gospel that fails to mention all that grace has done, and as a consequence does not give all of the glory for all of salvation to God, is a false gospel. We have also seen that the atonement, the blotting out of the sins of these chosen ones as if they never existed, is all done by the Savior, Jesus Christ, Whom the Bible says was named so because He would "...save His people from their sins..." (Matt. 1:21 cf. Psa. 80:2). No work of man’s, or effort on man’s part, has contributed one iota to satisfying the justice of God, which demands that every sinner pay the penalty of an eternity in hell for their sinfulness. Also, the obedience that must be established for any to meet the stringent requirements that God’s law demands, was attained by Christ for all His people. They, in turn, do not look to their own obedience but only, always and exclusively to the obedience of Christ as that which meets the demands of God’s law. All these elect ones for whom Christ has established a perfect righteousness will be made to see, they will all be given the gift of faith and that faith will be savingly worked into their hearts by the Holy Spirit of God. From this we learn that no man can rightly stake a claim that their believing the Gospel of Christ is in any way due to their ‘decision to accept Him’, but only due to the fact that God has, by His will alone, by His grace alone, chosen and subsequently caused His people to see, understand and believe His Gospel by His Spirit.

Finally, no part of this salvation, which could never have been made possible were it not for the election of grace, the atonement and obedience of Christ and the work of the Holy Spirit in awakening a man to God and His glorious truth, will ever be for nothing. Nothing grace does is ever in vain for it is always connected with the will of God. It will never be in vain for none of God’s chosen will fail to be saved or ever lose their salvation. God’s elect have been foreordained to believe and predestined, or appointed, to salvation (Acts 13:48); the Lamb of God was slain for them from the foundation of the world (Rev. 13:8); and none for whom He died will ever be lost (Jn. 10:27-29). They have been given eternal life, life which is everlasting, and therefore cannot ever end, and therefore could not ever be dependant on their feeble attempts at obedience. It ensures that they will be obedient people (Eph. 2:10) but their salvation will not depend on their obedience but that of Christ’s alone. The only way they could lose their salvation, by their future sins, has all been blotted out by the atoning blood of Christ. What sin could they commit that would cancel out all that has been done for them? The very fact that God has appointed, or predestined, each one of these people to be saved, alone rules out the possibility that any other fate awaits them than salvation (see 1 Thess. 5:9,10). They have each been given the gift of eternal life and that life they have been given, which also comes by no other way than by the grace of God, is everlasting. Their "...life is hid with Christ in God" (Col. 3:3). With one voice the elect say, "...If God be for us, who can be against us?" (Rom. 8:31) and Scripture says, "Who shall lay anything to the charge of God’s elect? It is God that justifieth" (Rom. 8:33). God will never leave them, and so they will never leave Him (see Heb. 13:5). Now how could something be lost when it is everlasting and made so by God Himself? How could anything damn a sinner and cause him to lose his salvation, who has been eternally justified by God? By this doctrine of everlasting life, we see that just as no work of man’s is necessary to get saved, so too, no work of man’s is necessary to keep him saved. Salvation is because of grace and a man remains in that saved state because of the grace of God. A man gets saved by grace and he stays saved by grace. This teaching shuts out any possibility that remaining saved could ever be something which man by his obedience could achieve (Gal. 3:3), and therefore any reason for him to think that part of the glory for salvation belongs to him. A man could never have this understanding were he not made aware, by the preaching of the whole Gospel of Grace, that the whole of salvation is by the grace of God.

The Scripture says: "For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: not of works, lest any man should boast" (Eph. 2:8; cf. 2:5). Grace, faith, and salvation itself, are all gifts that come from God. No part of salvation is due to, or requires, the obedience of a man to get himself saved or to keep himself saved. Therefore there is no room in God’s Gospel for a man to boast of his salvation, that he has done anything or played any part in his being made righteous in the sight of God, or that he has done, or was required to do, anything to become one of those who would be made righteous in the sight of God. Moreover, this shows us that the only reason there is no room for man’s works in the Gospel is because it is FILLED to the brim with the work of the grace of God! God’s people are not responsible for their election of God; they are not responsible for Christ having died for any of the elect; they are not responsible for the Holy Spirit coming to them and applying the truth of God to them as none of them are responsible for their getting saved, being saved or remaining saved. And if no part of salvation is due to a man’s works, what else could it be due to but the Work of God, which the Bible calls the grace of God, and that exclusively. And if this is the case, which is patently obvious, what else could the Gospel be about but ALL the grace by which God saves His people. None can be saved who believe not in the Gospel as defined by the grace of God necessary in the salvation of His people. None who fail to believe this, or who believe that they, or anyone else, is/was saved in the absence of belief in this Gospel, can be in a saved state.

It must be pointed out that to truly believe in God, one must believe He is Creator of all things, that He has always been and always will be, and that He is all powerful and all knowing; That God the Son was not created but is very God Himself, that He came to this earth and was born of a virgin; That the Holy Spirit is very God Himself and is just as much a Person as is the Father and the Son. These are the absolute fundamentals of the Persons of the Trinity, and without belief in these truths one is not believing in the true God, and therefore cannot be saved.

In light of all this evidence, how can anyone have the audacity to even contemplate the appalling thought of separating the doctrines that deal with grace in salvation? How can these glorious doctrines, which each show the various facets of God’s design, His great salvation plan which is according to, and the manifestation of, all the grace that was necessary to make that plan work, ever be split into two or more groups? How could one of these doctrines be included in the Gospel and the others not, though still be referred to as essential to a saving knowledge of God? The whole premise is based on nothing so solid as sand. It has no foundation, it has no biblical support and therefore is not worthy of belief.

The Gospel is about the grace of God. It is not made up of only one doctrine, for no one doctrine is able to convey the whole message of grace, not even the doctrine of the righteousness of Christ, for this would imply that ignorance of the other doctrines of grace is permissible and one may believe erroneously about every grace doctrine that has to do with what the Father and Holy Spirit have done—but as long as one believes rightly about what Christ has done, one will be declared just. But how can one be declared just whilst believing erroneously about other salvation essentials? How can one be just but not saved? How can one be just while holding to error concerning doctrines, the knowledge of which is said to be essential to salvation, but not saved whilst believing erroneously about the righteousness of Christ? As we have seen, some people say that believing in Christ’s righteousness is enough to justify a person despite any residing ignorance of other doctrinal essentials. But ignorance naturally brings with it unbelief. They say that right belief of all the other grace doctrines will naturally follow on from right belief in Christ’s righteousness. This is easy for people to say who already know all the grace doctrines, who are not on the other side of the doctrinal fence. But in the real world, there are many folk who claim to believe that it is only by the obedience of One that a man is made righteous, and that it is only through the death of Christ that the sins of people have been atoned for, yet they remain vehemently opposed to at least some of the other grace doctrines which concern the matter of salvation, such as election by grace, that Christ’s death was only for the elect, and the fact that once a man is truly saved of God he can never lose that salvation and return to a lost state. There are plenty of ‘four-point Calvinists’, for want of a better term, who ‘believe’ most of the Gospel doctrines yet think that if they do not maintain a certain lifestyle they may lose their salvation. There are those called ‘Calminians’ who believe partly in Arminian doctrines and in some true doctrines. One of the rudiments of Calminian preaching is that the doctrines of grace should either not be preached or preached very sparingly and ambiguously when lost people are present. Scripture says that a man is saved by sanctification of the Spirit AND belief of the truth. This does not mean part of the truth but the whole truth, and this truth is nothing less than the Gospel of God (see 2 Thess. 2:13,14). Therefore, if it must be believed, IT MUST BE PREACHED!! (see Rom. 10:14). How can it be believed as the Gospel if it is not preached as the Gospel? The truth which one must believe to evidence a saved state must have to do with the grace of God in salvation, for only when a man believes in the fact that God has done everything in the salvation of a man, from election to final glorification, as is only revealed in His Gospel, can he be said to be truly saved. If this is not so, then all that remains for us to conclude is that a man can be saved by believing in a gospel that does not preach the whole grace message, and does not have to, thus allowing room for man to boast. Believing in gospels, then, that allow room for a man to boast would, contrary to what the Scriptures say, be perfectly acceptable. Nowhere in the Scriptures will one find that right belief in one doctrine cancels out the ramifications which come from believing erroneously about the other doctrines which deal with grace in salvation. A lopsided gospel such as this cannot stand. Like a stool with only two legs, no matter how you arrange them, it will always topple over until all of its legs are present and in their rightful place. Someone says, ‘I can make a stool stand using only two legs’. Then please feel free to sit on it, sir...if you dare!

So, be wary of those who bring with them another gospel AND AVOID THEM LIKE THE PLAGUE! Paul the apostle made his warning loud and clear: "Now I beseech you, brethren, mark them which cause divisions and offences contrary to the doctrine which ye have learned: and avoid them. For they that are such serve not our Lord Jesus Christ, but their own belly; and by good words and fair speeches deceive the hearts of the simple" (Rom. 16:17,18). The believer is to shun those who, while not denying the essentiality of the doctrines of grace, ‘only’ omit them from being part of the Gospel Message of salvation. If a doctrine is essential to salvation, then it MUST be in the Gospel of salvation. There is no other message which deals with salvation, and all the teachings to do with it, but the Gospel of God. Nothing could be left out of it, for the very Good News that the Gospel is concerns salvation by grace. If the Gospel were a person, it would speak of nothing else and nothing less than everything that was done by grace to save the chosen of God. It would leave nothing out because it could not leave anything out. It would be like Christ atoning for sin but not establishing that perfect obedience for His people. Or the Holy Spirit awakening people to who the true God is but leaving them in the dark as to what His truth is. Or the Father electing a people but not basing this election on grace or not giving them to Christ. Let me ask the reader at this point: how can one have doctrines that are said to be essential to a saving knowledge of God, but that are not part of the Gospel of the grace of God? No one is denying that these doctrines all deal with grace, or that they are all essential to saving knowledge, and yet all but one are disallowed their rightful place in the Gospel, which GOD HIMSELF calls the Gospel of His grace!!! There is no difference between the doctrines that deal with grace in salvation, insofar as their being all brought about by grace, which must all be believed if a person is to be biblically pronounced saved. They were all borne out of grace, so what can possibly stop them from being all in the one Gospel of God, which is given to teach about his saving grace! Just like the children that have been borne out of a mother and father could never be anything else but their children, so too, the doctrines of salvation which have all been borne out of the grace of God could never be anything else but the ‘children’ of the Gospel. Remember, the Gospel of God is that which must be believed if a person is to be saved. This means that every doctrine that must be believed, that is essential to a saving knowledge of God, MUST BE IN THE GOSPEL OF THE GRACE OF GOD!! It must be a doctrine that points to or teaches the grace of God in salvation. If it is essential, it must be Gospel, and if it is Gospel, it must all be essential to salvation knowledge. Why would God leave out even one of these essentials from His Gospel? There would be no rhyme or reason for doing so. In fact, it would be an injustice to the Trinity itself to leave out the work of any Person of the Trinity—Father, Son or Holy Spirit. Salvation is by grace and it is the combined effort of the Godhead. Any so called gospel that denies the rightful place of any part of the work of any Person of the Trinity is a false gospel which, far from saving a man, will only condemn him to hell.

In conclusion, let me say that:

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