FAITH! What is saving faith and where does it come from? I am not talking about the faith that is in every man by nature, the kind of faith that has led and continues to lead millions to place their trust in false gods. I am not talking about the kind of faith that cannot justify, the kind of faith that cannot save, but only serves to reveal and confirm the condemned and accursed state every man is in by nature. The faith I am talking about is the faith. That faith which is NOT in ANY man by nature. That faith which leads a man to trust only in the true God, Who He is and what He has done, for salvation. That faith which does not place its trust in false doctrines or even a mixture of false doctrines and true. I am talking about the faith which does justify, the kind of faith which converts a man from the condemned and accursed state into a right relationship with the true God. The only kind of faith that savingly believes the only Gospel there is that reveals the righteousness of Christ. I am talking about the faith that comes exclusively from God!

Faith is a wonderful thing—ONLY if it is the faith that God gives, which is the only one that believes the doctrine of Christ and no other. For any other faith, the kind of faith that every man can only believe with by nature, is a hopeless faith, a deadly faith, for it has never led any man to savingly trust in the true Savior but holds a man in a vice-like grip and deceives him into thinking it has! The evidence of this is plain for all to see in the pages of Holy Scripture. The Lord says that, by nature, "There is none that understandeth, there is none that seeketh after God" (Rom. 3:11 cf. Psa. 53:1-3). The faith that is of man, which is inherent in every man, cannot understand God and therefore cannot be that which can lead a man to seek the true God. Man is dead in sin and dead to God, and the faith that is of man is equally as dead to God as he is. Therefore it stands to biblical reason that if there are none who understand or seek after the true God, there can be none who know God or have any way of knowing Him with the dead-to-God faith that is in every man by nature. According to God’s declaration, despite man’s enormous love of religion, there is no man who even seeks the true God, for the faith that does not justify a man can never lead him to the true Savior. None by nature understand God, so it stands to reason that none by nature can understand God. None by nature seek God, therefore it stands to reason that none by nature can seek God. None by nature believe in God, therefore it stands to reason that none by nature can believe in God. Such is the dilemma of the dead man with a dead faith. No one with the faith that is of man can be motivated to understand, seek or believe in the true God. No man, in and of himself, can in any way come to the true God, or even want to, for the faith he has by nature, that thing which is slave to his warped ideas of Who God is and what He has done, can never lead him to savingly believe in the true God. It always leads him away from the true God .

The most succinct study of what faith is may be seen in Hebrews 11 and verse 1 which says "Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen." False faith present always means true Gospel absent. False faith can never be said to be the evidence that the true Gospel is believed, but only ever the opposite. No man can be said to have been visited by the grace of God whose faith belies an ignorance or unbelief of the Gospel of God. Faith is the evidence that shows just which God/god a man believes and places his trust in. Faith is the link between a man and his God/god. It is the umbilical cord, if you will, by which a man is attached to, and receives his nourishment from, the God/god of his life. One can tell a lot about a man by what he believes and it is of a certainty that what a man believes will show who that man believes in, and in turn the origin of his faith. Faith enables us to act as if that which we have faith in is real. Without faith in something, we simply do not and cannot believe it. We believe that which we believe because we believe it to be true. But it must be pointed out that simply because a person believes a thing to be true does not automatically mean that it is true. No matter how convinced a person may appear, this is no sure and trustworthy evidence that what the person believes is true. "There is a way which seemeth right unto a man, but the end thereof are the ways of death" (Prov. 14:12). What must also be pointed out is that which we believe not, which we do not have faith towards, is that which we do not believe to be true. If a man does not have the faith which comes from God he will continue to reject the truth of God, can only believe a mixture of truth and lies about God, and therefore cannot be saved. The man who believes in a false god cannot and does not believe in the true God. The man whose faith is in a false gospel cannot and does not have faith in the true God. THE TRUE GOD HAS NEVER REVEALED HIMSELF THROUGH THE LIES OF A FALSE GOSPEL. This would be like trying to tell a person what you look like by showing them a photograph of me! A person can only believe in one god/God at the one time, just as a person can only have one faith at any one time. With his home-grown faith, man does not believe in the true God but rather is in perpetual denial of him. Without the faith that comes from God, given by God out of love and grace, a man can only rebel against the true God and believe only in false gods. The faith that we all have by nature not only shows who or what we believe in but also who or what we do not believe in. You cannot simultaneously believe in a false god and the true God, just as you cannot have been saved whilst believing in a false gospel. You cannot believe in the true God with a false faith. How can anyone be said to have justifying faith who believes with a false faith in a false gospel which reveals a false god? False faith, revealed by its belief of false doctrines, is always connected with false gospels and false gods, just as one will always find "...another jesus..." and "...another spirit..." associated with "...another gospel..." (2 Cor. 11:4). True saving faith which comes from God can only believe in the true Gospel which reveals the true God. One is either for one and against the other, approving of one and disapproving of the other. One either has the faith that leads a man to abide in the doctrine of Christ or a faith that leads a man to abide in doctrines other than those of Christ.

True faith, the faith which God gives, means "...reality, substance, existence, in contradistinction from that which is unreal, imaginary or deceptive" However, false faith can make that which really does not exist seem to be as real as reality itself. "A belief in the veracity of another leads us to act as if this were so. As long as the faith continues, whether it be well-founded or not, it gives all the force of reality to that which is believed." We learn from this that faith, whether it is the faith which comes from God or that which is produced by man, is extremely powerful. It virtually shapes a man’s life. One leads a man in one direction and the other leads in the opposite direction. The question is, Which way are you headed? Which faith do you have? And most importantly, which god/God do you believe in?

Where does your particular faith come from? How are you going to find out which faith you have? Can we find out whether or not the faith we have is from God by looking at our actions? Is how good we are and how nice we are to others, or how good we feel in ourselves, the type of evidence we need to look for and/or maintain to convince ourselves that the faith we have is the one that comes from God? Hardly! The actions of a Mormon or a Buddhist can be just as kind and loving and selfless as those of a true believer, but can this alone be interpreted as evidence that they have the right faith, the justifying faith, that believes in the true God? NO! One can never rightly judge a man saved purely by his actions. How many times and in how many ways have people been deceived after judging a book by its cover! What makes the difference is what a person believes. It is not so much a matter of a person knowing more or less than another, but which God/god has revealed himself. Has the true God revealed Himself or has a charlatan been presented? Do they believe the truth or do they believe lies about God. Are they of THE faith or is the faith they have of themselves? In order to know if we have justifying faith or an unjustifying faith, a condemning faith, we need to look at what is behind the faith which we believe with and what exactly that faith believes in. Do we believe the doctrines about God that come from man or do we believe in the actual doctrine of Christ? The gravity and importance of such a question is accentuated by the following verse of Scripture: "Whosoever transgresseth, and abideth not in the doctrine of Christ, hath not God. He that abideth in the doctrine of Christ, he hath both the Father and the Son" (2 Jn. 9). If one has the truth then one has God and if one is without the truth then one cannot have God. God has not revealed Himself to that one, for if God loves a man He reveals His truth to him and gives him the faith with which to believe it. From this we see that what a man believes is vitally important, for what a man believes reveals whether or not he has the faith that comes from God or a faith of his own making. What a man believes is a consequence of either the true God or a false god having revealed himself.

The faith that man believes with by nature can never be in, or bring a man to, the true God. This is shown clearly by the fact that man’s faith, as we shall refer to it henceforth, always looks to the man himself to do something, to fulfill a certain condition or conditions, in order to secure or maintain his salvation. This type of faith, that is held to by the unregenerate, can only provide a semblance of assurance of ‘salvation’. Man’s faith has never led him to repent of ever having trusted and believed in the lie that he can do something to get or stay ‘saved,’ or of ever believing that he was not saved whilst believing doctrinal errors which make up false gospels. Man’s faith has never led him to completely throw himself upon the mercy, grace and love of God or to trust completely in Who the Savior is and what the Savior alone has done in order to procure and sustain salvation for His people. Even in many who claim to hold to the doctrines of grace, man’s faith has never led them to turn their back on the lie which says that a man can be saved in ignorance of the very doctrines that make up the Gospel of God, the very doctrines that the faith of God was sent to believe, THE VERY DOCTRINES THAT GOD USES TO REVEAL HIMSELF BY AND THAT A MAN MUST BELIEVE IN ORDER TO BE JUST BEFORE GOD! The principal factor, the indicative and essential nature, of true saving faith that comes from God is that it not only believes God’s Gospel but also does not believe that a man was or can be saved before the hearing of the Gospel of God. Justifying God-given Faith comes no other way but by hearing the God-Authored Gospel.

Saving, justifying, faith ALWAYS and ONLY believes in the Gospel of God. How could it believe in anything else? Can you honestly envision in your mind God justifying a man who has a faith of his own which does not believe in what God has said about His Son, but is instead partial to the lies man has concocted about God’s Son? How utterly pathetic is the lame claim made by those hirelings, who go by the name ‘pastor’ and ‘minister’ and ‘reverend’, who assure their followers with a nice soft pat on the head that they were saved or are saved regardless of how much they don’t know. The purpose for which faith is given by God is that His Gospel, His truth, be believed and that all erroneous concepts of it be expelled forever! The whole reason behind God having sent a Savior into the world is that man, left to his own resources, could never save himself. So too, the reason behind saving, justifying faith being something that has to be given to a man by God in order for him to believe in the Gospel of God, is that man, left to his own faith which he has by nature, could never be saved, for with such a faith man could never believe God’s Gospel and repent of all others, he could never be converted. Only God’s faith justifies, only God’s faith believes the true Gospel therefore only God’s faith makes a man free. The Lord Jesus says, "...the TRUTH shall make you free" (Jn. 8:32). He never once said, ‘Ignorance of the truth shall make you free,’ or ‘You shall be made free without the truth,’ or ‘ You shall be made free long before you believe the truth.’ No, Christ said a man will be made free only by the truth, by his belief of the truth via the faith of God sent to grant him the discernment necessary to recognize and abide in the truth. Do you think that God is going to give any of His elect a faith that will not believe in Him, a faith that believes in a false god, a faith that cannot discern between false gospels and the true, and then call that faith justifying faith? How could God maintain His Holiness and Justice if He were to place false faith on a par with true faith; if He did not make a distinction between the two and the results of believing with one or the other as different as black and white? God is not going to lead you to believe a lie about Him and then save you based on your belief of it! God cannot reveal Himself through a lie but only through the truth. Therefore no one can be saved by faith in a lie but only by belief in the truth of God. It is the exclusive domain of the truth as revealed in the Gospel of God, to reveal God. This is why the true God can never be revealed, and never be believed in, through falsehood.

God sent His Son as Savior for no man can save himself, and not even a professing Christian believes that one can be saved without the Savior. God sends His faith because no man can save himself by his own faith, a faith that is of him, which springs from within and is not given from without. No man is his own savior and no man can be saved by his own faith produced by his sinful nature. Everything that has to do with salvation is given by God: Love, Grace, the Savior, Repentance and Faith. All these must come from God, for salvation is an operation of God’s. No man can save himself (see Matt. 19:25,26). Therefore nothing within man can prompt him to receive and follow and believe in the true God. Anything about a saved man that is alive TO God has been made alive BY God! You cannot have faith that is alive to God but that believes in lies about God. You cannot have faith that is alive to God but that is not alive to the Gospel of God and dead to the lies about God which appear only in false gospels and in which only false faith can believe. Scripture says a man is born again "...not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God" (Jn. 1:13). Just as no man is born again by his own will, no man can be born again by his own faith. It is only by God’s will that a man is saved; it is only by God’s faith that a man can be saved. The Lord Jesus says, "No man can come to Me, except the Father which hath sent Me draw him....And they shall be all taught of God. Every man therefore that hath heard, and hath learned of the Father cometh unto Me" (Jn. 6:44,45). Only when a man has heard and learned of the Father can he come to the true Savior, Jesus Christ. How could anyone possibly come to the true God before hearing of Him and being taught by Him? How can faith in a false gospel ever justifiably be used, or interpreted, as proof that one has been taught, or heard and learned of the Father? Notice that man’s coming is not according to his choice, but exclusively that of the Father’s. God draws a man to him by His love, His grace, His faith. Man’s inability to come to the true God, in and of himself, proves conclusively that there is nothing intrinsic in him, nothing to which God can appeal to that can prompt man to choose, or even recognize, the true God for he is constantly and consistently being fooled into recognizing false gods as the true God and false gospels as the true Gospel.

The faith that every man has in his natural fallen state is not that faith which justifies a man before God, and it is this faith, inherent in every man, which cannot savingly believe the Gospel of the true God. The principal evidence for this, which makes it absolute truth, is the fact that justifying faith must be given to a man by God and as a gift of God based on the grace of God. The grace of God made the Gospel of God possible, and only the faith of God can believe it. "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. 2:8,9). Neither grace or faith are as a result of the works or efforts made by man to obey God but they are both gifts, undeserved gifts, which come only from God. They are granted, not based on a man’s works, but on the love, will and purpose of God. Man cannot achieve saving faith, he cannot climb a ladder to it, but is stuck with a faith that cannot save him. Lost man cannot see his problem—a dead faith—but happily goes on, convinced that his lack of aversion to things religious means that he is at least heading in the right direction. Saving faith is that which God gives and no man has it before it is given to him by God, therefore no man can believe God’s Gospel before he receives that Godly faith. Just as no man can be saved without the grace of God, no man can be saved without the faith of God which believes only the Gospel of God. No man can, therefore, believe in the Gospel before he is given the only faith which can savingly and eternally believe it. Consequently, no man can be saved before he believes the Gospel of God by the faith which comes from God. Man needs to be justified. There is no justification without the faith of God, so how can there be salvation without that justifying faith whose principal identifying feature is that it only believes God’s Gospel? Anyone who says that they or someone else is saved is saying that they are justified, that they have been personally justified by God. A person, and it matters not who they are or what their reputation is, who says one can be saved before or without the justifying gift of faith that believes in the only Gospel that reveals the true God, loses any and all credibility they might have had as a teacher of God’s Word, and as a ‘man of God’. Believing the truth of God and having the faith which is given by God always go hand in hand. You can never have one and not the other for how can you believe the truth without the only faith which can believe it, and, how can you have the only faith which can believe the truth if that faith does not have the Gospel to believe!

Whatever a man’s interpretation of grace might be, not even a professing Christian would tell you that you can be saved without the grace of God. Everyone who claims to be Christian will tell you they were ‘saved by grace.’ This is something that is easily verifiable. So with this established, we must now ask ourselves whether or not a man is saved by grace—the will of God motivated by the Love and Mercy of God—alone, or is there something attached to the grace of God, that never leaves its side, something that the gift of grace always brings with it? The simple answer is ‘yes.’ Yes there is something that always comes with grace, that grace is never without, and we see it clearly in the above verse: FAITH! A man is saved by grace through faith. They are holy siblings if you will and where one goes the other always follows. God cannot act graciously towards His elect without granting each and every one of them the gift of faith. IF THERE IS NO JUSTIFYING, GOSPEL-BELIEVING, FAITH THEN GRACE WOULD BE EMPTY. Faith is the kernel within the shell, or husk, of grace. If one is without the kernel then one cannot be in possession of the shell, and, if one is without the shell one cannot have the kernel. To have one is to ALWAYS have the other. To be without one is to NEVER have had the other. To have saving grace is to have faith in the Gospel of God and to have this justifying faith is the proof that one has been saved by grace. The grace of God, without which no man can be saved, is inextricably linked with the faith of God. It does not take a great mind to figure out that grace is not something which comes from within man but is something granted to him from without. Being saved by grace is something which obviously could not be of ourselves. So we see then that faith, spoken of in Ephesians 2, is also that which is not of ourselves. A man does not need to be told that grace is something which is not of him but of another, but he does need to be informed of the biblical fact, it needs to be made perfectly clear to him, that the faith through which a man is saved is not his own faith, not something which is of him, but something which is connected to grace and so, of necessity, must be something which is not of man but of God. A man is saved by grace through faith and neither of these two salvation essentials come from man. They are not of us but of God. They are not works but gifts. So then, if no one can be saved without grace, it stands to biblical reason that no one, and I mean no one AT ALL, can ever be saved without faith. By faith we mean belief in God’s Gospel. Saving faith is given so that a man can and will believe the truth. We see from this that believing the truth is vital to salvation. There is no salvation without the grace and faith of God. Without belief of the truth one cannot, and therefore does not, have the faith of God and without the faith of God one cannot be saved. Without a belief in the Gospel of God one would find it IMPOSSIBLE to prove that one has the faith of God, or that one has been saved by the grace of God. God justifies by grace through faith in the Gospel, not through some ignorance riddled faith in the fact that it exists, that it is, but through knowledgable faith in WHAT it is! The faith that God gives KNOWS what the Gospel is and believes what it says.

Now that we have established these truths in the mind of the reader, we approach the following question: FAITH TO BELIEVE WHAT? What does God give His faith to a person to believe? Would God ‘go to all the trouble’ to save a man by grace through faith, both of which are holy things that emanate from the love of God, if it did not matter what the man believed? Of course not. Grace is bestowed so that faith might be given so that a person will believe the truth of God. The fact that God’s faith rejects any and every gospel that is not His is just as important and relevant as the fact that God’s faith believes only God’s Gospel. Doesn’t it stand to reason that if the only way a man could believe the truth of God is if he were given the faith of God, the faith that a man has by nature could never savingly believe God’s truth? Therefore, equipped with the faith of God, how could a man still believe in a false gospel? No loving father would ever sit his child on a tricycle and point him in the direction of a busy road, so too, God would never give His faith so that a person would believe a false gospel. God’s faith believes only God’s Gospel and so God’s people, ALL God’s people, believe only God’s Gospel from the moment of their birth into God’s Kingdom. How can we say this? Because the Scriptures say that a man is begotten of God by the Word of God: "Being born again...by the Word of God....and this is the Word which by the Gospel is preached unto you" (1 Pet. 1:23,25 cf. Js. 1:18). A Christian is a person begotten of God by the Truth of God so how, it may well be asked, can a person be saved and yet not know or believe the Gospel of God? How can a person be born of the Word of the Truth of the Gospel (Col. 1:5) of God and yet not have the faith that believes in that Truth!! The faith of God gives birth to Gospel believers, not Gospel deniers. It does not leave a person in denial of the Gospel, but opens his eyes to it.

There are many gospels out there but only one true Gospel, the one that God bears record to, the only one which tells about His Son and His righteousness. So too, there are many faiths out there but only one faith that comes from God, which believes in the only Gospel that comes from God. There is no salvation without the Gospel of God, and therefore it stands to reason that there can be no salvation without the faith that comes from God. The faith which comes from God is given in order that a man will believe only the Gospel that comes from God AND REJECT all others. It does not tolerate the presence of a false gospel, but expels it forever from the mind of the elect. Can there be salvation before or without the gift of faith, the only faith that can believe God’s only Gospel? Of course the answer to this question is an obvious and scripturally emphatic NO!!! The faith which God gives a man could only believe, can only believe, and does only believe HIS Gospel. So naturally there can be no salvation whatsoever before or without the faith which is given by God to believe His Gospel. Otherwise we would have the absurd situation of either a person being saved whilst only having man’s faith which believes in false gospels, or, God giving a person saving faith yet that person persistently believing a false gospel, all the while continuing to remain ignorant of or rejecting the only Gospel that saves. This would mean that having the faith of God would mean nothing, for one could still believe error even with God’s faith! Why would God grant a person His faith in order for them to continue to remain in ignorance and believe a false gospel? How could true faith ever believe in a false gospel, a counterfeit plan of salvation? I defy anyone to show me from the Scriptures a case of a saved man believing in a false gospel, though having the justifying faith which comes from God! I defy anyone to show me a case where someone in the Scriptures had saving, justifying, faith yet who remained in ignorance of the Gospel of God! This would be as fruitless an exercise as trying to prove a man converted who has not been brought out of darkness into God’s marvellous Light and from the power of Satan unto God (see Acts 26:18). Why would man need to be given something, by God Himself no less, in order for him to continue to be deceived by believing in a gospel that cannot save? God does not need to assist man in believing a false gospel, for every man by nature is more than adequately equipped to do this all by himself. When faith is given by God, it is for the express purpose of turning a man from believing lies to believing the truth of God’s Gospel. I mean, that is the whole essence of salvation isn’t it—to turn a man from darkness to light? So then why does a man who claims to believe in the doctrines of Light insist he was saved whilst lovingly embracing the doctrines of darkness! Justifying faith makes a man understand God and believe God. The faith which comes from God is that which is necessary for a man to believe in the Gospel of God and turn from every false gospel that his own natural faith has fallen prey to and believed in before saving faith came. I believe that no one in their right mind could possibly oppose these truths, or want to for that matter, for it all makes perfect and proper biblical sense and I challenge anyone to deny them from God’s Word.

It is plain to see in the Scriptures that faith, saving faith, is a gift given by God in order for a man to be converted—in order for him to go from believing a gospel that is not God’s Gospel and which does not save, to believing God’s Gospel, the only one which does save, and turning away from ever believing he was saved whilst believing any other. This is obviously a necessary thing, for without this justifying faith, which can only be given to man and not something he himself can produce, no man can be saved. Without this justifying, Gospel- believing faith, no man can see the ineptness of, and turn away from, false gospels. Before saving faith is given there is nothing but lostness and hopelessness. Just as man’s physical body and spirit have suffered death—separation from God—so too, man’s faith has suffered a death towards God, it is eternally separated from God and therefore can never lead any man to the true God. It is this BLIND FAITH that can never lead a man to the true God. True faith is never blind but can see the true God, and flees all others. Christ said "...Everyone that is of the truth heareth My voice" (Jn. 18:37 cf. Jn. 10:4,5). That sin has brought physical death to man is obvious. That sin has brought spiritual death to man is also obvious, seen in the fact that to be saved, one must be born again. And that sin has brought death to man’s natural faith is seen in the fact that to be saved, man requires justifying faith that can only come by the grace of God, which shows that it is something that does not and cannot emanate from man. Without saving faith one cannot know, understand or seek the true God. Without God, and without the faith that comes from God, man is simply tossed about in a whirlpool of religious mayhem UNTIL he is rescued by means of the gift of faith, which comes by the grace of God and separates him from belief in that which cannot save him. He is no longer "...tossed to and fro, and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by the sleight of men..." (Eph. 4:14), but through the faith he has been given, sails the calm seas of the Doctrine of Christ. Again, the gift of faith is that indispensable link between man and salvation. Without it, without the faith that comes from God which believes only in the Gospel of God, there is no salvation at all. Without the true Savior, the true God, there is no salvation; without the Gospel that reveals this one and only Savior there is no salvation; and so therefore, without the only faith that believes the truth about the true Savior as He is revealed in His one and only Gospel there can be, never has been, and never will be any man saved.

The key to understanding and coming to the unchallengeable conclusion that a person cannot be saved, that they cannot be in a saved, justified state, before they believe the Gospel of God to the point where they exclude all other gospels as having any power to save, is the gift of faith. The gift of faith given by the God which that faith believes in, is the difference between believing the Gospel and rejecting the Gospel. It is the very difference between saved and lost.

For if one does not have the faith which comes from God, by the grace of God, one cannot believe in the Gospel that comes from God. Scripture says that all to whom the Gospel of God is hidden—all those who do not have the faith that believes in it—are lost: "But if our Gospel be hid, it is hid to them that are lost" (2 Cor. 4:3). How can anyone who has been given the faith of God not see, know and believe the Gospel of God? Or how can anyone claim to be saved, that is, have the faith of God, and with that God-inspired and God-given faith continue to believe in lies, and only later come to believe the truth and reject the lies they once believed yet still claim to have been saved whilst having believed those lies!! If a man is lost it does not mean, necessarily, that he does not have faith, but simply that he does not have God-given faith in the Gospel of God. Most lost people have a faith but none at all have THE faith. THE IDENTIFYING SIGN OF EVERY LOST PERSON IS THAT THEY DO NOT HAVE THE FAITH IN THE GOSPEL OF GOD! If those who cannot see, know and believe the Gospel of God are lost, how could it be said that any of them have justifying faith? God does not and cannot justify a man, He cannot vindicate a man, based on the fact that he believes a false gospel, but only when he believes the true Gospel. How can it then be said, in light of this Scripture, that those who have justifying faith, who are born again, can also be among those to whom the Gospel is still hid? Paul goes on in the following verse to show that those to whom the Gospel is hid and who are lost have been blinded by the god of this world, Satan, so that they believe not (see 2 Cor. 4:4). Satan’s purpose is to keep man blind to the true God via faith in false gospels. God’s purpose is to reveal Himself to His chosen ones and grant them the faith to believe His Gospel, WHICH REMOVES ALL BLINDNESS to Him. Those whose eyes are blinded cannot see and those whose minds are blinded cannot identify, or discern, and therefore believe the Gospel, which is why it is said to be hid from them. This is incontrovertible and undeniable evidence that such people could not possibly have the faith which comes from God, and that they could not possibly be saved. They do not see the Gospel because they do not have the faith to believe it. The faith of God REVEALS the Gospel of God in that it gives a man eyes to see and ears to hear and a mind to believe it. Those who cannot see the Gospel, who do not recognize it as God’s Message, are those to whom the Gospel is hid, and they therefore cannot have the justifying faith of God. What other spiritual state could such people be in but a lost one.

To be saved is to have the faith that comes from God and believes only His Gospel. To be saved is to have the faith that cannot and will not accept the lie that one was saved before hearing and believing the Gospel of God. To be lost is to not have that faith, but a vastly inferior one produced by the lost and spiritually dead nature of fallen man, which rejects the Gospel of God as being that which a person must believe—to the exclusion of all others—in order to be saved. The foolish faith of the lost believes that one can hold to doctrinal error regarding Gospel issues and still be saved. But the Scriptures are clear in saying that to be saved a man must believe the Gospel, which means all the Gospel, everything God says His Gospel is. Believing part of it, or even most of it, is not enough. To leave out one doctrine of the Gospel, one detail, is to make way for error, and any error when it comes to the Gospel changes it into a different gospel that portrays a different god to the one revealed in the Gospel. The faith that believes that one must learn and come to believe in the right doctrines but that one is just as saved during the learning process regardless of its being riddled with error and ignorance, evidences lostness. Just as a net full of fish being drawn to shore or into the boat is not in the boat or on the shore until the drawing is completed, so too, none can be said to be in Christ whilst the drawing (dragging) is taking place but only after the process is completed (see Jn. 6:44,45). The new birth of any man is by the will of God and the means He uses for each man’s spiritual birth does not differ. It is always by His Mighty and Glorious Message, which is His Gospel, and none are saved until they believe the whole of it. Salvation is a blessing from God and contained in that blessing is the faith, which no man has by nature but that must be given to him as a gift, that rejects every false gospel, every untruth about how God saves, and accepts, adheres to, abides in and believes, ONLY in the Gospel, which also comes from God. How can anyone accept the nonsensical lie that a man can be saved before he hears, before he understands and before he believes the Gospel? (compare Matt. 13:15 & !3:23 cf. Psa. 49:20). How then can anyone be taken seriously when, whilst claiming to believe the Gospel, they insist they were just as saved before they came to a knowledge of the Gospel doctrines? The Lord Jesus says, "He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved; but he that believeth not shall be damned" (Mk. 16:16). Any denial of any Gospel doctrine is a denial of the Gospel. No one can rightly be said to believe God’s Message unless they believe ALL OF IT!! Believing the Gospel is not something that is conditional. Just like God’s love for His people is unconditional, so too, the faith God gives to His people knows, believes and accepts the whole Gospel and not merely part of it. God has not said in His Word that to be saved a man must believe His Gospel, and then disregard His Word by saving people who believe only a portion of it. What are you going to call a gospel that contains partly truth and partly fiction? Surely you would not have the temerity to call it God’s Gospel? Then how pray tell can anyone refer to a faith that believes partly truth and partly fiction as justifying faith? Anytime you refuse to believe something in its entirety you either replace that which you do not believe or leave the matter open. Either way, you are denying the message as a whole, you are refusing to believe it as a whole. The Lord Jesus did not say, ‘He that believeth what they like about the Gospel, or what they know about it, shall be saved.’ Jesus did not say, ‘He that believeth and he that believeth not shall be saved’ but made a distinction between the two. And the distinction is: he that believes the doctrines that make up the Gospel of God which reveal Who Christ is and what He has done for His people will be saved, as opposed to the one who does not believe the individual doctrines of the Gospel of God and therefore rejects the Savior of that Gospel. The Scriptures say those that perish do so "...because they received not the love of the truth, that they might be saved" and "That they all might be damned who believed not the truth, but had pleasure in unrighteousness" (2 Thess. 2:10,12). If one does not have the love of the truth, the whole truth, then one cannot have the faith of God to believe, for how can one believe that which one does not love? The Scripture also says that this love of the truth, therefore belief of the truth, is connected with salvation. You cannot have one without the other and you cannot have salvation before the love of the truth. And how can you have a love of the truth of God before you know what that truth is! To love something is to imply that you know what that something is. The evidence here for salvation is the love of the truth of the Gospel. Ignorance of the truth of the Gospel will not get you saved, but warrants only damnation. Not being submitted to the plan of salvation as God has outlined it in His Gospel, is evidence of a false faith, a distinct lack of love of the truth. Do not fool yourselves, such people WILL be damned, not saved! Scripture says that Christ WILL take "...vengeance on them that know not God, and that obey not the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ: who shall be punished with everlasting destruction from the presence of the Lord..." (2 Thess. 1:8,9). Notice here the connection between knowing God and obeying the Gospel of God. No one can know God or obey the Gospel of God without the faith that is given by God to believe His Gospel. In verse 12 the apostle states clearly that, far from receiving mercy from God and a crash course on the Gospel so that those who remained ignorant of it on earth may also enter heaven, those who failed to believe the truth during the course of their lives, no matter how much they were convinced that what they believed was the truth, WILL BE DAMNED!! As for those who did believe the truth, who were given the faith of God to believe it, who were called by God from the beginning and chosen to salvation, they will be recognized as children of God by the fact they have been sanctified by the Spirit of God, evidenced by their believing the truth of God with the faith of God: "...God hath from the beginning chosen you to salvation through sanctification of the Spirit AND belief of the truth: Whereunto He called you by our Gospel..." (2 Thess. 2:13,14). The elect man is called to believe the truth, God’s Gospel, not to remain in ignorance of it. His belief of the truth does not come years after his sanctification any more than his sanctification could occur years after his belief of the truth. Sanctification and belief of the truth are two sides of the same coin. When one arrives the other is always with it. Find me a coin with only one side and I will believe that one can have sanctification without belief of the truth! Notice that those God called by His Gospel did not remain ignorant of His truth but were made believers of His truth. They had to have been, for there is no salvation without belief of the truth. This is the real Christian; this is the complete Christian—one who is chosen and called by the Gospel of God and believes the Gospel of God! Obviously, the person who does not believe the Gospel has not the faith to believe it. They have not been led to it, the truth, by God’s Holy Spirit: "For as many as are led by the Spirit of God, THEY are the sons of God" (Rom. 8:14). Those who are led by the Spirit of God believe in the Gospel of God, and so it stands to reason that all the sons of God are believers in the Gospel of God. THEY CAN HAVE NO FAITH IN ANOTHER, FOR THEY HAVE BEEN LED TO NO OTHER!! How can one have been led by the Spirit of the Truth of God and not have justifying faith, which believes in the Gospel of God? How can one be saved after being led by another spirit to another gospel which speaks of another christ. And, how can a man have the mind of Christ who believes he was saved whilst embracing these counterfeits? He that savingly believes the Gospel of God is saved. The evidence for this is clear: they believe the Gospel, for they have been given the faith of God to believe it. If all any mere man’s faith can believe in is anything but the Gospel of Christ, then surely if a man has been granted the faith of God he can only believe, will only believe and want to only believe, God’s Gospel, wanting nothing to do with any other gospel. HE WILL NEVER CLAIM TO BELIEVE THAT HE WAS SAVED BEFORE BELIEVING THE ONLY GOSPEL OF GOD!! How utterly stupid and irrational does this sound: ‘I was saved by God before I believed the Gospel of God’, or ‘I was saved when I believed a gospel I thought was of God with a faith I thought was from God’. Now, can you imagine God’s gift of faith leading a man to believe such hogwash? Of course you can’t. God-given faith will show each and every elect child of God, in no uncertain way, that only the Gospel of God is the power of God unto salvation and that any other gospel could not possibly be that which must be believed in order for a man to be saved; that no other gospel but the Holy Gospel of God could be qualified, or fit to be called, "...the power of God unto salvation" (Rom. 1:16). Two of the surest signs of lostness are belief in a false gospel, and a man’s belief in the lie that he or anyone else was saved whilst believing a false gospel. THE FAITH OF GOD DOES NOT LEAD A MAN TO BELIEVE SUCH RUBBISH, BUT TURNS A MAN FROM IT. The faith of God is given so that a man will believe the Gospel of God, and shuts every door and closes every window in his mind so that no draft of gospel error can get in or ever return. False gospels only require false faith. Only God’s Gospel requires God’s faith. God’s only Gospel can only be savingly believed by the faith God gives to believe it. Man’s faith and man’s gospels go together like a horse and carriage. They are in sync, they are perfectly matched. They were meant for each other. They are the perfect couple. God’s faith in God’s Gospel is required for salvation. Only God’s faith and His Gospel combined will save a man.

"...the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned" (1 Cor. 2:14). The Spirit of God is "...the Spirit of truth; whom the world cannot receive, because it seeth Him not, neither knoweth Him..." (Jn. 14:17). The faith that is man’s by nature cannot recognize the Spirit of Truth and therefore does not believe in the Truth of the Spirit. The Gospel of God is foolishness unto man (see Rom. 1:16 & 1 Cor. 1:18). Man in his natural fallen state rejects the only Gospel that saves, and the ramifications of it—no man is saved before he believes the Gospel, and no one claiming to believe it yet insisting they were saved before they knew and believed all the doctrines that go to make up the Gospel of Christ, are saved either. The Scriptures say that one can only trust in the true Christ "AFTER" and not before one has "...heard the Word of Truth, the Gospel..." (Eph. 1:13). And it is a given that no one can trust the true Christ without the true faith that comes from God, for why else would it have been given other than to ensure a man believe in the true Christ of the true Gospel. The truth of God, the Gospel of God, is something that is spiritually discerned. It cannot be properly discerned by the natural thinking of man, by the carnal mind, but only by the mind of Christ, which every true believer has (1 Cor. 2:16). The faith that God sends brings a man’s thinking into line with God’s thinking and agrees with His plan of salvation AND that no other can save. If no other gospel can save, how can anyone claiming to believe the Gospel of God say they were saved whilst not believing it? God has never signed His name to a false gospel, so what other Gospel but His own could His justifying faith ever lead a man to believe! True saving faith does not come naturally. The faith that saves is that which comes SUPERNATURALLY as a gift from God. There is no way that a man in his natural fallen state can ‘drum up’ the faith to savingly believe God’s Gospel and reject all others. Natural man’s mind can have an intellectual knowledge of the Gospel but he can never savingly believe the Gospel, from the heart, which declares that all of salvation from beginning to final glory is conditioned on the Person and Work of the Lord Jesus Christ, for the mind of the unregenerated will always look to works as a contributing factor to one’s salvation. The spirit of the world is that which guides men into believing false gospels, unlike the Spirit of God Who alone can and does lead men to the true Gospel and grants them the Faith to believe it. "Faith is only produced by the Holy Spirit, and it is only produced by the Holy Spirit in conjunction with the Word of God, principally the Gospel." Every true believer may join together in unison and say, "Now we have received, not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit which is of God; THAT we might KNOW the things that are freely given to us of God" (1 Cor. 2:12). To really know the things of God is to be taught by the Spirit of God and none can learn by the Spirit of God unless one has been given the faith of God, which alone can discern and believe those things. The faith of God is that by which a man can rightly interpret the language of the truth of the Gospel and reject all which contradicts it. It is clear then that only by God-given faith can a person know the true God for Scripture exclaims "...the world by wisdom knew not God..." (1 Cor. 1:21). Nothing that comes naturally to man can lead him to God, therefore no man by nature seeks God. All that the wisdom natural to fallen man can produce is a faith in a false gospel that speaks of a false god who cannot save. God gives His chosen His faith so that they will love His truth. Without the grace of God there is no love of the truth, because there is not the faith of God present to believe it. That saving faith must be given by God BEFORE a person can be saved is testament to the undeniable fact that salvation is by grace, and to believe the Gospel of grace one must, BY GRACE, be equipped with that faith that can only come by grace.

If a person could be saved before saving faith was given to them, why would that faith be necessary at all! What purpose would it serve, what role would it play, if a man could be saved without it? If a man could be saved, could actually savingly believe in the Gospel of Christ, which requires the faith of Christ to be believed, before receiving the faith to believe it then we would have a case for the justification of a man by works—by his own efforts, something that emanated from him and not by a grace-motivated gift of God. Seeing that faith is always contrasted with works in the Scriptures and that salvation is by grace through faith, it is clear that none could be saved before receiving the faith that God gives, which can alone believe His Gospel (see Rom. 4:5). Salvation is by grace (which comes from God) through faith (which comes from God). No one is saved in the absence of the faith that God gives, just as much as no one can be saved in the absence of His grace. Without grace there is no justifying faith and without justifying faith there can be no salvation. Just as a man is saved only by Christ’s perfect righteousness, so too, it is only by God’s perfect faith in that righteousness that a man is saved. If God saves by a means is it then not obligatory that to be saved man must believe the means by which God saves?

The fact that saving faith is a gift which comes from God is absolute proof that a man cannot be saved without it and that there is nothing inherent in man that can convert him to a saved state. Justifying faith is essential to a man’s salvation and without the grace of God which imparts it, no man can be saved. And so we see that salvation is by what God does and by what God gives. Without God man has no hope, therefore, no saving faith and no salvation. Without the grace of God that provides the faith of God to believe His Gospel, no man can be saved. No man has ever been saved who did not receive the faith of God to believe only His Gospel. ONLY TRUE FAITH BELIEVES TRUE GRACE. False faith, that which presents itself to the mind of man as true faith, is merely an illusion by which no man has ever entered heaven. False faith will believe many truths. False faith can drive and motivate a man to morally reform his entire life, never to return to his immoral ways. False faith often makes a man very religious etc. But false faith does not and cannot save because it is not the faith which comes from God. It is not that faith which believes that the righteousness of Christ is the only ground of salvation. The faith that does not come from God, but from the mind of man, is anti-God, which is why it cannot ever lead a man to believe the Gospel of God, thereby leaving him in an unjustified state. Carnal minds can only produce carnal faith: "For to be carnally minded is death....Because the carnal mind is enmity against God..." (Rom. 8:6,7).

The faith that believes in God comes by God (see Acts 3:16). Sanctification can only be by the faith that is in the true Son of God, which can only come from God (see Acts 26:18). When one is sanctified by the Spirit of God one believes in the truth of God, i.e., one is given the faith to believe in the true Gospel of God by which one has been called (see 2 Thess. 2:13). No one in their right mind believes in a sanctification-free salvation, so how can anyone accept the lie that one can be saved, or sanctified—separated from the lost unto God—without the faith that comes from, and believes in the Gospel, of God! Scripture declares that the saved man shall live by faith (see Heb 10:38). Now, just which faith do you think the Scriptures are speaking of here? Do you honestly believe that the Word of God is speaking of the faith that is common to every man by nature, which his carnal mind has convinced him is true faith but that can only lead a person to place their trust in a false gospel, or, the special and unique faith that is given by God? Of course the saved man shall live by the faith that is given to him of God. Without that faith no man can please God (Heb. 11:6). Without that faith man cannot live, he can have no spiritual life, for his faith is in a lifeless god. A man cannot live eternally by any other faith than that which God gives. Therefore a man cannot live eternally by believing any other gospel but God’s Gospel. The man who ‘believes’ with any other faith is not saved but accursed. Scripture says a man is justified by faith, but this faith is not of man, it is not something he produces, for justifying faith is contrasted with the works of man, that which he can do or produce (Rom. 3). Saving faith does not fall within the parameter of what a man can do, but is outside the realms of possibility and ‘potentiality’ of man. Man is inside the circle and saving faith is outside. The two cannot be brought together, but by the grace of God. Saving faith is not a work of man but is a gift of God.

The true Gospel is the power of God to save because in it He declares the righteousness of Christ "...for the remission of sins....that He might be just and the justifier of him which believeth in Jesus. Where is boasting then? It is excluded. By what law? Of works? Nay: but by the law of FAITH" (Rom. 3:25-27). Man needs a Justifier, for he cannot save himself. This means that nothing within man can ever please God. No work of man’s, no faith of man’s, can ever justify him before God, which is why there was a need for a Savior to be sent and a Faith to be given. The Word of God says that no man can boast in his salvation, for any and all boasting is excluded because of the law, or principle, of faith. If salvation were by works then man would have a right to boast. However, salvation is not according to works because the principle of faith rules out any boasting on man’s part that he has done anything, or contributed anything to his own salvation. Consequently, this in turn rules out any possibility that justifying faith is something a man can summon from deep within himself, for if it was, faith would be a work of man’s and not a gift from God. If it was by man’s efforts, according to what he did or by something he was able to grasp with his intellect and needed not any power from without to bless him with this ability, he would have a legal right to boast. But these Scriptures are saying that none can boast, for salvation is by faith. Obviously then, this faith is not a work of man’s but something that must be given to him: "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. 2:8,9). What exactly this verse is referring to when it says that not of yourselves need not be debated, for it is clearly stating that grace, salvation and faith are all interconnected and one cannot have one without the others. With this connection established we conclude that grace, salvation and faith are ALL the gifts of God and none of them are as a result of man’s works. In theologizing, or debating whether this verse is talking about grace, salvation or faith as that which is not of ourselves, one misses the big picture that this verse portrays and that is that salvation, grace and faith are all gifts from God and therefore ALL OF SALVATION IS ALL BY GRACE THROUGH FAITH. The whole parcel of love from God towards His elect contains everything necessary to save them, including these three gifts. If faith was of man then it would be a work of man’s that would save him and not a gift from God. Man would be boasting and God would not have all the glory for salvation.

The clearest, most outstanding verse of Scripture contrasting faith and works is Galatians 2:16: "Knowing that a man is not justified by the works of the law, but by the faith of Jesus Christ, even we have believed in Jesus Christ, that we might be justified by the faith of Christ, and not by the works of the law: for by the works of the law shall no flesh be justified." Salvation is not by our works but by His faith. If justifying faith were not a gift, then salvation would not be a gift and therefore not by the grace of God but by what a man did, by a work of man. But justifying faith is a gift of God and therefore only by this ruling principle, this governing principle, of salvation can it rightly be said that salvation is TOTALLY by the grace of God and NOT AT ALL by the works of man, which includes the faith that is in every man by nature. Any condition a man must meet in order to be saved would require a work of man’s, which would automatically nullify, or cancel out, grace: "...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..." (Rom. 11:6). Grace does not work hand in hand with works, but independently of them. Grace does not need any work of man’s to guarantee salvation, otherwise it would cease to be grace. The minute you add works as a condition for salvation, grace disappears. Such a gospel does not come from God, but has been constructed by the mind of man and does not require the faith of God to believe it. Only the faith of man will believe in a gospel made up by man. The faith that comes from God rejects all such gospels that condition any part of salvation on a work of man’s, for that justifying faith was given to embrace and adhere to the Gospel of total grace.

Paul, in Romans, said: "But to him that worketh not, but believeth on Him that justifieth the ungodly, his faith is counted for righteousness" (Rom. 4:5 cf. 4:6). The evidence for justification is the faith that comes from and is given by God, and the evidence that it is the faith that comes from God is that the person who has it believes that only the Gospel of God is the power of God unto salvation and repents of ever believing that salvation could come by belief in any other gospel. This particular Scripture also shows conclusively that faith is not a work of man’s but a gift from God. The man who believes the Gospel of God did not do anything to merit the gift of faith, for then it would cease to be a gift, it could not rightly be called a gift, but saving faith would have to be called a wage that man has deserved. Grace teaches that the gift of faith is not given because of what man has done but despite what he has not done: sought and honored God. The man who believes is not working, but simply exercising the gift of faith given to him by the grace of God. This exercising of faith is part and parcel of the gift of faith from God. Without the agency of the Holy Spirit one cannot have justifying faith or the ability to exercise it. If a person does not have justifying faith one could hardly expect such a person to exercise it. Faith "...exists in the mind only when the Holy Ghost produces it there, and is, in common with every other Christian excellence, to be traced to His agency on the heart." Can you imagine God’s Spirit of truth producing faith in a man which does not believe the truth?

The Gospel of God will not profit a man if he is not, by the grace of God, united to it through the faith that comes from God. "For unto us was the Gospel preached, as well as unto them: but the word preached did not profit them, not being mixed with faith in them that heard it" (Heb. 4:2). The faith of man could never be yoked with the Gospel of God. Those who are destitute of God’s faith are destitute of a love of God’s Gospel and therefore destitute of God’s salvation. The saved man’s faith, in other words the gift of God and from God which believes in His Gospel, is what is counted for righteousness, not just because it comes from God but because it believes God’s Gospel, which is the essential evidence that it is from God (see Rom. 4:5). Salvation is not by what a man does or has but by what God does and GIVES! Salvation is by the gift of faith "...that it might be by grace (not works)..." (Rom. 4:16). Why? To what end?"...that the promise (of salvation) might be sure to all the seed (God’s elect)" (Rom. 4:16). If faith was not a gift from God then salvation could not be by the grace of God. If faith was a work, if it was the responsibility of a man to produce, then salvation would be by works and not at all by grace. If you claim to believe in the ‘doctrines of grace’ and yet insist you were saved before believing them, or if what you have is a gospel made up of God’s grace and your works, it is a false gospel which cannot save, for works and grace cannot be mixed together for the one cancels out the other. They are two diametrically opposing principles. A man cannot believe in a grace and works gospel and be saved, just like he cannot be in two places at the one time. Anytime you have the slightest work you have a works gospel. Even if you attribute that work to the grace of God you have a gospel of works and not grace (see Lk. 18:9-14). Only the Gospel of God’s grace includes within it no condition for salvation that man must fulfill by an act of obedience on his part. If salvation is by grace—which is to say by God—which is what the Scriptures teach, then by definition salvation by grace could not possibly include, or depend upon, any work of man’s even if it required the grace of God to perform it. Scripture says that the saved are "...justified by faith..." (Rom. 5:1 cf. Gal. 3:8,11). By faith in what? By faith in the Gospel, wherein God bears record of Who His Son is and what His Son has done. Seeing then that the Word of God also says that no man can be justified by works, it stands to biblical reason that what justifies a man cannot be something that is of him, but only of God. The Christian never lays claim to have ever been saved without justifying faith in the Gospel of God, but only after he was made willing to receive it.

The Jews in Romans 9 were said not to have attained 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). The carnally minded Jews believed, as the multitude of religious people do today, that salvation was attainable by what they did. This is the lie that deceives all men by nature and which all religion is built upon: man can only be saved by something he does. Many religions add a perverted form of grace to this rule, but ultimately all religion hinges salvation on what a man does. They are ignorant of the fact that salvation can only be attainable by what God gives and by what Christ has done. This ignorance is an obvious and conclusive sign of the absence of faith. The faith that God gives causes a man to abandon any and all hope of his meeting, or being required to meet, any condition of salvation, but believes all conditions of salvation were met by the Person and Work of the Savior, Jesus Christ. Hence he seeks salvation, not by anything he has done or needs to continue doing, but by complete faith in Who Christ is and what Christ has done, for the saved man knows that he is complete in Christ (see Col. 1:5). Observe, if you will, that Romans 9:32 provides another instance of faith being contrasted with works: faith being of God, works being of man. Ignorance of God and how He saves is evidenced when a person attempts to establish their own righteousness by their own works, rather than acknowledging and accepting the fact that true righteousness can only come by God’s gift of faith. If one has not been given the faith of God one is simply not saved. There are only two types of men: those who go about trying to establish a righteousness of their own, and those who have been given the faith of God to believe that righteousness can only come through the obedience of the Son of God and no other; that salvation is not conditioned on what a man does, but on what a man believes (see Mk. 16:16 & 2 Thess 2:10,12,13); that this condition is not something a man can comply with in and of himself but something that can only be met by the love, grace and gift of God. Conditioning any part of salvation on man is to take grace out of the picture. Of course, when a man believes with the faith of God there will be a change in his lifestyle etc., but no part of salvation is conditioned on any moral reformation on the part of man. The fact that salvation is conditioned on what a man believes and that no man can savingly believe with his own faith, shows conclusively that salvation is all of, and purely by, the grace of God.

Another vital verse of Scripture to do with faith is found in Romans 10:17: "So then faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of God." Both faith and the hearing of God’s Word are undeniable essentials to salvation and without them, or without either one of them, there can be no salvation. The faith that justifies cannot be present if one has not heard and believed in the Gospel of God. Contrary to what many believe, before the hearing and believing of the Gospel of God there is no saving faith present. How could there be? If there is no hearing there can be no faith. And, if there is no hearing by the Word of God there can be no justifying faith. The Scriptures ask: "How then shall they call on Him in Whom they have not believed? and how shall they believe in Him of Whom they have not heard?..." (Rom. 10:14). And it may rightly be added, ‘How shall they believe without the faith that comes from God?’ For without the faith that comes from God, one cannot call on Him and one cannot believe in Him, for one cannot have heard of Him. The only one you can call on is the one in whom you have believed. The only one you can believe in is he of whom you have heard. Now, based on these biblical principles, how can anyone believe the true God when all they know is a false gospel? Notice that faith cometh by hearing (Rom 10:17) is within the context of verse 14. To be saved is to hear the Gospel and believe in the Savior of that Gospel with true Faith. The absence of either one denies the existence of the other. If one does not have the true Savior then one cannot have the faith that God gives to His people to believe in Him, and as long as one is without that faith one will always be without the Messiah that God bears record to in His Gospel. If there was saving faith present, what would it believe if the person who had it had not yet heard the Gospel? This would be like saying that one is indwelt by the Holy Spirit of promise but is not yet sealed with Him (see Eph. 1:13). Can a man have the Holy Spirit and yet not be sanctified? Can a man have saving faith and yet still be ignorant of the Gospel that faith was given to believe and rightly consider himself saved? Can any man savingly believe the Gospel of God WITHOUT the faith of God? Can a man have the faith that comes from God and still believe in a false gospel? Can he have justifying faith and still hold to major doctrinal error, ie abide in false doctrines and not in the doctrine of Christ? Remember 2 John 9 which says that if a man "...abideth not in the doctrine of Christ, (he) hath not God..." Can a man have the faith that comes from God and with it not believe the Gospel of God, or believe it but say that one can be saved without abiding in God’s truth? Saving faith is not given so that it may lie dormant and without influence for days, weeks or even years before it is exercised. Saving faith instantly takes effect on the man it is given to, for it is a living faith! Saving faith is not sent to believe nothing, to not have an effect on a man’s spiritual state, but it is sent to change a man’s spiritual state! Saving faith does not produce some imperceptible or gradual change that cannot be noticed, but it brings a striking change, an obvious change, in the one who has been given it, the kind of change spoken of in Acts 17:6 that turned the world upside down!! Saving faith is not sent of God in order that one may believe something that is not the word of God, not the Gospel of God. One does not need faith from God to believe that which is not of God. This is describing the fallen state of man—believing that which is not of God. Surely when given the faith of God, which is granted so that a man will believe the Gospel of God, none of its recipients will remain believers in a false gospel whose savior is a charlatan and whose god cannot save! The faith sent by God never shares its habitat with the faith of man. There is only room for one faith in a man and it is either his own faith or the faith of God. The faith of God cannot abide a false gospel, but only abides in the doctrine of Christ. The sole purpose for the existence of God’s faith is that it be given to His elect so that they will believe the truth and reject every false gospel.

The faith that man has believes what man says and the faith that God gives believes what God says. "...faith does not exist unless there is a message, or report, to be heard or believed. It cannot come otherwise than by such a message; in other words, unless there is something made known to be believed. And this shows us at once the importance of the message, and the fact that MEN ARE CONVERTED BY THE INSTRUMENTALITY OF TRUTH, AND OF TRUTH ONLY." False faith can only come by a false gospel, therefore belief in a false gospel can never be the evidence of a saved man. True faith can only believe the true Gospel, for it is the only faith which that Gospel can produce—faith cometh by hearing etc. A man cannot believe the Gospel if he has never heard the Gospel, for he can only have faith in that which he has heard. THIS IS WHY IT IS AN ABSOLUTE NONSENSE FOR ANYONE TO SAY THAT A MAN IS, OR WAS, SAVED WITHOUT HEARING THE GOSPEL OF GOD!! It therefore stands to biblical reason that a man cannot be saved without the Gospel, or the faith that believes the Gospel. Otherwise we would have the situation of a man being saved who has not heard the Gospel and does not believe with the faith that comes from hearing the message of God and does not need to! I mean, if hearing and believing the Gospel are not essentials to a man being saved, then what does it matter what a man believes either before or after he is ‘saved’! Doctrine shmoctrine! Who cares about right teaching or wrong teaching if a man can be saved without hearing and believing the truth! If one can be saved whilst believing false doctrine, who cares about learning the true doctrine? What does it matter if salvation is not dependant on it? Let’s just concentrate on what we do rather than on what we believe. What incentive would there be to know the truth if one could be saved without it! Such thinking is plainly nonsensical. This all leads us to rightly conclude that if one cannot be saved without the faith of God in the Gospel of God, how can anyone argue that a saved man can believe error, a false gospel, whilst in possession of justifying faith! If you believe you were, or that anyone can be, saved before hearing the true doctrine of Christ, then you are not only saying that you were saved without the Gospel but also that you were saved without the justifying faith that is given by God!! What kind of devilish ‘salvation’ is this that requires neither the Gospel of God nor the faith of God?? Perhaps some might soon come up with a gospel that does not require God at all for salvation, or that one does not even need to be saved!! Only a deluded, blinded, mind and only a faith that comes from man, energized by the Devil himself, could possibly conceive of such God-dishonoring blasphemies as these.

The message that is to be believed, God’s Gospel, is sent by God at His direction and the faith necessary to believe that message is also sent by God. One cannot have one without the other and rightly call oneself a saved person. If there is no Gospel then there can be no faith present to believe it, and if there is no saving faith present then there can be no belief of the Gospel of God and therefore no salvation. A key point in all this is the fact that one cannot have saving faith if one believes that one can be saved by a belief in any other gospel but God’s Gospel. You may claim to believe in the doctrines of grace, but insisting that you, or another, was saved, or is saved, whilst abiding in false doctrine is to say the unthinkable—that one can be saved without the justifying faith given by God to believe His Gospel. Or, that one can have saving faith yet still believe in a false gospel! If such were the case, that a man could have justifying faith and believe in a false gospel, what would one base such a person’s ‘salvation’ on? Where would the evidence lay that would show that such a person was saved? Such an absurdity is not found in the Scriptures. If God from the beginning has chosen the elect "...to salvation through sanctification of the Spirit AND BELIEF OF THE TRUTH" (2 Thess. 2:13 cf. Jn. 17:19), how can it be said that a person is saved regardless of what they believe? That they can be sanctified through the Spirit of God and reject or remain in ignorance of that very Truth the Holy Spirit was sent to guide all of God’s people into (see Jn. 16:13). Many so-called ‘pastors’ and alleged ‘ministers’ of God’s Word argue that because man is an imperfect creature he will believe imperfectly. That is, he will believe the Gospel but because of his sinful nature his believing will always contain some error, some imperfection. Because of this, they claim, God is tolerant of the erroneous concepts of the Gospel man has fashioned in his mind and placed his faith in, and while man cannot believe perfectly, what he believes rightly is enough to save him. But how can a man be saved who believes errors concerning the Gospel, which is the power of God unto salvation, revealing that he has wrong notions of what it is, of how God saves. How can he be believing in the Gospel of God which, along with the faith of God, is given so that THERE WILL BE NO MISTAKE as to Who God is and how He saves!!! The reality is, the faith man has by nature is an imperfect faith, hence its fatal attraction to imperfect gospels. Conversely, the faith which God gives is perfect and always leads those to whom it has been given to believe in the perfect Gospel perfectly, WITHOUT FAIL!! The faith which God gives is attracted only to HIS Gospel and is repulsed by any other. The enemies of God believe that because man is an imperfect creature he will believe the Gospel imperfectly EVEN WITH THE FAITH THAT GOD GIVES! Subscribers to such thinking reveal that they know no other faith than the natural imperfect faith of man! They have not been blessed by God with HIS faith to believe the Gospel, and therefore to believe it perfectly. Of course these people are going to conclude that even a saved man with the gift of faith can only believe the Gospel with partial accuracy, because all they have ever believed with is the faith that is natural to man. Scripture says that "...it is required in stewards (of the mysteries of God), that a man be found faithful" (1 Cor. 4:2). A steward is a preacher of God’s Gospel and a teacher of God’s Word. Now, how can a preacher of the Gospel be found faithful to that Gospel if he is not accurate in the preaching of it? How can one preach erroneously concerning the Gospel and be said to be faithful to it? Therefore how can a man be a true Christian if he does not faithfully and accurately believe in the perfect Gospel of God? The inseparableness of sanctification and accurate belief of the truth may be seen in Jesus’s own words in John 17:17: "Sanctify them through Thy truth: Thy word is truth." No one has any argument with the scriptural truth that there can be no salvation without sanctification, so why are so many people fooled by the lie that one can be saved without belief of the truth or with an imperfect understanding of it? This is a sad testimony to the carnal way of thinking of the unregenerate.

Jesus Christ is "...the Author (beginner) and finisher (perfecter) of our faith..." (Heb. 12:2). Again, saving faith is not something man can manufacture, something of which he is the orchestrator or beginner. Man has no such command over his faith as to direct it to savingly believe in the Gospel of God, nor can his natural faith influence him in such a way. If it could there would be no need for God to grant His faith so that a man would savingly believe His Gospel. As with every other thing to do with salvation, man is never the initiator. The saved man loves God but only because God loved him first (1 Jn. 4:19). The saved man believes in God, but only due to, and after, God gives him the faith to believe with. Saving faith comes from God and therefore it is He Who is the beginner of it, the author and implementer of it and consequently He must be the provider of it, giving it to whomsoever He wills. If it comes from God then it starts with God. The command, when made to God’s people, to believe God’s Gospel guarantees they will believe in no other. This means, for it to be the true Gospel of God, and for there to be true saving faith, what a person believes in must not contain error, no imperfection at all, but be the perfect Word of the Gospel of God. God giving His faith to a man is God commanding that man to believe His Gospel and no other and, behold, a new creature is created. "Let there be light: and there was light" (Gen. 1:3); "Let the earth bring forth grass" (Gen 1:11) and there was grass. And God giving His faith to a man is God saying, ‘Let there be a NEW creature, a believer in MY Gospel’ and, behold, there is a new creature who no longer believes in any false gospel no matter how much truth it contains but is now, by the grace of God through the faith of God, by means of the creation power of God, a new creature in Christ and believes in the only Gospel that saves!! Without the Gospel of which God is the Author and without the faith of which God is the Author NONE CAN BE SAVED! No one can please God without faith (Heb. 11:6), the Scripture says, and the reader knows by now that faith comes by hearing and the hearing by the Word, which is the Gospel of God: "But without faith it is impossible to please Him..." (Heb. 11:6). How then can God be pleased with one who does not believe His Gospel, which evidences the fact that he has not the faith that comes from God? Is God pleased with a man who possesses natural faith and believes a false gospel? Of course not. God would be even less pleased, to say the least, if a man who was given God’s faith believed a false gospel with it, if such a thing were possible. "So then they that are in the flesh cannot please God" (Rom. 8:8). None that are in the flesh, that have a faith produced by their carnal minds, can ever please God. For without the faith of God, one can never please God, and therefore be accepted by Him. No one can please God without the faith that believes in the Gospel of God. Believing in a different gospel to that which God is the Author of shows that one has a faith of which God is not the Father. For God to be responsible for the faith that believes in erroneous Gospel doctrines, it would mean He would be indifferent to what a man believed with the faith He gives. Just so long as man believed something with it would be good enough! It is important to note that not all false gospels are filled with lies. Some contain almost all truth yet stopping short of the whole truth, therefore making it impossible for God to call such a gospel His Gospel, and His giving anyone the faith to believe such an unnatural hybrid of truth and error. False gospels are believed in with a false faith which belongs to false christians. True Christians do not believe false gospels—or that they were ever saved believing them—because they have been given the faith of God to believe only HIS Gospel and that only belief in this Gospel saves, that only this Gospel is the power of God unto salvation. God saves those to whom He has given faith for they alone are the ones who believe His Gospel, and therefore they alone are the ones who please Him. This is so serious a matter that the Scriptures go so far as to say that a person cannot be of God, that is born again, they cannot have God, if they do not abide and believe in the doctrine of God: "Whosoever...abideth not in the doctrine of Christ, HATH NOT GOD....If there come any unto you, and bring not this doctrine, receive him not..." (2 Jn. 9,10).

"So then faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the Word of God" (Rom. 10:17). Faith can only come by hearing the Word of the Gospel. It cannot come before hearing that Word, it cannot come without hearing that Word, and anyone who says it can is flying in the face of Scripture and contradicting God. How can one have saving, God-given Faith if that Faith has not the Gospel of God to believe in? Obviously one cannot have saving Faith if one has not heard the Gospel, which that Faith was given to believe!! The very presence of saving, God-given Faith is the surest evidence that one has heard and believes in the true, God-given Gospel. The Gospel never comes to an elect person on the day he is to believe it without the Faith to believe it. There is no saving Faith without the hearing of the Gospel, just as there is no trusting in the true Christ before one has believed the Gospel. Any honest, rational, person must admit, judging by the above verse, that the Gospel must be heard for there to be a saving Faith present. Why would God give His saving Faith to someone who had never heard the Gospel? What would they do with this Faith? Believe another gospel which cannot save? No one needs God to give them a faith to believe in a false gospel, for that is all any man by nature believes in the first place! The reason God gives His faith is that those whom He gives it to will believe His Gospel and banish FOREVER any other gospel they previously believed in, wiping from their minds any notion that they were ever saved believing it. Saving Faith is always and ONLY given to one through the hearing of the Gospel. It does not come mystically after some existential experience, but only after hearing the Gospel of God. You cannot have it without knowing and believing what it was given to you to believe in! What else could one have faith in but the Gospel of God in order to be saved? The Gospel is what God has said must be believed if any are to be saved. Faith can only come by the hearing of the Gospel, so it stands to reason that the Gospel must be heard for there to be saving Faith.

The Scriptures say, "...BEFORE FAITH CAME, we were kept under the law, shut up unto the faith which should afterwards be revealed" (Gal. 3:23).It must be pointed out that while this verse is primarily talking about the Jews and the law, it is not improper to say that before saving Faith comes, all men by nature believe that they must do something to gain or maintain salvation, in other words, that salvation is conditioned on what a man does. "The Law condemned every other mode of salvation, and the law condemned all who attempted to be justified in any other way." Man’s only ‘hope’ before faith came was by obedience to the law, for all were kept under the law. Of course, none were ever saved by their obedience to the law: "For as many as are of the works of the law are under the curse: for it is written, Curseth is everyone that continueth not in ALL things which are written in the book of the law to do them" (Gal. 3:10). So we see that anything outside the Gospel of grace, everything outside of what God has done or gives, comes under the heading works of the law. Every gospel other than God’s Gospel promotes works to some extent as necessary to one’s salvation. In light of this, it is not difficult to see that there is only one Gospel of grace and multitudes of gospels that are of works. One comes from God, and the others are all of men. One requires the faith of God, the others the faith of men. All that can exist in the mind of the unregenerate is the faith which believes a gospel that conditions salvation in some way, and to some degree, on what a man does. Neither that faith or that gospel come from God, for His is a message of total grace and it is only His faith that can savingly believe it. To savingly believe the Gospel is to believe it from the heart, which means to abide in the doctrine that teaches all of salvation is all by grace and all through faith in the Person and Work of the Son of God, and that there can be no salvation without, or before, belief of the Gospel.

All men by nature are locked into believing systems of ‘salvation’ based on works, many of which masquerade as grace. Man believes he must do something and God, in His law, has revealed what it is that man must do—OBEY AND LIVE, DISOBEY AND DIE! But He also reveals that none can do it! The very need for both grace and the faith of God, indeed the Savior Himself, confirm this. Therefore, no gospel that conditions any part of salvation, the attaining or maintaining of it, on what a man does, qualifies as the Gospel of God for it is works-based, and no faith which believes such lies could possibly justify a man before God because the faith that God gives believes only in grace (in what God had to do and give), it believes only in a Gospel which unequivocally leaves NO room for man to boast. Grace and faith are inextricably linked and only by this combination is there no room for a man to boast. God’s Gospel is a Gospel of grace and this is the key to understanding why all other gospels cannot save, because all other gospels promote works. All other gospels to some degree demand that man do something to secure or gain assurance that he is saved. The word of God reveals that, far from being a means to salvation, "...the law was our schoolmaster to bring us unto Christ, that we might be justified BY FAITH" (Gal. 3:24). The law shows us that none can be saved by trying to obey it, but only by Faith in the One Who HAS obeyed it: "...that we might be justified by the Faith of Christ, and not by the works of the law: for by the works of the law shall no flesh be justified" (Gal. 2:16). Therefore the Christian has "...no confidence in the flesh" (Phil. 3:3), he has nothing to glory in "...save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ..." (Gal. 6:14). There is nothing man has done or can do that will impress God and motivate Him to save him. Salvation is not reliant upon what a man does or restrains his flesh from doing, "For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision availeth any thing, nor uncircumcision, but a new creature" (Gal. 6:15). "The fact that a man is created anew, or born again, constitutes the real difference between him and other men. This is what Christ requires...It is not by conformity to certain rites and customs that a man is to be accepted; it is not by elevated rank, or by wealth, or beauty, or blood; it is not by the color of the complexion; but the grand inquiry is whether a man is born again, and is in fact a new creature in Christ Jesus." It is the faith with which a man believes that is the telling factor, for in this can be seen the new creature or the old man. Man’s faith, which looks to what a man does or must do instead of, or in addition to, what Christ has done, cannot justify and therefore cannot be of God. Man is only saved by faith that is of Christ and looks ONLY to Christ, and only the new creature possesses it! If you have a faith that has led you to believe that you were saved, or remain saved, by your obedience to a particular law of God, then the Word of God says you are "...a debtor to do the whole law" (Gal. 5:3) and as a consequence "...are under the curse: for it is written, Cursed is everyone that continueth not in all things which are written in the book of the law to do them" (Gal. 3:10). Those who claim to be saved, or remain saved, by their obedience to a particular law of God, are claiming, whether they realise it or not, that they are saved by something they have done, by a work of the law, and are therefore saying that Christ died needlessly: "...if righteousness come by the law, then Christ is dead in vain" (Gal. 2:21). The word vain here means ‘for naught’ and ‘without a cause’. The only way Christ’s death could have been for nothing or without a cause—ineffectual to any degree—is if righteousness could in any way come through the efforts of a man. If any part of righteousness can come by anything you do, then Christ’s death becomes a vain thing, not just for you but for all for whom He died. His obedience unto death was not necessary at all if man could obtain righteousness by his own obedience. Only if you have a Gospel that says ALL of righteousness can ONLY come by Christ’s obedience unto death, have you the true Savior, the true Gospel, the true Faith. The believer in the Gospel of the grace of God is no longer a debtor to do the whole law, for he believes in the One who fully obeyed that Law and his faith is counted for righteousness. He does not do, or seek to do, or feel compelled to do, anything to get saved or stay saved for HE KNOWS, WITH THE FAITH WHICH COMES FROM GOD, that Christ has done it all for him. He is no longer charged with his sin or sinfully imperfect attempts at obedience, but with Christ’s perfect righteousness (see Rom. 4:5-8; 2 Cor. 5:21). He has been freed from that debt by the One who fully complied with every demand the law made: Jesus the Justifier. The Gospel believer, made so because he has been blessed with the faith of God, does not believe that righteousness comes by the law for he believes that Christ did not die in vain but that, by His obedience unto death, He established a perfect righteousness for all those whom God gave Him, who have been blessed with the faith that rejects all personal obedience as playing any part in the salvation of a man, for he believes that all of salvation from beginning to final glory is conditioned on Christ. A gospel that does not teach you to count all that you were, all that you did, including what you believed as a whole, as dung, thereby testifying to the fact that you were lost before you claimed to believe the true Gospel, is a false gospel and you are yet in your sins (see Phil. 3:4-10).The Gospel believer, through the Spirit, waits "...for the hope of righteousness by faith" (Gal. 5:5 cf. Rom. 9:31,32), not by his obedience (works). He has no hope of salvation based on his obedience, but all his hope is in the obedience unto death of the Lord Jesus Christ. Obedience to the law has never saved anyone, for no one has ever obeyed it perfectly. God’s law is that which points us to Christ so that we might be saved by faith in Him and not by faith in our works, our own efforts at obeying God. God’s faith believes in Christ’s obedience and leads those to whom it has been given away from any and every ‘hope’ that one is, or remains, in a justified state by their own personal obedience.

The Faith that God bestows is the catalyst that ensures the recipient looks wholly to another for salvation and not to himself. The faith that is given by God causes us to look away from ourselves to another, for it convinces us of our sin: "Therefore by the deeds of the law there shall no flesh be justified in His sight: for by the law is the knowledge of sin" (Rom. 3:20). And so we see that before Faith came man had no hope of salvation, which means that before the Gospel came, before that faith from God came believing His Gospel, no man can be said to have been in a saved state. This is why it is an evidence of lostness for a man to say that he was saved whilst knowing little to nothing of the Gospel of God, for to know little to nothing of the Gospel of God is to admit that one is ignorant of the truth, believing something other than the truth of God’s plan of salvation revealed in His power unto salvation: the Mighty Gospel. It is to say that one CAN call on Him in whom they do not believe, and that one CAN believe in Him of whom they have not heard! If one is ignorant of the truth of God, how can it be said that one is saved? For to be saved means that one is no longer ignorant of the truth, that one has been converted from ignorance to right saving knowledge of God by the hearing of the Gospel of God, for one has been given the faith that believes that Gospel and that removes and abolishes ALL ignorance of it! Those who perish do not believe the truth of God, they have no love for it. The saved are those who believe the truth, who love it with all their heart and will never leave it, for the faith of God is an everlasting gift! The Gospel of God pronounces that a man is not saved by his obedience to, or by his faith in, a false gospel, but only by the obedience of Christ and by God-given faith in the only Gospel that reveals that Christ. And this is precisely why a man cannot be saved who claims to believe the Gospel but who says that he was saved before he heard the Gospel, or that others are saved who believe a different gospel, or can be saved prior to believing the Gospel. The reason for this is clear in that before Faith in the Gospel of God’s Grace, there was only, and could only have been, faith in a gospel of one’s works! It will be hard for some to get their minds around this. Especially those who are Calvinists, convinced that they adhere to a Gospel of grace and yet believe that one must keep up a certain level of obedience in order to stay saved, or that Arminians are just as saved as they are. Any gospel that teaches it is Christ Who has saved us, initiated salvation, but it is what we do that gets us over the line, in other words keeps us saved to the end, is a false gospel. It is a gospel no different to the one the Galatians were being fed, which appeared to acknowledge Christ and what He had done but added circumcision to offset His Work. "Are ye so foolish? having begun in the Spirit, are ye now made perfect by the flesh?" (Gal. 3:3). Faith in such a gospel will not profit any man for it does not come from God (Gal. 5:1,2). To claim anything apart from Christ’s Righteousness "...as a thing essential to salvation, as indispensable to justification and acceptance with God...(is) a renouncing of Christ as Himself sufficient to save us" AND KEEP US SAVED.

Anyone who believes that one must do something to either get saved or stay saved is "...a debtor to do the WHOLE law" (Gal. 5:3). They cannot pick and choose what they are ‘good at’ but must obey the law of God in its entirety and seek salvation by their own righteousness, which must be perfect. One cannot appeal to the grace of God if one conditions any part of salvation on what a man must do. To whoever believes that they must do something to justify themselves before God, or keep themselves ‘justified’, the Scriptures say: "Christ is become of no effect unto you..." (Gal. 5:4). As for every true believer, "...we through the Spirit wait for the hope of righteousness (SOLELY) by Faith" (Gal. 5:5), not by works, or faith and works, but by faith alone in Christ Jesus alone. The truth is, the Calvinist who believes that prior to saving Faith in the Gospel of Grace one can be saved, or that one must ‘do’ in order to remain saved, is just as lost as the Arminian. Galatians 3:25 tells us: "...after that Faith has come, we are no longer under a schoolmaster." The Faith that God gives does not look to one’s efforts at obedience as that which will recommend, or help recommend, us unto God, it never even glances at our works, but rather never takes its eyes off God; it trusts solely in, and looks only to, the obedience of Christ as the only ground of salvation. Thus, this Faith that is of God trusts in no other Gospel but the Gospel of God’s grace. Only when a man has the faith that comes from God, which believes the Gospel of God, can he rightly say he is saved. Only then will he see, and readily admit to, the fact that he was not saved, that he could not have been saved, whilst believing any gospel other than God’s Gospel, and that this faith could not have been of God. Any claim that a person was saved before or without the faith that comes from God, without which no man is justified, shows that such a person does not have the faith of God, which would never promote such a God-dishonoring lie. You cannot be saved now if you believed you were saved when you believed in a false gospel. A person can only be saved FROM the time they believed the truth and not before (see Eph. 1:12-14). By definition, salvation means that you are saved from that point on, from that time forward. Salvation does not apply to your unbelieving past. Salvation is not retrospective. It does not begin—become effective or operative—from the time you became religious, during which time you adhered to erroneous doctrines which spoke lies about the God of grace, BUT FROM THE MOMENT YOU CEASED to believe in a false gospel and BEGAN to believe in the true Gospel of God!!

Finally, verse 26 of Galatians 3 informs us that those who are saved "...are all the children of God BY FAITH in Christ Jesus." No one is or was a child of God by faith in a false jesus taught in a false gospel. To be saved by faith in Christ Jesus is to be saved by faith in the Jesus and in the particular and specific works He performed to save His people from their sins. The faith that God gives His elect never has and never will lead them to believe in a false gospel. Simply because you are in possession of a key does not mean you will be able to enter your friend’s house. You must be given the right key, the only key, that will give you access to your friend’s house and that key can only come from your friend. Why would a friend give you the wrong key knowing it could never gain you access into his house? Before THAT Faith of God comes which believes only in God’s Gospel, the only faith a man has is one which believes in a salvation by works. The only key he has is one that cannot unlock the door. You will never gain access to God by means of a faith that does not come from God and which can only ever lead you to a false gospel, a different god and another christ. The key words in Galatians 3:23 we have just quoted are: "before Faith came." How could there be salvation before Faith came, the Faith sent from God which believes, and can only believe, His Gospel?

How ludicrous is the preposterous assertion, in light of such biblical evidence as this, that one can stand justified before God, meaning that one can have saving Faith, without having heard and believed His Gospel? Faith cannot exist unless there is a message heard and believed. After all, the message is the very object of the faith that believes it. If the message is not the true one—God’s one—then there can be no conversion. To think otherwise is to say that God ‘converts’ His chosen by the instrumentality of lies, and that they can be just as saved believing a false gospel with a fake faith as they can be believing in the Gospel with God-given faith. To be converted to something, one must have been converted from something. As long as you are in error about the Gospel, you cannot be converted. To be converted is to change to another attitude or belief. To repent of the old and turn to the new. The only thing that can be said of man’s faith, when it comes to the Christian, is that it is a forsaken faith! To be converted is to change from believing a false gospel to believing only the True Gospel—the Gospel that God’s faith was sent to believe! Jesus was sent to save. The Holy Spirit was sent to guide God’s people to, and God’s faith was sent to believe only, the Gospel which reveals that Jesus as complete Savior. Biblical conversion is to change from believing a false gospel, and the false assumption that it could ever save, to believing the one and only Gospel of God and that it alone has been fitted to save, that it alone is the power of God unto salvation. God gives His faith to His elect so that they will believe with that faith and stop believing with their natural faith. One believes the truth the other can only believe anything but the truth of God. How could conversion take place without the essentiality of the true Gospel being heard and believed? And, how can anyone savingly believe the true Gospel if all they have is a faith that does not come from God and therefore can never believe in the true God? He that receives the Truth of God as revealed in His Gospel is he that has heard, understood and believed it (see Matt. 13:23; Mk. 4:20; Lk. 8:15). He has been truly converted. He has been blessed by God’s grace through God’s faith and is now saved (see Acts 18:27). One cannot believe before one has understood, and one cannot understand before one has heard that which is to be understood and believed. This is all so simple, so basic, as to beggar belief that a single person, let alone the majority, could fail to see and realise that there cannot be a proper biblical conversion, no proper biblical faith, before or without the Gospel being heard, understood and believed. It all goes to show the miserable condition of the lost, who have deluded minds, an obscene faith rather than a God-given one, and a biblically unsupportable hope of being saved.

The faith that comes from God is absolutely vital to salvation because it is the only faith by which a man can savingly believe God’s Gospel. Clearly the fact that man must be given the faith to believe God’s truth is testament to the certainty that the faith which man has by nature can never lead him to the true God. It can never save him. We must be made alive by God. We must be sanctified by God. We must be born of the Word of God—His Gospel. We can only be saved by the obedience of the Son of God. We must have our sins atoned for by the Son of God. We must be given eternal life (Jn. 17:2), so we must be given His faith to believe these things which is the evidence that we have been given eternal life. Everything a saved man has comes from God. Everything a saved man is, is because of God. God is the difference between a saved man and a lost man. The saved man has Christ’s righteousness, the lost man has his own righteousness. Nothing can distinguish one man from another except the faith that comes from God, which counts every gospel but God’s own Gospel as nothing but dung! The saved man believes in God’s Gospel, the lost man believes in a false gospel. The difference between the two is simple: one has been given the faith of God to believe God and the other remains with his own pathetic faith that will lead him to any one of ten thousand false gods but can never lead him to the true God. Imagine a person coming to God and being accepted by God via a faith that did not come from God! It simply cannot be. False faith leads to false gods! Remember, where there is false faith there is a false god and no one is ever going to enter heaven and place their arm around Jesus Christ whilst their other arm is firmly around the waist of a false god!! Jesus Christ does not recognize anyone as His who believes with natural faith in a false god. No man has ever seen the light who remains in doctrinal error. God’s Gospel can never be recognized for what it is—the Truth of God—as long as one has a faith that is not the gift of God.

The one thing that stands out like a sore thumb about all the lost is that they believe in a gospel that is not of God for they have a faith of which God is not the author. The principal evidence for a man having a faith that is not of God lies in the fact that he has never turned from false gospels, thus proving that he has never been led by God’s Spirit of Truth, through the gift of faith, away from every false gospel and only to the true Gospel of God, the one which says: man is dead in sin and cannot come to God in and of himself (Matt. 19:25,26; Rom. 3:10,11; Eph. 2:1,12); that God chose a people for Himself before the foundation of the world, not based on anything they did but upon His will, wisdom and grace and according to His purpose (Eph. 1:3-6; 2 Tim. 1:9); that Christ Jesus was sent to the earth to establish a perfect righteousness by obeying the law, and dying, for those people God had chosen and entrusted to Christ’s care (Jn. 10:27,28; 17:2,3; Eph. 5:25); that their sins would be charged to Him and His Righteousness to them, thus making them wholly acceptable unto God (2 Cor. 5:21; Eph. 5:2); that all these people would believe His Gospel and be saved, for this is the will of God, and none of them will perish (Jn. 10:26-29). Why does God give His faith to a man? So that he will believe God’s only Gospel so much so that he will forever reject every other gospel he ever believed in.

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