WHAT IS IT TO BELIEVE?
The Lord Jesus
said that only those who believe the Gospel shall be saved and all those who do
not believe that Gospel, God’s Gospel, will not be saved at all, but in
fact will perish (Mark 16). So what is it to believe and what is it to not
believe? To believe is to trust, to have faith in, to have hope in. To not
believe is either to be ignorant of, or to not trust or have faith in or have
hope in what God has said. Many today, as it has always been, believe what they
believe to be the truth. They believe it, they say, because they believe it is
what God has said. But when faced with what the true God has really said, one
quickly discovers that their trust, their hope, their faith, is not in what the
true God has said but in a lie. Most people in hell today are not there because
they believed nothing but because they believed in a lie which they thought was
the truth, what they thought God had said. In other words, most people in hell
believed in a false god, a false gospel. A false gospel is what God has not
said. Only the true Gospel is what God has said and can be looked upon as
His only power unto salvation. To believe in anything else is to believe a lie,
in something that cannot save, regardless of what one considers it to be
-
the
Gospel, etc.,
-
or how sincerely one believes it or for how long one has believed
it. To believe the Gospel is to believe the doctrines of that Gospel, which
is the Gospel of grace. Not any old grace but the grace of God in the
salvation of man. God has clearly stated the sinful state of man and also what
has been done by grace to save His people from their sins. It took God to choose
those whom He would save; it took God’s Son to live and die for them, to wash
away their sins and impute His righteousness to them. It took the Holy Spirit to
make those people
alive
and for them to be granted the faith to see and believe
God and His Gospel. God saves, and keeps saved, all His people. Every bit of
salvation is by God and from God. No part of it depends upon us. Nothing we do
can get us saved, increase our chances of being saved, or can keep us saved. God
has done it all. That is why it is called the Gospel of grace – salvation by
grace. In other words, salvation by what God has done not by what man
can or must do. To believe anything different is to believe in a lie, another
gospel, which is not of God but from the imagination of man. Belief in one
Gospel, God’s Gospel, evidences a state of salvation. Belief in any other, no
matter how minutely it strays from what God has said in His Gospel, and you will
perish.