Not all the enemies of the great Gospel of God, the only Gospel I might add, which Scripture calls "the power of God unto salvation" (Rom. 1:16), overtly oppose the doctrines it contains. The opposition by those of the Arminian persuasion, who do overtly oppose the great Gospel doctrines which attribute all of salvation to the God of Grace leaving no room for man to boast, are not what we shall be discussing in this booklet. The kind of opposition we will be addressing comes from those people who proudly call themselves Calvinists, or Reformed Calvinists to be precise. These people are taught, and do all claim to believe to be adherers to, and defenders of, the so-called Five Points of Calvin or as some prefer to call them, the Doctrines of Grace. Many of these people go so far as to say that they believe the Arminian gospel, or any gospel for that matter which differs from the one they believe, is another gospel. Yet for some inexplicable reason they will not, they adamantly refuse to, say that those who believe in such gospels are lost people. In other words, false gospels are accursed but not those who believe and trust in them. Moreover, they do not count themselves or their fellow believers as having been lost when they believed the doctrines of a false gospel. These people have been taught and do believe that such extreme thinking is outside the teachings of the Bible. In fact, they have termed such thinking Hyper-Calvinism. It is considered extra-biblical and particularly uncharitable to call people who believe in another gospel ‘lost’ and in need of salvation. At the same time, however, they do not believe that everyone who holds to a false gospel, such as Mormons and J.W.’s etc., are saved regardless of what they believe, but only those who hold to a majority of basic doctrinal truths about God such as the Trinity, the Virgin birth and the fact that Christ died on a cross. They are happy to call these people brethren despite the enormous divide which exists in their doctrinal beliefs, notwithstanding their acknowledgement of some basic truths. People who believe some basic biblical facts are considered by these tolerant Calvinists to be Christians who only require a little correction to their thinking, a little further instruction, but are on the right road regardless of their erroneous beliefs. These Calvinists claim to believe the doctrines we teach as the very doctrines of the Gospel taught in the pages of the Bible, but they draw the line when it comes to judging saved and lost by the Gospel, by the ramifications that are part and parcel of those doctrines. And so, we shall examine the questions, objections and opposition such people and the organizations they serve have to our Gospel overall. We shall also look at some more common questions asked, and objections raised, by people who do not believe that a person must know, understand and believe the essential Gospel doctrines to be saved. One question, one objection, at a time is how we shall analyze their opposition in order to see if there is any substance to what they say and to show you, the reader, how utterly wrong these people are and how, by their adherence to such thinking, they reveal themselves to be as lost as lost can be. In the process we shall show the reader how God has only one Gospel, one Gospel which He has authored, and therefore only one Gospel by which He saves.

Someone wrote to me recently saying that they had poured through the history of Christianity and searched through the teachings of the various denominations but could not find one single group who believed the Gospel which we and others teach. More specifically, they found that it was not so much the doctrines that those who are historically perceived to have been Christians, disagreed with, but rather the ramifications of not believing them. In other words, to be at pains to point out what the Gospel of God is by which He saves is all well and good, even important, but to judge people lost simply because they do not believe it is utterly wrong, according to these people. The doctrines which we teach are nothing new. They are often, and correctly, referred to as ‘The Doctrines of Grace’ but collectively all sides of the religious establishment have come to refer to them as Calvinist doctrine or Calvinism. The term Calvinism comes from the name of the famous 16th century French theologian, John Calvin. The fact that Calvin’s name is associated with these true doctrines, which are part of but not the whole Gospel, is not to suggest that they in any way originated with him. Therefore to label Gospel doctrines with the name of a man is at once both highly irregular and utterly inappropriate. It is to associate the origins of the doctrines of the Gospel with a man rather than rightly attributing them to the Most High God. All Calvin did was to use these Gospel doctrines he saw in the Scriptures in his response to the teachings of one Jacobus Arminius who had written a list of several doctrines, a doctrinal system published in 1610 that would become known as Arminianism and would, in years to come, deeply influence Wesleyan and Methodist theology. To label these doctrines with the name of a man is most appropriate due to the fact that they were invented by man, they did not originate in the mind of God but in the sinful mind of man. They may not have originated with Arminius himself but they certainly did not come from God’s Word. These doctrines were very much in line with the heresies of Pelagius, a fifth century British monk who originated the body of doctrines known as Pelagianism and was first condemned for heresy in 416, and were not incompatible with what the Roman Catholic Church would later teach. In fact, many refer to Arminian teachings today as semi-Pelagianism while others have called Arminianism the road to Rome. Remarkably, belief of such doctrines, which stand in contradiction with, and in eternal opposition to, the true doctrines of the Gospel, and which are even called another gospel by many in Calvinist circles, is said not to signify the lostness of their adherents but only shows that they are merely in error and require a little adjustment, a little correction, to their thinking. But can it be that error, when it comes to what the Gospel is, which is to say what the Word of God teaches about Who God is and how God saves, is not a sign of lostness? Can it be that, though believing in right doctrines, those Calvinists who tolerate error in others and who are saying that one can be saved without a correct understanding of what the Gospel is, of the record that God bears of His Son, are saved men who are faithfully and therefore accurately and fully teaching and defending the Word of God? This booklet will also look at why a person who does not believe in the true doctrines of the Gospel, or who claims to believe them yet insists that they or others were/are saved before or without belief in them, is lost; and the reasons why there are so few who believe the Gospel of God, and therefore so few who are faithful to the word of God who say that there is nothing but lostness outside of belief in that Gospel and who, after their much witnessing, cry out as the prophet Isaiah did, "Who hath believed our report?" (Isa. 53:1).

And so where do we begin our analysis of what the opposition is that so many people have to what we are preaching? How shall we begin to answer those people who oppose what we are saying, insisting that one can be saved before believing the Gospel doctrines correctly, who are in essence saying that one can be saved without acknowledging the specific doctrines of that particular Gospel, which identify the true God and distinguish Him from all false gods, and to which God puts His name? Well, I propose to breakdown the arguments of the opposition in order to show that in reality they are no arguments at all. In fact, when taken apart they reveal that there is no biblical consistency to them AT ALL! That their words are merely thoughts without substance. That there is no biblical ground for their arguments to stand on, and that these opposers have no biblical recourse whatsoever in attacking the truth we teach. That all their arguments and objections amount to a void wrapped up into one big ball of NOTHING!

The first question we will look at is one that is often asked by members of the mainstream conservative religious establishment, in particular its leaders, to those few who rightly insist that there is no salvation outside of belief in the only Gospel of God:

Such thinking immediately reveals the automatic assumption which connects longevity with that which is true. If a religious organization has existed for long enough then that is proof enough that such an organization must be what it claims to be, one which represents God on earth by being the bearer of His Word to mankind. This is the kind of thinking that permeates the minds of most people. There are many religious organizations which make such a claim, organizations that would not dream of saying they are in any way associated with each other or that the other is even Christian at all. The Roman Catholic Church, the Seventh-Day Adventist movement, the Mormon Church, the J.W.’s and many others would say the exact same thing as the mainstream Calvinist churches: that what we teach is wrong because their particular organizations have never taught it. So what is this supposed to prove? Does this mean that simply because a group has never taught what we teach, it automatically means that such a group is teaching, and has always taught, the truth? Hardly. At best, all it proves is that the organization making the objection has never taught what it is up in arms about. What is interesting to note is the fact that in making this objection, the leaders of Reformed Calvinist organizations do not immediately refer to the Bible, as we do in defense of our Gospel, but to their organization’s teaching manuals and past leaders to ‘back up’ what they are saying! Their knee-jerk response is, ‘But this man never taught this, are you implying that such a man was lost, too?’ Or, ‘Are you saying the whole denomination is wrong?’ This type of thinking, while readily appealing to the conditioned, unthinking, mind which accepts just about everything that has organized itself into an official entity as being what it claims to be, and as having the authority to teach what it teaches, is just plain wrong no matter how many have adopted it. Many today are wary of a new company, or new business, starting up. They wonder about how reliable their product can be for it has no history, and therefore no way to really know whether the product they are selling is worth buying. But how many companies just starting up have been looked at with such doubts and reservations yet whose product was just as good as, even better than, those companies who have a respected name and who have been in business for years. Only if that company can manage to last those early years and cement itself in the market place is there credibility given to it. Increasingly, many companies and businesses today often tell you in their advertisements that they have been established for the past 20 years or more. Some even lie about it knowing how much credibility people attach to an organization which has been around for years as opposed to one that is just starting up. People feel an automatic sense of, and freedom to, trust in a company that has a long history and a good name. Longevity is immediately connected to credibility and people just seem to automatically believe that the product being sold is reliable. Now, in some instances this can prove to be true but in the majority of cases, how long a business has been operating really has nothing to do with the credibility of their product. It is no proof that what they are selling is a reliable product. Many $2 shops have been around for a number of years now, but even though they have proven very popular and people continue to patronize these stores, does not change the fact that many of their products are cheaply made and break down after a few days, or even hours, of use. In the religious arena there have been many new groups spring up with teachings differing greatly to those which have for centuries been considered correct. Some of these groups did not last long. Others, however, did manage to endure through those early turbulent years and continue on even to this day. Groups like the Mormons and J.W.’s have been around for over a hundred years. The point I am making is: the fact that a religious organization has been around for hundreds of years does not automatically mean that what they are teaching is true? Does the fact that Mormonism and the so-called ‘Jehovah’s Witnesses’ have survived through the years mean that what they teach is of God and that their gospels are the means by which God reveals Himself and saves His people? Of course not! So too, we cannot as a matter of course believe that even those religious organizations which teach the doctrines of the Gospel but who do not judge saved and lost by the Gospel are representing God on the earth, for longevity can be ruled out as proof of credibility if error is taught. It matters not how long an organization has been teaching, for this can never be a reliable way to gauge its teachings as true, but what it has been teaching should be our main focus. In saying this, I believe we have established at least a reasonable doubt as to the veracity of a religious organization’s claims to be the bearer of truth simply based on the fact that it has been around for years. The real issue is not who has taught in God’s name or for how long but what is God’s Gospel. The issue is not how many have believed God’s Gospel but what is God’s Gospel. The issue is not who has claimed to teach the Gospel longer than others but what is the Gospel. The issue is not the reputations and number of people who lay claim to having believed the Gospel but what is the Gospel. The real issue is what is true Christianity? The real issue is what is the truth, not how long an organization claiming to teach it has been in existence. What this ministry teaches is not new, it is only little known. No matter how long the truth, which true believers believe, has existed, if it is little known, if it has not had the forum or the exposure which the popular teachings of today have enjoyed, then it will always be wrongly labelled and assumed to be new or wrong. The only thing that will matter on judgement day is whether or not one believed the truth and not whether one belonged to a certain religious group. The issue will be who has believed the truth according to the Scriptures and not how loyal they have been to a denomination’s creed. We shall all stand as individuals before God on that Day with what we have believed, and not as some anonymous member of a religious organization hiding behind its leader. We shall be admitted into heaven because by God’s grace we were given His faith to believe only His Gospel and counted ourselves saved in light of that and not because we were part of some long-standing tradition-filled denomination which claimed to teach the Gospel but in actual fact did not, for it taught that one could be saved before or without the Gospel of God.

Is the truth what we have been told it is by mainstream religious establishments or are they the ones who have got it wrong? This is a very important question, especially in light of the fact that the mainstream religious establishment cannot always be counted on as right or being the bearers of truth, as is shown in the biblical precedent of the Pharisees. These religious leaders of Israel claimed to be leading one and all of its hearers to heaven, but what they taught was obedience to the Law and not faith in the Messiah Whom God sent to save His people from their sins by HIS obedience unto death. Jesus said of the false teachers of His day, "But woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye shut up the kingdom of heaven against men: for ye neither go in yourselves, neither suffer ye them that are entering to go in" (Matt. 23:13). By the false teachings, the false gospels, these men taught they closed off the way to heaven rather than paving the way to it, and neither they nor those who listened to and believed what they were saying ever entered into heaven. "They shut it up by their doctrines. By teaching false doctrines respecting the Messiah; by binding the people to an observance of their traditions; by opposing Jesus, and attempting to convince the people that He was an impostor, they prevented many from becoming His followers." Isn’t this what is happening in our own day? Aren’t all those who deny THE Gospel denying the true Messiah of that Gospel and calling Him an impostor? Aren’t religious leaders of today who know not the Gospel shutting up the kingdom of heaven against men, and opposing Jesus the Lord, by their false and misleading doctrines? Of course they are. The name of Jesus has become so well known as that of the Savior that many of today’s false teachers who teach counterfeit christs call these impostors by the name ‘jesus’. The only way to discern the true from the false is what they say about Jesus in the doctrines of their particular gospels (see my booklet ‘God’s Only Jesus’). They call good evil and evil good and ask us to trust in a messiah who is NOT God’s Messiah but a charlatan who, rather than saving people from hell, leads people to it! The observance of traditions that are not based on truth and do not come from God has kept great multitudes from the truth and in bondage to the false gospels which oppose it. And these multitudes, for the most part, belong to large religious organizations. Jesus said, "...ye made the commandment of God of none effect by your tradition" (Matt. 15:6). In Luke 11:52 Jesus says, "...ye have taken away the key of knowledge..." "...they had taken away the right interpretation of the ancient prophecies respecting the Messiah, and thus had done all they could to prevent the people from receiving Jesus as the Redeemer." Such people are the murderers of men’s souls. This is further proof of the fact that if your knowledge of the Gospel is not in accordance with the Scriptures, then you are none of His. The Lord Jesus put it this way: "...in vain they do worship Me, teaching (and believing) for doctrines the commandments of men" (Matt. 15:9).

The Pharisees had the respect of the greater majority of the masses. People scrambled and almost fought to have these men eat in their homes that they might gain prestige among their peers. Because they looked like religious men with their long beards, and even longer robes, what they taught was received without question as the teachings of God. Because they were committed to the study of the Scriptures, because they were the men who had the authority to teach, who occupied the positions of leadership, they were considered to be God’s Voice on earth. Because these men had undergone an ordination and were Pharisees, which evidenced years of devotion to religious study, was enough to convince people that what they said was right and that it could be nothing else but right. Yet despite what the majority of people believed, NONE of those leaders taught the truth of the Gospel! This same misconceived devotion of undying loyalty may be viewed in many who attend the various ‘churches’ of our day. People who take great pride in boasting of how learned and esteemed their particular minister is whilst scant regard is paid to what these men actually teach. The Pharisees and Sadducees rejected Jesus’ teachings as being of God and they passed Him off as some blasphemer, a heretic who deserved to die a criminal’s death. What an interesting thing, that those who professed so much love for God and His Word failed miserably in recognizing His glorious Son Who came to save God’s people from their sins. And that the little people, the everyday average person, who were looked upon as unlearned people by their religious leaders, were the ones whose eyes were opened to the truth. These religious leaders all vigorously claimed to believe Moses and used this as a base to convince people they were God’s ministers, but in their rejection of the Messiah they showed that they didn’t even really believe Moses and so could not have been God’s ministers at all. Jesus said to them, "...had ye believed Moses, ye would have believed Me: for he wrote of Me" (Jn. 5:46). Earlier, Christ said to these men who all claimed to believe and accurately teach the Scriptures that "...ye have not His Word abiding in you: for Whom He hath sent, Him ye believe not. Search the Scriptures; for in them ye think ye have eternal life: and they are they which testify of Me" (Jn. 5:38,39). This should teach everyone a very valuable lesson: do not fool yourselves into believing that you have God if you abide not in the Doctrine of His Son!! Do not fool yourselves into believing you have the Son if you do not have HIS WORD abiding in you!! Do not fool yourselves into believing that a man who teaches some truths about God must be a minister of God. Despite all their knowledge and prestige among the people; despite all their religious ways and devotion to prayer and the synagogue, this ‘upstart’, Jesus, was the only one Who was right and all of them were the blasphemers. All of them, the very rulers of the entire religious system of the day, were the heretics who were not preaching the Gospel of Christ though they claimed to be the teachers of God’s Word. They were not the seed of God but rather children of the Devil (see Jn. 8:44)! No matter how great the number of people there are who believe the same thing, they can only be as right as those whom they follow. If those whom they follow are wrong then all those who believe the one they follow are wrong too. The blind masses were wrong because these blind guides they followed were wrong (see Matt. 15:14), and only one man, an unlearned man at that, a lone man who did not come out of their Bible colleges, out of their seminaries, Who was not taught by their professors, Jesus Christ, was right. And what did the religious leaders of His day say to those who believed Him: "...are ye also deceived? Have any of the rulers or of the Pharisees believed on Him?" (Jn. 7:47,48). Religious traditionalists who hold more fervently to the traditions of men rather than God’s Word, in order to prove their teachings right, display this trait by always referring their opponents to the testament of the history of their denomination or organization and their confessions of faith, their creeds etc., where it cannot be found that any of their forbears taught or believed the kind of things the Lord Jesus and his followers are really saying, rather than to the Scriptures. This same attitude is most prevalent today in those who oppose our Gospel and the ramifications that come with it. They ask, ‘Which of the great reformers of the past said, and which of the great theologians, teachers and biblical scholars of today say, what you are saying?’ Such statements provide absolutely no proof whatsoever that those who subscribe to them are bearers of the true Gospel, but are actually a confession, an admission, that their particular group does not, and never has, preached THE Gospel. One ‘pastor’, when he could say no more, asked me: ‘Who are you? Who gave you authority to teach..?’ Exasperated in trying to defend his message and trying to offer up scriptural evidence to support his opposition to my Gospel, this man said the self same thing Christ’s enemies said to Him: "...By what authority doest Thou these things? And who gave Thee this authority?" (Matt. 21:23). Now before anyone starts to falsely accuse me by saying I am putting myself on a par with the Lord Jesus Christ, let me make it perfectly clear that all I am saying by this is that the language of the enemies of the Lord, the enemies of truth who are in positions of leadership and who have the respect of the multitude, has not changed. They always end up questioning the credibility of, and vilifying, the one who teaches differently to them. When they cannot oppose the teachings that contradict with what their denomination teaches or with what their traditions dictate, they attack the ones who teach them. Such a fleshly, carnal, attitude is not without biblical precedence, as we have seen in the words of the religiously hypocritical Pharisees of Jesus’ day. Any teaching that is perceived to be new or that has not been part of a religious institution’s teaching manual, is labelled as false and that which causes division. So many believe this, even without Scriptural support, especially when it comes from the pulpits of long established religious institutions—as if no such group could have had things so wrong for so long! And so we see that such institutions are considered to be without error, that they are virtually infallible, and to believe something which the organization does not teach is construed as rebellion against the truth. This shows the arrogant and hypocritical attitude of such groups that say it is proper to judge right from wrong by what the religious denomination teaches, but that it is wrong to judge saved and lost by belief or unbelief of the Gospel. Many fail to realise that these large organizations are led by mere men, men who have been engendered, if you will, by these monolithic religious organizations through their colleges and seminaries. Men who have been expertly trained to think a certain way, and to uphold the customs, and maintain the teachings, of the denomination that gave birth to them at all costs. As is the case in various fields including religion, the greatest strength of those who have the truth is that they had not been taught how to think by human institutions.

Their thinking is not conformed to this world but has been transformed by the Word of God. Though many leaders and ministers employed by large established religious organizations are very sincere in what they believe, they are a manufactured product designed to tow the company line and call its tenets the teachings of God, and to whom the truth is that which best serves the organization, and when necessary, themselves. I know for a fact that many of these men don’t always believe all of what they are taught, and that many answered their exam papers with what they knew was the answer the college was looking for, but were not necessarily in line with what these men believed the Scriptures teach. How could they get a pass mark and become the pastors and ministers they long to be if they do not provide acceptable answers. Not answers that are necessarily right but answers that are expected. So often these men preach things that they don’t even believe. There have even been instances of men becoming ministers who didn’t even believe in God! So often, these men know that there are those in their congregations who believe wrongly about serious doctrinal matters but dare not say anything for fear of causing disharmony, of upsetting and therefore running the risk of losing members of their congregations, their jobs, their position within the organization and the chance to one day be ‘promoted’ to lead a larger assembly. Individuals who have no vested interests other than to know the truth, according to the Scriptures, are the ones that are to be trusted rather than those who are owned by the organizations they serve, for their livelihoods depend on their faithfulness to the organization and how well they tow the company line. These men dare not say they are wrong or that the denomination they work for is ever wrong. In fact, when was the last time you heard of a denomination announcing it had for decades or even centuries been wrong about a certain doctrine and then proceeded to correct it? These groups are founded on certain doctrinal beliefs and their employees must remain faithful to the denomination’s confession of faith, for to suddenly turn around and admit they have some of them wrong would jeopardize the whole structure. The people would think, ‘If they were wrong on this how many other things could they be wrong about?’ People see these groups as honest and trustworthy and people like to set up their spiritual homes within the boundaries of various denominations, and by doing so say , ‘I am of Apollos’, ‘I am of Paul’ or ‘I am of Calvin’ etc.

One thing history has taught us is: "An old error is more popular than a new truth!" One man has expressed it thusly, "When a myth is shared by large numbers of people, it becomes a reality." Now, the Gospel, and the ramifications of not believing it, is not a myth, nor is it a new truth but it is ‘new’ to those who hear it for the first time. Consequently, what is perceived as new is immediately considered strange and if not studied properly, this ‘strangeness’, which is immediately attributed to that which is perceived as new, becomes forever associated with the ‘new’ teaching in the mind of the ignorant and their reaction to it is seen as the appropriate reaction to that which in reality is not strange at all but proper and right. And so we see that this attitude is what feeds the lie that turns that which is true into a perceived lie, a myth. At best, the truth is a myth to those who believe error. This line of thinking then becomes a tradition. It becomes entangled and woven into the fabric of a society or a religious denomination. The end result is adherence and loyalty to that which is not at all real, not at all the Word of God, but the mere traditions of men. After reading my material or hearing it said that they are believing a false gospel and are therefore not saved, many immediately take a defensive attitude and thus their vision of reality is further blurred and the real bearers of truth are seen as the enemy. John Lennon once sang, ‘Give peace a chance,’ and all I am saying is ‘Give truth a chance!’ But most are not interested in real truth, only in perceived truth with which they are most comfortable. The ‘truth’ that only exists in the minds of lost men is called a lie by God. Perceived truth is nothing but a lie, it is nothing but a rejection of God’s truth and the acceptance of a man’s lie. People do not want to be moved from their religious comfort zones. They are like the person who is enjoying the warmth of the water at the beach who rushes back into it after being out of it briefly, because of the cold they feel. But this coldness is only due to the fact they are wet, not because the air is actually cold. They have gotten so used to the water temperature that they have perceived it to be warm and the air around it to be cold! They cannot comprehend the fact that it is the water which is actually cold and the air that is warm. They have accepted the water as being warm for they are used to it, and that which they are not used to, that which they are not acclimatized to, is perceived to be cold. And when it comes to what the Gospel is, right is wrong and wrong has become right! Because they have been used to error for so long, they believe truth to be error and the error they have become accustomed to as truth. And this is what lies at the heart of every denomination that teaches a false gospel. Such people do not want to be bothered with the facts but only with what they believe, or want, the facts to be. They are so biased that they are unable to recognize up from down and black from white. They operate in the sensual realm and not in the objective. They are not interested in what the Scriptures say but only in what ‘great teachers of the past’ teach the Scriptures say. Their faithfulness to such men is no different to that displayed by pagans the world over, to the various priesthoods of their Babylonian religions. Their unquestioning subservience to such men, rather than the Truth of God, is reprehensible! These traditionalists need to leave their traditions behind and come to the Truth! These people need to have the courage and the preparedness to believe God’s Gospel even if it means being ostracized by religious society, family and friends. They need to abandon their veneration of the fabrications of men and start paying homage to the Word of God.

Again, it is not the Scriptures which today’s leaders, modern-day Pharisees that they are, immediately point to as not teaching the things that oppose what they say, but the traditions of the institution and their past ‘great teachers’ that are immediately called in as support. Imagine what these institutions would say if one who taught independently of them, and something which they did not promote, sought refuge in tradition rather than go immediately to the Scriptures for support! They would immediately cry out ‘CULT!’ This ministry does not make the claim that there is no one who teaches the truth but us, or that no one else has ever taught it in the past. To accuse us of such a thing is to lie. There has never been a day that has not seen a Christian man walk this earth who did not believe these things and remain faithful to the Gospel of God. The fact that large denominations have not taught THE Gospel is not our problem, nor are we to blame for this, nor is it legitimate for anyone to call the few true Gospel believers and teachers the odd ones out saying their beliefs are extra-biblical or extreme. The only thing we are doing is teaching the truth as found in the Holy Scriptures, and we refuse to make any compromise with what the Scriptures say, regardless of who has not believed it, or even who has believed it. If anyone wants to make an issue out of this and turn it into a controversy, that is their decision. But all they are doing is being distracted from the real issue: what is the Gospel? It is the Gospel that reveals the true believer from the false. The Truth is never established, recognized or verified, by the number of people who believe it. The truth says that for a man to be saved he must believe the Gospel of God and therefore no other, and that those who do not believe the truth of the essential salvation doctrines which make up that Gospel are lost.

Let us look now at the reasoning, or rather the lack of it, behind such arguments as the one which says, ‘How can your Gospel and its ramifications be the right one when no denomination, no official religious entity, throughout all of history has ever believed it?’ To get the claims of such a question into perspective, let us break down its elements and see how they stand up under close scrutiny. They say no denomination has ever taught our Gospel, but whether or not they have is not the issue and it most certainly is no Scripturally supportable way to argue against it. Let us begin with the Gospel they are speaking about, the one they call ‘your Gospel’. As we have already established, and will continue to remind the reader, the Gospel doctrines we preach are no different to the ones reformed believers have claimed as their own down through the centuries. We have looked at the doctrines and they are all held to by the conservative reformed leaders of our day. Not one ‘pastor’ whom I have ever had contact with has argued against even one of the doctrines I teach. No person claiming to believe in the doctrines of Grace has ever argued against any doctrine I teach. The doctrines are simply not what is at issue here at all and therefore the Gospel I preach is not what is seen as strange or wrong. What these people take issue with is not that we teach the consequence of believing God’s Gospel is salvation, but that the consequence of not believing the Gospel results in damnation! But how can you have one without the other? This is like saying that a coin has only one side, or that just because a thing has a front it does not mean it has a back! As my six year old son said to me, ‘If something didn’t have (at least) two sides there would be nothing there.’ A denial of one ramification is a denial of the other. Don’t tell me you believe a man is saved if he believes the Gospel when you refuse to accept the reality that if a man does not believe the Gospel he is lost!

How can you judge one man saved by the Gospel Rule, but discard this Rule when one comes along saying he does not believe it? If there is no problem with a man being saved who believes the Gospel, why is there such an opposition to the teaching that a man is lost who does not believe the Gospel, and by believing the Gospel we mean believing the whole Gospel. Believing anything less than the whole Gospel is to not believe in everything God says His Gospel is. It is to deny something God has said as being essential to a saving knowledge of Him. Everyone believes some Gospel truths but it is the errors they add to it, or the doctrines they leave out of it, that make it a false gospel. Those who do not believe the Gospel are made up in part of those who claim to believe many of its truths, even most of them, and yet the absence of believing it in its entirety is the evidence that they believe, or allow room to believe, something else, something which God has not said, as well. The objections of such people to our Gospel come based on the fact that none of the people they follow and none of the great leaders of the past taught what the ‘hidden’ minority has taught ever since the apostles first preached the Gospel. This minority has never been able to voice its message on the grand scale that Satan’s ministers have taught his many gospels. Because those who are attracted by, and believe in, error are far greater in number than those who believe in truth, what Satan’s ministers say the truth is has reached the ears of many more people than the truth has. And because the carnal mind is fitted to believe error, what the Gospel is not is accepted by the majority to be what the Gospel is. Therefore error is seen as truth and the truth is seen as error and this is the way of the world—both the secular and religious sides. By this they reveal just who they follow, who they really listen to, who really has influence over their minds. It is not truth that these people want but what they want is to be associated with those men who are regarded by the majority as the bearers of it. Religious leaders no longer have to wear long white beards to be perceived and accepted as wise men who have heard from God, but religious degrees, large congregations, huge book sales and sometimes even the fact that one has died are seen as that upon which one can rest assured ensures that what a man is saying is the truth. It is men of reputation whom people want to listen to and not to a few voices crying in the wilderness. It is not so much that I teach that those who believe the doctrines of the Gospel are saved, for this is the only reasonable conclusion one can arrive at. Whoever heard of anyone believing, that is savingly believing, the Gospel and being as lost as when they believed a false gospel? So how can anyone say with a straight face that one can fail to believe the Gospel and yet be saved? It is proper and right and no one has any problems with the fact that those who believe the Gospel are saved. Why then, in light of this, do these people refuse to accept the other side of this coin which says that those who do not believe the Gospel are lost? Their message is: ‘Believe the Gospel and you are saved AND BELIEVE IT NOT AND YOU’LL BE SAVED TOO. On this basis one would be forced to conclude that everyone would be saved, for there are only two kinds of people: those who believe the Gospel and those who do not! By this they would have us believe that those who have entered a room are in the room, and that those who have not set foot in the room are also in the room! JUST WHICH PART OF "HE THAT BELIEVETH...SHALL BE SAVED; BUT HE THAT BELIEVETH NOT SHALL BE DAMNED" (Mk. 16:16), DO THEY NOT UNDERSTAND? Surely even the most primitive, most theologically ignorant, of people can understand this. Then why, the question BEGS to be asked, cannot the ‘great religious leaders’ of our day understand, believe and judge by this rule? For goodness’ sake, the leaders of false religions who promote false gospels understand it! The Roman Catholic Church pronounces a curse on those who do not believe the gospel she teaches, so why is it that those Reformed Calvinist professors, scholars and pastors do not believe that to not hold to the doctrine of Christ, as revealed in His Gospel, is to evidence a state of utter lostness?

What our enemies take particular umbrage to is the fact that we say that even though a person ‘believes’ the right doctrines we still count them as lost, as yet to be truly saved by the God of all grace, because they profess to have been saved whilst believing in other doctrines, doctrines which are not Gospel doctrines but anti-Gospel doctrines. To rightly, biblically, believe the Gospel is to see it alone as the only power of God unto salvation and that believing any other gospel can save is a denial of God’s Gospel being the only power of God unto salvation, and therefore is a denial of the Gospel itself. One cannot deny what the Gospel is and simultaneously claim to believe its doctrines, for to believe its doctrines is to believe all that the Gospel claims to be: THE ONLY POWER OF GOD UNTO SALVATION! The Gospel of God is distinguished from all false gospels, for it is the only one which is the power of God unto salvation. If one is to rightly and savingly believe the Gospel, one must not only believe the doctrines it contains but also what God says His Gospel is: HIS POWER UNTO SALVATION, and that no other gospel could be. One cannot separate the Gospel of God from its being the only power of God unto salvation, or say that believing any other gospel is also a means to salvation. To do so is to strip God’s Gospel of that exclusive power to save and blasphemously attribute it to other gospels which God has not authored. Such people, who claim to now believe the right doctrines, count themselves saved whilst having believed Arminian doctrines for instance, which are diametrically opposed to what the Gospel of God says. But to believe the Gospel of salvation is to admit that one was never saved before hearing and believing it, for to rightly believe the Gospel is to believe in its absolute and exclusive power to save, that it ALONE is the power of God unto salvation and that a false gospel can never under any circumstance or situation ever rightly assume this role. God has authorized that only belief in His Gospel is unto salvation. The Scripture says it most clearly: "...I am not ashamed of the Gospel of Christ: for IT is the power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth..." (Rom. 1:16). For God to say any other gospel other than His can save would be tantamount to God declaring that belief in any other god but Himself can get a man saved too! Just as God has said, "...I am God, and there is none else; I am God and there is none like Me" (Isa. 46:9), so too, in saying that His Gospel is His power to save, God says in His Word that His Gospel is THE ONLY GOSPEL and there are none others true; His Gospel is THE ONLY GOSPEL and there is none other like it! There are none others like it because no other speaks the same message; there are none others like it for it is the only one God has ever authored; there are none others like it because there are none others true and therefore there are none others like it for only IT can save. It is the only Gospel that has ever proceeded out of the mouth of God. Just like there is no other god like God, there is no other gospel like His Gospel. The Gospel is unique in two ways: 1) it is the only one God puts His name to, and 2) it is the only one which saves. Yet it appears that in the minds of those who believe they were saved whilst believing false doctrines, but who claim to now believe the true Gospel, salvation is seen as some retrospective thing; that somehow believing the true doctrines now means that one was saved in the past while believing false doctrines! Needless to say, there is no Scripture that will bear this out or any that will come anywhere near supporting such nonsense. Exactly why such people react so violently against the ramification of the lostness of those who do not believe the Gospel of God is somewhat of a mystery to me, especially when no Scripture corroborates their claims that one can be saved in ignorance of the Gospel. There is not a single Scripture they could use to support their unbiblical stance nor have I been presented with even one verse which would justify their anger. They will never find one because such a Scripture does not exist. The support such people think they have that makes them right in their rejection of the ramifications of not believing the Gospel does not lie in the Scriptures but in how convinced they are of the ‘weightiness’ of the witness of history. They put credence in the fact that to their knowledge, established religious orders have never said what we are saying today and so they conclude: ‘how could we be right and all of these groups wrong.’ Such ‘reasoning’ is really pitiful for it is based on the age old expression, ‘how could so many be so wrong?’ These people fail to realise that history contains many instances where it is now obvious to all that so many could be so wrong. Remember that at one time the world’s population believed that the earth was flat. All the great leaders and philosophers believed it to be flat and they heaped derision and scorn upon the man who first stood up and claimed that it was round. He was laughed at and considered a fool but the reality was, and history testifies to the fact, that the majority were the fools and not he. There are many other instances, such as in the area of inventors, those men and their great discoveries, whose ideas and concepts were initially scoffed at because it was only they who could see what they saw. Many times it was amateurs and their claims who were laughed at, for they were not part of the establishment and so the reasoning was: ‘How could they be right, how could they have discovered such a thing, when none of the learned men have?’

Let us look now at the clearest biblical precedent we have concerning such things, the story of a man called Noah. The fact that Noah was the only one who believed the true God, and initially knew what the true God had said, was not due to any intelligence or an exceptionally high IQ on the part of Noah. It was not because he was intellectually more advanced than his peers that he knew what he knew, but it was simply due to God having revealed Himself to Noah and no one else. This is a fact that no one has any dispute with. So in light of this, how sensible would it be for anyone to wipe Noah and what he had to say about what the mind of God was on the Flood etc. Everyone now knows that Noah alone was right and that the majority was wrong, BUT NO ONE BELIEVED IT AT THE TIME!! Majorities often only catch up with the truth in hindsight, and Hell—a place where the truth is known too late—is filled with such people. Was the fact that no one else believed what Noah was saying, let alone that no one believed or had even heard of his God, any reason to discount what he was saying? On the face of it, it was perfectly understandable that the majority did not believe Noah for he was not one of their religious leaders. He would have been seen as a mere amateur, for he did not have any formal training as their religious leaders had. Humanly speaking, according to how man thinks, one would have been as mad as Noah to believe him and reject what all the others said. In hindsight, it is easy to say that those people were fools to have the objections they had about Noah and his God, to have not believed Noah and his God. But I wonder if there would be any difference between the attitude taken by people born after the flood with those who were alive in Noah’s day. Friends, there would be, and there exists, no difference at all, for the majority has always and will always go with the flow and resist anything it perceives to be new or different to what society, the secular or religious sides of it, have believed. Most people simply want to fit in. How can anyone say, in light of the facts, whether they profess to be Christian or not, that Noah was a nutcase and the majority was right? Everyone now knows that Noah alone, out of all the people of his day, which some say numbered in the hundreds of thousands, was right because God had revealed Himself to him and no other. So, does the fact God chose to reveal Himself to one man excuse the rest from their unbelief? Of course not. This same principle is alive and well today. It is still how God operates today because it has always been His way and therefore always will be. God does not change. God always saves a remnant and never the majority. God saves those He reveals Himself to and He does not save those whom He has not revealed Himself to. ANYONE WHO HAS A PROBLEM WITH THAT HAS A PROBLEM WITH GOD!! (see Romans 9).

There are many things that multitudes do not believe but this does not mean it could not possibly be the truth. Those who perished in the Flood is a case in point. The multitude may have had varying ideas about God but they were as one when it came to judging Noah to be a crackpot, a maverick, who could not possibly have the truth for he taught outside of the religious establishment of his day. This judgement was based on the fact that no one other than Noah and his family believed it, and that no one had ever heard of such a teaching or of this ‘new’ God! Most folk don’t have much to say about the people in Noah’s day. Most believe them to have been a wild bunch completely irreligious and immoral in their ways. But despite the earth being filled with violence (Gen. 6:11), the people of Noah’s day were also religious. This is seen in Joshua 24:2 where Joshua, speaking to the people of Israel, said: "...your fathers dwelt on the other side of the flood in old times, even Terah, the father of Abraham, and the father of Nachor: and they served other gods." So from this we see that there were false gods whom the people worshipped and served. Noah also believed what the multitude believed, knowing nothing of the truth until God revealed it to him. Noah "...found grace in the eyes of the Lord....Noah was a just man and perfect in his generations, and Noah walked with God" (Gen. 6:8,9), and God told him: "...behold, I, even I, do bring a flood of waters upon the earth, to destroy all flesh, wherein is the breath of life, from under heaven; and everything in the earth shall die" (Gen. 6:17). There would be a flood of such magnitude that the waters would cover every hill and mountain under heaven (see Gen. 7:19,20) and all who did not hear and acknowledge and abide in what the preacher of righteousness, Noah, had to say, would be lost in those judgement waters. If I may digress for a moment at this juncture, it is noteworthy to point out the fact that the word grace finds its first mention in the Scriptures in reference to Noah in Genesis 6:8. "In sovereign mercy and by the election of grace, God had prepared the heart of Noah to respond in obedient faith to His will. Note the consistent Biblical order here. First Noah ‘found grace.’ Then Noah was ‘a just man’ (that is, ‘justified’ or ‘declared to be righteous’). Thus he was ‘perfect in his generations’ (or ‘complete,’ in so far as God’s records are concerned), and therefore he was able to ‘walk with God.’ Salvation in any era is exactly in this way. By sovereign grace, received through faith, the believer is justified before God and declared to be complete in Him. Only as a result of, and on the basis of, this glorious gift of grace, (which is given so that one will believe only God’s Gospel), can one then ‘walk’ in fellowship with God..."

Can you imagine the outrage which the religious leaders of Noah’s day, not to mention the masses, felt when Noah came along shaking the very foundations of their belief system by saying that he had heard from the only true God there is, a God they had never even heard of, and that regardless of how faithfully anyone served their gods they would all perish in a massive flood if they did not believe what Noah was saying. Imagine how ridiculous Noah must have sounded to those people. Noah was "...a preacher of righteousness..." (2 Pet. 2:5) but his message fell on the deaf ears of spiritually dead men who had not found grace in the eyes of the Lord. Only Noah and his family would escape the flood. The waters of the wrath of a God the people had never heard of and therefore did not seek, would come upon every last man who faithfully adhered to the religion, or religions, of the day, causing them all to perish. Though the truth that Noah spoke had not been real to the majority, the waters of judgement most certainly were, as will be the flames of hell to those who believe not the Gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ. How they scoffed and laughed at Noah and his family when they busily set about to build an ark which would take them one hundred and twenty years to construct (see Gen. 6:3), during which time the Lord remained silent, and which they were told Noah was ordered to make by this God they had never heard of and whom no one else worshipped. The mocking would have reached its crescendo when Noah and his family and the animals entered the ark "and the Lord shut him in" (Gen. 7:16) with not a hint of rain about. ‘But why only you?’ the people must have asked. ‘Why has this God only told you to build an ark, why has He not spoken to anyone else? If He is a God of Love, then surely He would save more than one man and his family?’ they must have asked. ‘We are just as good as you are and even serve the gods better than you.’ And still it was so. Though the people thought it madness that the world and everything and everyone in it, barring Noah and his family, would be destroyed (see Gen. 9:11), it was nonetheless true. And, significantly, it was just as true prior to their believing it as the flood waters rose around them, as it was when they did not believe it! You see, one does not have to wait for the majority to believe something for it to be true. The truth is what God has said it is, and whether eight or eight hundred million people believe it, it is truth nonetheless. Truth does not need anyone to believe it for it to be truth! The impending Flood was a fact that none of them wanted to bother with, for no one believed it other than a man called Noah. How accurate a portrayal is this of people today. A people so busy in the pursuit of happiness, who cannot be bothered with anything that differs from what they have been taught and which the majority believes. How many people, how many of the religious leaders of Noah’s day, would have approached Noah, having known him to be a faithful follower of their teachings and servant of their gods, trying to reason with him, to reason him out of believing such nonsense as some God having spoken exclusively to him, giving him a message to preach and that all those who refused to believe such a message—which would mean refuting everything they had ever believed in—would perish in a worldwide flood. Why, the very fact that there had never been rain (Gen. 2:6) was enough to show that what Noah was saying was the mere ramblings of a madman. "In the original world...there was no rainfall on the earth. As originally created, the earth’s daily water supply came primarily from local evaporation and condensation. There was also...a system of spring-fed rivers." But Noah was no madman and he stuck to what he knew was true, to what God had told him, knowing that no one else believed it. He continued building the ark, by faith, for over a century amidst all the scoffing of his fellow men and utter silence from God. His building the ark was an outward show of the inward faith he had been given by God and by which he condemned the world (see Heb. 11:7). Some who mocked Noah had, no doubt, at one time respected him as a friendly man and a ‘good old boy’ and enjoyed a great friendship with him. This was all to change when everyone turned on Noah and his family because no one believed him, or rather, no one believed his God. Everyone believed that everyone but Noah was right, and even if there were any who may have wanted to believe Noah, they no doubt reasoned within and among themselves: ‘How can one man be right, and EVERYONE else, not just the majority, be wrong!’ Significantly, such reasoning took each and everyone of its adherents to their doom. Their bias eradicated any chance they had of seeing and believing what Noah had told them the only God had said. Only Noah, the man they counted as radical, extreme and religiously hyper, was right. No doubt those who choose to believe and trust in what religious empires of today say and dictate, had they been alive in Noah’s day, would have gone with the majority just as they do today, and rejected what Noah was saying and, as a consequence, Noah’s God. What do we learn from all this? We learn that going by numbers, judging what the truth is by how many people believe it, is not the standard by which we are to judge whether a doctrine is true or not, or whether a person’s gospel is God’s Truth or not. We learn, and should be forewarned, that believing what the majority believes is no guarantee that what we believe is right, but that it often can be a guarantee that what a person believes is anything but right!

What also lends support to the fact that simply because a majority of people believe a thing it is no evidence in and of itself that what they believe is right, is the matter of a nation called Israel. The Scriptures say of Israel "For thou art an holy people unto the Lord thy God: the Lord thy God hath chosen thee to be a special people unto Himself, above all people that are upon the face of the earth. The Lord did not set His love upon you, nor choose you, because ye were more in number than any people; for ye were the fewest of all people" (Deut. 7:6,7). Now, it was not because of what they believed or who they were that made them so but the one Who had revealed Himself to them. No other nation was privileged to receive the blessings of God but the nation of Israel "For thou art an holy people unto the Lord thy God, and the Lord hath chosen thee to be a peculiar people unto Himself, above all the nations that are upon the earth" (Deut. 14:2). If one was not of Israel one was simply not of God. The pages of the Old Testament are filled with God’s dealings with this special people, His chosen people. "He sheweth His word unto Jacob, His statutes and His judgements unto Israel. He hath not dealt so with any nation: and as for His judgements, they have not known them. Praise ye the Lord" (Psa. 147:19,20; cf. Ex. 33:13; Amos 3:2). God blessed the nation of Israel and He gave His laws to that nation. He enriched that nation with His special favors. The Lord even showed those people the way in which their sins could be forgiven them (Lev. 16). It was through a sacrificial system that the Lord introduced Israel to His Son Jesus, the Messiah who would come. In particular, the Lord ordered a priesthood to be established and once a year the high priest was directed by God to enter into the Holy of Holies, there to make sacrifice for the sins of God’s special people: the physical nation of Israel (Lev. 16:34). No other nation was part of this. The sins of no other people were atoned for. Only Israel was to be the recipient of God’s forgiveness. No matter how religious any other people were, no matter how loyally and faithfully they worshipped their gods, all other nations were pagan nations, a heathen people whose gods were all false, and who could therefore not save them. Only the God of Israel could save because only the God of Israel was the true God. Only the people God chooses, elects, are His people and the others are not. And only God’s people believe God’s Gospel, for all others are not His chosen (see Jn. 10:26). In Old Testament days God’s people were revealed as those of the nation of Israel. In New Testament days and beyond, God’s people are recognized, Scripturally speaking, as those who have, by grace, been given His faith to believe His Gospel and reject all others as God’s means of saving His people. Interestingly, all those who reject our Gospel, be it the doctrines or the ramifications, have no problem with the Old Testament type/picture of God electing one people, one nation, as His people and rejecting all others, and that He counted every other nation’s gods as false gods. There was no salvation for any other nation than Israel, the chosen nation of God. Yet these same people who see no problem with God’s discriminatory and exclusive love for Israel in the Old Testament cannot, and will not, accept the fact that only those whom God has chosen to receive His Gospel—the truth about man, God and His Son—will be called God’s children and all those who do not believe what God has said in that Gospel will be damned!

Though there are multitudes of people who are religious, multitudes of people who faithfully follow the teachings of their respective religions, the safety-in-numbers theory is also blown to bits by the fact that none, the Bible says, seek after God! "...there is none righteous, no, not one: There is none that understandeth, there is none that seeketh after God. They are all gone out of the way, they are together become unprofitable; there is none that doeth good, no, not one....there is no fear of God before their eyes" (Rom. 3:10-12,18). Unless a person has been born again of God’s Word, His Gospel, one can have all the religion there is and still be lost. This is a hard concept for natural man to get his mind around, who has been raised on the ‘if it smells like a duck and looks like a duck it must be a duck’ philosophy which allows no room for the possibility of someone coming up with a counterfeit that can smell and look like a real duck but in reality be just a decoy. The faith that is of man by nature, that spawns his best religious efforts and sincerest moral reformations, can only lead to a false christ—an idol— a false religion, and therefore to ultimate destruction, for man is corrupted, and his heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked (Jer. 17:9), so that all of man’s judgements are based on a darkened understanding of what the truth is. Some people who have seen that what they believe may not be the right Gospel, dispel any controversy in their minds with the line, ‘whatever the Gospel is and whether I’ve got it wrong or not, God knows my heart’, etc. Those who do not believe the Gospel fail to realise that it is precisely because God knows their hearts that they stand condemned, "...for out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh..." (Matt. 12:34) and evidences that there is no love for God’s Gospel resident therein! The Word of God does not say that there are some who seek God, or that even one or two seek Him, but it is clear as clear can be that NO ONE AT ALL, by nature, seeks the true God. None understand God and therefore none seek God. None seek the God of the Gospel that says all of salvation is by the grace of God from beginning to final glory. This is the Gospel man naturally rejects, according to his fallen nature, and all those who do not judge saved and lost by this Gospel, or who reject it as the only Gospel which can save, reveal their accursed and unregenerate natures. They have all gone their own way and out of God’s way. Therefore we all start off equal in that none of us know God by nature. Those who end up knowing God and believing His Gospel, going HIS way, do so only because of God’s grace.

Friends, the truth is the truth whether one person believes it or one million people believe it. The fact that few believe it shows the majority’s ignorance of it or their lack of courage and willingness to want to believe it. It is difficult for many to come to terms with this and that only one or two people out of thousands could be the ones who are right about a thing and all the rest wrong. But when considered in light of the following example, one will readily see how plausible the concept is, and hopefully it will help them to understand how very real it is that a few could be right and the majority wrong. A true Gospel believer can be standing in the middle of a million Mormons and be the only saved man there because he would be the only Gospel believer there. A true Gospel believer can stand among ten million Hindus and be the only saved man there because he is the only one who believes the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Such a man is the only one who has true spiritual life because he is the only one there born of the Gospel of the Lord. All those around him may be very religious in their beliefs with deep and abiding loyalties and this carries through, and is easily seen, in their actions, in their manner of dress and in their treatment of others. All these people would give you the shirt off their backs if they could and many of them are learned people who have for years studied the doctrines of their particular faiths. Yet all this adds up to ABSOLUTELY NOTHING in the eyes of the Lord, for none of these people know or believe the only Gospel that the only God has declared His own. Only one person out of all those others is saved, for God revealed Himself only to that person and no others. The distinction is evidenced, not primarily in the person’s deeds, but by their belief in the true Gospel and rejection of the false. Now we begin to see how a few can be right and the majority wrong. Now we see that such a thing is not only possible, but is far from being the ridiculous assertion that so many think it to be. As was mentioned earlier, how many times have men stood out from the crowd and their ideas been scoffed at, who were later proven to be the ones who were right and the organized, long established and respected organizations that mocked their ideas, wrong.

The following statement, made without including any evidence and simply taken at face value, sounds ridiculous, far-fetched, outlandish and ignorant: ‘Most of the world’s population at any given time in its history have died lost people and are now perishing in hell.’ It just sounds so outrageous to say such a thing and most people immediately dispel such a notion without giving it another thought. To think that the many religious people, and even the irreligious who led lives that were filled with all sorts of ‘good deeds’, have all gone to hell because they did not believe the Gospel sounds crazy. But when the matter is looked into and certain facts brought to light, one will see that not only is such a thing plausible but it is irrefutable! The Word of God says that none who believe not the Gospel of God will be saved. No saving faith no salvation, is the Bible’s cry. Most estimates put the world’s population today at approximately six billion. Six billion people inhabiting the earth as we speak. Many of them are fine upstanding members of their communities, many of them are outlaws, many are rich, many more are poor, most of them are religious. Over one billion of these people are said to be Roman Catholic and, going by the fact that the Roman Catholic Church does not teach the Gospel but a perverted version of it, none of these people can be said to be saved. No one is saying they are not sincere, only that they are sincerely wrong. Muslims, the followers of Islam, are said to number approximately 1.3 billion worldwide. Such people, who for the most part are honest hardworking people who are kind to their neighbours and are dedicated to prayer and a ‘spiritual’ life, openly admit that they do not believe that Jesus Christ was anything but a good man and a prophet. They do not believe He was the Son of God and certainly not that He is God. To such people the Scriptures speak clearly, "He that believeth on the Son hath everlasting life: and he that believeth not the Son shall not see life; but the wrath of God abideth on him" (Jn. 3:36); "He that hath the Son hath life; and he that hath not the Son of God hath not life" (1 Jn. 5:12); and Christ Himself says "...if ye believe not that I am He, ye shall die in your sins" (Jn. 8:24). The Muslim gospel is not the Gospel of God and therefore no Muslim can be said to be saved. This is not a slur on the character of Roman Catholics or Muslims, it is simply stating a fact based on the Word of God. We do not deny these people’s zeal for their gods but declare that their zeal is not according to right knowledge (see Rom. 10:1-4). So, thus far we have looked at only two groups of religious people and already find ourselves with over one third of the world’s population as presently being with no hope of being saved, for they are without the faith of the true God which believes only in the true Gospel of God. Already we begin to see that the statement in question is not as crazy as it first appeared to be. Hinduism claims 900 million adherents and Buddhists are said to number 360 million. None of these people are saved for they abide not in the doctrine of Christ. That makes a total thus far of well over half the world’s population who are at the present moment, lost! But we are not finished yet! Now add to this Chinese traditional religion (225 million); primal-indigenous (150 million); African traditional and Diasporic (95 million); Sikhism (23 million); Spiritism (14 million); Judaism (14 million); the Mormons and the J.W.’s number collectively at least 12 million people. Neither one preaches the true Jesus and therefore they too could not be the bearers of God’s Gospel. Baha’i (6 million); Shinto (4 million); Neo-Paganism (1 million) and we now have over 4 billion people worldwide who are involved in false religions! That’s two thirds of the world’s population! And still the number is not complete! Add to all these: Charismatics, Pentecostals, Seventh-Day Adventists, The Quakers, the Shakers, Christian Science advocates, Scientologists, every Arminian based ‘christian’ denomination along with the Orthodox churches of Russia and Eastern Europe, and Freemasonry, not to mention all the irreligious people of the massive populations of Russia, China and India and we see just how verifiable and accurate the original statement, ‘most people are lost’, really is. The figures we have shared with you concerning the followers of false religions and believers of false gospels makes this a fact which none can deny or ignore. The statement is made not according to our statistics but according to Adherents.com. Their numbers are an approximate estimate and were last modified in September of 2002. The statement is made not according to the fact these people do not believe what we say but that they do not believe what God says in His Word. This brief study has easily proven that the vast majority of the world’s population is lost. Proportionately, true believers elected of God to believe the Gospel of the Righteousness of His Son Jesus Christ, number only a handful. The Lord Jesus says "Enter ye in at the strait gate: for wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat: Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it" (Matt. 7:13,14). Scripture says: "And we know that we are of God, and the whole world lieth in wickedness" (1 Jn. 5:19). Yes, there will be a great multitude of people saved (see Rev. 7:9; 19:6), but this does not mean that at any one time in history true believers numbered in the millions or even in the hundreds of thousands. The following will bear this out: if there were only one thousand people saved each century, that’s just ten people per year, over the past six thousand years this would come to a total of sixty thousand people! If two thousand were saved it would total one hundred and twenty thousand. If only three thousand people were saved every hundred years, that’s only 30 people per year, there would be one hundred and eighty thousand people saved, and so on. So we see that for there to be a great multitude of people in heaven which no man can number, there needs not be millions saved at any one time. There may well be only a handful of people saved during the course of a generation but this does not mean that heaven will be occupied by only a mere trifle. The fact that the prophet’s question, "Who hath believed our report" is still asked today by the true followers of God makes this a fact that cannot be ignored. To do so would be foolhardy.

I believe that the examples and evidences we have presented have proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that the majority, even those long established denominations which have built empires that span the globe and include Bible colleges, schools, hospitals and churches etc., can be wrong. In fact, history would testify that this is the norm and not the exception! When it comes to the truth, the majority does NOT rule! It is of equal and vital importance to point out that this should in no way be inferred by anyone as lending any credence at all, nor of our support for, the view that says the smaller the group, or the fewer the people who believe a thing, the more chance there is that they have the truth. Cults have appeared and continue to surface at a rapid rate. Schisms and splinter groups may be found to have come from much larger groups throughout history. Pockets of groups, or cells, some having as few as fifty people or less, can be found the world over who believe that God has decided to favor them and no one else. They have taken the fact that only a remnant will be saved to mean their own little group who believe certain things and who pride themselves in certain peculiar traits and whose existence is based on a Scripture or two. Many such groups, who have cut themselves off from the world and who live in communes or exclusive little communities, have perverted the Scriptures for their understanding of the Bible, just like their bigger sibling organizations, comes not from God but from their sin-polluted minds. Many of these groups have some form of perverted sexual relations as a core element of their teachings, while others caught up in doctrinal errors invariably become involved in some form of sexual perversion. Some believe that their ability to handle snakes and not get bitten too often is a sign that God favors them and no others, whilst others believe that a certain color or style of clothing or how the women wear their hair and the fact that the men all have beards is a confirming sign that they are the ones whom God calls His own. The one thing that binds all these groups, large or small, together is the fact that they all promote error when it comes to what the Gospel is—that is, Who God is and how God saves. The key to finding out if a group, whether large or small, teaches the truth or not is to home in on their doctrines. What do they teach about God? Specifically, what do they teach about the cross of Christ. Who do they say the Son of God is and what do they say Christ did on that Cross; what was accomplished, and for whom was it done? These things combined will tell you the Christ/christ they believe in, whether or not it is the one God bears record to in His Gospel or whether it is another christ of whom God says nothing other than there is no salvation in such a one. The only group I am a part of is the Body of Christ. That group of people that Christ has, by His blood, redeemed unto God "...out of every kindred, and tongue, and people, and nation" (Rev. 5:9) and who have been given the faith by God to believe only His Gospel. Only those who believe the Gospel of God have God. This is what the Scriptures say, this is what I say. God’s people do not have a name, they go by no title other than the elect of God, the Body of Christ, "...the general assembly and church of the firstborn which are written in heaven..." (Heb. 12:23). They are also known as sheep (see Jn. 10), and a royal priesthood, an holy nation, a peculiar people (see 1 Pet. 2:9). Only those saved of God, the believers in the Gospel of God, are deserving of the name CHRISTIAN, for they alone are the true followers of Christ. They are believers in the only Gospel that reveals the true Savior of men: Jesus Christ the Lord. Scripture also says of believers: "And we know that the Son of God is come, and hath given us an understanding, that we may know Him that is true..." (1 Jn. 5:20). Without that God-given understanding, one cannot know the true God and therefore cannot possess a saving belief of God’s glorious Gospel.

The truth is what God says it is and it is never to be, and can never be, reliably judged by how many or how few there are who believe it. This rule tears down the claims of those who belong to the religious majority that sheer weight of numbers is the conclusive evidence, God’s indelible stamp of approval, that undeniable sign from God, that what they believe is the truth. It was never the case in Noah’s day, it was never the case in Jesus’ day, and it is NOT the case in our own day! It also breaks down the argument that says that because there are few who believe such a thing it is more likely that the truth is in their possession. What neither view has highlighted and concentrated on is the fact that the truth belongs to God and He gives it to whomsoever He wills. It has never been a matter of how many or how few believe a thing but the issue is, and has always been, WHAT IS IT THAT MUST BE BELIEVED? What is the truth? What is God’s Gospel? Again, the truth is what God says it is. The Gospel is what God says it is and how many or how few believe it is just not the issue. It does not figure in the equation, nor in the answer to, ‘what is the Gospel?’ It is a DISTRACTION from the real issue. It is designed to detour people from their independent studies and divert them into becoming mind-numbed followers of the world system!!! Yes, the system of the world, the way the world sees things and runs things, has two faces—one secular, the other religious. The world could not function if it only had a political side to it. It must also have a religious side that works hand-in-hand with the political, thus covering all the bases. The world is a very religious, or superstitious, place and every religion that does not teach the only Gospel of God is of the world. What the Gospel of God is that must be believed in for a man to be saved is all we need be concerned about. The issue is not ‘Who hath believed our report’ or ‘How many have believed our report’ but WHAT IS OUR REPORT? What is the Gospel which must be believed in? Some stupidly say that the Gospel is something which cannot be defined, that no man knows it! If this were the case, how could Christ Himself have told His people to preach it? How could they ever preach it if they did not know what it was? Don't look around you trying to decide the truth by how many believe a thing to be the truth or at how long it has been believed. Don’t look around to see how many agree with you. What matters is what God says His Gospel is and not how many who claim to believe it. Look to God’s Word and compare Scripture with Scripture, not Scripture with what your favorite author says or with what your pastor says. Examining those you listen to is not a matter of hearing what they say and then believing it is what God says merely because the Scriptures they have quoted are all right there in the Bible. Compare what they are saying about the Scriptures they are quoting with what the rest of the Bible says and see if it is all united or if there is any contradiction. Friend, we had better know what the Gospel is because the Scriptures speak clearly when they say that there is no salvation, indeed there can be no salvation, without the Gospel believed in to the point where every other gospel, past, present and future, is rejected as God’s Truth, as His means of saving His people. This is the prime evidence that God has come to a person and revealed Himself to them. Belief of the Gospel is of paramount importance because it is the evidence that God has graciously favored a person with His faith, which can only believe His Gospel. This is why if there is no saving faith there can be no salvation. Belief in a false gospel—an incomplete gospel is also classified as such—is the unmistakable sign that a person is not a child of God but a child of the Devil, for in believing a false gospel, one automatically rejects the true, showing that one has not been given the faith of God. "But though we, or an angel from heaven, preach any other gospel unto you than that which we have preached unto you, let him be accursed" (Gal. 1:8); "If any man love not the Lord Jesus Christ (of Paul’s Gospel) let him be anathema..." (1 Cor. 16:22); "Whosoever transgresseth, and abideth not in the doctrine of Christ, hath not God..." (2 Jn. 9); "...preach the Gospel to every creature...He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved; but he that believeth not shall be damned" (Mk. 16:15,16). And to those who scoff at what we say, who believe one can be saved without the Gospel of God, "...the Lord Jesus shall be revealed from heaven with His mighty angels, in flaming fire taking vengeance on them that know not God AND THAT OBEY NOT THE GOSPEL OF OUR LORD JESUS CHRIST" (2 Thess. 1:7,8 cf. 1 Pet. 4:17). You will be rained on by the wrath of God who believe not His Gospel, for if you do not abide in the Doctrine of Christ the wrath of God abides on you (see 2 Jn. 9 & Jn. 3:36)!

The truth, God’s truth—His Gospel—has not been placed, nor is it, in the hands of large organizations or small ones, but is, as it has always been since the days of the apostles, in the hands of individuals. It is the Gospel for the people, but it is not the gospel of the people. God has not given His Gospel to some large religious group to disperse among His people, but has given it directly to His people wherever they are in the world. It is the Gospel of God, for God’s people, the elect, and the interesting thing is that they come from every nation and are brought out of the various forms of Babylonian religion. They are brought out of the kingdoms of darkness, where perverted and erroneous doctrines mixed with some truths are taught, and are brought into God’s Light, which is something that has no hint of darkness in it and that has never been found ‘here’ or ‘there’ but where God chooses to shine it. This bringing out from false religion is done via the faith which God gives that believes only His Gospel and rejects every other. This is why God’s people ALL come out of the various forms of Babylonian anti-God religions, for they cannot abide in their false gospels now that they have the faith of God with which to believe the truth. For the saved man, justified by the faith of God, there is nothing a ‘church’ which preaches a false gospel has for him. The faith God has given them is not attracted by false gospels and those who possess it can have no fellowship with those who do not believe God’s Gospel. The Church of God is not made up of a bunch of people who go about as chickens with their heads cut off, one believing this gospel over here and the other believing that gospel over there. They are uni-directional, for they have all been given ONE faith to believe in ONE Gospel, God’s Gospel. Only those who have the Light know where they are going: "...for he that walketh in darkness knoweth not whither he goeth" (Jn. 12:35). The very foundation of God’s Church, the ones He has called out of the world to believe His Gospel, is the doctrines of the apostles. All those who are now fellowcitizens with the saints and of the household of God "...are built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ Himself being the Chief Corner Stone" (Eph. 2:20). "That is the doctrines of Divine revelation, whether communicated by prophets or apostles, were laid at the foundation of the Christian Church. It was not founded on philosophy, or tradition, or on human laws, or on a venerable antiquity, but on the great truths which God had revealed....The Lord Jesus is called the ‘Cornerstone,’ because the whole edifice rests on Him, or He occupies a place relatively as important as the corner-stone of an edifice." Importantly, Christ is said not to be the whole foundation of the Church but the chief Cornerstone. This does not in any way minimize the importance of the Person and Work of Christ, for He is an integral part of the foundation and without Him the edifice could not stand. "Were it not for Him the edifice could not be sustained for a moment. Neither prophets nor apostles alone could sustain it." It merely shows that there are other doctrines, as well as those which specifically deal with Who Christ is and what He has done, which make up the foundation upon which His Church stands. For instance, Paul said he preached Christ and Him crucified, but to correctly do this he also preached the fact that if any were to be circumcised thinking that this was an essential work that had to be done to ensure salvation, then Christ would profit them nothing (see Gal. 5). A person could claim Christ and preach what He did all they like, but if they were ignorant of the fact that there is nothing one must add to what Christ has done, such as a work of man’s, Christ would profit them nothing. Therefore, the doctrines of grace, which negates any need for man to perform a work in order to get or remain saved, and which cannot be preached without election, which talks of God’s Sovereignty etc., is an essential Gospel matter which does not take away from the Person and Work of Christ, but enhances all that He is and all that He has done. The Church is founded on doctrines and these doctrines are collectively called the Gospel of God. If one only has the doctrines which teach Who the Messiah is and what He has done, one does not have the whole Gospel. Likewise, if one only has all the other doctrines of the apostles but does not have the doctrine of the Person and Work of Christ, one does not have the whole Gospel. One can see from this that the doctrines of the Gospel MUST NOT be separated, for if they are, if even one of these doctrines is left out, then one no longer has the Gospel of God. In light of all this, can you imagine even one error being among that which Scripture calls the foundation of God’s Church? Can you imagine the words and teachings of mere men, found in every false gospel, forming part of the foundation of the Christian Church? Or can you imagine Jesus Christ being the Chief Cornerstone of the foundation a people who believe in a false gospel are built upon? Of course not. Then how, it may well be asked, can anyone believe that a person is saved, or can be saved, whose house is built on a foundation that is not the foundation of the doctrines of the apostles and of which the apostles’ Christ is the Chief Cornerstone? God does not build His Church on any other foundation than that of the prophets and the apostles, so how could God save anyone whose faith was founded on doctrines that are simply not of God? The Lord God does not place any of His people in a house that is laid on any other foundation than that of His apostles and prophets, of which Christ His Son is the Chief Cornerstone!

If He did, Salvation would be nothing more than being moved from one house built on sand and placed into another house built on sand. There would be no rhyme or reason for this. Any doctrine which the apostles did not teach, or any doctrine that is in error concerning what they taught, cannot be said to be part of the Church’s foundation or have any part in the Church’s life. They certainly play a big part in the life of the counterfeit church, but not in Christ’s Church. And so we see that anyone whose faith is wholly or partly based on false doctrines, or on an incomplete gospel, cannot be among those of the Church of God, because they are built upon the foundation of the whole Gospel truth. Therefore, is it then a fantastic thing to say that no one is saved who does not abide in those doctrines, the doctrine of Christ, the WHOLE doctrine of Christ, especially in light of such Scriptures as 2 John 9 which says, "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 cf. Jn. 12:44). Christ says that any house built on a foundation of sand will fall (see Matt. 7). Such is the foundation of error and such is the fate of the house which is built upon it. The Church of God, which are the believers who make up the Body of Christ, should not ‘be’ the pillar of truth, IT IS THE PILLAR OF TRUTH!! "...the house of God, which IS the Church of the living God, THE pillar and the ground of the truth" (1 Tim. 3:15). The Church of God is not striving towards, nor is it aiming to be, the pillar and the ground of the truth, it IS the pillar and ground of the Truth ALREADY!! WHAT IT PREACHES IS THE GOSPEL OF GOD AND WHAT IT BELIEVES IS THE GOSPEL OF GOD AND NO OTHER! Therefore, how could anyone who believes in a false gospel possibly be within the Church of God? There is no room in such a Church for any who believe false gospels. The entrance way is too narrow for them to pass through. The Church is not split, the Body of Christ is not divided, it is unified, it is as one, for it believes ONE Gospel. How could Christians be the "...ambassadors for Christ..." (2 Cor. 5:20) if they did not all believe the Gospel of Christ? If the Church of God, the people of God, are already the pillar and ground of God’s truth, how can they teach and believe anything which differs from God’s Gospel? The Church of God, made up of the people He has chosen by grace, IS the pillar and ground of the truth, collectively and as individuals, because they have all been blessed with the faith of God to believe it. They all believe the same Gospel, for they have all been given the same faith. They are "...with one mind striving together for the faith of the Gospel" (Phil. 1:27 cf. 2 Cor. 13:11; 1 Cor. 1:10; 2:16; Rom. 15:5,6). If they believed different gospels with the same faith, how would they differ from those unregenerate souls who believe different gospels with the faith that is common to man. The Church of God is not some gargantuan organization with massive Gothic cathedrals adorned with grotesque looking gargoyles and phallic-like steeples reaching up towards the sky. It is the assembly of called out ones, the ones who have been called by the Gospel out of error and into God’s marvellous truth "...to the obtaining of the glory of our Lord Jesus Christ" (2 Thess. 2:14).

If, out of all the various ‘christian’ denominations, there was only one that did not preach the Gospel, would it be my fault? Could my Gospel, and the consequences of not believing it, be rightly attacked if there was only one mainstream religious denomination that did not believe it? Would it be the Gospel's fault that this organization did not teach it? Of course not. Would there be something wrong in the Gospel I teach, or in the plain and obvious ramifications of it, if just two of these long established groups failed to teach it? Of course not. What if there were only three that did not believe it? Would this be the evidence that would prove my Gospel to be wrong? If not, how many groups would it take, who did not believe this Gospel, before it could rightly be said that this Gospel is not God’s Gospel?? Would five prove us wrong? No? How about ten, or twenty? When could we draw the line between what is truth and what is error? How many denominations would it take, who believed the same thing, to prove wrong what one group taught that differed from the majority? What absolutely ludicrous thinking! So are we to believe that simply because there are many organizations which disagree with our Gospel, that this logically proves that what we are saying is wrong? Of course not. No rational person would be a party to such thinking. Does it mean there is something wrong with the Gospel if ten organizations claiming to be Christian do not preach it? Of course not. Nor does it prove a single thing about this Gospel if NO professing christian organization preaches it or ever has preached it! To say that it does would be to presume that all these organizations had the truth. You would be surprised just how many people believe something to be the truth simply because there are ten or so organizations which believe the same thing and had preached it for a considerable number of years. You would not believe a man’s message as true simply because he has been preaching it for 30 years or more, would you? Then why automatically and unquestioningly believe a denomination’s teachings because it has promoted them for the past five hundred years! Since when did the truth of God begin to be rightly discerned by how many people believe it or how long a thing had been taught, and where in the Scriptures for that matter does it say such a thing? Where is this imaginary line drawn that instantaneously and automatically proves something as true because a certain number of people believe it? Is something true if one thousand people believe it? How about a few thousand? Or what about one hundred thousand? How about five hundred thousand? Surely it would be safe to believe something is of God if one million people believed it. If so, let us then join the Mormons for they number well over one million. But then how could we be sure they had the truth when the followers of the Roman Catholic Church number over one billion? If one million people believed something to be true, would it cease to be truth if only nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand nine hundred and ninety nine believed it? I believe by now the reader can see for himself how silly such thinking is. Are the Mormons right in what they believe because they number around 5 million people. Does it mean that what they believe is wrong merely because the Roman Catholic Church has over one billion adherents? Of course not. Then why judge my Gospel by this rule? Would a truth cease to be truth, or cease to be considered as truth by God, if no one believed it? Of course not. Then where does anyone get the temerity to say that because only a few people believe a thing to be true and the majority does not, it couldn’t possibly be the truth! What absolute and utter arrogance! What bullyish thinking. The fact that a few people believe something can never be used as proof that what these people believe is the truth. Nor is this the type of evidence that could be used to discount the possibility that what they believe is the truth. The Gospel is the Gospel whether there be one person who believes it, or ten thousand, or no one else in this universe. I, for one, will, by the grace of God, never be moved from His Gospel for it is the truth and there is no other. Just as the apostle Peter said to His Lord, "...to whom shall we go? Thou hast the words of eternal life" (Jn. 6:68), I will not be shaken from the truth that there is no salvation but only damnation for those who believe any other gospel, which contain words of eternal damnation. This is the attitude Paul the apostle had in the first century and this is the attitude I have in the twenty-first century. The fact that the majority of religious people in the world believe false gospels just goes to show the deceitfulness and wickedness of the heart of man (see Jer. 17:11), how influential false gospels are and how attractive they are to those of a carnal mind, who have not the mind of Christ, nor the love of His truth. The well of false christianity is deep and there has never been a shortage of those willing to drink from it. That the majority does not believe the Gospel is no license for anyone to go about treating those who do believe it as people who have something wrong with them. Democracy certainly gives a voice to the people and always allows the majority to triumph, but this can never guarantee that what the majority sees as right is right. It certainly gets its way but its way is not always right. That the majority does not believe the true Gospel, let alone the fact it pays no attention to the consequences of not believing it, proves one thing: none of these groups who deny the Gospel outright, or who deny it by rejecting its ramifications, were ever Christian to begin with. If they were, how could they, and why would they possibly entertain the notion, let alone promote the idea, that those who do not believe the Gospel—who do not believe what God has said about how He saves—but who come ‘close enough’ to believing it, will be as saved as those who do. To properly understand and believe what the Gospel is all about is to recognize its doctrines as the power of God to save, and to know enough of what its doctrines teach to reject everything else that presents itself as the Gospel; to know that there can be no salvation for anyone whose faith is in any gospel other than God’s Gospel!!! Belief in a false god will not save anyone; belief in a false christ will not save anyone; belief in a false spirit will not save anyone. So how can anyone believe, and what could they possibly base their belief on, that one can be saved believing a false gospel, something which God has not declared to be His, and still be saved? Especially in light of the fact that false christs, false spirits and false gospels are all connected with the beguiling Serpent, and that none of these have anything to do with the truth (see 2 Cor. 11:3,4). This would present us with the following scenario: God saves by His Gospel and He also saves by the gospels Satan promotes to deceive people and keep them from believing the true Gospel!

To say no 'christian' organization out there preaches the Gospel sounds like something a cult would say, doesn’t it? 'Only what WE believe is true' etc. Well, when put like that it certainly does sound like something a cult would say. But in order to discover the credibility of such a claim, one would need to take the practical tack and go through each organization which claims to preach the truth one by one and see whether or not they preach the Gospel. In doing so, one would soon discover that they all preach something different to the Gospel God has authored. I have written extensively on this in my booklet, ‘Who Are The Lost?’ so I will not be going into this area in this booklet. The prime aim of this booklet is to provide biblically-based answers to the enemies of the Gospel who oppose the ramifications of the Gospel, and therefore the Gospel itself, who say that one is not lost if one does not know and believe it. It is also to help those true believers who, like myself, have sometimes wondered why there are so few true believers, but so many who claim to believe the truth, yet when told that neither they nor anyone else was saved before believing it, have not eyes to see and flee, it would seem, for their very lives. Every professing christian should be aware of what the apostle Paul said about different gospels and the preachers of them: "...if any man preach any other gospel unto you than that ye have received, let him be accursed" (Gal. 1:9). Notice Paul did not say, ‘Let the brother be corrected’, but stated clearly and in no uncertain terms that such a one who preached, and therefore believed, a gospel which differed in any way from Paul’s Gospel, was himself to be considered accursed!

Not wrong and saved, but wrong and DAMNED! A person who believed in a different gospel to Paul’s was to be viewed as flat out LOST! Why? Because their belief of a false gospel proved that the Lord of truth had not revealed Himself to them. If He had, they would no doubt have believed the true Gospel and no other for they would have been given the faith of God that believed the true Gospel and no other. No if’s, but’s or maybe’s about it. So, did this qualify Paul as a fanatical leader of some crazy cult because he warned Christians that if anyone preached a gospel which differed to his, which he had received by revelation from God, it was an unequivocal sign that they were accursed? If not, why not? The majority of people in Paul’s day thought this, saying he was part of a sect (see Acts 24:5), and some thought Paul’s great learning had driven him mad (see Acts 26:24). And later on there were groups that sprang up claiming to be Christian but who taught a different gospel to Paul’s, yet maintaining it to be the very Gospel of God. They preached it in His name and even included some truths about Christ in their gospels. Paul also warned of the days when "...of your own selves shall men arise, speaking perverse things, to draw away disciples after them" (Acts 20:30). Did this make Paul some crazy lunatic fringe extremist? Of course not. According to what Paul said, it was the ones who believed a different gospel to his, and not those who believed it, that had the problem.

Did you know that a man so revered and respected by millions as Martin Luther never actually renounced or gave up his Roman Catholic worship of Mary, but in fact prayed to Mary to his dying day!! Luther, whom so many Protestants idolise and upon whose name a whole denomination was built, who began the Reformation with his 95 theses showing that salvation was by faith and not works, never stopped praying to Mary! Luther did not want to abolish the Roman Catholic Harlot, he just wanted to re-form it. Christians are not here to re-form anything but to COME OUT of the doctrinal darkness of Babylon and INTO God’s kingdom of Light. Christians are not reformers. They are not here to reorganize themselves on the deck of false religion’s version of the Titanic, but have completely abandoned the ship of false doctrines and been placed aboard the unsinkable good ship GOSPEL! The only ‘ship’, I might add, of which God is the Captain. Were you also aware that though Charles Haddon Spurgeon called Arminianism another gospel, he obstinately refused to call those who believed it lost!! Now, is the fact that millions in the world follow these two men, proof that the gospel they preached was right and that their popularity is some sort of confirmation from God that they were His men? Of course not. This is high risk reasoning and not at all like the rational thought processes that the Word of God promotes. To try and settle the issue of what the truth is by the popularity, or lack thereof, of those who say they possess it is just plain silly. There is no biblical precedent for it. The cult of personality carries no weight with God. Nor does the fact a million people believe a thing to be true make it true in the eyes of God. Heaven is not run by a democracy.

The truth is not what the majority believes it to be but what God has proclaimed it is! Christianity is not a democracy where what the majority believes suddenly becomes truth, and the larger the body of people who believe a thing the greater the chance that they are the true Church of Christ. Heaven is ruled by a Theocracy and what God says is truth, what He says His Gospel is, is what all of true Christianity teaches and believes. It matters not to God who you trusted in, who you thought was preaching the truth or how much you believed they were teaching the truth. What matters is: what is the truth and did you believe IT. You are not going to impress God by saying you believed Billy Graham, or Kenneth Copeland or the Pope because you thought they were preaching the truth! You are not going to impress God or sway Him into favoring you by declaring your loyal and faithful allegiance to false preachers. Your statements will condemn you rather than impress Him. All God is interested in is did you believe the record God has given of His only Son in His only Gospel or did you believe something else. If you believed anything different, then you could not have believed God’s Testimony. There are a multitude of people who follow the teachings of Luther and Spurgeon. In fact, it can rightly be said that they veritably follow the men themselves, with portraits of them hanging in many a ‘pastor’s office, and sermons lifted from their writings. They even named a denomination after one—the Lutheran Church is its name. And, though there is no ‘church’ organization known by Spurgeon’s name, there are plenty of Spurgeonites who religiously follow and adhere to his brand of Calvinism, a brand of Calvinism that claims to defend the doctrines of grace and yet denies the fact that they are the only doctrines one can believe in that will evidence a saved state. A brand of Calvinism which says a person becomes a Christian and then goes down one of two paths: either the Arminian path or the Calvinist path. Believing error holds no fear for those who believe such a thing, for even if one believes in another gospel they will be saved anyway! Now just tell me who the mad one is! The one who says that only after belief of God’s Gospel and the rejection of all others is a man saved (what is this but to repent and believe), or the one who says God only has one Gospel, that there is only one power of God unto salvation, yet even if you believe something which differs to it God will save you anyway! ‘Believe or be damned, believe or be damned, believe or be damned’ is their cry, but when one comes along who says, ‘I don’t quite believe it as you do,’ they say, ‘oh, that’s O.K.’ When is error to be seen as damnable error? When it is error regarding the Gospel doctrines for the doctrines of the Gospel of grace are the very issues of salvation!

A further question, and objection made, by those who believe they are part of real Christianity because their particular group has existed for several hundred years, will be looked at in two parts:

It matters not what we say and it does not matter what those who oppose us say. What matters is what God says and we can all find out where God stands, what God has decreed, on this issue of doctrinal error and whether or not it means the man who holds to error concerning the Gospel is lost or that he is saved nonetheless. Most of what follows, in my response to the first part of the above question, has been excerpted from my booklet, ‘God Loves Doctrine’, which contains portions of Scripture that will make clear to everyone who reads them that a person who believes in erroneous doctrine when it comes to the Gospel, is in fact L-O-S-T! "Cease, my son, to hear the instruction that causeth to err from the words of knowledge" (Prov.19:27). There is doctrine that causes strife and confusion. False doctrines are the teachings that come from man’s imagination and not from God’s Word. False doctrines are nothing but fables designed to deceive, delude and to lead men astray and away from the truth of God. The only way a man can be free of false doctrines is to be full of good doctrine—the doctrine which comes from God. And the way to do this is to flee from the erroneous teachings of false preachers and go to those who uncompromisingly preach the Gospel of God. The Christian is told to "eschew evil, and do good..." (1 Pet. 3:11)—this includes the doctrinal evil that perverts the Gospel of Christ. "The Lord is against them that do evil..." (1 Pet. 3:12), and He is against them that believe evil. "Then understood they how that He bade them not beware of the leaven of bread, but of the doctrine of the Pharisees and of the Sadducees" (Matt. 16:12). Christ warned His disciples of the erroneous doctrines of the religious leaders of their day and this warning is just as pertinent in our day. The Christian will not sit under the teachings of false preachers for he knows that their gospels do not honor God but dishonor Him. The Bible shows that God’s children abide in His doctrine, for they love Him and His teachings: "And they continued steadfastly in the apostle’s DOCTRINE and fellowship, and in breaking of bread, and in prayers" (Acts 2:42). One cannot have union and fellowship, two cannot walk together the Bible says, unless they be agreed (Amos 3:3). And two cannot have true Christian union and fellowship unless they are agreed as to the doctrine of Christ: Who He is and what He has done. Acts 2:42 shows that the believers sat together and fellowshipped in harmony, for they all believed in the same doctrine, the apostle’s doctrine. They were of one mind, for they all had the mind of Christ (1 Cor. 2:16). But for those who differed from what the Christians believed, there is the following statement made by the apostle: "And with all deceiveableness of unrighteousness in them that perish; because THEY RECEIVED NOT THE LOVE OF THE TRUTH, that they might be saved. And for this cause God shall send them strong delusion, that they should believe a lie: that they all might be damned who BELIEVED NOT THE TRUTH, but had pleasure in unrighteousness." (2 Thess. 2:10-12). Now what truth is this? What truth is this passage of Scripture referring to? Verse 14 of 2 Thessalonians 2 tells us it is the Gospel of God by which every elect child of God is called. This is the truth of which the Word of God speaks when it promises damnation to those who do not believe it. This is the truth, which if a man has no love for, he cannot be saved. This does not bode well for the ones who believe not the truth, who have any objections to what the Gospel is and to what the consequences of believing it and not believing it are. I certainly would not be ‘packing my bags for heaven’ if I did not love and believe the Gospel of God. Those who do not love the truth cannot believe the truth as revealed in the doctrines of the Gospel and will all perish. Notice that the above passage of Scripture firmly establishes the connection between loving the truth and salvation, and the damnation of those who believed not the truth. Doctrine is so essential, so vital, so central, and so predominant, in the Christian life that Paul warns in these next verses that any who come preaching any other doctrine apart from that doctrine which they had received from him, were to be avoided: "Now I beseech you, brethren, MARK THEM WHICH CAUSE DIVISIONS AND OFFENCES CONTRARY TO THE DOCTRINE WHICH YE HAVE LEARNED; and AVOID THEM. For THEY THAT ARE SUCH SERVE NOT OUR LORD JESUS CHRIST, but their own belly; and BY GOOD WORDS AND FAIR SPEECHES DECEIVE the hearts of the simple" (Rom. 16: 17,18). Is this not a fitting description of denominationalism? For what else is denominationalism other than that which has caused divisions and offences contrary to the Gospel as taught by the apostles? Notice here that it was not Paul the apostle or any other who brought sound doctrine that were causing division, but those who came with UNSOUND teachings. These were the ones who caused the division and offences! Good doctrine is not the enemy of the Church; it is bad doctrine, false doctrine, which is Her enemy! It is not good doctrine which deceives, but false doctrine. If one speaks and teaches the sound doctrine of God then one is obeying the Lord and doing His work (1 Tim. 4:6). Those who come opposing God’s doctrine in any way are called enemies of the cross (Phil. 3:18,19) and should be avoided, for they speak not according to wisdom but according to their own deceitful hearts. Notice also that the thing which Paul sees as absolute proof that a man is not serving the true Jesus Christ is that he teaches things contrary to the doctrine Paul had taught his hearers. They are deceivers who serve only themselves, troublemakers who are opposed to the sound words of good doctrine.

The Christian is taught to beware of false doctrine many times in Scripture. It is the only form of doctrine that the believer is to have nothing to do with. "That we henceforth be no more children, tossed to and fro, and carried about with every wind of doctrine, by the sleight of men, and cunning craftiness, whereby they lie in wait to deceive" (Eph. 4:14). The Devil and his ministers are so very subtle. They deceive the hearts of the simple with many and varied doctrines, by good words and fair speeches that take away from the finished work of Christ or add to what He has done. Those who do not know the Truth are blown about with the many false doctrines which abound in our day and which often come under the guise of ‘salvation by grace’. The reason they are blown about by various doctrines is that their faith, which is common to every man by nature, has failed to anchor them to the unchangeable Gospel of God. Those who are fixed in God’s Word, who are grounded in God’s Truth and who abide in the doctrine of Christ, cannot and will not be moved from His glorious Truth (Jn. 6:68). They all see that there can be no salvation by believing in any other gospel but God’s Gospel and that those who claim to be saved, but who do not abide in the doctrine of Christ, who do not believe the Gospel as God meant it to be believed, exhibit no love of the truth of God but rather an aversion, a hostility, towards it. Paul continues his warnings against false doctrine in this next Scripture and emphasizes that it is only Christ’s doctrine that His people teach and believe: "As I besought thee to abide still at Ephesus, when I went into Macedonia, that thou mightest charge some that they teach no other doctrine" (1 Tim. 1:3). Paul instructed Timothy in this next passage that the law was not made for a righteous man but for sinful men, which includes, "...whoremongers, for them that defile themselves with mankind, for menstealers, for liars, for perjured persons, and if there be any other thing that is contrary to SOUND DOCTRINE." What is the sound doctrine that is here spoken of? The very next verse tells us: "According to the glorious GOSPEL of the blessed God, which was committed to my trust" (1 Tim. 1:10,11). The Christian is to avoid, he is to have no fellowship with, those who believe or teach or do anything that is contrary to sound doctrine, which is the Gospel of Christ, the Word of Truth (Eph.1:13). "Be ye not unequally yoked together with unbelievers: for what fellowship hath righteousness with unrighteousness? And what communion hath light with darkness?" (2 Cor. 6:14). Perhaps at no time did the apostle Paul speak clearer, when dealing with true doctrine and those who taught otherwise, than in this next passage. Hear, and hear well, the words which Almighty God inspired Paul the apostle to write: "If any man teach otherwise, and consent not to wholesome words, even the words of our Lord Jesus Christ, and to the DOCTRINE which is according to godliness; he is proud, KNOWING NOTHING, but doting about questions and strifes of words, whereof cometh envy, strife, railings, evil surmisings, perverse disputings of men of corrupt minds, and DESTITUTE OF THE TRUTH, supposing that gain is godliness: FROM SUCH WITHDRAW THYSELF" (1 Tim. 6:3-5). Here we see clearly that those men who set themselves up as Christian ministers and pastors yet who come teaching doctrines which are contrary to what the apostle Paul taught and are not conformed to wholesome words, the doctrine of Christ which is according to godliness, are proud men who know nothing and who, by their doctrinally perverse disputations, cause trouble and strife. These false teachers are, the Bible says, destitute of the truth. Their opposition to the Gospel of God is referred to as evil surmisings and perverse disputings and that such talk comes from men of corrupt minds and not from the renewed minds of saved men. Isaiah 8:20 says of these men: To the law and to the testimony: if they speak not according to this word, it is because THERE IS NO LIGHT IN THEM." The Bible does not teach that there is some light in these men, it clearly says that there is NO light in them for they are destitute of God’s Truth, even though they come in His name and proclaim that Jesus is Lord! It is men such as these who are the ones that are guilty of perverse disputings due to their corrupt minds, and not those who bring the true Gospel with them seeking to bless those who hear it. These men are the ones every true believer should withdraw himself from and have nothing further to do with. The Christian has no business whatsoever attending a church service where a false gospel is taught by men who have no light, evidenced by their not knowing and not abiding in the doctrine of Christ. The Bible says that such people have not God (2 Jn. 9) and those who meet and fellowship with them are "partakers of their evil deeds" (2 Jn. 11). The Lord Jesus Christ literally hates false doctrines and He calls those who believe them accursed people. Hate implies passion. Christ is not neutral when it comes to false doctrines—He HATES them!! False doctrines are repulsive to a Holy God as they are to all His people. No true Christian would ever bow his knee to the lie that a man who believes in false gospel doctrine is saved. To slander a man is a very serious crime. How much more serious an offence is it when man slanders the God of the Universe by preaching false doctrine in His name that promotes lies about the True Character of God and what He has done, and claims that a man can be saved believing it. The people of God hear only the Good Shepherd’s voice and not that of a stranger (Jn. 10:4,5). See here what the Lord Jesus Himself says about false doctrine: "So hast thou also them that hold the doctrine of the Nicolaitans, WHICH THING I HATE" ( Rev. 2:15). The Lord Jesus Christ HATES false doctrines, He abhors false gospels. So how can anyone, in light of this, believe that He would ever save anyone whose ‘salvation’ was grounded in that which Christ hates! How can anyone in their right mind imagine the Lord Jesus Christ saying to one who believes a false gospel, ‘Because you have believed in a false gospel, and not in the Gospel which My Father has authored, I shall reward you by saving you.’ How could Christ save anyone who did not believe He did what He did, but believes in that which He did not do? Isn’t this a perfect definition of what unbelief is—to not believe that Christ did what He did but to believe that He did what He in fact did not do! If Christ saved anyone who believed in a false gospel, He would be going against His own Word, His own promise, that those who do not believe HIS Gospel will all perish. False gospel doctrine, which does not speak of God’s only Gospel, which alone presents God’s only Jesus, is a hated thing by God Himself. There is no salvation to be found in false doctrine. All a