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 false gospel can do is accompany a condemned man to his death rather than lead him into life. It is right and proper for the Christian to hate all false doctrines, for they speak lies about God’s Gospel and distort the truth about the Person and Work of the Lord Jesus Christ. The Lord Jesus commended the Christians at Ephesus who tested those who claimed to be apostles and were not, and found them to be liars, false preachers of false doctrines (Rev. 2:2). Jesus Christ often warned of those who taught lies, presenting them as the very doctrines of God: "But in vain do they worship Me, teaching for doctrines the commandments of men" (Matt. 15:9 cf . Mk. 7:7). He described false teachers as wolves in sheeps clothing (Matt. 7:15). False teachers often come with many true doctrines, but they are always mixed with false doctrines, teaching them as the very doctrine of Christ. They speak lies, and the only way to know that they speak lies is if one knows the truth. There is so much more that can be added, but this issue has been dealt with in my other writings in great detail and you are encouraged to read them.

The second part of the above objection is:

This is something that most of the people I have come across resent so vehemently. This is the ramification of not believing the Gospel that they simply cannot tolerate and which thereby causes them to resort to labelling us with such convenient and cultic sounding terms as hyper-Calvinist. Somehow it makes them feel good and even more comfortable with what they believe when they can come up with a label for those who differ from them. Their motto is: When you can’t attack the doctrines, label the ones who believe them! Those who cannot provide answers from the Scriptures always resort to childish name calling. The first thing I have to say to such people is: why would anyone who truly believed the doctrines which make up the Gospel of God want to believe that a person who did not believe all of those doctrines is just as saved by God as the ones who do. I mean, why did God bother to connect the words ‘believe’, ‘Gospel’, and ‘salvation’, if it did not matter whether a person believes the Gospel or not? He would have stopped at the word believe and not have gone on to explain what was to be believed. Why have so many ‘great’ men of the past given so much of their time, spent so much effort, and fought pitched battles, defending the doctrines of grace, only to say at the end of it all that men are saved who believe doctrines which diametrically oppose the truth of God! First they tell you what the truth is and presumably contrast it with error, and then they leave you with the impression that a man is saved believing either one! Its like a teacher spending all day teaching children the why’s and wherefore’s of an equation and why it can only add up to one number, and then at the end of the day say that even if you arrive at the wrong answer you will be rewarded equally with those who have the right answer. Or a man lecturing about his tried and true way to make a million dollars but at the end of his seminar tells his listeners that trying to make a million any other way is to faithfully adhere to his way! There is simply no sense to it. But apparently, the number of people to whom no sense makes sense continues to grow. The whole purpose of teaching is to instruct people in the right way and warn them of the wrong way. The right way has its consequences and the wrong way has its consequences. And when it comes to the Gospel, right teaching and wrong teaching is a matter of what God has said and what God has not said. What God has said is right and what He has not said is wrong. If you believe what God has said you are right and if you do not believe what God has said you are wrong. Now if salvation does not hinge on belief of the truth, then the truth simply does not matter. The truth of what God has done, of how He saves, would not be important enough to figure in the salvation of anyone. If God has said something, the onus is on us to believe it because you can be guaranteed that not believing what God has said will have dire and eternal consequences. No one has ever profited by not believing the Word of God, so how any can say that to not believe the Gospel, but to believe error concerning it, will still save a person, is beyond my comprehension. I mean, why preach the truth at all! Why warn of false preachers who come with false doctrines if one can be saved just as much by believing the lies they teach as believing what true men of God, who preach His Gospel, say? The reason why teaching is necessary at all is the fact that there is right and wrong, and the purpose behind proving that which is right as right is so a person will enjoy the truth and stay away from error, so that a person will enjoy the benefits of being blessed of God to believe the truth, as opposed to believing error and remaining in an accursed state for all eternity. But if whether one believes truth or error does not matter, that salvation does not hinge upon it, then there is no reason why anyone should teach anything, for believing whatever one believes to be the truth, as opposed to what actually is the truth, would be good enough! So good in fact that you can be saved regardless of whether you believe God or not! "Thus, in common with a fundamental tenet of the New Gnosticism—that there is no objective reality"—the Gospel can be anything a person wants it to be and thus how God saves is open to interpretation. Let us all live in and for existential experiences and form our own doctrines and believe what we want to believe. Thus we see the aim of Satan: to create a worldwide religious climate where there are virtually no rules, no standards of belief, where the lines between right and wrong, between true Gospel doctrine and the lies of false gospels, become indivisible. It is not enough to say one believes in the Gospel. It is not enough to say one believes in the Son of God, that this ‘confession’ will in some way protect the ‘believer’ from the consequences of believing any error. But one must actually believe the truth about the Gospel, one must believe the truth about the Son of God in order to be saved. One must remember that a person is not saved because they say they are saved, but only when GOD says they are saved!!!

Such people who believe that one can be saved whilst in ignorance of the Gospel, willful or otherwise, love to resort to the following age old argument: Those who are mere babes in Christ do not know as one who is mature in the things of the Lord, but we mustn’t forget they are babes and just as much in Christ as the mature are." Such thinking argues that we all start off with varying, even contradictory, beliefs about God and how He saves, ie what the Gospel is, but the fact that we all ‘turn to Him’ to be saved, or believe that only He can save, is enough to get us saved. Yes, there are babes in Christ, but where does anyone get the idea that this means they believe in error concerning God and the way He saves? Yes, the Bible speaks of the sincere milk of the Word (1 Pet. 2:2) and also of strong meat (Heb. 5:12), but where does anyone get the absurd notion that the milk contains error, that it is in some way curdled and representative of anything but the pure unadulterated Word of God, and that somehow the strong meat, alone, is representative of true doctrines? Most professing christians subscribe to the well-worn teaching that, as babes in Christ, we know little of Christ, that our view of the Gospel is obscured by much error, but as we grow and mature we eventually come into the right knowledge of Him and are corrected and instructed by Scripture as we go along and become adults in Christ. It is interesting to note that people who still don’t have a clue as to what the Gospel is, which is the state of those they claim to be babes in Christ, are, called the mature in Christ because they have been in the faith for a certain length of time! Erroneous doctrines are replaced by truer doctrines. But through even our doctrinally darkest days we were Christians, they insist. This all sounds so convincing and logical that no wonder those who believe it have no problem with such ‘reasoning’. Most have never heard anything different from this. They are convinced because it matches with most other experiences in life where man starts off in relative ignorance or having little knowledge of a matter, he later grows and becomes more knowledgeable and mature in what he practices or believes. Yet, the meaning of the key phrase ‘babe’ in Christ, often used in this line of reasoning as a defense for the religionists’ ignorant, but to their minds, nonetheless saved state, is totally misrepresented and misunderstood and is completely at odds with the fact that there is not a moment in the life of any true believer which is not spent abiding in the Doctrine of Christ, His Gospel. A CHRISTIAN NEVER COMES TO THE GOSPEL, FOR HE IS BORN OF THE GOSPEL! 2 John 9 shows clearly that it could not be otherwise, and that all who are not present, or stand not, in Christ’s doctrine have not God. This could never be said of a true believer, for whether he is a young Christian or one who has been in the faith for many years, he abides in the doctrine of Christ and no other. Whether it be his first day as a Christian or his last day on earth, there is not a moment in time which the Christian, does not spend abiding in Christ’s Gospel. If he is in Christ he stands with Christ’s doctrine, for it is CHRIST’S Voice which he has heard and does follow and not that of a stranger (Jn.10:4,5,27).

It must be asked, "How does one get to be a babe in Christ? What is it to be a babe in Christ? What makes the difference between one who is a religious, professing christian yet dead in his sins, and one who is a babe in Christ? How ignorant can one be and yet still be biblically referred to as a babe in Christ?" It might also be asked, "Where on earth did man ever get the idea that to be a babe in Christ meant that one was ignorant of the doctrine of Christ?" In light of 2 John 9 where it is stated that if one does not abide in the doctrine of Christ one does not have God, being a babe in Christ could not be a proper definition of one who is ignorant of the doctrine of Christ, that is, Who Christ is, what Christ has done and for whom He has done it. He could not possibly be ignorant of the Gospel, for he has been born of the Gospel! Remember, a babe in Christ is just as much a creature born again, born of God’s Seed, the Gospel, as one who is mature in Christ. If you are in Christ you are of Christ and your life is hid with Him in God (Col.3:3). If you are in Christ you abide in His doctrine and have God, if not, if you do not abide in the doctrine of Christ, you cannot be in Christ, babe, adult or adolescent, and therefore you simply cannot have God. To be a babe in Christ never has referred to, and never could be a proper description of, one who is ignorant of the Person and Work of Christ, for this would fly in the face of the Bible’s definition of what a truly born again new creature in Christ is: one who believes the Gospel.

The term ‘babe’ in the New Testament which refers to those ‘babes in Christ’ is found in Hebrews 5:13: "For every one that useth milk is unskilful in the word of righteousness: for he is a babe" (see also 1Cor.3:1ff.). It is important to note firstly that who the writer here refers to as ‘babes’ are Christians. All are agreed that the writer has addressed his Epistle to Hebrew converts to Christianity and that there is nothing in the Epistle which would suggest otherwise. That means they are all people who have been born again, born of that Holy Seed: the Gospel of Jesus Christ. It means that they have heard the Gospel and have understood it so as to give evidence that they are new creatures in Christ. "The Gospel had been preached and ‘confirmed’ unto them" (Heb.2:1-3). They recognize no gospel as having the power to save anyone other than God’s only Gospel. They are considered brethren throughout the Epistle (Heb.3:1,12; 10:19; 13:22) and if brethren, then they must be believers. Believers in what? Why, the Gospel of course! How do I know? Because every born again believer is born of the incorruptible Seed of God: the Gospel (1Pet.1:23-25). EVERYONE THAT IS SAVED IS A BELIEVER IN THE GOSPEL (Mk.16:16). Everyone alive today was born physically through the seed of man and everyone alive in Christ is born spiritually through the Seed of God: His Gospel. How can you be born of the truth if you do not believe the truth? How can one be physically born without being covered in afterbirth! The truth of God, which is the Seed of God, which is the Gospel of God, is the afterbirth that evidences spiritual birth that never comes off and that covers every Christian from the moment they are born again! If there is no afterbirth, there can be no evidence of a birth having taken place. Again, before hearing and understanding the Gospel, no one has any right to consider themselves a new creature in Christ, for the primary characteristic feature of a new creature in Christ is that he believes the Gospel. It is the principle form of judging a man saved, otherwise why would the Lord Jesus have stated in Mark 16 that a man is saved based on his belief of the Gospel? He did not say he was saved by what he does, but by what he believes. The works of a man are important, but they are not what is identified by Christ as THE prime distinguishing characteristic of a true believer. Just as faith without works is dead, so too, works without THE Faith of Christ is just as dead. (For more on this subject, including a study of the word unskilful from Heb. 5:13, please see the author’s booklet, ‘Born of the Gospel’).

‘Knowledge and belief in the right doctrines of the Gospel is a gradual thing learned over many, many years’ they say. But this whole argument is flawed because it suggests that eventually all will believe the true doctrines, the right doctrines, concerning the Gospel—GOD’S doctrines. It still works on the principle that one must believe the truth, for it says that every Christian will eventually believe the truth. But the question which stands out like a sore thumb is: what about those professing christians who die still ignorant of the Gospel of truth, revealing an absence of the love of the truth? Are they still saved? Are they saved because one is convinced they were going to believe the truth but died before they had a chance to? But what inkling do we have that they were going to believe the Gospel when they believed no differently to those who believe in false gospels! If one is saved who has died not believing the whole Gospel but only in some Gospel truths, what importance can we place on believing right doctrine when one can be saved without it, if one can be saved while still learning what the truth is but not be abiding in it. If it is finally acknowledged after their death that such people were not saved, based on their unbelief of Christ’s doctrine, then how could they have ever been saved in the first place? You’re saved while you believe error but you become lost if you die in this condition? AND THEY CALL ME WEIRD!!! Now, to many who have read my writings and who will read what I have just commented on, it makes perfect sense to conclude such things and I receive no protest over it. But, when people start to realise that men such as Charles Spurgeon and Martin Luther, or other ‘great’ names of the past or present, did not teach these things, they are rejected out of hand. ‘How could these things be true’, they think to themselves, ‘if those men didn’t teach them?’ Moreover, when they see that such teachings rule out the possibility that family members and friends are saved, especially the long lost departed ones, who did not agree with such thinking, I am immediately shunned and ‘excommunicated’, and labelled an extremist!! People just wipe me, and what I am saying, from their thinking after initially agreeing with me until some of their idols were mentioned or until they realise that my Gospel calls their long lost loved ones who did not believe it, lost! I have had people whom I considered friends and whom I had known for ten years and more, leave me without a word or whisper because of the Gospel I believe. If I were to act in the same way, they would no doubt see it as confirmation that I am in a cult and scared to hear of that which would seek to expose my thinking as erroneous. It is an absolute blight against the dignity of man to behave in such an unreasonable, irrational and vulgar way. And then these people have the gall to ‘pray’ for me and tell others how ‘concerned’ they are for me! Concerned? How concerned can they be when they refuse to sit with me and explain their position and why they believe me to be wrong? Such behavior exposes an extremely deep-seated bias against, and fear of, anything, EVEN IF IT IS TRUE, that would come against and seek to expose those things a person is comfortable believing and those persons whom they have listened to and loved for years. One question that must be asked of such people at this point is: if it could be proven that you were believing a false gospel, WOULD YOU WANT TO KNOW? If you hesitated, even for one moment, to answer this with a ‘yes’ then you have a problem. Many do not even try to understand the Gospel and its ramifications, because they simply do not want to believe it.

How anyone could be saved who believes that a man who does not know or does not believe the true Gospel, is another good question. What most who profess faith in Christ do not realise is the fact that to not believe in the Gospel of God does not only refer to those who believe nothing of what it says, but it also refers to those who do not believe ALL of what the Gospel says. If God has said that His Gospel is that which is to be believed, is that which He gives His faith to a person whereby they believe the Gospel in its entirety, for anyone to be saved, how can anyone say that a man is saved who does not believe all the Gospel which God has given? I mean, surely God gives His faith to man so that he will believe all His Gospel and not merely part of it. (See my booklet, ‘Faith to Believe What?’) The Seed of God is the whole Gospel and not merely part of it. "Being born again...of incorruptible (seed), by the Word of God....And this is the Word which BY THE GOSPEL is preached unto you" (1 Pet. 1:23,25). Therefore a man is born again when he is born of the whole Gospel, the whole Seed of God and not just part of it. Relevant to this is the fact that if one plants a whole apple seed, an apple tree will result, but if any part of that apple seed is cut off, even if it receives the slightest nick, nothing will grow from that seed! There is no part of anything in the physical world that is used symbolically in the Scriptures to represent a spiritual truth that will conflict with its spiritual counterpart. If a man could be saved by believing part of the Gospel, there would be room for him to believe wrongly about the part he remains ignorant of. And this would reveal his gospel as nothing but a false gospel, for none can say that the Gospel of God, the only Gospel which saves, contains or could contain any falsehood whatsoever. Having a faith which believes in only a few Gospel doctrines and not all, is to have a faith which is indistinguishable from the faith which is common to all men, by which God has never saved anyone. The only thing which severs the umbilical cord existing between an unregenerate man and his faith in false gospels is the grace of God, through which the faith of God is given that believes only in God’s Gospel and eternally attaches the lifeline between the true Gospel and everyone of God’s elect children. What would be the sense, and what would it achieve, for God to give a man the glorious gift of faith, whereby a man is justified, and with it only permit a portion of the Gospel to be believed, or see only a limited number of doctrines as being part of it, which would allow for the rejection of some Gospel doctrines and thereby leave him with the warped belief that a man can be saved without full knowledge and belief of God’s only Gospel?

Believe the Gospel and you WILL be saved, believe it not and you WILL perish. This is the rule, this is the governing principle, by which a man is to be judged saved or lost. Does he believe the Gospel to the exclusion of every false gospel as that which must be believed in order for a man to be saved, or does he believe that one can be just as saved when believing a gospel which teaches some truths but at the same time rejects others. Many who believe and teach Calvinist doctrine believe it to be the Gospel, but for some strange incomprehensible reason insist they were just as saved whilst believing in false gospels! Its as if they have said to themselves, ‘I will believe what God’s Gospel says because it is the truth and I want to be saved, but I am not going to consider myself lost when I believed error, or tell people they’ve got to believe the same thing I do or they will perish.’ Some of these men teach Gospel doctrines very well but refuse to judge saved and lost based on what a man believes, YET I NOTICE THEY HAVE MADE IT A PRIORITY IN THEIR LIVES TO MAKE SURE THAT WHAT THEY BELIEVE IS RIGHT!! They wouldn’t think of believing the doctrinal rubbish that many believe, but have made sure they believe what is true. Moreover, they would never dare to return to the lies they believed before ‘believing’ the Gospel, so how can they think that they were ever saved believing them? When Christ said that to believe His Gospel is to be saved and to believe it not is to be lost, He was not joking. He meant exactly what He said. If a person who believes in a false gospel is not lost, then it must mean that God saves people regardless of what they believe. This is in stark contrast with the first part of Jesus’ statement in Mark 16:16 where He pronounced that only those who believe His Gospel will be saved. Christ judged saved and lost by whether or not a man believed His Gospel, and everyone who fails to judge saved and lost by this same means does so at his own peril. Christ says: "He that rejecteth Me, and receiveth not My Words, hath One that judgeth him: THE WORD THAT I HAVE SPOKEN, THE SAME SHALL JUDGE HIM IN THE LAST DAY" (Jn. 12:48 cf. Rom. 2:16). "The word that Christ has spoken, the doctrines of His Gospel...will be that by which the sinner will be judged in the last day." Every man will be judged by that Message then, so how could it be that a man is not to be judged saved or lost by that same Message now? I mean, if a man is saved whilst believing lies, why change? What difference does it make what you believe if you were saved believing lies? This is what I find so very, very strange. This is what is so totally foreign to the Scriptures and which thing they cannot and do not support. This is that for which there is no biblical precedent at all, finding support only in the teaching manuals of Satan and in the deluded minds of those who believe him. If God says there is salvation only in His Gospel, if God says that the power unto salvation is His Gospel only, who do you think goes against this by saying that one can be saved believing other gospels too? Do you think the Holy Spirit does it? Who do you think is always the first in line to oppose any truth of God? Satan may appear as an angel of light and in many guises; his gospels may appear to be the very Gospel of Light, but Satan’s fingerprints always remain the same and these fingerprints are the very errors that are present in every satanically inspired false gospel.

For some reason, those ‘Christian’ groups which have taught the correct doctrines concerning the Gospel have baulked at the Scriptural ruling that those who do not believe the Gospel will perish. Many of them have taught, and continue to teach, the doctrines of grace including the righteousness of Christ and the fact that this is the only ground of salvation. They expose and fight with all their might the incorrect, and therefore invalid, doctrines of all those who oppose the Gospel. They call those messages ‘false gospels’ and ‘another gospel’ and yet refuse to call those who believe in such doctrines, or those that believe in belief of more than one Gospel as the power of God unto salvation, lost. Such people have betrayed the doctrines of the Gospel they claim to believe by saying one can be saved by believing other doctrines, doctrines which oppose the Gospel truths, as well. They have no qualms in calling erroneous gospels false gospels, but they refuse to call the people who believe them false christians!! How, it may well be asked, can one whose faith is in a false gospel not be a false christian? How can one have been born in one country and at the same time be said to have been given birth to in another? How can a true Christian be born from the seed of a false gospel? A man being born again of the seed of a false gospel and not of the Gospel of God, is like one man’s son being born from another man’s seed! Its just impossible. How can one be saved while believing a false gospel, which is a plan for salvation contrary to that unique plan of God’s which alone saves? God has only one Gospel and therefore He has designated only one Gospel to be believed in unto salvation. Anything which differs from it cannot be His Gospel and therefore cannot save. This is the only thing one can logically conclude about being saved and not being saved if one is to be faithful to the Word of God. Does a man’s believing in right doctrines automatically mean that he was always saved, even in the days of his believing false doctrine? What lunatic would answer ‘yes’ to such an absurd notion as this? Scripture makes clear that to be saved is to believe the Gospel of God which is HIS power unto salvation to everyone that believeth (see Rom. 1:16). And, to be lost is to not believe that Gospel at all or to claim that one does believe it but has in fact never repented of believing false gospels or of ever having trusted in them as the right way to God. How can one have rightly repented of believing a false gospel if they still believe they were saved whilst believing it? True repentance has never taken place if one continues to believe that one was, or can be, saved while believing a false gospel. Such teaching is looked upon as being unloving and without mercy. They say it makes God a God Who is without mercy and forgiveness towards man’s inability to accurately believe the Gospel of God. But please tell me which sin God has overlooked in order to let a man into heaven? Which sin was it that Christ did not have to make atonement for? EVERY sin had to be atoned for and at the top of that list was THE SIN OF UNBELIEF!! God overlooked no sin, for Christ had to pay the penalty of every last sin of His people and none can enter heaven lest they believe the Gospel of Jesus Christ. They say it would be unfair of God to cast a man into hell merely because he is wrong about a few doctrines. Yet they say it is right for God to condemn a man to hell because of his immorality. They fail to realise that their immorality comes from the same place as their unbelief: their sinful natures! They contend that God would be unfair in not making allowances for man’s sinfulness and proneness to error due to his imperfect nature. But if the Lord did this, would it not be right to expect Him to make the same allowances for their immoral acts! Wouldn’t salvation then just be a matter of God feeling sorry for, and making allowances for, sinful well-intentioned people who had a zeal for God but an incorrigible tendency to sinful acts and thoughts! But didn’t all imperfection—man’s sinfulness—need to be atoned for, did not a price have to be paid for man’s sin? Of course it did. So how much sense would it make for Christ to have died for the sin of unbelief, only to see His Father’s chosen ones walk into heaven with a faith that did not believe His Gospel!! This would be like expecting Christ to allow one to walk into heaven a saved man though he be a murderer. Some will say, ‘Yes, but though Christ died for our sins we still commit many of those sins, and so even though He died for the sin of unbelief it does not mean that His people won’t continue to believe error even when it comes to what the Gospel is.’ Well that may sound reasonable to you, friend, but nowhere in the Scriptures does it say that Christ’s death for His people would cause them to cease sinning. But it is obvious from the Scriptures that Christ’s death for His people would pave the way for them to believe the Gospel and therefore to be saved!! The fact that a person still sins after he is saved will not keep him out of heaven because the penalty those sins have incurred has been fully paid for by his Savior, his sins have all been atoned for. BUT a continuance in unbelief of the Gospel will keep a man out of heaven because the Word of God plainly states, and we have recorded many of these Scriptures, that if a man does not believe the Gospel of God he is lost. The fact that Christ has died for a person is proven by that person’s BELIEF of the Gospel and not by any unbelief of it. The sin of unbelief, and any other sin which reveals an unregenerate state such as murder or homosexuality etc., which the Scriptures say WILL keep a man out of heaven, are sins which the Christian, the saved man, does not commit. To think that a man is saved, even though he does not believe the Gospel or believes only some of it correctly, because Christ has died for the unbelief the man still abides in, is to leave one in a quandary as to why God would give a man the gift of faith to believe His Gospel if even with that faith man could remain in unbelief of it. It just defies logic! If a man could be saved in unbelief, who is to say how far that unbelief could reach? Would it mean that a man was saved who had no belief in God whatsoever? Would such a man be saved because it was claimed Jesus died for his sin of unbelief even though the man did not evidence any belief in the Gospel? As soon as you bring one doctrine into the picture that must be believed for a person to be saved, you bring Scripture into the picture. Not only must you show why a certain doctrine must be believed for a person to be saved, but you must also prove that nothing else needs to be believed! Many so-called ‘pastors’ and alleged ‘ministers’ of God’s Word argue that because man is an imperfect creature he will believe the Gospel of God imperfectly. That is, he will believe enough of the Gospel correctly so that what he believes is recognizable as the Gospel, but because of his sinful nature, his believing, even with the faith of God, will always contain some error, some imperfection! How confusing it is though when one goes from pastor to pastor and finds out that each one has a different and conflicting idea as to what believing enough means and which doctrines are involved! One says, ‘It is enough to know that Christ died for the elect’, and another says, ’It is enough to know Christ died for all.’ Because of man’s imperfect nature, they claim God is tolerant of error in His people. Exactly how tolerant of the erroneous concepts of the Gospel man has fashioned in his mind and placed his faith in, is not known exactly, but they maintain that just as man cannot behave perfectly, he cannot believe perfectly, and so what he believes rightly is enough to save him. But what is perplexing to this writer is that to say man can only believe the Gospel imperfectly, suggests that man actually knows what the Gospel is, or at least has some idea of what it is, but just can’t believe it as accurately as he can know which doctrines actually make up the Gospel! But who is to say that what a man knows about what the Gospel is, isn’t in fact the Gospel he must believe? If we cannot know what it is, then surely it stands to reason that we cannot know what it is not! And if anyone claims to know what the Gospel is not then they must be making such a judgement based on some standard of what they believe the Gospel is. But how can this be when they claim no one knows what the Gospel actually is. One ‘pastor’ wrote to me saying, ‘If only we could put our finger on what the Gospel actually is, that would be something.’ Well, doubtless this will come as news to this man and others who are like-minded, but God has already put His finger on what the Gospel is and has commanded His people to preach it and therefore believe it! If these pastors claim is that we cannot believe the Gospel perfectly, upon what do they base their claim that what we believe now isn’t the whole Gospel? How can they say what we believe isn’t the Gospel if they admit they do not know exactly what it is!! One wonders who it was that came up with the idea that no one can believe the Gospel because none of us are perfect. One can just imagine such a viewpoint sprouting in the minds of lost people who became confused when confronted by people they could not deny were Christians, by their character and conduct, but who believed differently to them. This shows clearly the predicament that one will always find oneself in when one does not know the Gospel or does not judge saved and lost by the Gospel. To say that no one can believe the Gospel perfectly, that is each and every doctrine in it, is to intimate some knowledge as to what the Gospel is. Yet with all the knowledge man has gained, with all the books he has written on theology etc., these men insist that no one actually knows what the Gospel is and therefore no one believes the Gospel perfectly. May I respectfully add at this point that it would make no sense for one to say that what a person believes is not the Gospel after they have stated that they do not know what the Gospel is! Imagine the conversation: ‘What is the Gospel, pastor?’ ‘Well, no one actually knows what the Gospel is.’ ‘Well,’ the man says, ‘this is what I have learned the Gospel is... what do you think?’ The ‘pastor’ answers, ‘It sounds pretty good but that’s not it.’ The man replies, ‘But you’ve just told me that you don’t know what the Gospel is, so how can you judge what I believe to not be the Gospel? For all you know it is the Gospel and you just can’t recognize it!’ You’ve got to know what it is to know what it isn’t!! You’ve got to know what the Gospel is to know what it isn’t, and, you must know what the Gospel is not, in order to rightly define, preach and believe what the Gospel is. Are the enemies of the Gospel saying that the Bible does not make clear which are the doctrines of grace that deal with salvation issues or that they simply cannot discern what God’s Word has made so perfectly clear? To say man can at best only believe the Gospel imperfectly is to say that what he believes is not the Gospel at all but a counterfeit, and a poor one at that. How can a man be saved who believes errors concerning the Gospel, which is the power of God unto salvation, revealing that he has wrong notions of what it is, and of how God saves? How can he be believing in the Gospel of God which, along with the faith of God, is given so that THERE WILL BE NO MISTAKE as to Who God is and how God saves!!! One must know God to be saved, and to know Him is to believe Him. To know God is to keep His Word (see Jn. 8:55). Believing what God has said, is what believing in Him is all about. The Scriptures show that to be related to God is to believe in God: "...believe in the Light, that ye may be the children of Light" (Jn. 12:36). To be saved while believing the Gospel imperfectly would be like a man drawing a picture of something. His copy of it will not be perfect but it will be close enough to the original as to be recognizable. Likewise, belief of enough truth will reveal that the gospel one believes in is the true Gospel, they say. This is the theory but it is a fundamentally flawed one. As we shall see later in our discussion of the biblical fact that a little leaven leaveneth the whole lump of dough, meaning that a little incorrect doctrine will change the face of the true, an approximation of what the Gospel is, is not the same as believing what the Gospel is. The slightest error, the smallest deviation from what God has drawn to represent His Gospel, will show the copy to be a false one and not what God has drawn at all. It is the differences which make all the difference!! Its the differences which make God’s Gospel unique and separate from all false gospels, that distinguishes it as God’s only Gospel. That’s why Paul the apostle warned of any gospel which differed from his. The difference between false gospels and God’s only Gospel is in the doctrines. Yes, the Devil is in the doctrines of false gospels which differ with the doctrines of God’s Gospel. The true Gospel is the one which God commands is to be believed and a false gospel is one which Satan says you can believe and thereby be saved. God commands that no other gospel but His is to be believed and Satan says that one can believe any gospel and be saved. God says there can be no salvation before belief of His Gospel, and Satan counters by saying that one can be saved by a false gospel before one comes to believe the true. WHOM DO YOU BELIEVE? The reality is, the faith man has by nature is an imperfect faith, hence its fatal attraction to imperfect gospels. Conversely, the faith which God gives is perfect and always leads those to whom it has been given to believe in the perfect Gospel perfectly, WITHOUT FAIL!! There are no exceptions to this rule, for just as a man blessed of God can only believe in the true God, so too a man blessed of God can only believe in the true God’s Gospel. How can a man say he believes in the true God when the false gospel he has placed his faith in fails to identify the true God. JUST LIKE ALL MEN BY NATURE FALL SHORT OF THE GLORY OF GOD, ALL FALSE GOSPELS FALL SHORT OF IDENTIFYING THE TRUE GOD! What else can the Holy Spirit of God lead His people to but the truth of God as revealed in the Gospel of God? If He is the Holy Spirit of truth, what other gospel can He lead people to than the Gospel of truth? And what else can the faith which God gives to His people believe in? And what other gospel but God’s Gospel could God’s people possibly abide in? The faith which God gives is attracted only to HIS Gospel—the WHOLE of it—and is repulsed by any other, no matter how closely it may resemble it. Paul told Titus that he should teach the young men to speak God’s doctrine with exactness and preciseness, at the same time showing that it is most surely possible to do this: "In all things shewing thyself a pattern of good works; in doctrine shewing UNCORRUPTNESS, gravity, sincerity" (Titus 2:7). Do you think there is any room for error in that word uncorruptness? If Titus was to teach God’s doctrine with uncorruptness, then it is of a surety that Paul taught it thus and therefore we are to teach it with equal accuracy, with equal uncorruptness, and therefore believe in Paul’s uncontaminated Gospel. Even if only one doctrine is left out, one would be left without the full story, the full plan of God’s salvation, and therefore be left with a corrupted gospel. Even if a Gospel doctrine is believed in, yet not seen as a doctrine that is part of the essential knowledge one must have, that saving knowledge encapsulated and revealed in God’s Gospel, one is not believing the whole Gospel. If one does not have to know a particular doctrine to be saved, then obviously one is saying that one does not have to believe that doctrine to be saved. Subsequently, if one does not have to believe a doctrine to be saved, then one can believe whatever one thinks to be right in the matter which that doctrine speaks, and still be saved. As soon as the essentiality of one doctrine is denied because another Gospel doctrine is seen as more important, who is to say that the only doctrine which must be believed is the most important one. What other doctrine could possibly be essential to saving knowledge but the superior or predominant one? The Gospel needs ALL its doctrines to stand. To deny the essentiality of one doctrine is to deny them all, for they are all inextricably connected and they stand together or not at all. Wherever one goes the rest go. You cannot separate them or exclude even one from being a Gospel doctrine merely because you believe one to be more important than the others. The Gospel doctrines are not in competition with one another but flow into one another and mutually enhance the beauty each one possesses. God’s faith loves no other gospel than God’s Gospel and therefore it recognizes, knows and loves every doctrine in that Gospel. The faith which God gives is monogamous! It has no appetite for any other gospel, not even those which have the slightest under taste of error. The only ‘bait’ that will attract this fish called faith, is God’s only Gospel. The enemies of God believe that because man is an imperfect creature he will believe the Gospel imperfectly, EVEN WITH THE FAITH THAT GOD GIVES! Subscribers to such thinking reveal that they know, and have known, no other faith than the natural imperfect faith of man! They have not been blessed by God with HIS faith to believe His Gospel, and therefore to believe it perfectly. They congregate around false gospels all their lives because they have a faith that has a taste for no other kind!

Again, there is nothing new in the doctrinal content of what we teach. But because we teach that before or without belief in the Gospel of God there can be no salvation, which is precisely that which Ephesians 1:13 teaches, one mainstream Reformed minister wrote accusing me that what I teach is new doctrine and promptly (and conveniently) quoted the familiar phrase: ‘What’s new is not true and what’s true is not new.’ This is a true saying in terms of God not having any new truth for His people to believe outside of that revealed in the Scriptures. But it is wrong for anyone to take this saying and use it inappropriately by ruling out anything as being true simply because it is not the line adopted by a particular organization. A truth previously concealed is no doubt new truth to a person to whom it has just been revealed, but this does not make the particular teaching new. When a Christian prays, ‘Show me new things, Lord,’ he’s not asking for new revelation in terms of extra-biblical revelation, but things he has not yet seen in the Scriptures. The truth of God has been around longer than anything man calls truth. After believing false gospels for around 30 years, the truth of the only Gospel of God was new to me for I had never heard it before, but this did not mean that it was some new truth heretofore concealed from mankind, nor did the fact that I had never heard it rule it out as being truth. How silly would it be for a person to reject something, labelling it ‘new doctrine’ and therefore ruling out any possibility that it was the truth, simply because they had never heard it or because their particular denomination had never taught it! The doctrines I teach have been agreed with by several 'reformed' pastors I have had contact with and along with many others who have read my booklets, they have no quarrel with their doctrinal content at all. In fact one man emailed me saying, "It is not often that I write to individuals or to organizations on the net...I felt compelled to write to you and tell you your presentation of the Gospel is the clearest most precise declaration of Truth I have ever heard aside from the scriptures themselves. I want to thank you for helping me! I have studied and I have preached and I have read many reformed writer’s work in the past but never have I been moved, motivated, and inspired as I have been by your work..." One can tell by this response to our Gospel that there is nothing new in its doctrinal content. We do not preach new truths, yet because many have not heard preached the ramifications attached to our Gospel, they contend that what we teach must be new. The gentleman who made the above comments regarding my writings was very familiar with the ‘great’ reformers of the past and their teachings and found NOTHING in my writings that conflicted with what they had said. Unlike others, he at first appeared to have no problem with the declaration that a person is lost before they hear and believe the Gospel. But what really struck him, what really hit him like a freight train, was when I mentioned that Charles Spurgeon was lost because he believed that though Arminians have a false gospel this did not mean they were lost. He admitted having had problems about some of Spurgeon’s writings and although agreeing that a person is lost who believes a false gospel, like so many, when names are mentioned and real individuals exposed, especially those of such a reputation as Spurgeon, the whole issue suddenly changes and to the minds of such people, these things just could not be right. In a way, it causes a short circuit in their minds to think that so many, who for so long were considered great men of God and spiritual giants, were in reality lost because though teaching the right doctrines of the Gospel of God, they refused to judge saved and lost by the Gospel. The big picture is so frightening to them that they feel compelled to look away and never set eyes on it again. To say that a man like Charles Spurgeon was lost is tantamount to blasphemy in the mind of many and no matter how much you try and reason with them, they will not hear what you say because it would mean the dethroning of such religious icons and, of course, an admittance on their part that not only those men, but that also they themselves, are lost. It would cause such a massive upheaval in their lives that their minds refuse to accept such a thing. If that is the bottom line to what we teach, if it means that men like Spurgeon are lost, then our Gospel cannot be right. This is the unreasonable thought process that runs through the minds of unregenerate men. Needless to say, the man never wrote to me again and never gave me a reason for his disagreement with what we say despite his previous excitement and glowing comments regarding my writings. I was tempted to write to him again and ask him what exactly his reasons were for ceasing his correspondence with me so abruptly, but Christ did not go chasing those who did not believe Him, and I am not about to do it just to satisfy my curiosity. This ministry is always open to discuss matters with anyone, but we will not hound anyone or bother anyone who does not want to know, who does not want to follow the truth and who runs away after hearing it. Those who flee make a very loud and clear statement by their action: I DON’T WANT TO KNOW ANYMORE; LEAVE ME ALONE!! We are dealing with adults and I will not wet nurse anyone who will not take an open and honest approach to the truth of God. I will love such people by praying for their salvation but what more can I say to them than what I have already said in my numerous booklets, which they all have access to on the Internet, especially when they do not want to talk about that which they disagree with. ‘None are so blind as those who WILL NOT see.’ And this is the interesting and very sad truth behind all this: that many people simply do not want to know. The fact that they do not want to know is what lies behind their claim to not understand. They seem deathly afraid of anything which comes along that even vaguely threatens their comfortable religious existence. I know the feeling well, for in my lost days of believing and following the teachings of Kenneth Copeland I immediately closed a book I was looking at when I realised that the author was critical of his teachings. I simply did not want to know, I did not want to admit there existed anything wrong in Copeland’s teachings. I just did not want to be proven wrong about him and what he taught. I was enjoying Copeland’s television program and his teaching tapes and simply did not want this to stop. And when people flee my teachings, when they cease all communication with me, that is exactly what they are doing. They are closing the book on the issue because they do not want to know, they do not want to have to stop what they refuse to believe are their erroneous religious ways! They look at you as if you were some alien fresh off his flying saucer and they often treat you with the respect one reserves for a child molester! To allow themselves to see as false that which they believe, and to turn to and believe only God’s Gospel, would cause such turmoil in their lives that it simply will not be accepted. One man, whilst not able to refute what was told him about what he believed, said he could not accept it for it would mean he would have to admit that for the past two or three years he had been deceived! This is not a made up story, it is reality. This is how real people really think! People like to think that they are making progress in their lives and that they are not wasting their time in what they are involved in. People just hate to admit they’re wrong at the best of times. And so, because of their unwillingness to even hear the truth, these dear folk label me and others like me as this or that and then go on in wilful ignorance believing what they believe to be the truth. In some cases, not even caring what the truth is, they are just convinced they are Christian because of the lives they lead and the lovely people they mix with. Those who claim to ‘see’ but who are without discernment, don’t know anything but are merely hoping their gospels are O.K. What a day these people will face when they hear from the mouth of God Himself what they had heard from true Gospel preachers. Some will think this an outrageous statement but all I can say is, try and prove me wrong! All I, and any other Gospel teacher, is saying is what God is saying. Go to the Scriptures and PLEASE show me where it says a man is saved whilst ignorant of the Gospel of God, or denies any part of it as essential to saving faith, or where any of the writers of the Bible ever said that a man could be saved, justified by God, who believed in lies about God, or who called blessed that which the Holy Spirit calls accursed!!

Again, there is nothing new about the doctrines I preach. The thing that really disturbs people, the thing which really gets their noses all bent out of shape, the thing they really oppose and just cannot swallow, the thing that has hit a raw nerve and caused them to act the way they have in breaking off all communication with me and other Gospel believers without even a goodbye or any explanation as to why they will not believe what we are saying, and why they refuse to even talk about it, is the fact that none can be saved before hearing and believing this Gospel. But what I am saying is no different to what Christ said: Believe the Gospel and you will be saved, believe it not and you will perish (see Mk. 16). There is nothing new in my doctrine, just as there is nothing new in the ramifications which come with not believing it! If the ramification of believing the Gospel is salvation, then why do people have such a problem with the fact that a person is lost who does not believe it? I mean, if you’ve got to believe it to be saved, what else is there to say about a person who does not believe it but that they are lost? To believe the Gospel to be saved is to say that before belief of that Gospel one was not saved. Seeing then that believing is connected with being saved, what else could unbelief be connected with but lostness, an un-saved state? You either believe or you do not believe; you are either saved or you are not saved. There is no doctrinal middle ground, just as there is no middle ground in eternity. One either spends it in heaven or in hell, and when it comes to the Gospel: one either believes it or not. Christ said ‘preach the Gospel’, ‘believe the Gospel’, so how can I be rightly accused of being some cult-leading, hyper Calvinist extremist fundamentalist fanatic when I say, along with Christ and all the apostles, that without this Gospel none can be saved? I mean, what is so outrageous and offensive about such a statement? AND WHY DON’T THEY ACCUSE CHRIST OF SUCH EXTREMISM? Oh, sorry, I forgot. This is EXACTLY what Christ’s enemies did in the Scriptures and what they still do today! If they call me an extremist, what must they call the Lord of my Gospel? Friend, if the Lord of the Gospel reveals that Gospel to you, you will see that such a statement is not outrageous at all but the height of biblically conservative thinking. It is a statement made after seeing the Word of God through the eyes of the faith which He gives to His elect. It is only ever seen as outrageous by those who do not count the Gospel of God as the power of God unto salvation for they do not believe it, but in reality count it foolishness! (see 1 Cor. 1:18) It is perfectly in line with what the Scriptures say. It is as black and white as what the Scriptures say about saved and lost, so how could it differ with what the Scriptures say? Belief and unbelief are as poles apart as being saved and being lost. It is interesting to note that no one who has visited my website and read my writings who have disagreed with what I say, has ever written to me to tell me their explanation of why I am wrong. None of them have actually told me what they believe the Gospel is. Nor have they said anything to anyone I know as to why they disagree with me. They all say I am wrong, but no one has yet to tell me why! They all say I am wrong, but no one has yet to present me with any Scripture that proves I am wrong! Now, I could understand their reluctance to contact me if I were an arrogant man whose writings oozed malice and hatred etc., which would belie a stubborn unteachable spirit. But as anyone can tell you, I am not that way inclined nor are my writings unreasonable and arrogant claims which are unsupported by Scripture. They are written with purpose but done so with a gentle manner according to biblical reason, and I would be happy to discuss the great Gospel of God with anyone in a civil way. The only responses I have ever had, that often come through a third person, which tried to defend the crazy idea that one can be saved before one hears and believes the Gospel, which is to say that one can be just as saved without it as with it, have all been based on experiences and sincerity. It is interesting to note that in referring to lost people as ‘them that have no knowledge,’ God said they "...pray to a god that cannot save" (Isa. 45:20), thus linking ignorance with false gods. Why did God say they pray and not they worship, or they bow down to? One of the reasons is that people who pray to false gods can and do have many experiences through apparent answered prayers. People in every nation and of every religion who believe in false gods, testified to in false gospels, all have experiences through their prayers to such gods. How long do you think any religion would have lasted if people didn’t get what they perceived to be answers to their prayers? For so many, these prayer-induced experiences are what they base their salvation on, convinced they are in contact with God and that He favors them. This also has conspired to blind man from taking the matter of doctrine, what the Gospel is and what it is not, very seriously. The fact that they are ‘communicating with God’ through prayer and that God is ‘blessing’ them is what convinces them that they are right with God. Though, to their minds, they sincerely strive for the truth, they ‘know well and good’ through their experiences of ‘answered’ prayer that regardless of what they know or don’t know, they are saved! With one man I knew it was the fact that he experienced an instant relief from a dependance on drugs and alcohol that convinced him he had found the true God and been saved. Though admitting much of what he believed at the time was what he now recognizes and calls error, this could in no way, according to this man’s mind, cancel out his experience as God-given. This man agreed with the doctrines I teach and could not fault one of them, but refused to judge saved and lost based on the Gospel of God. The attitude is: ‘If you believe the Gospel you are saved, but even when you didn’t believe it, or if you do not believe it now, you are saved too!’ This is the outrage, friend!! They refuse to judge saved and lost according to doctrine but they are happy to judge saved and lost by experiences and works!! What an insult to the Truth of God, to God’s whole plan of salvation, if one could be saved without believing in that Plan. To not believe in the Gospel is to not trust in the true God for salvation. If you do not believe His Word then you cannot believe in Him. That many who claim to be Christians judge those of overtly non-Christian organizations as lost, is due wholly and solely to the doctrines those people believe. Look up any book you like which exposes a religious organization as not being of God and you will see a book which focuses on the doctrines that organization teaches and how it conflicts with the Scriptures. Yet, interestingly enough, according to the way these folk judge saved and lost, if one believes enough of the truth, a certain amount of truth or certain doctrines, they will not be judged lost even though they hold to several erroneous doctrines concerning Gospel issues! Everyone is a theologian when it comes to the errors of Mormonism, or the J.W.’s, and there is no hesitation in judging such people lost due to their doctrinal beliefs, but when it comes to those who believe in more orthodox truths concerning God and His Son, but who still fail to believe the doctrinal detail which distinguishes God’s Gospel from all counterfeits, these people suddenly change to judging saved and lost by experiences, works, sincerity of belief and character and conduct etc., and not by doctrine! Believing enough is good enough, they say. One wonders what exactly is meant by ‘believing enough’. Is it to believe enough truth about the Gospel doctrines, or does believing enough mean believing a certain number of doctrines correctly. If either of these ‘rules’ is true, where may we find this explained in the Scriptures? Where is it taught that believing enough is good enough to be saved and who actually gets to define what believing enough actually means? And where exactly are the Scriptures that would back this up? Where is it written that to believe enough is good enough and that the rest of the Gospel doctrines which are not believed in do not matter when it comes to being saved, or that the error one has embraced will not keep you from being saved, and the doctrines will all be correctly learned during the course of one’s Christian life anyway and that even if not learned, it will not effect a person’s salvation? What a load of rubbish! The Scripture does not say, ‘God has chosen His people through sanctification and belief of enough truths’ but "...through sanctification...and BELIEF OF THE TRUTH" (2 Thess. 2:13), meaning the whole truth! AN UNADULTERATED AND IMMUTABLE BELIEF IN THE UNADULTERATED AND IMMUTABLE GOSPEL!! The word the immediately preceding the word truth in the above verse shows that the truth spoken of is a definite and actual thing rather than something subjective, or something ambiguous. A person is not saved through some second rate faith that believes in a corrupted gospel! Believing enough Gospel doctrines is NOT good enough, for the command is to believe THE Gospel, meaning the entire Gospel, the WHOLE Message and not just part of it. And believing enough truth (whatever that means) about the Gospel doctrines is also not good enough, for error would still be accommodated. Saying that believing enough Gospel doctrines but not all is enough to be saved, is like the fool who called his Chevy a Ferrari based on the fact both have four wheels! Or the man who calls his Volkswagen a Cadillac based on the fact they are both made of metal and have windows all around! If a person looks similar to you, does this mean they are you? Of course not. So too, merely because a gospel resembles the true Gospel in many ways, even if it includes all its doctrines but for one, it cannot be the true Gospel unless it is the whole Gospel.

It cannot be the true Gospel if it shares its power to save with any other gospel. There has never been any scriptural proof offered to me by those who oppose our Gospel, just mere subjective nonsense which would not only fail to stand up in a court of law, but would not even have the legs to make it as far as the court room!! Do not follow the words of men, but only follow the word of God.

Again, there are many Calvinistic organizations who find no problem in the Gospel we preach. But the difference is, they are tolerant of those who believe in gospels that are at best nothing but a hybrid of error and truth. To tolerate is to not penalise, which is not what one sees in Scripture, concerning those who do not believe the Gospel. To tolerate is to permit and to condone a thing. Now how anyone can read any level of tolerance into Jesus’ words that those who do not believe the Gospel will perish (Mk. 16:16), or in Paul’s words, that those who do not believe the truth will be damned (2 Thess. 2:12), is beyond me. The saved of God are not permitted to believe a false gospel, for no belief in error is condoned by God, which is why they are outfitted with HIS faith: that HIS Gospel be believed and no other. Tolerance is not how God deals with those who do not believe His Gospel, but punishment, vengeance and eternal damnation is how they are dealt with!! So much for tolerance. For some reason, the tolerators of error seem not to know where to draw the line between saved and lost based on doctrinal beliefs when it comes to those people who believe more truth than error. They have no problem, no hesitation, in judging a man lost who claims to be a Christian but lives an immoral lifestyle, yet they refuse to call a man lost who claims to be a Christian but is guilty of living a spiritually immoral lifestyle evidenced by their belief of erroneous, God-dishonoring, doctrines! What are they afraid of? Are they fearful of offending the one who believes a false gospel? Perhaps this is the crux of their problem, for they have no hesitation in calling doctrinal lies a false gospel, yet they contend that those who believe in such lies are saved based on their belief of them! To those who say they do not base their ‘salvation’ on their belief of those doctrines, I ask then: what do you base it on? Works? Years ago I asked both a Presbyterian minister and a very scholarly minded professing christian just how wrong one would have to be to evidence a state of lostness. This was during my pre-Gospel days when I was busy exposing error in false ministries, yet unaware of my own damnable error in believing a false gospel. Neither man had an answer for me, nor any idea how to answer my question. One Reformed Calvinist ‘pastor’, in discussing this matter, confessed to me that he had ‘no idea how much error God is willing to put up with in His people’ (when it comes to the matter of the Gospel). The answer is: NO error, which by its very nature contributes to the perversion of the Gospel of Christ, thereby revealing another gospel that God has not declared and another christ whom God does not bear record to as HIS Son, will be tolerated. And no one who believes in such error can be considered among God’s people, for they cannot be believing God’s Gospel. They cannot be promoting or believing it as the only power of God unto salvation. IF IT IS THE ONLY POWER OF GOD UNTO SALVATION, THEN IT IS THE ONLY THING THAT CAN BE BELIEVED UNTO SALVATION! You’re not going to be saved believing something to be true which God does not. Some will ask, ‘But how will we know when an error has actually perverted the Gospel and turned it into another?’ Any gospel that differs with the Gospel of God in any way to any degree cannot be God’s Gospel. ERROR IS THAT WHICH DISAGREES WITH TRUTH and is in no way compatible with it, so how can any believe that both will produce the same reward. This is why the presence of any error when it comes to what the Gospel is leaves a person with another gospel which cannot save. Error denies truth and no one who believes in an erroneous gospel can at the same time believe the true Gospel. To believe in a gospel which contains error is to believe in a distorted and warped gospel and not the pure Gospel of God. A gospel which contains error is one which has misquoted God, it has misrepresented what God has said, and is duly proscribed by God as a false gospel which cannot save. Error is the sign that it is not God’s Gospel being preached or believed, for there is no error in God’s Gospel. Moreover, it is not the size of the error, not the degree of error, that corrupts the Gospel and turns it into another gospel, it is the fact that there is any error present AT ALL that spoils God’s message and qualifies it as another’s message. Error is the spoiler. Error is the leaven which leaveneth the whole lump. Error is that which changes truth into a lie and THE Gospel into another gospel. ERROR IS NOT WHAT GOD HAS SAID BUT WHAT AN UNREGENERATE MAN BELIEVES GOD HAS SAID! Belief in error concerning the Gospel is something that can never be excused, or overlooked, but is always, always, always the identifying mark of a false Christian. Tolerant Calvinists say that a man such as an Arminian is saved despite his error. Despite the fact they say Christ died for all, thus making salvation hinge on a man's free-will decision rather than on the Sovereignty and grace of God. Such men say, and you can read this in greater detail in several of my booklets, including 'How Many Gospels', that they were saved BEFORE knowing the Gospel. Does this mean that though God saves through the instrumentality of truth, He also, in certain situations and under certain circumstances and with certain ‘privileged’ people, saves through the instrumentality of lies??? I hardly think so. How could the God of Truth save anyone based on lies? How could the God of Truth save anyone based on their belief of something God did not say? How could God ignore His own Gospel and save people based on their belief of a false gospel and still be the God of Truth? How could the Holy Spirit of truth, Who is never without His Sword, the Word of God (Eph. 6:17), be instrumental in the salvation of a man who still believes in lies? Does God save a man through sanctification of the Spirit and also prior to one’s being sanctified? Of course not. Then how could He save one man through belief of the truth and another through unbelief? Its either one or the other. You cannot have salvation in both cases, through belief and unbelief, for the two are diametrically opposed and God would be a God of contradiction and the author of confusion if He saved the believer and unbeliever alike. Yes, God saves the ungodly, "but He intended that it should be in connection with their believing;...It is the purpose of God to save His people, but He does not mean to save them as infidels, or unbelievers. He intends that they shall be believers first—and hence He sends His ministers that they may become such in order to secure the proper acknowledgement or recognition of the truth (see Rom. 10:14,15). The object of the apostleship, as it is of the ministry in general, is to secure the proper acknowledgement of the truth among men" (see Titus 1:1). God justifies the ungodly, He justifies the unbeliever, not by perpetuating their unbelief but by delivering them from it and causing them to believe in His mighty Gospel. It is the truth that makes a man free (Jn. 8:32 cf. Jn. 8:36). Belief in lies about Jesus Christ will only keep you tied to the apron strings of hell. The only way one can acknowledge the truth is if one has heard the truth contained in the Gospel and been given the Faith to believe it. If all the sins of God’s people have been atoned for, is it not right to conclude that the sin of unbelief has also been taken out of the way? For what good would it have done and what sense would it have made for Christ to atone for every sin EXCEPT that ultimate and unpardonable sin which keeps a man out of heaven, the sin of unbelief towards the Gospel of God which is a blasphemy against the Holy Spirit? The Scriptures are clear when speaking of true believers, the elect of God: "...God hath from the beginning chosen you to salvation through SANCTIFICATION of the Spirit and BELIEF of the truth: Whereunto He called you by our GOSPEL, to the obtaining of the glory of our Lord Jesus Christ" (2 Thess. 2:13,14). Notice here how there is a connecting line, an unbreakable chain of iron, existing between God’s sovereign election of a man, the Holy Spirit, sanctification, belief of the truth, the Gospel of God and the obtaining of the glory of the Lord Jesus Christ. Now, try and fit belief of error into all this as being acceptable to God and grounds upon which He will save a man. IT IS IMPOSSIBLE!! It would be like removing the Holy Spirit, or God’s sovereign grace-based election, or sanctification, from the process of the salvation of a man and still think that at the end of such a mess one will nevertheless obtain the glory of the Lord Jesus Christ. Can you imagine, for instance, the elect of God believing in all the Gospel doctrines barring the doctrine of the election of grace! All you, I or anyone need concern themselves with is not who has believed our report or how many have believed our report but WHAT IS THE REPORT! What is God's Gospel? What is the record that GOD bears of His Son. Incidentally, for those who are not convinced that ‘Who hath believed our report’ is a direct reference to the Gospel, may I direct you to Romans 10:15,16: "...How beautiful are the feet of them that preach THE GOSPEL of peace and bring glad tidings of good things! But they have not all obeyed the Gospel. For Isaiah saith, Lord, who hath believed our report?" (cf. Jn. 12:38-40). The word report actually means doctrine or preaching and as is seen clearly in our passage from Romans, the doctrine being preached is the Gospel of God. It means: "That which is delivered to be heard and believed." God has given us His Scriptures which show what His Gospel is and also what it is not and could not be, and the faith God provides each and every one of His people believes His Gospel and no other. This should be proof enough that God saves only through belief of His Gospel and no other, for the faith He gives believes in no other. The grace of God, through which He gives His faith, could never be the catalyst to anyone’s believing a false gospel. To not believe this is to say that God, by grace, gives His faith to people to believe in any number of gospels and that He saves His chosen through whichever gospel they happen to believe. How dishonoring to His Son, Jesus Christ, would it be for God to save a man who did not believe in what Christ actually did to save His people from their sins, but placed his trust in what He, in reality, did not do! IF CHRIST HAD TO PERFECTLY FULFILL GOD’S PLAN TO SAVE HIS PEOPLE FROM THEIR SINS, HOW CAN ANYONE BE SAVED WHO DOES NOT BELIEVE IN THAT PERFECT PLAN PERFECTLY!! If Christ had failed to fulfill even one part of God’s salvation plan, it would have been a fiasco and no one would have been saved, so how can anyone not see how vital it is to believe in what Christ did, and how foolish it is to say that to believe not the whole Gospel is still grounds for God to save a person. If God had overlooked the necessity of His electing by grace those whom Christ was to die for, how could any have come to Him? God saves a person based on what He gives His faith to them to believe, and that is HIS GOSPEL! If you believe that God gives His faith to a person so that they will believe any other gospel but His and save such a person based on this, you are in dire need of a Scriptural awakening.

If you have any concern or problem with any doctrine which makes up the Gospel we teach, then my advice to you is to bear down on it and study it out and find out, try and prove to yourself from the Scriptures, what the Gospel could be if it isn't what we say. Your task would be to first deny the Gospel doctrine that we preach from the Scriptures and then try and prove another doctrine as Gospel truth and prove it from the Scriptures and also show what the Scriptures that we use to preach this Gospel are 'really' saying. I have made this challenge to several men in the past and have received not a single word in reply. I told them they would not be able to show me what the Gospel is, not because of any inability on their part but because one can only biblically prove THE Gospel from the Scriptures and be right. Those of you who claim to believe the right doctrines which make up the Gospel of God, are asked to find in the Scriptures how a man can be saved without believing in them. How could a man who is not submitted to the truth of God be saved by God? God goes through all the ‘trouble’ of meticulously preparing and attending to every detail that had to be fulfilled in order for His salvation plan to be successful and then put that plan, and no other, into action, and then saves those who don’t believe it? It just don’t add up!!

Many people, who upon hearing the Gospel for the first time, do find the concept rather unsettling and they can be quite shocked and perturbed at the fact that prior to their hearing and believing the true Gospel they were not, and could not have been, saved; that there is no salvation, no provision made, for those whose beliefs lie outside the Gospel confines. They believed they were lost when they lived an immoral lifestyle or before they believed in the existence of God, but not while they believed fallacies about God and how He saves. Then what is believing in a false god if it is nothing but believing lies about the true God!! Am I to understand then that to believe "an incorrect or misleading notion or opinion based on inaccurate facts or invalid reasoning" concerning God and His Gospel is O.K. but don’t you commit such and such a sin or you’ll be lost! What do people think believing any other gospel but God’s Gospel is! A righteous act which God will reward? Name me a greater sin than not believing what God has said and not only that but thinking you can be saved believing it!! To believe what God has not said is to disbelieve and reject that which He has said. The initial shock that professing christians go through who hear the Gospel for the first time and then realise that it is saying they were never saved because they had never before believed it, is due mainly to three reasons: (a) the intention of the heart ie, the fact that they cannot see how a person who wants to be saved and is convinced what they believe is truth could be lost; (b) the conditioning everyone goes through who has ever been part of mainstream religion where a person’s claim to be a Christian is taken at face value merely because they utter the name of Christ, professes to be His follower and does it all with a smile; and (c) because man seems to equate an openness to religion as evidence that one is loved of God and therefore saved. They believe that because they are, in their minds, not against Christ they must be for Him. But Christ did not say this at all. He said: "He that is not with Me is against Me..." (Matt. 12:30). Every man by nature is against God and His Son, for there are none who seek Him. So we see then that to be with Christ, one must believe in Christ as He is revealed in the Gospel of God for none can seek Him who are not with Him. Before one knows and believes the Gospel one cannot be with Christ and therefore, despite what anyone might believe about Him and how sincere they are in those beliefs, they are against Christ, as is every person to whom the Gospel is hid. Christ, of course, was talking about Himself in the above verse and not any of the counterfeits who are presented in false gospels. This would preclude the man who performed miracles in Jesus’ name from being one who did not abide in His doctrine (see Mk. 9:40). To be with Christ is to abide in the doctrine of Christ, to believe His Gospel and no other. To be without Him is to be against Him. To not be against Him is to abide in His doctrine not that one can say His name with a smile, or have a ‘zeal for God’ that is without right knowledge of God. Most are aware of the doctrinal disagreements that abound, but in the current ecumenical climate these are not allowed to stand in the way of just about anyone calling anyone else saved. Only the ‘positives’ are accentuated and doctrine is laid aside, it is not focused on because anyone can see that many beliefs of the various religions clash. What comes as a shock to me is that there are some who are not even aware of the fact that the Bible warns about believing in another jesus. Not just other christs, but other jesuses. This other jesus is revealed by false doctrine, which makes up the various false gospels. In my lost religious days I believed, without question, that I was saved simply because I was a Roman Catholic, and years later because I had woken up to the lies of Roman Catholicism, asked God to forgive me my sins and for Jesus to save me. And when I joined the local Baptist church no one questioned my salvation, but rather had me up in the pulpit as quickly as they could, giving my testimony. Doctrine did not figure in the equation, and I don’t recall anyone asking me what the Gospel was that I believed. The fact that I asked God to save me and that I had ‘renounced Satan’ was enough for me, and those around me, to believe I was saved. And this, sadly, is the case with most who profess to be Christians. What a condemnation this is of the men who dare to call themselves ‘pastor’ who cater to a politically correct religious system where questioning a person’s salvation based on what they believe and calling someone lost because of what they do not believe is just not the done thing. As they ‘grow’ in their ‘christian’ lives, some people come to realise how important doctrines are but they never see their initial ignorance of right doctrine as evidence of lostness but merely as their days as ‘babes in Christ’. It is generally accepted by the rank and file church attendee that those in their midst are all Christians. Yes, many are aware that their beliefs and the beliefs of their comrades do differ, sometimes to a great extent, but for some inexplicable reason none of this is ever seen or considered as evidence that either one of them is lost. Believe just about anything you like and most congregations will be happy to welcome you in their ‘churches’ and call you brother. You might find a few there who would seek to discuss some of your beliefs with you and gently try and correct you, but throughout this process you will be accepted as a Christian. This is seen as being loving and kind and exhibiting the brotherly kindness spoken of in the Scriptures. In reality it is not love at all. It does not evidence the love of the truth of God, for it claims that one can be saved without it. It would seem that ignorance of the Gospel is no grounds for calling a man lost in the mind of twenty-first century man but is seen as an opportunity that just about commands some people to make sure they call such a person saved and to approach them with great tenderness, careful not to offend them by even hinting that they are not saved. The love of God is not merely gentle but it speaks the truth in gentleness. If one does believe the right doctrines but is what we call a tolerant Calvinist, their tolerance exhibits an attitude of compromising the truth of God and condoning error for the sake of ‘peace among men’. Baloney is what it is! God’s zero tolerance of error is made plain in His Word, in particular the verses that mention belief of the Gospel as that essential, indispensable component of salvation, and unbelief of the Gospel as that which shows one has not received the justifying faith of God, given so that His Gospel and no other will be believed or tolerated. If Christ was not ‘permitted’ to make a mistake in carrying out God’s plan, if He had to carry out God’s plan to the letter for the salvation of His people, what makes anyone think that believing erroneously about what Christ did will get anyone saved? To believe erroneously about what Christ did on the cross is the equivalent of believing that He failed in fulfilling God’s salvation plan perfectly.

What we shall look at next is what it actually means to believe a thing. Every word in the Bible is there for a reason. God does not use words as we do. He uses them as deliberately and with more precision than a surgeon uses his delicate instruments. An example of this is seen in the Gospel of Matthew where a man who came to Jesus addressed Him as "Good Master" (Matt. 19:16). Christ’s response was: "Why callest thou Me good? There is none good but One, that is, God..." (Matt. 19:17). Now, if ever there was a good man who walked the earth it was Jesus Christ, so why did He respond to His enquirer in this way? One can see by this that Jesus’ use of the word good was a whole lot different to how it was used and what was meant by the one who spoke with Him. The proof of this is seen in Christ’s calling no one good but God. By this we see that by good Jesus meant perfectly, flawlessly and interminably good, and not merely as basically good. Christ was saying, "Why do you give Me a title that belongs only to God? You suppose Me to be only a man. Yet you give Me an appellation that belongs only to God...And though the title applies to Me, yet you did not intend to use it in the sense of which it is proper, as denoting infinite perfection, or Divinity; but you intended to use it as a complimentary or a flattering title, applied to Me as if I were a mere man-a title which belongs only to God." According to this, we would be right in saying that Christ would never call anything or anyone good that had the slightest bad in it. Hence His calling only one good, that is, God. For Christ to call someone good they would have to be perfectly good which is what the word good implies in the first place, hence Christ’s question to the one who thought Him a mere man: "Why callest thou Me good? (when you think Me to be only a man)" To say something is mostly good is to say that a thing can be mostly perfect, which is to deny the proper meaning of the words good and perfect. A thing could not be perfect if it contained any flaw and a thing could not be good if it had any bad in it. When Christ commanded that His Gospel be believed, He meant it in the purest sense. To believe something is to believe it perfectly. It is to believe it wholly and not in part. Jesus would not have used the word believe to imply that a person hold rightly to some Gospel doctrines or to believe them in an imperfect way. Any imperfection in a person’s believing signifies unbelief when it comes to the Gospel. To believe means no less than correctly and fully accepting and abiding in what God has said in His Gospel. Does it sound right to say that in order to acceptably believe something, Christ meant not only believing it 100% but also that one could believe it 50%? How about 75% or even 90%? Hardly. If Christ had meant to believe the Gospel less than 100%, then He could not have meant to believe it 100% at all. Believe it enough is all we would be left with and if this were the case, then to not believe enough of the Gospel correctly would leave a person lost. But where are the Scriptures to show us what it is to believe enough and not enough? To believe is to believe perfectly and precisely that which is to be believed in. Of course, no one is expecting perfect belief of the Gospel as God knows it, but believing the Gospel as God has revealed it to His people. If Christ has said believe, then that is exactly what He meant to say. If there was any qualification to a man’s believing, surely Christ would not have failed to mention something as important as this. To believe God’s Gospel means there has been a perfect transition, a perfect copy, made of the Gospel from the ‘mouth’ of God to the mind of the one who believes. The Gospel is not something which man may interpret with his own mind, but is that which is written on his mind (and heart) by the very hand of God (see Heb. 8:10; 10:16). Only then can a man be said to truly believe. God would never call truth that which contains the slightest error. No one could imagine God saying a man was correct who said 2 + 2 = 5, so how can anyone say God would declare as His chosen child one who believed in a gospel other than His Gospel. To believe the Gospel is to believe the whole Gospel. As soon as you allow for one error to be believed concerning it, yet still claim to believe the Gospel, you’d be asking yourself, why not two, then three, four and so on until believing the truth that is the Gospel simply would not matter anymore—JUST LIKE IT IS NOW!! Truth is pure, therefore believing it must be just as pure, which is precisely why God gives His faith to His people for them to believe with. When Christ said believe the Gospel, He meant to believe it JUST LIKE GOD SAID IT—WITHOUT ERROR!! If this were not so, then the Holy Spirit would never have inspired Paul to say that any who believed a gospel which differed in its doctrinal content from the Gospel God gave Him, was accursed and not blessed (see Gal. 1). Christ told His people to preach the Gospel, not a reasonable facsimile thereof. So to preach a gospel that contained error could never qualify as a fulfilment of His command. The same goes with believing an erroneous gospel, which could never be the realisation of Christ’s command to believe His Gospel. A gospel which differs from God’s Gospel is made so by the error it contains, or by the exclusion of any of its doctrines. To be saved one needs to be perfect, to have never been born a sinner and thus to have never sinned at all. No one can fulfill this requirement, which is why God sent His Son to the earth to die for His people and establish a perfect righteousness on their behalf and charge it to God’s chosen so that they would be perfect in Christ. And, to believe God’s salvation plan as revealed in His Gospel, one has to believe the whole Gospel perfectly. Again, man cannot do this with his own sin affected faith so God has given, along with His grace, Son and Spirit, His faith to His people so that they will all believe all His Gospel perfectly. There are no flaws in, and nothing imperfect about, this faith just as there are no flaws in the Gospel it was sent to believe. To believe is at once to not believe. That is, to believe one thing is to automatically rule out any belief of that which opposes or which differs in any way to that which is believed in. Even if a person says they are neutral on a particular subject, they are not for if they do not believe it, if they do not accept it as truth, it shows that they do not believe it, they do not accept it regardless of any claim to neutrality. ‘I just believe whatever’s right’ just won’t cut it. Those who are not with Christ are against Him. You must know Him to be with Him and you must know the Gospel to believe it. Something must happen to you and your entire belief system for you to know God and believe His Gospel. You must repent of the false and believe only the true. You cannot just sit there and say, ‘I believe what’s right’ and not know what is right! Just as God knows those who are His, so too, those who are His know Him and believe the only Gospel that is of Him. One must know what is right in order to properly believe it and to repent of that which is wrong. To say, ‘I believe whatever God says is right’ is not enough, for if you do not know the truth, a person can present anything to you as truth and if convinced enough, you will believe it even though it is really not what God says at all. ‘Whatever the truth is I will believe it as soon as God reveals it to me’ is what some people say, but they do it whilst believing a false god of a false gospel. They do it whilst resisting the true Gospel and in ignorance of the true God. Often these words are said as a polite way of saying, ‘Leave me alone, I’m happy with what I believe and what makes you think you’re any smarter than I am when it comes to knowing what the truth is.’ Being smarter than the next person has nothing to do with knowing the truth. To believe the Gospel one must have it revealed to them by God and one must be given the gift of faith to believe it. The Christian’s believing is not of himself but is a gift from God. You don’t call on God for His Truth, but rather He calls you by His Gospel and gives you the faith to believe it. An empty bottle does not go about seeking someone to fill it, but must be taken and placed under that which it is to be filled with. The fact that I am saved is a matter of grace and not superior intelligence. It is not a matter of having an exceptional intellect or a high enough IQ but rather Divine Revelation. Salvation is by grace not works.

To believe that 2 + 2 = 4 is to automatically rule out, at least in the mind of a sane person, any belief that any other number is the correct answer to this equation. To believe that George W. Bush is the current President of the United States is to automatically rule out the possibility that you believe anyone else is. And so, though it appears to have escaped the minds of many who call themselves Christian, this same rule applies to doctrinal matters, namely the Gospel. To believe that the Christ of God’s Gospel is the Savior is to rule out any possibility that the christ of any other gospel can possibly save. Regardless of the fact that many today do not consider a person lost simply because they believe in a different doctrine or a collection of different doctrines, to believe one doctrine is to rule out all other doctrines that contravene it as being truth. To believe even one false doctrine is to come against what God says the Gospel is. Just like an equation can only have one correct answer, so too, there is only one plan of salvation that will work, evidenced in God only having one Gospel. If God’s Gospel were a number, anything which takes away from or adds to that number would make it a different number, a different gospel. To believe that God saves by grace is to automatically rule out any belief in the lie that says God saves a person, or keeps them saved, based on what they do. The fact that so many do not fully understand what the word grace means because they have never been taught that it completely rules out salvation by any work of man’s, does not change this rule. True Christians believe that grace, far from being a mere aid, or helping hand, to salvation, is the sole source of salvation. If a person says they believe in salvation by grace but conditions any part of getting saved or staying saved on what they do, it shows that they do not believe in grace at all (see Rom.11:6). And if a person denies even one of the ‘doctrines of grace’ as being essential to a saving knowledge of God, they too, are denying grace. To not have to know a doctrine to be saved, means one does not have to believe it and therefore it is to say that one can believe anything when it comes to that doctrinal issue and it will not affect one’s salvation. One can believe all the doctrines of the Gospel correctly, but if one denies even one of them as being a Gospel doctrine, one is saying that one does not need to know it, therefore believe it, to be saved. It is to say that the Gospel can do without it and that God will save you regardless of what you believe He says about that particular grace/Gospel doctrine. The Gospel is made up of doctrines that deal with grace, that teach grace. This is why all Gospel doctrines are essential doctrines to a saving knowledge of God, for each one of those doctrines brings glory only to God for the great things He has done and allows no room for man to think that he must contribute any work of his own to make sure his salvation. It covers all the bases as to whom the glory belongs for salvation. (see my booklet ‘To Whom Belongs the Glory?’) Anything which denies grace is anti-Gospel. Salvation is all by grace and to believe one doctrine that conflicts with a grace doctrine, such as election or the righteousness of Christ, is to do away with the Gospel of total grace. This is why Paul had no hesitation in saying that any gospel which differed from his was a false gospel, because anything added to grace turns the whole thing into works and ultimately bases the success of salvation not on God but on God and man. Scripture refers to the Gospel as "...the Word of His grace..." (Acts 14:3 cf. 14:7) and Paul later described the ministry he received from the Lord as his duty "...to testify the Gospel of the grace of God" (Acts 20:24). Leave out even one grace doctrine and you give a man reason to believe that some part of salvation is conditioned on him. The Devil is subtle. He will not deny the necessity of a doctrine to salvation knowledge without distracting his listeners from the severity and gravity of such an action by saying that this or that doctrine is far more important, or that what makes a man righteous before God—the righteousness of Christ—is all one needs to believe. The Gospel is more than one doctrine, and it is nothing without ALL the doctrines God has ordained to be part of it. What do you think God calls a gospel that contains some, even most, of His Gospel’s doctrines but not all? HE CALLS IT ANOTHER GOSPEL, THAT’S WHAT! And the last time I checked, God had still not saved anyone who believes any gospel which differs from His. The Gospel is nothing without grace, therefore any doctrine which has to do with grace is a doctrine that is essential to a saving knowledge of God. Beware of those who try to make the doctrines of the Gospel compete with one another and place them in order of importance. Salvation is grounded, it is based, on the righteousness of Christ, which includes His death for His people, but the Gospel which contains this doctrine is not made up of this one doctrine alone, it has others which enhance the beauty and the wonder of it. The Gospel of God is a Testament to the whole of His grace and not merely selected portions of it. Each of these doctrines is as vital as the other for a true salvation knowledge, otherwise God would not have included them in His Gospel. A gospel without all the doctrines essential to a saving knowledge, which the true Gospel contains, is not God’s Gospel, just like two ain’t three AND NEVER WILL BE!! The fog of confusion that has enveloped the minds of so many people has convinced them that regardless of how contradictory their beliefs and those of others are, all are believing enough truth to be saved. ‘What’ is being believed has virtually lost most of, if not all, its significance, all of its meaning, and the fact that a person ‘believes’ anything at all about God is the evidence that is good enough for most that such a person is saved. This leads me to an illustration I shared with my 6 year old son just a few moments ago. He brought in a pink balloon to show me. I remarked, ‘What a lovely blue balloon.’ He promptly informed me that it was a pink balloon and not a blue one at all. I replied by saying, ‘That’s right.’ I asked him, ‘Am I right about the color of the balloon merely because I recognized it as a balloon?’ ‘No,’ he replied. And so we learn that merely because a person calls a set of doctrines ‘the Gospel’, it does not mean that what they believe are the right doctrines, or that they are all the doctrines of the Gospel. Nor would it be right to say that simply because a person says they believe the Gospel, is it proof that they have faith in the proper Gospel doctrines. ‘What’ is believed has always been important to God. For what a person believes about God reveals whether they have placed their faith in man-made doctrines or a combination of God’s Word and man’s word, which can only ever fashion a god of man’s imagination, or whether in fact the true God has revealed Himself. People say it is not important what you believe but whom you believe! But surely WHAT you believe about whom you believe DEFINES the one you believe in! After all, "it is a man’s doctrine which identifies and distinguishes the god/God he worships and serves." It is what a man believes that reveals who he believes in. What you believe shows which road you’re on, whether it is God’s Road or someone else’s. Salvation is incompatible with ignorance of the Gospel, which teaches Who Christ is and what Christ has done, and the grace doctrines which surround this central tenet. The doctrines a man has placed his trust in will reveal whether he believes in lies about God, which is what false gospels are all about, or whether they believe THE Gospel of God which alone has nothing but the truth to say about Who the true God is and how He saves. A SAVED MAN, A BLESSED-OF-GOD MAN, BELIEVES WHAT GOD SAYS AND REJECTS WHAT HE HAS NOT SAID! The Scriptures show that to believe the Gospel of God savingly, a man must be given the faith that comes from God. The fact that he must be given this faith shows absolutely that he cannot savingly believe the Gospel without it, and consequently, that he will not believe any other gospel with it! Therefore, a man who believes in a false gospel cannot be justified. Faith is sent so that a man will believe God’s Truth and reject every lie that would dare present itself as truth. So, what a man believes shows where a man’s faith comes from, either from God or from his own sinful nature. To believe is at once to reject. As was said earlier, to believe one thing is to reject another, it is to repent of another. Salvation is not just about believing the Gospel, it also involves repenting of all that which opposes God’s Gospel. How anyone can believe they were saved believing that which they are commanded to repent of is another of life’s mysteries. To believe God’s Gospel is to believe that it alone is the power of God unto salvation and to reject every false gospel, and to repent of ever believing that any other gospel could save, no matter how much truth it contains. The Gospel itself says that no other gospel can save, in that each doctrine says what GOD has to say on a matter. For instance, the Gospel doctrine which declares that man is dead in sin, dead to God and without God and therefore without hope, is simultaneously saying that anything which conflicts with what God has said pertaining to man’s spiritual state after the Fall is a false doctrine, which is part of a false gospel which cannot save.

Another objection people have to the ramifications of our Gospel—which says that to believe in God one must hear and understand and believe the Gospel of God, and that before this hearing, understanding and believing none are converted, is:

This is an objection which I have heard from many, including a Presbyterian pastor who, upon hearing of our Gospel, phoned me to express his vehement opposition to it. Though calling me saved, he strongly objected to my saying that if one did not believe the Gospel, or believed they were saved before hearing it, one could not be saved. The main reason for this was revealed later on in his call when he presented the following scenario to me: "So when I cried out to God on my bed when I was young, are you saying I was not saved?" Regretfully, he did not give me a chance to properly explain what I believed before interrupting me, saying a few other things, and then hanging up. Isn’t it amazing how there was no love, or patience and a preparedness to listen and understand, shown by this man, yet he has all the love in the world for those who say they were saved before they believed the right doctrines of the right Gospel! I am sure that had I been a scripturally ignorant little man, this ‘pastor’ would have had no problem with me no matter what I believed. Scripture asks the question plainly: "How then shall they call on Him in Whom they have not believed? And how shall they believe in Him of Whom they have not heard" (Rom. 10:14). These of course are rhetorical questions which are making a statement rather than looking for answers. In light of the Word of God, it is utterly impossible for anyone to savingly believe in the true God without having heard the Gospel which reveals Him! The Word of God says that none can be calling on the true God if they do not believe in Him and that none can believe in the true God if they have not heard of Him, and that there can be no conversion without hearing, understanding and believing the Gospel (see Matt. 13:15). Now, what exactly this ‘pastor’ believed about God when he claims to have cried out to Him was never mentioned, but it was understood in the context of the conversation that he did not know the Gospel at the time he ‘cried out to God’ and therefore my question is, how could he have known the true God and been calling out to Him? Now he may well have known some truths about God, but any error mixed in with that truth would have ruled out any saving knowledge of the Gospel on his part. Religion has taught us that one can simply lift up one’s head, call out to God, and He will instantly spring to attention and do what we ask. But the Word of God states that to truly call out to Him, one must believe in Him, and no other, and to believe in Him one must have heard of Him as He is revealed in the Gospel. How can anyone call out to God before they know the Gospel wherein God has revealed Himself? Knowing a few truths about God, a few facts, such as He is all-powerful and His Son is the Savior and that He created all the pretty little butterflies and the big blue sky, is not going to save anyone for this is not salvation knowledge. The Jews in Romans 10 are a perfect example of this. They knew a great deal more than the fact God is the Creator etc., but it did not profit them for they were ignorant of His Righteousness, how He saves, and were therefore lost. Think of the apostle Paul prior to his salvation. Philippians 3 shows us how loaded up with religious credentials Paul was, and how zealous for God he was. But none of this was enough to save Paul. He was still a lost man despite all his religiosity and ‘knowledge of the Scriptures’ prior to his knowledge of the Gospel. It in no way means that purely because you know a handful of things about God this automatically means you actually know Him. To know God is to obey His Gospel and to obey His Gospel is what it means to truly know Him (see 2 Thess. 1:8). And you can’t have a personal relationship with someone if you do not know them. To know the God of the Gospel, one must know the Gospel of God. How can one obey that which one does not know? To know of God is not the same as knowing God. One can believe many facts about God and yet be very wrong about how He saves and therefore what God is like, His Character etc. Most religions know some truths concerning God, but the false gospels they teach show clearly that they do not actually know Him, that He has not revealed Himself to them. To know how God saves is to know what God is like. This knowledge comes only by revelation of the Gospel of God, by God. The fact that a person cries out to ‘God’ is no certainty that they are addressing the true God. Your sincerest intentions of calling on the true God are not the pass key to heaven. Sincerity is not the key to heaven. It is sincerity and truth that will open the doors of heaven. Man is not born again out of his own sincerity or because of any conviction that a certain religious experience he once had, or is having, came from God. SINCERITY IS NOT THE SEED, and therefore no amount of it can bring forth a new creature in Christ, for this is wholly the domain of the True Seed of Christ: His Gospel. Sincerity of belief is not the evidence, proof, or qualifier for salvation. What man believes, however sincerely, does not mean it is true even if there are millions who believe it. Sincerity is an evidence of conviction, but the issue is: is it a conviction based on Truth? The true believer is saved not because he is sincere but because his sincerity is coupled with belief of the Truth. That sincerity must be directed to, and centred on, the Gospel of God. Everyone believes something and most are very sincere in their beliefs, but it is WHAT a man believes that is the central issue and not how sincerely he believes it. You can sincerely intend to drive to Sydney, but if you are not on the right road you are headed in the wrong direction. No matter your sincerity, you will simply not arrive at your intended destination if you persist on travelling the wrong road. It is noteworthy to add that you do not need to be on any particular wrong road, for when you are not on the right road you are always heading in the wrong direction. Sincerity is not the key to freedom, it is the TRUTH of God which makes a man free: "And ye shall know the Truth, and the Truth shall make you free" (Jn.8:32). It is vital for all to realise that GODLY SINCERITY IS ALWAYS ACCOMPANIED BY GOD’S TRUTH. Joshua 24:14 says: "Now therefore fear the Lord, and serve Him in SINCERITY and in TRUTH: and put away the gods which your fathers served on the other side of the flood, and in Egypt; and serve ye the Lord" (see also 1Cor. 5:8; 2 Cor.1:12; 2;17).You cannot be fearing the Lord of the Gospel and serving Him in sincerity and truth if you have yet to put away the gods you have served, and disowned the false gospels you have believed. How perfectly all this ties in with the fact that there are none who understand or seek God and therefore none by nature who fear God (see Rom. 3:10-18). Sincerity without Truth always leads to false gods and false gospels. Many believe that their sincerity and well doing somehow offsets their belief in error; that failure to believe God’s truth is compensated by what a man does. But the good works a man performs and the sincerity of belief which motivates his doing, can never hide or excuse the fact that he rejects what God has said His Gospel is and has chosen another gospel, one which speaks lies about what God has said. This ‘pastor’ may well have embraced the Seventh-Day Adventist jesus after ‘crying out to God’, for in his ignorant yet zealous state he could easily have been convinced that the jesus of their gospel was the true one. Or what about the man who knows little about God, but what he has heard has come from Mormons or J.W.’s. Could he be calling out to the true God? His sincerity is not being questioned nor is his zeal, but as with the Jews in Romans 10 he may well have been sincere and had a great zeal for God but if that zeal was not according to the knowledge of God, as He is revealed in the Gospel, he was lost and remains lost today for ever thinking that he was saved without God having revealed Himself to him in the Gospel. The apostle Paul prayed for the salvation of the Jews, of whom he said "...have a zeal of God, but not according to knowledge" (Rom. 10:2), and representatively of all who would in the future have a zeal for God but not according to saving knowledge. They are ignorant of God’s righteousness and therefore cannot be submitted to it. No one can be saved whilst ignorant of God’s righteousness, for how can ignorance be conducive to submitting oneself to something which, due to that ignorance, is not known. None can call on Him of whom they do not believe and they cannot believe in Him of Whom they have not heard, so how can anyone submit themselves to that which they are ignorant of? Now tell me, how can a person who does not know God, has not heard the truth about Him as revealed in His mighty Gospel, possibly be calling out to Him! One can call out a person’s name at an airport but if two or more people present themselves, how will he know which one is the one he had to meet? Only if he knows the person, or has had them described to him, will they be able to discern. Again, the person who ‘calls out to God’ in ignorance of the Gospel could, moments later, be presented with false doctrines about the true God and believe them, and thus embrace a false god. I am not being pedantic, I am not asking a question that I have made up from some false concept I have devised about what salvation is and what knowing God is all about. I am simply echoing the Holy Word of God! YOU CAN ONLY CALL ON THE ONE YOU DO BELIEVE IN AND YOU CAN ONLY BELIEVE IN THE ONE OF WHOM YOU HAVE HEARD. And, in turn, you can only submit yourself to that which you are NOT ignorant of! You cannot be calling on the true God if you believe in a false god, and you cannot call on a false god if indeed you believe in the true God. You cannot be calling on the true God if you are ignorant of the true Gospel. How can a person holding to a false gospel possibly be calling on the true Christ, Whom that gospel does not and cannot reveal, and in Whom they do not believe? It would be like expecting the true Jesus to claim responsibility for something He did not do. Or allowing Himself to be yoked with one who did not believe the truth about what He has done, but in falsehoods. And how can anyone believe in the true Jesus if they have not even heard the only Gospel which reveals Him? If we love God because He loved us first (1 Jn. 4:19), then it proves that no man can call on God before He has revealed Himself via the Gospel. You cannot call on God and love Him before God saves you. SALVATION IS NOT ABOUT MAN COMING TO GOD BUT ABOUT GOD REVEALING HIMSELF TO MAN! If such were not the case, then salvation would be something merited by a man who had conformed to a directive. It would no longer be something given but earned. You cannot call on, trust in, or be submitted unto, the true Christ if you have not believed in Him. "In other words, calling on the name of the Lord is preceded by faith." If not, then one could rightly call on the true Lord before being given the faith to believe the Gospel which reveals Him! If there is no saving Faith present, which can only come by hearing the Word of the Gospel (Rom. 10:17), how can the one you are calling on be the Savior defined and identified in the Gospel? FAITH DOES NOT COME BEFORE HEARING, BUT BY HEARING! How can you be submitted to the Lord Jesus if you do not believe the Gospel which reveals Him? You may well be calling on the name ‘jesus’, but if it is not the Jesus of the Gospel, how can you be calling on the true Savior? No one has any right to say they believe in Jesus if they have never heard the true Gospel, which alone reveals Him. To think that God will save a person regardless of what they know and believe about Him is to say that God cares nothing about His truth, His grace, or how many lies a person believes about Him. It would mean that what God has done to save does not matter and is therefore not a factor in the salvation of a man. How would anyone be able to identify a false god if believing in lies about the true God could get a man saved? By their names? But what about the many false gods who go by the name jesus and god? False gods are identified by false doctrine. And, false christians are identified by the false doctrines they believe. False gospels may engender hope of salvation, but that hope can never be realised for it is not founded in the Gospel of God. Surely no one is foolish enough to think that one could identify the true God by false doctrines? Then how, it must be asked, could a man ever be believing in the true God who did not know and believe the true doctrines of His Gospel! It is to say that God will save you based on your ignorance of Him, based on what others say about Him as well as what He reveals about Himself in His Gospel! The Scriptures do not concur with any of this, for ignorance is the refuge of the damned! The Word of God says that belief of the truth, not ignorance of the truth, is the evidence that a man is saved. Sincere, heartfelt, belief in a false gospel, rather than being an excuse for someone’s salvation, is an indictment on those who preach and believe it. The man who is brought out of darkness and into the Light is the one who is saved, and the one who remains in darkness/ignorance is lost. Salvation is separation. It is to be separated from darkness to Light, from Satan to God, from error to truth, from ignorance to knowledge, from a false gospel to the true Gospel etc. It is not a gradual separation, but an instantaneous one! One does not become a Christian and is then slowly weaned off a false gospel, for the Christian is one who has been born of the Gospel. Belief of the Gospel comes at the point of being born of the Gospel. One cannot be born of God unless one is born of the Gospel which is the Seed of God. The Word of God does not say that anyone can be saved whilst believing a false gospel, but only those who are separated from such beliefs, who are sanctified by the Spirit of God for the express purpose of separating them from the ignorant and unregenerate who adhere to error, into God’s kingdom of Light where all His people—those who have heard, understood and believed His Gospel—dwell.

In a nutshell, YES! How could it be otherwise? How can a person be said to be saved if they do not know and believe the whole Gospel of God? To believe part of the Gospel is like saying that one can be partly saved. What nonsense! People can believe what they believe the Gospel to be, but unless it is what God calls His Gospel it is no gospel at all. One requires the whole of the seed of man in order to be conceived. And one requires the whole of the Seed of God in order to be born again! Those who do not believe the Gospel shall perish, the Scriptures say, so it is imperative that we find out what it means to not believe it. What qualifies as unbelief of God’s Gospel? How much error does one have to believe in order to show they are in a lost state? This is done by finding out what the Gospel is. Then, if one believes it one is saved, and if one does not believe it, that is, if there is any amount or any degree of unbelief towards any of its doctrines, or if any of its doctrines are said to not be part of the Gospel, one cannot rightly be said to be saved. All the doctrines of the Gospel are connected, they are conjoined, and so to reject one is to reject them all, for the Gospel cannot stand, it will not support you, if it does not have all the doctrines which God meant it to have. The Gospel is like a circle—all its doctrines are seamlessly joined, leading into and out of each other. If even one of those doctrines is missing or removed then one is left with a disjointed circle and a gospel which fails to fully distinguish every facet of grace required to save a man. It is to end the unity, the sequence and the coherence of all that God has done to save His people from their sins. Are you of the opinion that the Scriptures mean that to believe the Gospel to be saved is to believe in anything short of the whole Message? Can you honestly detect even a hint of this in Jesus’ command to believe the Gospel? When Jesus said "preach the Gospel" (Mk. 16), do you think He meant ‘preach some of it’ or ‘a certain part of it’ or ‘enough of it’? Did He mean preach all of it, but that preaching some of it would be good enough? Hardly! Christ meant preach ALL of it! If He said preach it He meant preach IT—THE WHOLE THING! There is no qualification implied, no element of adequacy in His words, nothing to suggest He could have meant preach most of it, or preach most of it accurately, or preach enough of it. In saying ‘preach the Gospel’ Christ meant just that: preach the whole Gospel of God. Paul stated that he had "...fully preached the Gospel of Christ" (Rom. 15:19), meaning he had provided "...a full account of the truth and terms of the Gospel", that he had "...not shunned to declare unto you all the counsel of God" (Acts 20:27 cf. v.24). Nothing short of this and nothing more than this could qualify as preaching His Gospel! If Paul the apostle preached and declared the whole Gospel then it is a given that to be saved one must believe that whole Gospel, for Paul described anything which fell short of his Gospel or differed in any way from it as another gospel, which obviously has not the power to save which only the true one has. To preach the Gospel is to preach ALL of it and so it stands to biblical reason that to believe the Gospel is to believe ALL of it!! How silly would a person be if they were to say, ‘I have heard the Gospel fully preached and I have fully believed it by consenting to most of its doctrines’. Believing only part, or even most, of the Gospel is not enough because in such a case the issue would not be how much truth one believes but why does one not believe all of it! If one claims to have the justifying faith of God, how come one does not believe the whole Gospel with it? Some of, or most of, is not ALL of. Why did the WHOLE Gospel have to be preached if the WHOLE Gospel did not need to be believed for a man to evidence salvation? If one claims to have the right key, HOW COME IT WON’T OPEN THE DOOR!! In order for a key to open a lock, it must be of a specifically contoured shape. A key has several notches in it and only one key will open a particular lock because only one key has the right number of notches in the right place and the precise shape those notches need to be in order to fit the lock perfectly and thus open the door. At first glance two keys may well look alike, and you may even have tried to open a lock using a key which was similar in appearance to the right key, but found that it could not open the lock. Simply because a key will fit the keyhole does not necessarily mean it will turn the lock. And a false gospel may contain some truth, it may even contain enough truth to convince a person they have the true Gospel, but the fact that it does not contain the whole truth of the whole Gospel is what identifies it as a false gospel and is why it will never gain anyone access to heaven. Only the key which was made to fit the lock will open it. Only the key which has all the correct sized notches in all the right places will not only fit the lock but will also open the door. If one tries to open a door with a key that is very similar to the right key, but which is missing even one notch, or that has one notch which is not the right shape, the door will just not open. So too, a gospel which falls even one doctrine short of God’s Gospel is a gospel which cannot save. This raises the question: ‘what is a man believing in place of the truth he should be believing, when it comes to the Gospel God has COMMANDED be believed?’ Those who leave a doctrine or two out of the Gospel are saying that right knowledge of the omitted doctrine or doctrines is not essential to saving knowledge. Not only this, but they leave the way open for erroneous beliefs concerning such doctrines to be mixed in with right belief of other doctrines and claim that such error does not affect salvation. Does it make any sense for God to reveal only part of Himself to a man through a few doctrines and then save him regardless of the fact that He has not fully revealed Himself to the man? Of course not. If only part of the Gospel mattered, then the rest of it would not matter. One could believe anything one wanted about the doctrines which did not matter and be saved regardless. To believe in God is to know God as He has revealed Himself in His Gospel and no other. He gave His Gospel to be believed and no part of it is to be ignored or thought of as dispensable. By ‘no other’ I mean gospels which contain partly truth and partly fiction about God, or nothing but lies about Him. That’s what a false gospel, or as Paul called it, another gospel, is. False gospels are either filled with lies about God or contain a mixture of truth and lies. The more truth it contains the more deceptive it is. Unless it contains the whole truth it cannot be the Gospel of God. So a gospel that does not contain all truth, all the truth God has revealed about Himself which makes up His Gospel message, cannot be His message because it leaves room for error and therefore cannot save anyone. If every part of grace is not covered by the doctrines of the Gospel then it leaves certain areas open to speculation, which leads to private interpretation and inevitably, works. If you have a gospel which allows room for a man to boast in what he has done, you cannot have the whole Gospel of God. For instance, if you have a gospel which leaves out election by grace you are saying that a man can be saved who believes that God has chosen him because of what he has done, or that one can believe that they chose God. How else can a false gospel be recognized apart from the erroneous doctrines it contains and/or the true doctrines it excludes? How else can a false gospel be recognized apart from the room it allows for man to think that some part of salvation is conditioned on his character and conduct? This is why, if it is a gospel that contains any error, or one which leaves out even one Gospel doctrine, it is at once revealed as a false gospel for, at best, it only contains part of the truth God has revealed about Himself in His Gospel and leaves room for conjecture, which can only lead to confusion. The presence of error in one’s gospel, or the absence of even one Gospel truth, shows that the whole truth has not been revealed and therefore one cannot be believing in it. Believing in some truth about God or even believing in most Gospel truths about God, far from being the identifying mark of a true Christian, always reveals that a man is also believing in something which God has not said, but in something which man has imagined. God reveals Himself to a man through the whole Gospel, the unbroken Gospel Message, and then grants the man the whole faith with which to believe that whole Gospel. The faith which God gives a man does not come in dribs and drabs so that it believes the Gospel gradually, for this would suggest that a man could be saved whilst still holding to error. Even if the majority of what he believed was error, he would still have to be considered saved because he has ‘begun’ to believe the truth. ALL THE FAITH NECESSARY TO BELIEVE ALL THE GOSPEL THAT SAVES IS GIVEN IN ONE PRESENTATION! God’s people are given the whole of God’s faith to believe the whole of God’s Gospel, for this is what is required for a man to be saved. The key to understanding this is that the faith which God gives justifies a man (see Rom. 5:1). Can anyone honestly say that God gives His justifying faith to a person only to see them believing in part of His Gospel? This would present us with the absurd situation of saved, justified people all believing with the faith of God but at different stages of their beliefs. Some would believe quite a few Gospel doctrines and others, who had not yet reached ‘such an advanced stage’, would be believing things that contrasted with the right doctrines of their ‘brethren’. ‘God saves this way’, ‘No, God saves this way’, is the situation the very Church of God would be in if each of its members did not believe the same Gospel with the same faith. Could anyone be so naive as to believe that even with the faith God gives, which justifies a man, a person could still fail to believe the whole Gospel message, could still fail to recognize all the doctrines which form the Gospel? How could God’s perfect faith lead anyone to believe in an imperfect gospel? How could God’s perfect faith lead a person to most of the doctrines which have to do with salvation but not all of them? And why would God allow such a thing? Anyone who believes in a gospel that contains error mixed with truth is believing in a false gospel and cannot, at this moment in time, be saved. Why are we so certain of this? Because believing only a few truths, believing only part of the true Gospel along with part of a false gospel is the best any unregenerate man can already do in and of himself. He does not need God’s help to believe God’s Gospel imperfectly, which is what the essence of believing a false gospel is. To believe God’s Gospel imperfectly is to believe it without the saving, justifying faith of God. To believe a false gospel is to believe God’s Gospel imperfectly, and therefore unsavingly, and evidences a faith which is carnal and not God-given. God’s giving a man a faith that could do no more than what man’s natural faith can do for him—believe a false gospel—would not make any difference to a man’s life. It would defeat the whole purpose of God’s dealing with a man by grace. It would serve no purpose, for salvation is incontrovertibly connected with knowing God and believing His Gospel, thereby being brought out of the realm of ignorance and into God’s marvellous Truth. How could there be sanctification—separation unto God—if one has not been separated from erroneous beliefs concerning the Gospel? Moreover, how could this ever fit with the fact that God sends His Holy Spirit to lead His people into ALL truth and to bring them out of darkness and into God’s kingdom of Light. Christ said, "I am come a Light into the world, that whosoever believeth on Me should not abide in darkness" (Jn. 12:46). Those who believe in the Christ of the Gospel are not in the dark about any part of the Gospel. The saved man is no longer in ignorance of what the doctrines of the Gospel are. A man cannot be justified and therefore have the faith of God until he believes the whole Gospel of God. A man cannot savingly believe one Gospel doctrine and not others. Any unbelief present is proof of the absence of God-given faith. Any unbelief of any Gospel doctrine reveals it is not the Gospel which is being believed in, for that is the only message, the only Gospel, God’s faith is given to believe. Some would argue, ‘But wouldn’t belief of even one or two Gospel doctrines be the evidence one had the faith of God, that one is already justified even though the other doctrines aren’t yet believed?’ What is being assumed here is that one can correctly, biblically, believe in some Gospel doctrines and not others. This is wrong thinking because it is contradictory. One simply cannot rightly believe even one Gospel doctrine and yet deny the others. One cannot evidence the justifying faith of God if one believes in anything that contradicts a Gospel doctrine. You cannot rightly believe that man is dead in sin and dead to God if you do not believe that all of salvation is all of God. You cannot rightly believe that Christ died for His people, atoned for their sins, imputed unto them His righteousness, and took their sin and guilt, if you do not believe that all those for whom He died will be saved. One can understand the individual doctrines of the Gospel and still not see and therefore judge saved and lost by the whole Gospel Message. To savingly believe one Gospel doctrine is to believe all of them. Yes, one can gradually learn more about why this doctrine is true and others not true, but saving faith is evident only when the whole Gospel is believed and all false gospels rejected. The scales may fall off our spiritual eyes gradually, but we will only be able to see when we are given sight by God. As the darkness is lifted one can begin to see dimly, but only when all the darkness is gone and the whole Gospel revealed and believed in can a man be said to have justifying faith. Otherwise one would be justified believing only part of the Gospel and not all of it and it would be impossible to distinguish a saved person from a lost person. What then would be the motivation of knowing the whole Gospel if one was saved believing only part of it? And how would one know there was more to be believed if one felt saved already believing what they believe? If one has the faith of God, what else can one do but believe the Gospel of God. How could a man ever repent of believing lies about God, that is, false gospels, if he still believes a gospel which contains some lies, or not the whole truth? How could God be the God of truth if He saved people based on their believing a gospel that was not the whole truth?

Not a few people ask the following very important question:

‘Just how small an error would it take to pervert the Gospel of God and thus reveal the person who believed it as lost?’

Many ‘pastors’ are at a loss to answer such a question and mentally throw up their hands in despair. But a careful examination of the Scriptures will provide the answer these men fail to give. We have not been told by Paul in Galatians 1, in his warning of those who came preaching another gospel, just how large or how small an error would need to be for a gospel to be called a false gospel. And this is something which some have latched onto as being the loophole that will admit into heaven those who hold to a minimal amount of error when it comes to what the Gospel is, in other words, how God saves. But Paul’s silence here on exactly what it is that constitutes a false gospel reveals more than one might think. Notice that Paul did not qualify his warning with some line about a person’s message being another gospel only if the error they proclaimed reached a certain level or the quantity of errors they believed reached a certain number. A false gospel was not to be judged so when its errors reached a certain point, according to the apostle, but in the fact that it contained any error at all! Paul left his readers with no doubt in their minds, and with nothing else to conclude, that if anyone was to bring a gospel which differed in ANY way, to ANY degree, with what Paul had told them, they were accursed people who believed in an accursed gospel. Such people all clearly evidenced a lack of saving faith. Paul’s succinct statements regarding what the Gospel was and what it was not, shows the simple reasoning of Paul that if what a person presented to the Galatians was not what he had told them, which was to say what God had told him, if they did not agree with Paul’s Gospel or claimed to believe it yet added or took away one jot or tittle from it, it would no longer be what God had told Paul and would therefore qualify as another gospel. The strongest evidence for this, that even the smallest or slightest deviation from the truth, from what God has said in His Gospel, qualifies a person’s gospel as something other than God’s Gospel, and therefore a false gospel, the belief of which cannot save, is found further on in Paul’s letter in the following key verse: "A little leaven leaveneth the whole lump" (Gal. 5:9). Leaven, as seen in Matthew 16, is symbolical of teaching. "By leaven the Hebrews metaphorically understood whatever had the power of corrupting, whether doctrine, or example or anything else....Leaven is used in making bread. Its use is to pass through the flour, and cause it to ferment or to swell, and become light. It passes secretly, silently, but certainly." Paul warned that only a little leaven is needed to leaven the whole lump. The word little here comes from the Greek word mikros from which we get our word micro, meaning very small. This is conclusive evidence which shows that when it comes to what the Gospel is there can be no margin for error! It confirms that even the slightest error when it comes to what the Gospel is, is enough to brand that message a false gospel. How could it not be so? God is an exact God, He is a precise God, and what He says the Gospel is, is precisely the Gospel a man needs to believe to be saved.

The best and quickest way to understand what a false gospel is, is to begin with the true Gospel. Then, if one is presented with a gospel that includes any differences, by way of change— either adding to it or taking anything away from it—one can easily see it for what it is. The Gospel is made up of various components, doctrines. If even one of these pieces is missing, or if one or more are added to it, one no longer has what God has proclaimed is His Gospel. If you have drawn a picture and someone erases part of it or adds a few things to it, it is no longer the picture which you drew. A false gospel is any gospel that does not say, strictly and entirely, the same thing God’s Gospel says. ANY DEVIATION IS A SURE SIGN THAT IT IS NOT GOD’S GOSPEL! To believe God’s Gospel is to believe exactly, not approximately, what God has said it is. Nothing short of this will evidence saving faith. An approximate understanding of the Gospel does not amount to a saving belief of it. A false christian is a person who does not believe exactly what God’s Gospel says. A false christian is a person who claims to be saved based on what God has not said, or a mixture of God’s Word and man’s ideas. If there is anything different about a gospel, anything in it which differs from that great Gospel of God, it is a gospel that cannot save, and the faith which believes it is not justifying faith, but one which is deficient and therefore not of God. God will not tolerate anyone who believes in anything that differs from His Gospel, and therefore who believes with anything but His faith, for He has commanded that people believe His Gospel and not one which merely resembles it!! God does not stray from His truth, He does not change, so His Message of how He saves cannot change. And so what His people believe that Message to be does not change. His message is not pliant, but dogmatic. God’s Gospel is flawless, so too, the faith which God gives His people to believe His Gospel is indefectible. God’s Gospel does not contain error of any size, and so any message that does contain even the most minute error cannot be God’s Gospel. If it takes away from grace and introduces, or makes room for, the works of a man, it is NOT the Gospel of God. If God did not put error in His Gospel, what makes anyone presume that one can be saved believing a gospel that contains error? No one can savingly believe the Gospel with the faith that is common to all men, so why would God give His people a faith to believe His Gospel which also could not believe it all, in light of the fact that to savingly believe the Gospel one must believe it in its entirety? All those, no matter what their appearance, rank, or reputation, or how respected they are as religious leaders or worshippers, are lost, the Scriptures say, if they do not believe the specific doctrines of that one particular and specific Gospel of God. IT STANDS TO REASON THAT IF GOD HAS A SPECIFIC GOSPEL, WHICH HE HAS, AND IF GOD GIVES A SPECIFIC FAITH, WHICH HE DOES, THEN HIS PEOPLE, ALL HIS PEOPLE, WILL, WITH THAT SPECIFIC FAITH, BELIEVE THAT SPECIFIC GOSPEL AND NO OTHER...AND THEY DO! Friend, those ‘few errors’ that are contained in those more ‘accurate’ gospels are precisely what the Word of God tells us are the identifying mark of false gospels! "A little leaven leavens the whole lump." HOW ELSE COULD A FALSE GOSPEL BE IDENTIFIED BUT BY ITS ERRORS NO MATTER THEIR SIZE!! They are the very thing the Bible tells us to watch out for! Error is that which has strayed from the truth and all who believe it share in its accursedness. To define the seriousness of the situation and how important it is to believe the right doctrines of the right Gospel, and to show that it did not take great error to make a false gospel, Paul’s warning was not ‘A LOT of leaven leaveneth the whole lump’, but that it takes only a little leaven to leaven the whole lump. ‘Pay attention to the tiniest detail of what you believe’ is what the Holy Spirit is saying through Paul, because a little false doctrine turns the whole message into a false gospel.

Some say, ‘But I know a person who is saved and they don’t believe what you believe, at least not all of it.’

I will not spend much time at all on such a foolhardy comment as this, for it is patently obvious that it is steeped in ignorance and naivety, other than to say, by what rule are you judging this person saved? Are you moved by their lifestyle? Is this what has convinced you of their ‘salvation’? That God has saved them because they are righteous and not to make them righteous. That God has saved them by grace, but He has given them a faith to believe that what they do has helped to get them saved or keep them saved. That God has favored them with His grace, whereby He has saved them perfectly but given them a faith that believes imperfectly, or allowed them to continue to believe with the faith which is common to every man by nature, that is never referred to in the Bible as justifying faith, and which has a propensity only for false gospels? One man who subscribes to such foolishness once said to me, concerning two elderly ladies he knew, "You can’t tell me they are not saved." Why not? If what they believe is a false gospel, why can’t I say they are lost? It is what the Scriptures say of them. Are you personally offended because I call those sweet old ladies lost even though I can back such a judgement completely on the word of God? You would be surprised how many people believe someone is saved though they have no foundation in the Scriptures to support their claim. Obviously the man, a Calvinist, believed these ladies were saved, even though they believed in Arminian doctrine, because they were in fact sweet old ladies whom he had grown very fond of and because they would not collectively or individually harm a fly and that they regularly attended ‘church’ and were kind and thoughtful and loving and caring, and despite their years and the regular aches and pains that accompany old age, still helped out at the local op shop and at church bazaars! What kind of nonsense is this to base a person’s salvation on and what an insult it is to God to say that He would save anyone based on their zeal, their sincerity, their harmlessness or for that matter their age, rather than on the love and belief of His Gospel. And what an injustice is served to these old ladies when the true Gospel is not preached to them, but in order not to offend, one tells them they are saved. Those ladies may well be exactly what he said they were, but they cannot be saved despite our warm and fuzzy sentimental thoughts of them, and the lovely image we have of them in our minds, if they do not abide in the doctrine of Christ!! This is not being harsh, it is LOVE IN ACTION!! What greater act of love can there be, short of dying for someone, than to tell them the true Gospel of the True God? I do not say these things because I take some perverted pleasure in saying they are lost or because I want to see these ladies perish, but because I do not want to see them or anyone else perish but to believe in the only Gospel by which God will save a man. Many think that doctrinal issues will be sorted out when we get to heaven. Doctrinal issues are meant to be sorted out here on earth, for Christ has commanded that His Doctrine, His Gospel, be believed because people will perish without it. Scripture says, "...it is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgement" (Heb. 9:27), not a Bible course in what to believe and what not to believe! The whole idea of believing the Gospel is that it be heard and believed before one’s death, not taught and learned after one’s death. Christ said that those who do not believe the Gospel shall be damned. This means that, far from undergoing a Bible course designed to teach them the Gospel upon their deaths, unbelievers will suffer damnation and be tormented in hell forever!! Others believe that God has mercy on the religiously misguided and disinformed; that the important thing is that they are religious and lead a good and moral life. But how does this fit with the Word of God which says: "...we are all as an unclean thing, and all our righteousnesses are as filthy rags..." (Isa. 64:6). The reality we must face up to and deal with is that mercy cannot overrule the Gospel. Love cannot overrule it; grace cannot overrule it; forgiveness cannot overrule it, nor can pity overrule the Gospel, for mercy, love, grace, forgiveness and pity all operate within the context of the Gospel of God and not without it. Just as God’s mercy, love, grace etc., is not to be found outside of Christ, outside of the Covenant God has made with Him, there is nothing but wrath that awaits those whose faith is not in, and within the boundaries of, the Gospel of God. No one can be saved who does not believe the Gospel. This is what Christ says, this is what I say, and this is the rule whereby one can accurately assess whether a person is saved or not. Salvation is not to be judged based on human emotion or sentiment but by the very Gospel of God, which MUST be believed.

Another complaint against this Gospel is one based on the false premise that we make knowledge a condition for salvation:

First of all, neither I nor anyone else who believes the Gospel, is making anything a condition for salvation. Nor have we come up with some new concept or new law, that one must believe certain doctrines before one can rightly claim to be saved. I am well aware of man’s natural penchant to believe that being saved, or knowing God, is all about some mystical experience or some inner feeling rather than on something as objective as believing with one’s mind the doctrines, or teachings, of God. The jailer who asked Paul "What must I do to be saved?" was told the exact same thing that we are saying: "BELIEVE on the Lord Jesus Christ and you will be saved." So does this mean that one cannot be saved unless they believe the Gospel? Of course they can’t! One would have to be physically blind as well as spiritually blind not to see this!! But this condition is not one that man must meet for he cannot; it is, like all the conditions which must be met for a man to be saved, conditioned on God alone, on His grace. Man cannot meet any condition for he is dead in sin. A man must believe the Gospel to be saved, for in doing so he acknowledges that he cannot save himself, and believes that the only way he can be saved is if he believes, acknowledges, accepts and receives the message of God’s Gospel which says He is the only one who can save and details the way in which He does it. The Gospel is God’s ‘roadmap’ for His people out of the maze of damnation every man is in by nature. If all these directions are not followed, one can never escape the labyrinth of the lost. Man’s believing can only occur by grace through faith, both of these being gifts from God. If there is no grace there can be no faith, and if there is no God-given faith there can be no grace. Man must be made alive by God and given the faith of God so that he will believe. It is God’s work from start to finish. To believe on Christ as Savior, one must believe what God says about Him and this record which God has borne of His Son is revealed in His Gospel alone. Therefore to believe the Gospel is to believe in God’s Son. No matter how many Gospel doctrines are rightly believed, one cannot be saved if one does not believe in the Person and Work of Christ. To believe God’s Gospel is to be saved. No, we are not saying that salvation is conditioned on knowledge, for the Gospel we teach says that all of salvation, from beginning to final glory, is conditioned solely on Christ Jesus the Savior, on Who He is and on what He has done. Knowledge is not so much a condition as it is an evidence of salvation. It is not something which man attains to but that which is given to him by God. What we are saying is that if one is ignorant of what the Gospel teaches about Christ, His Person and His Work, there can be no salvation, for how could it be that God has revealed Himself to a person and yet that person remain in ignorance and darkness concerning His Son? Scripture says of believers 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). This understanding and knowing is linked with believing the record that God has given of His Son. "...he that believeth not God hath made Him a liar; because he believeth not the record that God gave of His Son" (1 Jn. 5:10). So we see by this, he that believes the Gospel has the Son and he that does not believe the Gospel does not have the Son of God, and therefore does not have life (see 1 Jn. 5:11). The reason that knowledge plays such a huge and integral part in salvation is that God reveals Himself through doctrine by which right knowledge of Him is gained, and ignorance of that doctrine means the absence of the knowledge of God. It means the presence of erroneous knowledge or a complete lack of knowledge. One cannot be saved in ignorance, hence the essentiality of knowledge. Absence of the truth means the presence of error. IGNORANCE OF THE TRUTH IS THE MOTHER OF ALL ERROR. Ignorance of the Gospel is no free ticket to heaven, but is the evidence that one has the wrong ticket! An absence of salvation knowledge, which is only revealed by God through His Gospel, means the presence of ignorance concerning His Truth. False gospels can only tell you some facts about Christ. God’s Gospel provides saving knowledge OF Christ. It is not the knowledge of error, nor the ignorance of truth, which saves, but salvation comes through a knowledge of the Truth, which automatically does away with the ignorance that only encourages an abidance in error. None are saved who are in ignorance about Jesus Christ. On the contrary, ignorance of the true Christ is what a person is brought out of when they are called by the Gospel of God (see 1 Pet. 2:9 & Acts 26:18).

And, yes, the Body of Christ is a very special group of people and there is no other like it on earth. No other body of people comes anywhere near this group, for they are separated from the rest of mankind by the Gospel they believe which evidences that they alone are the children of God. Why is this so? By anything they have done? By any condition they have met? Of course not! And no Christian will ever tell you that they are special because of anything to do with themselves, but only because of the grace of God and the God of grace!! God’s people do not boast in themselves for they "know that in (them) dwelleth no good thing" (Rom. 7:18). Their boast is in God and they glory only in the Lord Jesus Christ and what He has done for them, and along with the apostle they each say, "...by the grace of God I am what I am..." (1 Cor. 15:10). They are not proud, but humble people, made so because they know they are the children of grace. They are the product of grace and therefore have nothing to boast of in themselves. The only thing which makes these people any different to other people is God Almighty! It is by the grace of God, through something the Bible calls "the election of grace" (Rom. 11:5), that these people are separated from the rest. They are chosen of God to BELIEVE His Gospel and to no longer remain in ignorance of it, of Who He really is and of how He really saves. They no longer live in a world of spiritual fairy tales about who God is and how He saves, for they now know and believe the truth. But none of these people go about boasting that they are the elect of God for they have done nothing to attract God’s attention or to merit His favor. They fully realise that before God showed them favor they were no different to anyone else, dead in sin and deserving of nothing but the wrath of God (see Eph. 2:1-10). That were it not for the grace of God they would still be children of His wrath. But God has chosen them for no other reasons than His grace, will and purpose and they are all mere benefactors of His great mercy. There is no great or superior intelligence required to believe the Gospel, for the Lord Himself reveals Himself to a man and provides the faith with which to believe it! In fact, the Bible says that "...not many wise men after the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble, are called: But God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise..." (1 Cor. 1:26,27). Therefore, to argue against this Gospel according to the viewpoint which asks: ‘What about those who don’t understand the Gospel?’ is to lodge a senseless protest, for it is God Who gives His chosen understanding and the faith to believe His Gospel. It is not a matter of intellectual assent but a favor from God that a man truly sees Him in the Gospel. The Scripture says that "There is none that understandeth (and therefore) none that seeketh after God" (Rom.3:11). As this could not be referring to those whom God has chosen, who now know Him and believe His Gospel, we see that this is referring to every man by nature. That is, the state of every man without his being given the faith to understand and believe the Gospel. By this we learn a simple rule: without the faith of God none can understand or seek Him, but with the faith of God a man not only can but does understand Him and believes in His glorious Gospel. The believer of the Gospel is not to be seen as some sort of intellectually elite creature who is tuned into some esoteric spiritual knowledge, but one who is simply blessed of God and made to see, understand and believe in Who He is and how He saves. "Blessed is the man whom Thou choosest, and causest to approach unto Thee..." (Psa. 65:4), and, "Thy people shall be willing in the day of Thy power..." (Psa. 110:3). The difference between the Gnostics, who were "followers of various religious movements in the early Christian centuries which stressed salvation through ‘secret knowledge’ (gnosis)," is that these people viewed "the material creation as evil.: They believed, however, that "Sparks of divinity...have been encapsulated in the bodies of certain individuals destined for salvation. These ‘spiritual’ persons are ignorant of their celestial origins. God sends down to them a redeemer, often a Christ who merely seems to be human, to bring them salvation in the form of gnosis....Since salvation is not dependant upon faith or works but upon the knowledge of one’s ‘spiritual’ nature, some Gnostics indulged in extremely licentious behavior." Now, if anyone thinks this is a fitting description of a true believer, or what we say salvation is all about etc., then I have great pity for them. The Christian man does not see the material creation as evil and he certainly does not believe that sparks of divinity have been encapsulated in certain individuals. Man is dead in sin. This means that he is dead to God and will remain dead to God, for in his natural state man is without God. Without grace, man will forever remain without God. There remains in him no spark of spiritual life but, despite all man’s carnal thoughts to the contrary and his confusing sensual emotions with spiritual awareness, he is spiritually dead to God. No true believer is ignorant of his saved state, that he has been saved by the grace of God through the faith of God and not through a work of his own. The Christian also does not believe that Christ only seemed to be human, but that He was fully human as He was fully God. The Christian in no way believes that because his salvation is not conditioned on what he does, he has license to live as he pleases. Paul addressed this accusation made by those who heard but did not believe his Gospel, when he said "What shall we say then? Shall we continue in sin, that grace may abound? God forbid. How shall we that are dead to sin, live any longer therein?" (Rom. 6:1,2). The Christian believes that it is very necessary and very important to follow the law of God and live by His rule, but he does not for a moment believe that his salvation is dependant on this obedience nor does his remaining saved depend on his character and conduct. This does not mean that Christians go about and live as they please, it simply means that they do not believe they are saved or remain saved by what they do or how morally reformed they have become. Salvation is dependant on Christ’s obedience and on His actions (see Rom. 5:19). Our works are the result, or fruit, of being saved, not what makes or keeps us saved (see Eph. 2:10). So, in all this we see the stark contrast between what the gnostics believed and what the true believer of God’s Gospel abides in.

The bottom line to the feelings expressed in the above objection is the same tired argument that says that God will save those who are sincere enough and faithful enough to what they do know, even though they don’t know much or are intellectually challenged when it comes to understanding and believing the Gospel. This kind of thinking readily appeals to the carnal, unregenerate mind because it leaves the way to salvation open for man to believe what he feels comfortable with, or whatever he is ‘capable’ of believing. In other words, though man by nature hates God, he does not hate religion and though he does not understand the true God, he claims to and thereby is convinced that the one he seeks must be the true God. This is a humanist gospel because it puts what man thinks and feels ahead of what God says. The reason why so many people believe false gospels is because of the absence of the true God in them! They have carnal minds which cannot understand or lead a person to seek the true God, hence their attraction to gospels that do not preach the true God. There is one thing unregenerate people love about the true God and that is His absence from the gospels they believe in! The first temptation man ever faced was a direct one from Satan. In the Garden of Eden Satan tempted Eve to disobey God by providing her with his interpretation, his version, of what would happen, of the truth God had told Adam, if she ate of the forbidden fruit. ‘Don’t believe it the way God said it’ was behind Satan’s words, ‘but believe what I tell you the truth is’. This is the foundation of all false religion. ‘Don’t believe what God has said, or what He meant by what He said, but believe Satan’s version of what God said or meant.’ Don’t believe God’s ministers when they preach the Gospel and say that none can be saved who do not believe it, but believe Satan’s ministers, as they provide a user-friendly interpretation of what God meant that is far more appealing to man’s spiritual taste buds, that makes provision for belief in error rather than pronouncing a curse on all who do not believe the Gospel. If it doesn’t suit your particular religious bent, then simply look for what does, is Satan’s motto. If those you preach to are getting upset at what you are saying, just change it to suit so that everyone will be comfortable, or just don’t speak about it at all! Scripture mentions such people, doesn’t it, in 2 Timothy 4:3: "For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine; but after their own lusts shall they heap to themselves teachers, having itching ears; and they shall turn away their ears from the truth, and shall be turned unto fables." The true ministers of God may not tell you what you want to hear, but they will tell you what you need to hear. The Christian is different. He is made so by the grace of God, whereby he has been given the faith of God to believe His Gospel as the only means to salvation. He will not turn away from the Gospel, because he has been affixed to it by the adhesive of faith! It is the Gospel he believes at the beginning of his Christian life and remains the Gospel he believes to the end of his life and beyond. There is no doctrinal metamorphosis after one has been born again; doctrinal allegiances are not changed after one has been born again, born of the Gospel, for being born again is a sign one HAS ALREADY gone from a false gospel to the true. Jesus is the Way, Jesus is the Truth and Jesus is the Life, and this Jesus is revealed only in the Gospel of God. If anyone thinks they can be saved without knowing that Gospel, or before they ever believed in the Jesus it defines, they are among men the most deluded. Woe unto those who embrace the darkness with open arms believing it to be light.

Only our enemies have said that we condition salvation on knowledge. Incredibly, even those who claim to believe the doctrines of our Gospel have falsely accused us of conditioning salvation on knowledge because we maintain the biblical tenet that those who do not believe the Gospel are lost. We have never said salvation is conditioned on knowledge and the word of God has never said this. Knowledge of the Gospel is not so much a condition of salvation as it is the evidence of it. Now, humanly speaking it can seem to be a condition, but not in the sense that it is something we must attain to. If Paul’s response to the question, What must I do to be saved?’ was believe, then of course one must believe to be saved, and one cannot believe if one is ignorant of that which is to be believed in. This is said, not in order to teach a man that he must meet a condition before he can be saved, but to highlight the fact he cannot be saved without the grace and faith of God. It is designed to take his eyes off of himself and onto God, the one upon whose grace ALL of salvation is conditioned. Knowledge of the Gospel is not an achievement of ours, it is not a condition we have met, but is the gift of God. Saving knowledge is therefore not conditioned on ourselves but wholly on the grace of God. If knowledge of the Gospel were a condition man could fulfill, in and of himself, in order to be saved, then salvation would not be something conditioned solely on the grace of God. So to accuse us of saying that before being saved we must by some effort on our part find out what the Gospel is and then believe it, is to present a straw man argument. By all means search the Scriptures etc., but if and when you come to a saving knowledge of the Gospel it will not be because you have met some condition, but purely because of the grace of God. The Bible says that there is no salvation without believing the Gospel of God. How then can one believe it without knowing it, without a knowledge of it? We have seen that the apostle Paul prayed for the salvation of those Jews who showed extreme zeal for God, because their zeal was not according to the correct revealed knowledge of God. No one is saved without faith and so no one is saved without the revealed knowledge of God that saving faith is given to believe. Again, how can our Gospel condition salvation on knowledge when it plainly states that all of salvation is conditioned on Christ? Yes, we must believe the Gospel but this belief, this faith, is a gift of God’s, not something we have attained through any independant effort of our own. IT IS NOT A CONDITION WE HAVE MET BUT A GIFT WE HAVE BEEN GIVEN! Therefore salvation is not conditioned on man, but totally on the grace of God and not on any effort on the part of, or any goal reached by, man. Salvation knowledge is the evidence that a man is saved and without this evidence no man can be saved or rightly be said to be saved. What those who operate within the bounds of the carnal mind have assumed is that we say salvation is all about man achieving a certain acceptable level of knowledge and that everyone has to reach that level in order to be qualified to be saved; that if you study enough and gain enough knowledge, you too can be saved, which by definition means that this knowledge is a work of man’s. But we join with the Scriptures in saying, the saving knowledge of God as He is revealed in His Gospel is not a work but a gift, a gift so indispensable, so absolutely essential to salvation, that one cannot be saved without it. The jailer who asked what he must do to be saved was told to believe in the Lord Jesus Christ. So obviously there is nothing else to conclude but that before he believed in the Lord Jesus Christ as He is revealed in His Father’s Gospel, the jailer was not saved. He did not have the right knowledge, so therefore his ignorance was an unmistakable sign of his lostness. So we see that, as with all of salvation, saving knowledge of the Gospel is conditioned on God’s gift of grace. Yet again we see the straw man argument being put forth by those who are so biased against the truth of Scripture that they cannot see their utter disdain for God’s own rulings, which underpins their rejection of our Gospel. A saved man is not one who has gained his salvation through his knowledge, but one to whom God has REVEALED Himself and has done so, and could only have done so, through the doctrines of the Gospel of Jesus Christ!! This is not semantics, but a matter of grace versus works. The Christian is saved because of grace, and through that grace comes the gift of faith to believe in the right knowledge of God as it is contained in the Gospel of God. You see, salvation is not about what man has to do or know to get saved, but about God revealing Himself to a man, bringing that man out of doctrinal darkness where dwells every false god, and bringing him into His marvellous Light where He, the God and Savior of the Universe, and all His people dwell. No man can savingly believe the Gospel without the grace of God, therefore a saved man’s ‘knowing’ is not a work of his but a gift from God. What gets a man saved is not his ability or inability to believe the truth, but God revealing that truth to him through the Gospel, wherein the righteousness of Christ is revealed, and providing the faith with which to believe it. Salvation involves both a revelation and reception of the Gospel of God. The revelation of it is by God’s grace and the reception of it is only made possible by God’s grace through faith, which He gives to each one of His elect through the work of the Holy Spirit. Importantly, this faith from God is given not so that a man will remain ignorant of the Gospel, not so that he will continue to remain unsubmitted to the truth of God and about how He saves, but so that he will BELIEVE it and thus be fully submitted to it!! Salvation, far from being something that a man can attain via knowledge, is a gift which comes by the grace of God through faith in the true God. No man can be saved without the grace or faith of God, therefore no man can be saved who does not know the Gospel of God, which is why this grace is manifested and why this faith is given.

Two verses that are most pertinent to our response to those who say that salvation comes before knowledge, are found in the first chapter of the Book of Ephesians. This will show the reader that there simply cannot be any evidence of saving faith present if one does not have the knowledge of the Gospel. "...faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of God" (Rom. 10:17). How can there be faith without hearing? And, how can there be hearing without the word of God? How can there be right knowledge of God if one has not heard His word? The following Scriptures will show the reader how utterly impossible it is to trust in Christ for one’s salvation before one has heard and believed in the Gospel of Christ: "That we should be to the praise of His glory, who first trusted in Christ. In Whom ye also trusted, AFTER that YE HEARD the Word of Truth, THE GOSPEL OF YOUR SALVATION: in Whom also AFTER that YE BELIEVED, ye were sealed with that Holy Spirit of promise" (Eph. 1:12,13). Can you see how perfectly this matches with what the Holy Spirit is saying in Romans 10, that one cannot have the faith of God that believes His Gospel until one has heard the Word of the truth of the Gospel of God? Note the emphasis in Ephesians 1 that Paul made by twice using the word ‘after’ in relation to when a man is actually saved. This shows that salvation is an impossibility, a figment of one’s imagination, a spiritual mirage if you will, if one has not heard and believed the Gospel. If you have not heard God’s Word of Truth—the Gospel—then you cannot trust in the true Savior. How can one have trust in the Savior before one has heard of that Savior through the Savior’s Gospel? Clearly, and beyond dispute, these verses are saying ‘YOU CANNOT TRUST IN CHRIST BEFORE YOU HAVE HEARD THE GOSPEL.’ How would you know what to trust about Him if that which reveals him remained a mystery to you? Obviously then, this shows that the Savior who is to be trusted in is ONLY revealed in that Word of Truth, the Gospel, and unless one believes in it one cannot believe in Him. Its like, how can one know and therefore identify what is hidden from sight before one knows what it is and can distinguish it from other things. The Gospel is hid from the lost, the Scriptures say, so how can the lost savingly believe that which the Gospel contains? The fact that trusting in the true Savior can only come AFTER one has heard the true Gospel that alone reveals that Savior, is at once a very simple thing that hardly needs any mention at all, and yet a most profound thing that must be made as clear as possible over and over and over again. The Scriptures show that one cannot trust—look to for salvation—in Christ and consider oneself sealed for all eternity with that promised Holy Spirit of God before one has heard and believed the Gospel of God. If what you believe is a false gospel, made up of nothing but lies about God or a mixture of lies and truth, then you cannot be trusting in His Son as Savior, but in an impostor! In other words, Paul is saying that there is no trusting in the true Christ, no being sealed by His Holy Spirit, without the Gospel. "The sealing was the result of believing, and that was the result of hearing the Gospel." THE ISSUE IS NOT THAT A MAN ‘BELIEVES’, BUT WHAT A MAN BELIEVES! Is it the truth or is it a cunningly devised imitation, or a fable? Doesn’t it make perfect biblical sense to say that if one can only trust in Christ after one has heard the Gospel, any christ—whose person or work would naturally differ from the true—who was trusted in before one heard the Gospel was a false christ? Now in light of these Scriptures, we challenge you to try and convince yourself that you were, or that one can be, saved before hearing the Gospel, and how you or anyone else could be sealed with that Holy Spirit of promise, that is, have God’s stamp of ownership on you, before you believe the one and only Gospel of God. Some have said, ‘But isn’t it enough to know that you are elect, and that if you are elect, you will be saved regardless of what you believe?’ Election is not the be all and end all of salvation. The error of those who express such a view is seen in the fact that God does not elect a person to salvation and then leave them in ignorance of Who He is and what He has done, which is revealed in the doctrines of the Gospel of grace, for the whole purpose of election is for God to reveal Himself to those whom He has elected that they might KNOW Him, the true God, and His Son Whom He has sent. God saves by the election of grace through the instrumentality of truth, not lies. One can be assured that before one believed the Gospel, one did not believe the Gospel, just as before one was saved, one was not saved. One can be sure that before one believed the Gospel, one was numbered among the lost, to whom the Gospel is hid (2 Cor. 4:3). To believe the Gospel is to say one is saved. Therefore, to say one was saved before knowing and believing the Gospel is to say that one was saved before one was saved!! Everyone agrees that there is no salvation, no saved state, before one is sealed with the Holy Spirit of promise, so what makes anyone think that they were saved before they believed the Gospel, seeing that one can only be sealed with the Holy Spirit after one has heard and believed the Gospel of God? People who do not believe in salvation without the Holy Spirit make the fatal mistake of thinking that one can be saved without belief in the whole Gospel. They fail to realise that the main purpose the Holy Spirit is sent is to guide God’s people into God’s Truth. Obviously then there can be no salvation prior to this taking place. BELIEVING COMES ONLY AFTER HEARING THE GOSPEL AND THE SEALING WITH THE HOLY SPIRIT COMES ONLY AFTER ONE HAS BELIEVED THE GOSPEL. The process of salvation does not begin and end with election, but involves the distribution by grace of God’s faith, which believes the Gospel. The fact that all the elect will believe is accentuated by Christ when He said that those who believe the Gospel shall be saved. Election is the forerunner of belief and love, and belief of the Gospel is always the fruit of election. The passage we have before us is perhaps the clearest evidence of the truth that no one is saved before hearing and believing the Gospel of Jesus Christ. That no one is saved who has not been blessed with saving knowledge of God as He is revealed in His Gospel.

One of the more ridiculous objections raised against this Gospel and its ramifications is made by those in leadership. Some so-called pastors and ministers, and even those who have the affrontery to call themselves evangelists, claim that what we teach is not the Gospel at all. While not disagreeing with the doctrines, they say that they do not make up the Gospel which must be believed in, and therefore are not essential to one’s salvation. Their interpretation of what the Gospel is, is revealed in this next objection:

The Scripture reference such people use to support this false and misleading claim comes from 1 Corinthians 15:1-4. But what they do not realise is, these Scriptures do not end at Christ’s death, burial and resurrection, which precludes these Scriptures from saying that a mere knowledge of what happened to Christ is enough to be saved. But twice in this passage of four verses we are told that Christ’s death, burial and resurrection were according to the Scriptures. "For I delivered unto you first of all that which I also received, how that Christ died for our sins ACCORDING TO THE SCRIPTURES: And that He was buried, and that He rose again the third day ACCORDING TO THE SCRIPTURES" (1Cor.15:3,4). The death, burial and resurrection of Christ, as mere historic events, is NOT what the Bible teaches is the Gospel of God. What it does teach is the death, burial and resurrection of Christ ACCORDING TO THE SCRIPTURES and not according to anything or anyone else as being part of the Gospel of God. The Scriptures spoken of here is a reference to the Old Testament, whose types and sacrifices all pointed to the coming Messiah, and to the prophecies made regarding the Messiah and what He would do. If mere acknowledgement of the historical facts concerning Christ’s death, burial and resurrection were enough to get a man saved, we would have to include every Roman Catholic, every Arminian, every Seventh-Day Adventist etc., in the Body of Christ. That what these groups teach about Christ and His death, burial and resurrection differ greatly is not what is focused on by many ‘pastors’. Simply that they ‘believe in the fundamentals of what happened’ is enough for these men to conclude that these people, though wrong in other areas of faith, actually believe in the true Christ and are therefore brothers and sisters in the Lord because they acknowledge that He died, was buried and rose from the dead. The fact that all these people are guilty of believing false doctrines that have been used to set up empires of false religions which perpetuate lies about God, changing His Nature and how He saves, is simply not considered, or just plain ignored, because it would complicate things. The fact that these people, Roman Catholics in particular, practice all sorts of Babylonian ceremonies and rites would not mean a thing if our enemies are right in saying that acknowledgement of what happened to Christ, and changing one’s lifestyle, was the evidence that a man truly believes the Gospel. The Gospel is what God says it is, not what a man believes it to be.

What Charles Spurgeon has said is the mind set that many people have adopted, in particular those tolerant Calvinists whom we spoke of at the beginning of this booklet, thinking it to be conservative biblical thinking. Spurgeon believed that a person became a Christian, that is, was born again, and then took either one of two roads: the Arminian path or the Calvinist path. Both Arminians and Calvinists claim to believe in the death, burial and resurrection of Christ, but what they teach about these things are markedly different. So different in fact that Spurgeon could see enough to recognize that the Arminian gospel was a false gospel, however, he continued to believe unto his death that the people who believed in this false gospel were just as saved as those on the Calvinist path. To call this outrageous is to grossly understate the issue which is at stake here. Spurgeon, on numerous occasions, had Arminian ministers speak in his ‘church’ and he referred to them as brothers. One of these men who spoke from Spurgeon’s pulpit was prominent Arminian, Dwight L. Moody. "Not only did he knowingly allow it, but he happily and unashamedly endorsed it." (please ask for a 3-page article on Spurgeon’s endorsement of Arminian preachers). Spurgeon said of the modern prince of Arminians, John Wesley, who once called the Calvinist god ‘my Devil’, "I can only say concerning him that, while I detest many of the doctrines which he preached, yet for the man himself I have a reverence second to no Wesleyan" (‘A Defence of Calvinism’). Spurgeon even went so far as to say that if two more apostles were ever needed, one of them should be John Wesley! To call a particular doctrinal system false but to say that those who hold to, teach and completely place their trust in, it are saved is to show oneself to be at best a spiritual buffoon and at worst a blasphemer of the highest order. How can a thing be so wrong, but the person who believes it be said to be so right? And this man, Mr. Spurgeon, is held to be ‘the prince of preachers’ and one of the staunchest defenders of the doctrines of grace, whose books continue to sell in the millions! No wonder people run when we tell them there is no salvation outside of believing the only Gospel of God, for they have been thoroughly conditioned by the works of Spurgeon and others like him to believe that people whose faith is in false gospels are saved regardless! This is seen as being courteous and loving! One wonders where Spurgeon got this thinking from. Could it have been from the apostle Paul? Did Paul say to the Galatians that if one was to bring them a gospel which differed from his, they were to be considered saved though their gospel accursed? Did Jesus say that whilst a person who believed His Gospel was saved, those who did not believe it, but placed their trust in another, were equally saved? NO!! Paul didn’t say this, Christ didn’t say this and so how one could ever reconcile what Spurgeon taught and his Calvinist students believe with what the Word of God says, is one of the great mysteries of our time. Spurgeon readily claimed to ‘detest’ the doctrines Wesley believed in, but why detest doctrines however wrong they are, however God-dishonoring they may be, if a man can be saved believing them? Why bother hating or detesting any doctrines for that matter if one can be saved regardless of which ones they believe? And so who cares what Christ accomplished in His death, burial and resurrection? As long as one believes these things happened to the Son of God, all is well. So are we to conclude that a man is saved by his belief of a false gospel? Some say, ‘Oh no, we are not saying that God saves people based on their belief of erroneous doctrines.’ Well, if the contention is that a man does not have to believe the Gospel to be saved, but that he cannot be saved if he believes a false gospel, what else are we to conclude but that a man is saved by what he does. If we cannot judge a man saved by what he believes, all that remains is works? But the Scriptures speak clearly that man is not saved according to his works but according to God’s grace. So then, are we to believe that whilst a man cannot be saved by his imperfect obedience, he can be saved based on an imperfect faith? It is not by a man’s faith that he is saved but by his works, is what is really being promoted by people like Mr. Spurgeon. Regardless of how many times Spurgeon wrote about salvation by faith and not by works, refusing to judge a man saved or lost by which gospel/Gospel he believes, shows that there is nothing left to judge by than by a man’s works or lack of them. In light of this, isn’t it interesting how often Spurgeon lauded Mr. Wesley for his ‘godly nature’, saying things like ‘he lived far above the ordinary level of common Christians, and was one ‘of whom the world was not worthy,’" whilst conveniently overlooking Wesley’s doctrinal atrocities. (‘A Defense of Calvinism’). If Wesley believed in another gospel, as Spurgeon rightly claimed but did not judge Wesley to be saved based on those doctrines which Spurgeon detested, what was there left for him but to judge Mr. Wesley saved by his character and conduct!!! What on earth is a man’s salvation based upon if he does not believe the Gospel? Perhaps a better question would be, ‘what COULD a man’s salvation be based upon if he rejected God’s Gospel and embraced another?’ The answer is quite simply, NOTHING!!! Before a man believes the Gospel, all he could possibly turn to for something to recommend him to God is his works. But seeing that the Scriptures speak clearly, that "...by the works of the law shall no flesh be justified" (Gal. 2:16), and that God "...hath saved us, and called us with an holy calling, not according to our works, but according to His own purpose and grace..." (2 Tim. 1:9), man has nothing to recommend him to God and therefore nothing upon which to base his ‘salvation’, if he does not believe the Gospel. There is no way one can possibly defend, from the Scriptures, the appalling theory that a man can be saved before he believes the truth, before he believes the Gospel. And by ‘believe’ we mean believe it to the point that one rejects any and all other messages as false gospels, and any claims that one can be saved whilst believing them, as coming from unregenerate people who do not have God. The doctrines of the Gospel must cover all of grace. The doctrines of the Gospel all have to do with grace, which is why they have been rightly termed ‘The doctrines of Grace’. As was said earlier, if there is room in a gospel for a man to boast, it shows that the whole Gospel has failed to be preached. This is why the Gospel cannot only be the doctrines which deal with the death, burial and resurrection of Christ, or even the righteousness of Christ, but must include all the doctrines which detail all that the grace of God has accomplished in salvation.

Sadly, no matter how much evidence one provides, no matter how much one may reason from the Scriptures, most who follow Spurgeon and others like him will not see. To deny a truth simply because one cannot come to terms with the ramifications of a provable, undeniable fact, is to close one’s eyes from reality and become willingly ignorant of the obvious. This is no different to the story of the Roman Catholic professor who saw clearly that the doctrine of the Assumption of Mary was impossible to prove from the Scriptures. He said, "...this is not possible — we don’t have a foundation in Scripture. It is impossible to give this as dogma." But rather than see through this lie of the Roman Catholic Church as evidence that she is not the Church of God, nor the bearer of His Gospel, the professor immediately reaffirmed his abiding Catholicism by saying: "No, at this moment I will be convinced that the church is wiser than I."

And so many have this same attitude when confronted with something that conflicts with what ‘heroes’ like Spurgeon taught. Wiser than I? Spurgeon wiser than I? After I have seen for myself what the Scriptures say and that what Spurgeon believed clearly contradicts it? Spurgeon wiser than I? Not on this matter he wasn’t!! To adopt a head-in-the-sand attitude to a teaching that is seen to oppose that of one’s favorite author or teacher; to claim people are saved, not on doctrinal belief but according to manner of life, is to say that salvation is in the eye of the beholder and that believing the Gospel can be whatever one wants it to be! All this claptrap falls perfectly into line with official Roman Catholic thinking which says: "Even a person who does not explicitly know the Gospel may be saved by a positive response to the grace of God, expressed in a life motivated by true love and charity" (‘Is One Religion As Good As Another?’) Those who are determined to not see will not change, for they are so moved by the reputation of men, and so fearful of life without them, they cannot come to terms with the fact that if what we are saying is right, then men like Spurgeon are wrong. So wrong, in fact, that they cannot be said to be saved men, but lost unregenerate men who stand in direct violation with what the Scriptures clearly teach. Such people are like the prisoner who has been locked away in dark solitary confinement, who recoils when light is allowed back into his cell. He has become so used to the darkness that for him the darkness is ‘light’! My open challenge to such people is have the courage to go to Spurgeon’s books, if you claim to love the truth so much, and see for yourselves, go beyond his ‘defense of the grace doctrines’ and see what he had to say about Arminianism and those who trust in its accursed gospel, and then try and find backing for such heresy in the Scriptures. Have the courage to be willing to see the truth regardless of what it will do to the reputations of those you admire so much. Can the truth ever be a lie or a lie ever be considered truth? What kind of an imbecile do you think the enemies of our Gospel would label me as if I came strutting down the aisles of their ‘churches’ warning people of a false gospel, but reassuring those that believe it that God has saved them despite their denial of His truth! Such a thing would be considered so ridiculous, so nonsensical, I would be laughed almost out of existence. What would be the point in warning of false gospels if those who believe them are saved? How can believing the truth be considered important if it is not essential to a man’s salvation? Those who are of one mind with Spurgeon cannot be of one mind with Christ. Importantly, no one has ever come to me defending what Spurgeon believed; no one has ever come to me to deny what I have said about Spurgeon. No one has offered me any evidence that what I am saying is wrong. They just get caught up in emotion and leave in a huff, offended that I would say such things about such a revered ‘man of God’. Some men I know who profess to believe in Sovereign Grace are simply in denial about the truth concerning Spurgeon, preferring to believe what they are comfortable in believing about him. They don’t want to be bothered with the facts! They refuse to believe Spurgeon said what I have quoted him as saying and refuse to check the documented facts for themselves. Why are they so afraid? And what of their alleged ‘commitment’ to truth? If they are so afraid to check the facts themselves, how loyal can these men be to the truth they claim to love and teach? Some have even gone so far as to say that someone else wrote these things in Spurgeon’s name! But how can this be, when Spurgeon’s autobiography, during the writing of which he died, included these statements, and the fact that the whole book was overseen by his wife. Prove me wrong, people, and I will gladly retract everything I have said. The apostle Paul spoke in the same breath of another gospel, another christ and another spirit. He said in Galatians 1 that if any came to the Galatian Christians teaching any other gospel than the one he had taught them, they were to count such messages AND those who taught them as accursed. "Let HIM be accursed" said Paul of the false gospel preacher and not only of his gospel, as did Mr. Spurgeon! When it comes to salvation, any message that is not God’s message is an accursed and abominable thing for it seeks to take the place of what God has said! It is as anti-Christ as the Devil himself! Likewise, anyone who believes such an ungodly message is just as accursed, just as abominable as the message itself. In works and lifestyle they may resemble Dr. Jekyll, but in doctrinal beliefs they are a veritable Mr Hyde!

There are, no doubt, other questions and objections people have towards this great Gospel of God’s, but none of them will hold any water. I have dealt with the ‘best’ of their arguments and objections as well as the most common, and shown clearly that there is no reason or rhyme to any of them. If you believe or know of any other objections to this Gospel that have not been addressed in this booklet, please do not hesitate to inform me so that I might also address them in future writings. I have shared with you those objections I have personally received against the Gospel and its ramifications, as well as others I have heard of. The sad thing is that so many people who claim to be Christian do not want to know the truth because they are happy believing their version of it. How many simply will not consider what we say because we are not part of some huge religious organization or because my writings are not leather bound, because I have no reputation to match the ‘spiritual giants’ today’s ‘christian’ gains great comfort and sense of security in following, and whose teachings are attended to as if they were the Scriptures themselves. It is an amazing thing to me that so many fail to view what they are taught with a critical eye, that is, until they hear the true Gospel! Suddenly they become suspicious and wary and then, with minds that are conformed to this world’s carnal and religious way of thinking, they do examine and question and almost always end up rejecting the truth. The only thing they look at warily, with any natural bias against, is the true Gospel. Everything else is seemingly automatically embraced, largely due to the fact it was presented to them in an environment to which they have become accustomed, and taught by someone they have respect for and feel trust towards. But all is not what it seems. How many ‘pastors’ out there and how many members of congregations have secrets they keep from one another? How many ‘pastors’ know that what some members of their congregations believe is wrong, but simply do not have the courage to confront these people in love and care, trying with patience to highlight their error and correct them. How many members of congregations know that what their ‘pastor’ is teaching, and what those around them believe, is wrong but who stay where they are, willing to compromise the Word of God because of the fellowship they get and the friendships they have made, or for the sake of their children who love playing with the other children there, who arm themselves with the excuse that if they didn’t go there they wouldn’t have any place else to go. Isn’t this a tad selfish? Isn’t this placing the cart before the horse? I mean, doesn’t the Word of God say that Christians should fellowship among themselves and not have anything to do with those who teach and believe false gospels? "Not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together..." (Heb. 10:25).This verse is so often used by professing Christians to highlight the need to attend ‘church’ somewhere, as if salvation itself hinged upon this act. But what is missed in their exuberant, yet ignorant, use of this verse is the fact that the emphasis should not be placed on ‘forsaking’ but on the word ‘ourselves’. Christians are not to stop meeting with other Christians, that is, Gospel believers are not to stop meeting with other Gospel believers, but they most certainly are to cease having any religious fellowship with those they recognize as not believing the Gospel of Christ (see 2 Jn. 10 cf. Prov. 19:27; 2 Cor. 6:14). How many ‘church-going’ folk have put doctrine to one side for the sake of some warped sense of unity and this desperate need which dictates, ‘we’ve got to attend church somewhere even if it means meeting with those who don’t even believe what we believe.’ I know of people who have been on holiday, wanting to remain loyal to this edict at any cost, attend a ‘church’ which is not even of their own denomination and which teaches contrary to what they believe! I have known people to even attend a ‘church’ that is ‘pastored’ by a woman, because ‘there was no where else to go.’ People say ‘no church is perfect’. Yes, but I haven’t said anything about waiting for a ‘perfect church’ to spring up before the Christian may attend it. The true Christian is to only meet with those of like mind who believe the same doctrines which make up the same Gospel God gave to His people and which is the foundation of the Church of Christ. Christians may differ on various things, but they do not differ on what the Gospel is, otherwise God’s house would be divided and therefore could not stand. There can be no union possible through diversity, but only division. How many professing christians do not give voice to what they really believe because it would mean disunity in the family or the loss of respect from friends and perhaps having to leave the assembly they have become so accustomed to. How many who enjoy this ministry and who have learned many things from this ministry, keep hidden the fact that while saying they believe the doctrines of the Gospel we teach, and who ask for my writings and tapes, they do not hold to the ramifications of it, meaning that they believe that they or others were or can be saved without believing God’s Gospel? People who think they believe the doctrines, but by their disagreement with the ramifications and their unwillingness to even mention this fact, reveal that their claim to believe is really a sham! People who think they agree with what this ministry teaches but do not judge saved and lost by the Gospel are only fooling themselves. Churches, like governments, ostensibly have one priority and that is to please and appease the people who supply the money that their very existence depends upon. They virtually could not care less what they did or believed. Every day ‘pastors’ are shunning questions, dodging and avoiding discussion, that demands they reveal their doctrinal position. Many of them hardly ever preach doctrine anymore, preferring rather to go the safe way and talk about ‘how to live your life’. Many sermons have become nothing but empty psychological pep talks rather than a time for the instruction and equipping of the saints! They despise controversy over doctrine to the point that they avoid doctrinal discussion at all costs for the sake of ‘peace’ and ‘unity’, rather than being lovers and promoters of the truth of God, making sure they do not compromise it so that REAL unity and REAL peace would prevail. What kind of deadly dangerous game is being played out there? Who do these people think they are and what are these ‘churches’ really about? These men are not pastors but hirelings who, by their avoidance of the real issues, display an apathetic approach toward the doctrinal care of their ‘sheep’. What are people thinking who do not believe what they claim to believe enough to separate themselves from that which they know is false and from those they know are believing in false gospels. One man has wisely stated: "He that hath truth on his side is a fool as well as a coward if he is afraid to own it because of other men’s opinions!" Christ said, "He that loveth father or mother more than Me IS NOT WORTHY OF ME: and he that loveth son or daughter more than Me IS NOT WORTHY OF ME....He that findeth his life shall lose it: and he that loseth his life for My sake shall find it" (Matt. 10:37,39). "He that is anxious to save his temporal life, or his comfort and security here, shall lose eternal life; or shall fail of heaven." To claim to be a Christian, and yet shy away from the truth that opposes what a person believes simply because it is not what they believe, is to be one of the saddest people on earth. To claim to be a Christian and know the doctrines of the Gospel, yet be unwilling to judge saved and lost by the Gospel and to stand up and own them before friends, family and foe alike for fear one would lose friendships and respect etc., is not only to be a coward whom Christ will say He never knew, it is to be a miserable coward, a wretch, not fit for the place where only the truth is believed, but rather is made for the horrors of hell where dwells all those who have believed in what God has not said.

Friends, the issue is not ‘Who hath believed our report’ but WHAT IS OUR REPORT? What is the report God has given to all His people of the spiritual state of man and what He, through His Son Jesus Christ, has done to save His people from their sins? For this is all that will matter on the Great Day of Judgement. Not whom you fellowshipped with; not what you did for the sake of ‘peace ‘ and ‘unity’. Not how often you attended ‘church’. But what did you believe? Was it God’s Gospel or a gospel which He did not author? What is the Gospel? What is not the Gospel? Can belief of any gospel be enough to save a man or must it be the one and only Gospel of God? Are the Scriptures indifferent to what a man believes and is man saved because he is merely sincere and moral? If one did not believe the truth, the sole ‘defense’ will be that one certainly intended to believe it. The road to Hell is paved with good intentions! Being sincere and believing that one believes enough to be saved and is constantly in the process of learning more and more and getting their theology straightened out now and then, is not the condition of a saved man. The saved man’s knowledge of the Gospel of God IS NOT a work in progress! The straightening out happens before one is saved, just as the dragging of a fishing net is done before the fish are loaded into the boat. God drags His people to the shore of life certainly, but they are not out of the water before they arrive on the shore (see Jn. 6). And so we see that a man is not saved whilst in error of what the Gospel is, which is nothing but unbelief, and therefore Who God is and what His Son has done, knowledge of which is the essence of THE Gospel, but only AFTER he has heard, understood and believed the Gospel of God. Yes, a man does learn more and more about the great doctrines of the Gospel, his detailed knowledge of them will increase, but this occurs only after he has become a believer of those doctrines, which make up the Gospel. Where are the Scriptures that support a man’s being saved without belief of the truth, without his being sanctified, separated from darkness to Light, from error to truth, from ignorance of God to the truth of God? To be separated from darkness to light, from error to truth and from ignorance of the Gospel to belief of the Gospel, is to be separated from a false god to the true God.

Some have pitifully raised the case of the thief on the cross in a vain and desperate attempt to find support for their claim that one does not need to know the doctrines of the Gospel to be saved. Surely the reader is not going to subscribe to this smokescreen, which attempts to build a doctrine based on a single verse! If I were presenting to you my claims based on one verse—WOW! What kind of reaction do you think I would get! I would be ridiculed and called a cult leader! Yet when the religious establishment tries to do this, suddenly we are to take such a claim seriously. What rubbish! The thief on the cross repented of his verbally abusing the Lord on the cross for a reason. Jesus spent six hours on the cross. Does anyone believe that for six whole hours He remained silent? If not, what do you think He would have told those two thieves either side of Him and anyone else within earshot? The Gospel of course! This is no argument from silence, as some have alleged, but a fact based on what the whole of Scripture says a man’s salvation is based upon: belief of the Gospel of God. Preach the Gospel to every creature was no mere command of the Lord to His people, but a rule which He also lived by. The enemies of the cross try and convince us that in some ‘special’ cases, like that of the thief on the cross, God will save a man despite his ignorance of the Gospel, of what he needs to have knowledge of, trust in and have faith towards, in order to be saved. Are we to understand then that a man who is in the process of dying does not need to hear the Gospel? That in such cases, if they show remorse God will save them regardless of their unbelief towards His Gospel and therefore showing ignorance of Who God is? Should we take the following approach in the case of a dying man: don’t preach the Gospel to him at all for he might reject it, so just get him to repent of his sinful life and ‘call out to God’ to save him. What a slap in the face of God and His Son and the Holy Spirit—all that They are and all They have done—and the Gospel this would be. So then, if all one needs to do is be remorseful over one’s sins to be saved, according to these people, let us not go about preaching the Gospel to every creature, but let us make sure people remain in ignorance of it and then all they will need to do to be saved is feel sorry for their sins! Clearly, this whole line of thinking when followed to its conclusion leaves us at a dead-end with nowhere to go. Jesus Christ preached the Gospel to those thieves and one of them, by the grace of God, was given ears to hear and a mind to understand and the faith to believe it and be saved. God does not save based on ignorance of the Gospel but on belief of the Gospel! You cannot yoke salvation with ignorance! Salvation is all about rescuing man from his ignorance of God. It does not take a six-year course to hear the Gospel. It does not require some high brow Bible study course to present it. The Gospel is made up of simple doctrines which can be presented in a matter of minutes and understood, when a person is given the faith to believe it, in seconds. All the doctrines of the Gospel are based on a principle, the principle of grace. So from the witness of Scripture as a whole concerning what it takes to be saved, the means God uses, we can be certain that Christ preached the Gospel on the cross and that one man, at least, believed it and was saved. All believe that none can be saved without being sanctified, so too, none are saved without belief of God’s Gospel. We all know that without regeneration by the Holy Spirit of God none are saved. And Scripture says that the Holy Spirit quickens those who are God’s elect and for whom Christ died. And with what does He quicken them? The Word of Truth and the faith to believe it (see Jn. 6:63). James says "Of His own will begat He us with the Word of truth..." (Jas. 1:18 cf. 1 Cor. 4:15; 1 Pet. 1:23,25). Why is it that whilst people believe that to be saved one must be regenerated and sanctified by the Holy Spirit, they place little or no emphasis on the fact that one must also love, therefore know and believe, the truth! Is it because there are so many interpretations of what the truth is? And that doctrinal issues are seen as always being the cause for argument and debate rather than peace and unity. But surely, the fact that there are many interpretations of the Gospel can never deny the reality that there is only one true Gospel and that man must believe that Gospel to be saved. The Scriptures reveal that Christians pray for the salvation of those who are ignorant of the truth. Christians do not thank God that a person is saved when they express ignorance of what the Gospel is. People argue that the thief on the cross did not know doctrine. But friends, this man had the Lord of the universe hanging on the cross right next to him for SIX HOURS! The great atonement of the sins of God’s people was taking place right next to this elected man of God, and you think that Christ remained silent? That He did not tell the great salvation plan to this chosen man of God, whom He knew He was dying for? What do you think Christ said on the cross? Do you think He talked to him about the weather or how nice the view was from Calvary’s hill? OF COURSE NOT!!! Did this man just ‘miraculously’ repent because he saw how the Man next to him was dying differently to him and his friend, or that when he mocked Him Christ did not retaliate and curse him? Did he somehow know that this man was the Savior of the world simply by His silence? The truth must be communicated if it is to be believed! "Knowledge of God is not a prerequisite of salvation; it is an inevitable and immediate result of salvation. God does not save someone and then leave him ignorant of the Gospel for a time." According to some people, the thief on the cross could have believed anything about salvation and been completely ignorant of how God saves and still have been regenerated by the Spirit of God! This would imply that the Holy Spirit sometimes lays aside His Sword, which is the Word of God, that He does not need it, for He can quicken some of the elect without it! If knowledge of the truth is not the prime evidence of salvation, then who are we to say who is saved and who is lost. As one man has put it, "Who are we to judge a Muslim or a Satanist to be lost..." When God saves a person He gives them the knowledge of His Gospel. The Word of God says that despite great religious zeal, one is lost if one is not given this knowledge (Rom. 10:1-4). The Word of God reveals the sister doctrines which salvation could not exist without: SANCTIFICATION and BELIEF OF THE TRUTH!! (2 Thess. 2:13). To have eternal life is to KNOW God: "...that He should give eternal life to as many as Thou hast given Him. And this is life eternal, THAT THEY MIGHT KNOW THEE the only true God, and Jesus Christ, Whom Thou hast sent" (Jn. 17:2,3). The Lord says in Jeremiah 9:24 "...let him that glorieth glory in this, THAT HE UNDERSTANDETH AND KNOWETH ME..." Those who are ignorant of the Gospel are not among the saved, for "...they have NO KNOWLEDGE...and (therefore) pray unto a god that cannot save" (Isa. 45:20). If one has not the knowledge of God revealed in His Gospel, how can one be praying to God? The Gospel is hidden, and therefore not believed in, ONLY from those who are lost, NEVER the saved (2 Cor. 4:3). The saved are those to whom the Gospel is revealed and therefore they believe it and are no longer ignorant of it. They don’t go around saying one can be saved before knowledge of the Gospel, or whilst the Gospel is hid from them, but that only after this Gospel is revealed can a man abide where salvation resides. Those who try to use the thief on the cross as a serious attempt to debunk the fact that without knowledge of the Gospel of God there can be no salvation "...try to make the fact that salvation is of the Lord incompatible with the fact that all saved people believe certain truths. In doing so (they) twist the Scriptures to (their) own destruction...Theology does not save. Theology does not play a part in the ground of salvation. Knowledge of doctrine is not a prerequisite to salvation. But when the Sovereign God saves someone, He sovereignly GIVES that person the KNOWLEDGE of Gospel DOCTRINE..." People think that all one has to do is ‘believe in Jesus’. Yes, but which Jesus are we to believe in? The Mormon jesus, the J.W. jesus, the Arminian jesus, the Roman Catholic jesus, the Charismatic jesus, the Faith movement jesus, the New Age jesus, the Muslim jesus, the Seventh-Day Adventist jesus, the Christian Science jesus, the Buddhist jesus, the Spiritist jesus, the Masonic jesus, the jesus of the Shakers or the Quakers, or the jesus of Scientology? Which Jesus do we believe in and how will we know the true one, how will we identify Him? Paul the apostle warned of another jesus (2 Cor. 11:4), so how do we know we have the true Jesus and not this other jesus? BY DOCTRINE!!! God identifies His Son for His people in and by His Word! God does not do this by any other way than by means of His mighty Gospel, and the thief on the cross could never have repented, never have been saved, never joined the true Jesus in Paradise that very day, without the saving knowledge of the Gospel of Jesus Christ that reveals, among other things, the only ground upon which anyone can be saved: the Righteousness of Jesus Christ. That anyone can think that this man was saved in ignorance of all this is testament to the fact that they themselves are ignorant of it and that the Gospel remains hidden from them and that they themselves are lost. So many have almost invented a new religion which bases its salvation on ignorance of the truth rather than love and belief of it. They see the gaining of knowledge and the belief of truth as something that is not compatible with a merciful and loving God who has great empathy for His creation. Little do these people realise that God’s love and mercy and empathy are expressed and released towards His people by giving them the knowledge of the truth of the Gospel WHEREIN He is revealed and whereby they can know of Him and how He saves! YOU CANNOT KNOW GOD IF YOU DO NOT KNOW THE TRUTH ABOUT HIM!! People think that the command, "...Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved..." (Acts 16:31), "is devoid of a command to believe doctrine. Well...I challenge you to define for me ‘the Lord Jesus Christ’ without using any doctrine. If you command people to ‘Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ,’ what are you commanding people to believe? Is ‘the Lord Jesus Christ’ a wombat? A dog? A tree? A river? No, you say? He’s the Son of God? Uh-oh - you just brought THEOLOGY into the picture. You brought the DOCTRINE of Christ’s Person into the picture. You can’t do that. And what about this ‘Lord Jesus Christ’? What did He do? Did He live a normal life and die of old age? Did He sin just like the rest of us? No, you say? He lived a perfectly righteous life and died on the cross for people? Uh-oh - you just brought THEOLOGY into the picture again. You brought the DOCTRINE of Christ’s work into the picture. You can’t do that. So tell me...WHAT DOES A DOCTRINE-LESS, THEOLOGY-FREE, ‘BELIEVE ON THE LORD JESUS CHRIST’ MEAN?"

There is nothing new in what this ministry teaches. We teach the same doctrines that the apostles were inspired to teach. Our doctrines do not differ with those of the so called reformed groups which they have taught for centuries: that man is dead in sin and cannot come to God in and of himself; that no man by nature understands God and therefore does not and cannot seek the true God, and that without God man has no hope (Matt. 19:25,26; Rom. 3:10,11; Eph. 2:1,12); that this teaching is the launching pad for grace; it introduces people to grace and the fact that no part of salvation is conditioned on anything else but grace; that God chose a people for Himself before the foundation of the world, not based on anything they did but upon His will, wisdom and grace and according to His purpose (Eph. 1:3-6; 2 Tim. 1:9); that salvation is according to the election of grace and not by the works of man (Rom. 11:5; Gal. 2:16); that Christ Jesus was sent to the earth to establish a perfect righteousness by obeying the law, and dying as Representative of and a Substitute for, those people whom God had chosen and entrusted to Christ’s care (Jn. 10:27,28; 17:2,3; Eph. 5:25); that their sins had to be atoned for and would be charged to Him and His Righteousness to them, thus making them wholly acceptable unto God (2 Cor. 5:21; Eph. 5:2); that these people would all be taught of God and made willing in the day of His power to love and believe the same Gospel—GOD’S ONLY GOSPEL—and be saved, for this is the will of God, and none of them will ever perish (Jn. 10:26-29). So what is the controversy? What is the problem that every so-called reformed pastor has with what this ministry teaches? What is the problem that every tolerant Calvinist has with this Gospel? If all the doctrines are right, if as one ‘pastor’ has said after reading one of my booklets, ‘I cannot fault it’, what then could the problem be? If the doctrines, which must be believed, are right, then how can anyone be saved believing anything else? If salvation cannot be by works, what else can it be but by the grace of God, which delivers unto each of its elected ones the faith of God to believe the Gospel of God!! IT IS THE GOSPEL ITSELF, IN SAYING WHAT IT SAYS, IN BEING WHAT IT IS, THAT PROCLAIMS THAT ALL THOSE WHO DO NOT BELIEVE IT, IN ITS ENTIRETY, ARE LOST. THESE PEOPLE WHO SAY THAT SOME CAN BE SAVED WITHOUT THE GOSPEL, ARE IN FACT DENYING THE GOSPEL OF GOD. For to deny the ramification of damnation for all those who do not believe the Gospel is to deny what the Gospel is: THE POWER OF GOD UNTO SALVATION!! These people appear to know the words, they are familiar with the doctrines but have totally missed their meaning. They see the detail, the individual dots which make up the picture, but fail to see and discern what those details are saying for they have failed to see the big picture and in doing so, remain very small minded. The doctrines we teach and promote are Scriptural and have been taught and ‘defended’ by reformed theological heroes of the past. The issue with which they are at loggerheads is the ramifications of not believing this Gospel. As another put it, ‘Its not the doctrines but the ramifications I don’t agree with.’ What other ramification could there be of not knowing or believing God’s Gospel than not being saved? If being saved means believing the Gospel and believing the Gospel means being saved, what else could not believing the Gospel mean but to be lost? Why did Christ bother to say that if anyone believed the Gospel they would be saved, if not believing it meant being saved as well! How simpler do people need something explained to them than how Christ said it? How more succinct could anything be presented than how Christ explained the ramifications, and therefore the importance, of believing and not believing His Gospel. Christ commanded that His Gospel, therefore no other, be preached and therefore that no other be believed. How could He have said to one person, ‘Make sure you preach only this Gospel’ and then turned to another person saying, ‘It doesn’t matter whether you believe that Gospel or not, My Father will save you anyway’. To think like this is to be off with the pixies in a spiritual Disneyland! Of a certainty then, we may rightly and biblically conclude that those who do not preach the Gospel, but a false gospel, are false preachers, ministers of Satan, AND that those who believe not the Gospel, but false gospels, are nothing but false christians. Christ did not advocate the preaching of any other gospel than His own, so how can anyone believe that He would welcome anyone, save anyone, who believed in any other gospel than His own? Let the enemies of the cross answer that one if they dare to even look at the question! The only ones whom Christ will not cast out are those whom the Father has given Him, and all those who have been given to Christ shall come to Him believing the Gospel that reveals Him! (see Jn. 6:37). No one has a mandate from God to teach error, nor has any one the right to preach error in Christ’s Holy name, so it stands to biblical reason that no one has the right to expect themselves to be saved of God who believe in erroneous gospels. This is blue sky thinking because it is centred on the Word of God and not the nebulous religious traditions of men. Christ said "...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). You remain a child of wrath who has no rightful claim to being a child of God if you believe not His Gospel. Believe and be saved—believe not and be damned. That is God’s Message to man. There is no way of escaping this most fundamental of truths. One wonders about the type of person who would seek a way around this Rule, who would try and come up with some loophole through which they could smuggle people into heaven. Can you not see that there is NO MARGIN FOR ERROR here? That to be saved you MUST believe God’s Gospel and no other, and that to be damned is to believe it not, or in a gospel other than God’s Gospel. To believe God’s Gospel is to know Who God is and how God saves; it is to trust, to look to, and to have no hope whatsoever, in any other plan than God’s plan of salvation. Believing the Gospel is like having the very key to heaven. No other key will gain anyone admittance. To be saved without the Gospel would be to be saved without God! It just cannot happen. Believe is not some meaningless word that has no substance and, as we have seen, it is not used by the Lord as man uses it today, to mean that if one believes enough, it is sufficient to qualify a person as a believer. To believe is to believe entirely not partially. The Gospel of God is not damaged by error and so the faith that God gives His children is not damaged by error, it does not lead a person to believe in part of the gospel, but in the whole error-free Gospel of God. To believe something is to know it and want it and reject everything that contradicts it. It matters not that you ‘believe’, but it matters very much what you believe for this will show whether you are a child of God or a child of the Devil. Who hath believed our report? Every elect child of God, that’s who!

Friend, everything has a consequence. Everything is a matter of cause and effect. If I kick a ball, it will move from the spot I kicked it to another. If I close a window, the wind will be stopped from blowing through my house, etc. And Christ made it perfectly clear in the Scriptures that only those who believe the Gospel will be saved and those who do not believe it will be lost. If the effect of believing the Gospel is salvation then what is the outcome of not believing it? Could it be that not believing the Gospel has no consequences? No, for just look at Christ’s words. Could it be that not believing the Gospel has the same consequences as believing it? How mad would a person have to be to believe such a theological abomination as this!! Whatever the result is of not believing the Gospel, it certainly could not be salvation, for Christ has said that only belief of the Gospel will save a man. If believing the Gospel is contrasted with not believing it how could the consequences be anything but what they are? There is nothing else one can conclude but what Christ ‘concluded’, that to not believe the Gospel is to perish for all eternity in hell! Since the first word in response to the one who asked ‘What must I do to be saved?’ was ‘BELIEVE’, don’t you think that salvation would then hinge upon WHAT a person is to believe? Obviously, for a person to ask the question ‘what must I do to be saved?’, it shows they believed themselves to be lost and in need of salvation. And the answer they received reveals that those who gave it discerned that the person who asked such a question could not possibly be a Gospel believer, hence the instruction to BELIEVE. Can’t you see that what a person believes has everything in the world to do with salvation? That ignorance is the natural enemy of belief and that the presence of one means the absence of the other? A man must believe on THE Lord Jesus Christ to be saved. Not in any christ; not in a false christ, but THE Christ of the Bible. And the only place where this true Christ is revealed is in the Gospel of the Lord, that’s why Christ said preach the Gospel and that’s why the Word of God says believe the Gospel if you want to be saved. Can’t you see that salvation has everything to do with the report that God has given His people to believe and preach to every creature? Can’t you see that salvation has everything to do with the report that God has commanded be believed? How then could it not matter what a person believed; or that one can be saved before believing the Gospel? That believing the Gospel is a relatively unimportant element to what being saved is all about? Included among those who do not believe the Gospel are all those who have never heard it; those who have heard it but reject it, and those who claim to believe it but say that they were, or others can be, saved before believing it, without believing it, and even knowingly rejecting any of its doctrines as essential to saving knowledge! To believe the Gospel is to say that God saves by no other way. No other gospel but God’s Gospel is the seed that God plants in the hearts of men to bring forth spiritual life. How can there be life before the seed is planted? To say that one was saved before or without the Gospel is like saying that apples can spring forth without an apple seed. Which is about as stupid as believing that an apple tree can come from carrot seeds, or that if one has the proper intentions one can derive carrots from the seeds of lemons. BELIEF MEANS SALVATION, UNBELIEF MEANS DAMNATION! Plant an apple seed and you will always get apples; plant carrot seeds and you will always get carrots. A seed which carries within it the DNA. of a carrot will never produce an apple, so too, the seed of a false gospel does not carry within it the DNA of the true Gospel, and therefore salvation can never be the result (cf. Gen. 1:11). "Implanted in each created organism is a ‘seed’ programmed to enable the continuing replication of that type of organism." Likewise, the seed of a false gospel can never produce a true believer in the true Gospel but only a false christian. And the Seed of God, which is His true Gospel, is the only seed which can produce true Christians. "The modern understanding of the extreme complexities of the so-called DNA molecule and the genetic code contained in it has reinforced the biblical teaching of the stability of kinds. Each type of organism has its own unique structure of the DNA and can only specify the reproduction of that same kind." Believe a false gospel and you are lost. Believe the true Gospel and you are saved! The fact that I teach, no differently to the Lord Jesus and His apostles, that those who believe God's only Gospel will be saved and those that don't will perish, is what people simply cannot stand. I mean they hate this teaching with a passion! What then about the One who originated it, Jesus Christ? It is Christ Himself, Who hates false doctrine so much HE WILL NOT SAVE ANYONE WHO BELIEVES IT, that they really hate. This is also evidenced in their not believing the Gospel which identifies Him. One who loves another gospel loves another jesus! The specific problem they have, what really gets them all up in arms, is that they themselves, or a dearly departed loved one whom they know did not believe our Gospel, are counted as lost by our Gospel because they say they were saved when they believed in false gospels such as that of Arminianism. This is what really hits a raw nerve in all these so called men of God, in particular men who have positions of authority, men who stand in their temples week after week and teach Calvinism, who think they are being so loyal to the word of God and yet who count themselves and others saved, and therefore what they believed in prior to believing what they call the Gospel, as powerful as the Gospel of God itself to save a man from his sins. If they don’t believe this, then what is it they call the power of God unto salvation without which no man can be saved? They argue that we are so dogmatic, we ruthlessly wipe out and count as lost people all those who have a different doctrinal viewpoint. But the Word of God says that Christ not only counts such people lost, but that He will take "...VENGEANCE on them that know not God and that OBEY NOT THE GOSPEL of our Lord Jesus Christ: who shall be punished with everlasting destruction from the presence of the Lord, and from the glory of His power" (2 Thess. 1:8,9). The issue is, where did you get your doctrinal viewpoint from: God or man? I suggest that these enemies of the Gospel busy themselves with Scriptures such as these and get down to understanding what God is saying, rather than confusing the issue by claiming it is something that we teach incorrectly. What these people fail to realise is, that in overlooking or tolerating doctrinal error, they are denying the necessity of saving God-given faith in the Gospel of God as that which is the only means to a man's salvation. The rather limp theory that a man, after being given the faith of God, is saved but only gradually comes to believe the truth of the Gospel, is shot down in flames when one realises that many who make this assertion have died still in ignorance of what the true Gospel is, without the belief of which none can be saved. All they are left with is the blasphemous lie that God gives His faith to a person but saves that person even if they believe a false gospel. How can a person believe a false gospel with the faith of God? Why would God have given His faith to a person other than for the purpose of believing His Gospel? All faith believes something, so what does the faith that God gives believe? If it can believe error, surely you do not believe that it could believe any more error than what the faith which is common to all men believes. And what about the lost man who believes the doctrines of the Gospel correctly but fails to judge saved and lost by it. He would be believing more than some who have the very faith of God!! How could the faith of God, which He gives to all His elect, direct some of His people to believe the truth about the Gospel whilst leaving others in ignorance of it? How could the faith of God believe the truth about a Gospel doctrine in one person but not in another? Could you honestly see God giving His justifying faith to a person only to leave that person in the same condition he was in before receiving His faith? Or how about God giving His faith to a person, but that faith leading one to believe in a gospel that did not rightly identify Him as God.

We take no pleasure in saying that a person is lost other than knowing we are being truthful and faithful to the only Gospel of God that saves. Nor do we spend all our time thinking ‘this person’s lost, that person’s lost’ like some crazy, fanatical cult member. All we are interested in is believing and teaching the Gospel of God. If a person is proclaimed lost, it is not done with any malice or venomous intent, but so that the person’s attention will be brought to the fact that what they believe is not the Gospel of God but another. This is done with patience, gentleness and meekness so that the person might see their error and come to a saving knowledge of God and His Gospel and not remain in ignorance of it. (see 2 Tim 2:24,25) To call one saved who is not saved or to call one lost who is not lost is a most serious matter, to which the Scriptures say: "He that justifieth the wicked, and he that condemneth the just, even they both are abomination to the Lord" (Prov. 17:15). We are not here to play some game and feel in some way God-like and superior to others by saying you are saved, you are lost etc. I am not interested in games. I am not interested in anything but the truth of God and to defend it with all my might in all gentleness and patience, but with an uncompromising resolve, and to make it as clear as I can to my fellow man that to believe only the Gospel of God is to be saved, and that to believe any other gospel as well as, or apart from, God’s only Gospel can also save, is to be lost, it is to be in a condemned and accursed state. DOCTRINES is what the Gospel of God is made up of and the Scriptures are replete in stating over and over and over again that those who will not, or do not, believe the doctrines of the Gospel WILL PERISH!! To argue against this is to say that black is white and white is black. Every time people like this open their mouths, they argue themselves into the same corner over and over and over again. Sometimes their wealth of ignorance astounds me. If ignorance of the righteousness of God, of how He saves, was the reason, the sole motivating factor, behind the apostle Paul’s praying for the salvation of the Jews, how can anyone be saved who shares in such ignorance?

To truly believe God’s Gospel is to believe that belief in anything else cannot save, just like loving your wife or loving your husband is to love them to the exclusion, the forsaking, of all others. This is because the Word of God says that God’s Gospel is God’s power unto salvation, it is the only Gospel by which God saves. Never once in all of Scripture will you find God saying that a false gospel is His power to save, or that even God Himself can save a man based on his belief of a false gospel as well as His Gospel. God has set the principle of salvation in place: ‘believe the Gospel and I will save you, believe not My Gospel and I will not save you.’ How can God save you when you do not believe in the way He saves, in what His Son has done, etc.? God does not save by any other means than by His Gospel. There are two types of professing christians: those who believe in false gospels and those who claim to believe in the true one, in the doctrines of grace, yet insist that salvation comes by belief of false gospels as well as believing the true. There is only one type of true Christian: one who believes that the only Gospel that saves is the only Gospel of God.

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