THE DOCTRINES OF THE GOSPEL OF THE GRACE OF GOD

(part 5)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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