WHO HATH BELIEVED OUR REPORT?  (PART 12)

 

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 Godlike 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.