What is the "Gospel"?

by Keith Comparetto

 

Table of Contents

Part One: Preface & Introduction

Part Two: The Lessons of Church History

Part Three: A Closer Look at Scripture

Part Four: Seeing, but not Perceiving

Part Five: Closing Thoughts

 

Part Four: Seeing, But Not Perceiving:

The Danger of Presumption

Speaking in Parables

It is a historical fact that truth has rarely been preserved in the large institutions of Christendom.  God has indeed allowed error to rule the masses for nearly all of church history. His true church has existed as a small remnant, either outside of or within the large institutions, and it seems He has always allowed the insincere to be deceived.  

As to why God does this we can only speculate, but it should cure us of the disease of presumption.  In Psalm 78:2, the psalmist says, "I will open my mouth in a parable: I will utter dark sayings of old."  What is this – a God of peace and love, speaking to us in "parables" and "dark sayings"?  Perhaps the clearest insight into the heart and mind of God regarding this mystery is Matthew 13:13-15, in which Jesus implies that speaking in parables is God's way of dividing the sincere from the insincere:

Therefore I speak to them in parables, because seeing they do not see, and hearing they do not hear, nor do they understand. And in them the prophecy of Isaiah is fulfilled, which says: "Hearing you will hear and shall not understand, And seeing you will see and not perceive; For the hearts of this people have grown dull. Their ears are hard of hearing, And their eyes they have closed, Lest they should see with their eyes and hear with their ears, Lest they should understand with their hearts and turn, So that I should heal them.."

Eating the Bread of Deceit

“Bread of deceit is sweet to a man; but afterwards his mouth shall be filled with gravel” (Proverbs 20:17).  Perhaps Satan has reserved his most clever ploy for the last days, a day when deceived individuals by the multiplied thousands can sit in churches where the Bible is recognized as the inspired Word of God, often participating actively in its programs and mouthing its doctrinal beliefs, while remaining under the dominion of their sins, lacking in spiritual affections, and deceived by an unregenerate heart.  Often the church plays into Satan’s hands by too eagerly making the assumption that their new “converts” are truly saved before the furnace of affliction has proved them to be genuine, thus forgetting the teaching of our Lord in the parable of the sower, in which the "stony-ground hearer" undergoes a counterfeit conversion:  “He hears the word and immediately receives it with joy; yet he has no root in himself, but endures only for a while. For when tribulation or persecution arises because of the word, immediately he stumbles.”  It may be true that because of man's emotional makeup, along with his fallen condition, such counterfeit Christians will always be an ever-present reality.  But when we consider how the message and methods of the modern church often encourage such "conversions," and even boast in their numbers, I would suggest the church is not merely an innocent bystander.

My Bible education and all of my church experience took place in a number of “conservative, evangelical” institutions, and over the years I saved virtually every piece of literature, every tract, every preaching and teaching outline I had ever received.  As I began to examine these things more closely, I looked back in my files through the personal evangelism materials I had collected, and found that in nearly all of them, repentance is barely even mentioned, and even when it is, it is given little more than lip service – not the serious, probing emphasis that it deserves.  In its place are salesmanship and methods:  “How to get in the door,” “How to break the ice,” “How to draw the net,” and other techniques and gimmicks to get people to make an emotional “decision.”   Summaries of the gospel abound, and it seems they become more and more oversimplified.

The results of this kind of “evangelism training” are often counterfeit converts.  Consider what may be the typical new “convert” in most evangelical churches today.  Welcomed into the church through an outreach program such as a musical performance, outing, retreat, sports event or youth activity, they are given an appeal to “accept Christ” or “trust Christ as personal Savior” and, often in an emotional moment, "make a decision" and are “saved.”  Or perhaps they come into the church already having a testimony of “accepting Christ” as a child, but have been “backsliding” or “away from God” for years, and now want to give their life for Christ. They are encouraged to join the church and, perhaps shortly after, asked to serve in a church ministry, often an outreach program like the one that drew them in.  They then go out and invite others to “come to Christ” in the same manner in which they did.  We do not question their sincerity or their zeal, but God's work must conform to right doctrine, or results will be defective.

An ABC Nightline broadcast a few years ago on the topic of “the making of an evangelist,” showed on camera an evangelist-in-training, at a conservative Christian college, supposedly “leading someone to Christ.”  As the woman was led by the evangelist in a “sinner’s prayer,” her eyes were open and she showed little outward evidence of one going through true penitence and confession unto salvation.  This is no criticism of the young evangelist, who was probably very sincere in his efforts; but this young man should have warned, at some point in his training, of the devastating spiritual consequences of leaving an individual deceived into thinking she was saved, when she probably was not.  Furthermore, viewers who saw the broadcast received a distortion of the true gospel, one which could do great damage to the cause of Christ.  This is, after all, His work, and we must not deceive any even to win one, for “Cursed is he who does the work of the LORD deceitfully” (Jeremiah 48:10).

Ministerial Shortcomings and God's Sovereignty

What does all this mean for those who have responded to Christ in the past but may have received Him by means of a deficient message?  Are they not truly saved?  The answer is that God is sovereign, and He can work even when gross error and deceit are present.  Some who professed faith under the above conditions may have been truly saved and become a “new creation” in Christ (2 Corinthians 5:17), because God is the one who saves.  Yet many never evidence true salvation, as manifested by a hungering and thirsting after God and the Bible, a desire to be separate from the world, a spirit of prayer, obedienceto Christ, a decreasing pattern of sin in one’s life, etc.  They may remain in the church, often “serving,” but their heart and life have never been truly transformed.  Of course, we do have certain expectations about one who claims to be saved, but in most of our churches, as long as they don’t boast about their sin or do it too openly, such a person may sit for years, listening to message after message about forsaking their backsliding, getting “back into fellowship with God” or getting busy for God, and never again be challenged seriously to consider whether their salvation was genuine!  We must be honest with ourselves and acknowledge that there are many such people in our churches today.

The children in our churches also frequently have empty professions of faith reinforced, often year after year.  In many churches they are even rewarded with candy and prizes for memorizing the Bible or “evangelizing” by bringing others in.  The children often learn the points of a simplified gospel, such as the Wordless Book or Gospel Hand:  God loves me, I am a sinner, Christ died for me, if I receive Him, I may have eternal life.  Since this presentation, if not qualified, makes no mention of repentance, or of the fact that one's decision to accept Christ is not in itself saving, it is teaching a partial truth which in effect is an untruth.  If one makes a shallow profession, it is often reinforced with songs like “If you’re saved and you know it, clap your hands,” and ­­­­­­“I’m going to heaven, can’t wait!”  When they are teenagers, we urge them to go to Christian camp, where they are worked up emotionally with fun, games, and camaraderie, then preached a message and encouraged to “make a decision” for Christ.  When they come home, they give testimonies about how great their week at camp was and how great God worked. Many go on mission trips and encourage others to make the same shallow and ineffectual "decisions."  In the end, with all the tears and emotion aside, how much true, Biblical, lifelong repentance are we seeing?  This may the reason for the devastating recent statistic that perhaps as high as 90% of our churched young people today do not intend to continue in the belief system in which they grew up.  This is not true conversion.  As Spurgeon rightly said, “The work that is done in regeneration is not a temporary work, by which a man is, for a time, reformed; but it is an everlasting work, by which the man is born for heaven.”

The Christian gospel is not complete without considering Jesus' admonitions to count the cost of being a Christian.  When we give people little idea of the need for a deep, soul-searching repentance or of the cost of being Jesus’ disciple, we should not be surprised if they never live up to it, for many of them were never truly saved—only deceived.  This is why Jesus taught that "No one, having put his hand to the plow, and looking back, is fit for the kingdom of God” (Luke 9:62); and on the same subject, “And whoever does not bear his cross, and come after Me, cannot be My disciple.  For which of you, intending to build a tower, does not sit down first, and count the cost, whether he has enough to finish it?” (Luke 14:27-28)  If they fall away from church, we will doubt their salvation based on 1 John 2:19:  “They went out from us, but they were not of us; for it they had been of us, they would no doubt have continued with us.”  But many false converts, for various personal reasons, will either remain in the church, or leave and then come back.  This often happens as they grow up, have children and seek respectability, or simply desire to be a “good person.”  When this happens, as it often does, they will blend in just like tares among the wheat.  John MacArthur comments,

You may have heard someone, when he is getting baptized, say, “I received Christ when I was twelve, but my life was a mess after that, and now I want to get back to the faith.”  The truth probably is that he never received Christ at all when he was twelve.  He went through some superficial religious activity and was deceived into thinking he was saved as a result. 

Furthermore, the typical church today unwittingly makes it easy for such unsaved people to avoid the implications of many sobering passages of Scripture, thus allowing them to sit among the saved, often with false assurance, and with little fear of God’s final judgment.  When the church carelessly allows fruitless salvation testimonies to remain unchallenged, and these people find themselves condemned before a holy God, what legitimate accusations will they level at the churches that have led them to such a fate?  And what responsibility do the leaders and members of these churches have to avoid such a charge?

The Simple Gospel

The church has indeed become too sophisticated in how it ignores or dispenses with the many passages that make worldly and ungodly professing believers comfortable within the body, and I believe sitting under the continual drone of that message has made even many true believers dull of hearing.  In 2 Corinthians 11:1-4, Paul expressed the burden of his heart toward the Corinthian church: 

Oh, that you would bear with me in a little folly––and indeed you do bear with me. For I am jealous for you with godly jealousy. For I have betrothed you to one husband, that I may present you as a chaste virgin to Christ. But I fear, lest somehow, as the serpent deceived Eve by his craftiness, so your minds may be corrupted from the simplicity that is in Christ. For if he who comes preaches another Jesus whom we have not preached, or if you receive a different spirit which you have not received, or a different gospel which you have not accepted––you may well put up with it!.

I would contend that the church of today has also been corrupted from the simplicity that is in Christ, as modern theology has created a massive and complicated system which relies, in part, on the following arguments to explain away simple and basic but very sobering gospel truths: 

1.  Where submission to Christ’s lordship is so clearly demanded in passages in the Gospels such as Matthew 16:24, "If anyone desires to come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow Me.,” many modern theologians tell us those words do not directly apply to us because Jesus is preaching the gospel of the Kingdom, a dispensation of Law, and not the gospel Paul preached, which is one of grace.  (No pre-20th century commentator I know of holds this view.)  Thus, there really are two gospels (though Jesus never really told us so), and the one He Himself preached is not the one for us.  This is the view of the Scofield Bible, and it is pervasive today, for whether or not it is openly articulated or acknowledged, its influence is found in the vast majority of evangelical churches.  But in the Great Commission, Jesus makes it clear there is only one gospel, and it is the one that He Himself preached:  "Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations... teaching them to observe all things that I have commanded you"; and Paul warns Timothy in 1 Timothy 6:3-4, "If anyone ... does not consent to wholesome words, even the words of our Lord Jesus Christ, and to the doctrine which accords with godliness, he is proud, knowing nothing, but is obsessed with disputes and arguments over words..."  Thus, there is one gospel, Jesus preached it, and the sobering words of Matthew 16:24 are for us and should not be lightly passed over!

2.  When our Lord says, “Come to Me, all you who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take My yoke upon you and learn from Me" (Matthew 11:28-30), modern theologians suggest that taking the yoke is an act separate from saving faith.  In other words, there are two rests, a rest in salvation and, for those who desire to go to the next level, a rest in sanctification or in service.  This is also the view of the Scofield Bible, but it denies the truth Jesus was preaching: that one who has refused His yoke has no claim to His saving benefits, and that genuine, life-transforming salvation is all one needs to find true rest in Him.

3.  When repentance from one’s sin is stated as an essential element of salvation in Scripture, modern theologians use complex explanations from the Greek to say that “repent” simply means to have a change of mind about one’s sin and about Christ, merely to acknowledge that I am a sinner and that Christ died for me.  Thus, if one has “believed,” he has in fact also “repented.”  In one sense this is true:  One whom God has drawn to “believe” savingly will indeed “repent” of his sins, and to do so more deeply as he grows in grace.  But taken to the extreme, the Greek arguments often cloud the simple gospel truth that when one is saved, there will and must be a corresponding dramatic change in one’s life.  As this argument developed in the time of Charles H. Spurgeon, he responded,

Together with undivided faith in Jesus Christ there must also be unfeigned repentance of sin. Repentance is an old-fashioned word, not much used by modern revivalists. "Oh!" said a minister to me one day, "it only means a change of mind." This was thought to be a profound observation. "Only a change of mind"; but what a change!

This thorough change wrought by true repentance was clearly expressed by John the Baptist, who commanded his hearers to “Bring forth therefore fruits suitable for repentance” (Mark 3:8), and echoed by Paul who said, “[I] declared first to those in Damascus and in Jerusalem, and throughout all the region of Judea, and then to the Gentiles, that they should repent, turn to God, and do works befitting repentance.” (Acts 26:20). 

4.  When Paul tells the Corinthians to “Examine yourselves as to whether you are in the faith” (2 Corinthians 13:5), many modern evangelical theologians contend that he was really saying, “Examine yourselves since you are in the faith,” and thus he was not really challenging unsaved people in the church.  Again, a complex Greek argument is put forth, and a simple warning goes unheeded.  The fact is, virtually no significant Bible translation translates it “since,” and the old commentators would have taken the sober warning of this verse at face value. 

5.  When 2 Peter 1:10 says, “Wherefore the rather, brethren, give diligence to make your calling and election sure,” the Greek word spoudazo, translated “diligent,” is interpreted by many today to refer to mere acts of “Christian service,” no matter how empty and heartless they may be.  Hebrews 4:11, containing the same Greek word, is given the same interpretation: “Let us therefore be diligent to enter that rest, lest anyone fall according to the same example of disobedience.” Yet both of these verses are intended as warnings for professing believers to examine the spiritual condition of their souls.  Their simple truths are explained away using arguments which the old commentators – many of whom were Greek scholars themselves – could not have conceived of.

Questions Begging Answers

If the modern interpretations just described are what the Bible actually teaches; if salvation is as easy as simply believing the facts of the gospel; if repentance merely means a change of mind that acknowledges, "I am a sinner and I believe Christ died for me"; and if taking Christ's yoke is an option that one may or may not exercise after he is saved, then I believe the following questions beg to be answered: