The Four Spiritual Laws is likely the most popular gospel tract ever written, the most widely distributed of all time, likely over 2.5 billion. It summarizes basic Gospel truths in four simple points:
- God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life. (Jn 3:16; 10:10)
- Man is sinful and separated from God. (Ro 3:23; 6:23)
- Jesus Christ is God’s only provision for man’s sin. (Ro 5:8; 1Co 15:3-6; Jn 14:6)
- We must individually receive Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord. (Jn 1:12; Ep 2:8-9; Re 3:20)
The tract ends with instructions to “receive Christ” by praying a prayer inviting Him into our heart and committing our life to follow Him, assuring us that if we prayed sincerely we’re now a child of God regardless how we feel.
While each of these four laws is scriptural on the surface, the actual gospel (or good news) presented in this tract — that if we sincerely ask Christ to forgive our sins and come into our heart and save us, that He will — is not. In fact, it is so vastly different from the Biblical reality it amounts to another gospel (2Co 11:4), a false one. It distorts each of these four spiritual principles and encourages an unbiblical response to them.
While the Bible equates receiving Christ with supernatural rest in the Person and finished work of Christ (He 4:3), this false gospel substitutes a mechanical “sinner’s prayer” technique, and also incorrectly defines every key term: repentance, sin and faith. It even explicitly normalizes unbelief by discounting the primary evidence of saving faith: assurance of salvation. (1Th 1:5)
The true Gospel is that Christ delivers those who believe on Him from their violations of His law: Torah. (Mt 1:21, 1Jn 3:4) As we trust Him to do so, He saves us from both the penalty we deserve for breaking Torah by dying for us in our place (Is 53:11), and He also saves us from our tendency to break Torah (Ro 6:14) by writing His laws into our minds and hearts. (He 8:10)
When God changes how we think about deliberately breaking Torah and gives us hearts fully submitted to God (repentance: 2Ti 2:25), and reveals to us that His blood has paid our sin debt in full (faith: Ro 3:25), that Father God has now made His Son Jesus Christ to be sin for us (2Co 5:21), we cannot rightly pray and ask Jesus to save us… because we will confidently know that He already has.
This supernatural knowledge will be accompanied by several significant changes within our hearts: we will love Jesus Christ (1Co 16:22); we will start obeying Torah (1Jn 3:9); pleasing God will become the most important thing to us; we will be willing to forsake anything and everything to follow Him. (Lk 14:33)
So long as any of these evidences of saving faith are not present, no one should be assured of salvation (2Co 13:5); rather, we should diligently continue seeking God, asking Him to reveal Himself to us and give us repentance to acknowledge and rest in the truth (2Ti 2:25) until He gives us faith and a new heart, assuring us of our eternal safety. (He 11:6) We should strive to enter the narrow gate into salvation (Lk 13:24), examining ourselves and systematically proving it to ourselves (2Co 13:5), diligently making our calling and election sure (2Pe 1:10), until doubting our salvation the tiniest bit is entirely foreign to us. (1Jn 5:13)
But this tract, rather than encouraging us to wait on God until we experience this deep, supernatural, inward change in what we are trusting in as the basis for our salvation, shifting entirely away from dependence on ourselves and our own works to the finished work of Christ — which is the only act that can save us, and experience how this change in our faith system is transforming our hearts to love and obey Christ from the moment this first appears within us, we are told we are now a child of God even if our beliefs about Christ and salvation have not changed and we feel no different since we started reading the tract.
In other words, this gospel assures us of eternal life simply because we asked for it, regardless what we actually believe or how we feel. This teaches us to depend on the act of praying sinner’s prayer for our salvation rather than on Christ Himself and His finished work, and it positively affirms the reality of our salvation even if we have no evidence of this faith at all, no true faith in Christ.
So, what this tract is actually doing is inoculating us against the true Gospel by offering us false hope of Heaven based upon our own work: our act of sincerely praying the sinner’s prayer.
This framing of the Gospel implies Christ has died for everyone but that His death saves no one, that believing on and resting in the atonement of Christ is insufficient, that faith does not save us, that we must do something else besides believe.
The message effectively presents Christ’s sacrifice as ineffectual: not actually saving us as we believe, only making it possible for us to save ourselves by deciding to pray the sinner’s prayer and “receive Christ”. So, in trying to distill the Gospel for us, it explicitly denies Christ’s atonement as the divine act which saves us when we rightly receive Christ and believe on Him. (Jn 1:12-13)
While presenting Jesus as the only bridge to God, this false gospel lies to us about how we cross this bridge; it deceives us about how Christ truly accomplishes our salvation: by dying for us as we believe in Him and manifesting the reality of this faith in our hearts. It leads us up the path to the narrow gate (Mt 7:14), offers us a cheap substitute for entering in through this gate, and then turns us away, assuring us we have entered in and that all will be well as we continue on down the broad road to destruction. (13)
There is only one true Gospel; trusting any other gives false hope of Heaven, which may be the most dreadful possible state we can ever be in — thinking we’re eternally safe when we’re not. God’s curse upon those who willfully participate in such deception is evidently just. (Ga 1:8-9)
After so many millions have been misled by this shallow, evangelistic travesty, is it any wonder Christ Himself prophesies of the many who will come to Him expecting open arms, only to hear Him say, “I never knew you. Depart from me, you who practice lawlessness.” (Mt 7:22-23)
The first law, that God loves us and has a wonderful plan for our life, is certainly true, though extremely misleading; God never publicly introduces the Gospel in this way.
Rather, the Gospel reveals Father’s wrath currently abiding on all who have not already believed on Christ (Jn 3:36), Christ’s anger with all who do not love Him supremely (Ps 2:12), and an invitation, not to a “wonderful plan”, but to deny ourselves, take up our crosses and follow Him. (Mt 16:24) Paul did not appeal with God’s love but with His terror. (2Co 5:11)
Starting a gospel message with God’s love misleads most of us because we equate it with Him giving us what we want, not what we need. Prior to Him transforming us this is problematic because what we want is harmful to ourselves, to each other, and to Him. We think bondage is freedom and freedom is bondage. What we need is a new heart, a new way of looking at Him, ourselves, and each other: we call it repentance, and it’s the free gift of God.
Claiming man is sinful without defining sin is also misleading since we tend to interpret sin from our own sinful perspective, not as the violation of God’s Law but rather as the violation of human happiness.
Lack of clarity here invariably twists the Gospel of Christ into the “Harm gospel”: do what as you please (“freedom”) so long as you don’t hurt others (“sin”).
Grounding the Gospel in Torah where it belongs changes everything.
Saying Jesus is the only provision for man’s sin is also misleading unless we explain how He is the provision for our sin.
Does He offer us a gift, a get-out-of-jail-free card so we can go to Heaven, so long as we reach out and take it? Or does He actually pay our sin debt and reconcile us to God on His own, such that we are entirely passive in the transaction, there being nothing we can do to receive or obtain it?
In other words, has Jesus already done everything He can to save us, and the whole world, but we are still all lost until we do something to acquire the benefit of what He has done? Or is Jesus inviting us to come to Him so that He can do what needs to be done to save us?
If it is the former, if we are merely receiving a gift that is already paid for and offered to everyone, but which saves no one, being ineffectual in and of itself, we may introduce any kind of mechanism we like to close the deal and secure our salvation. But the gospel is NEVER presented this way: it is not receiving a gift which is already paid for — it is receiving a Person who can settle our infinite debt, which is much different.
The former points us to rest in our act of “receiving” Christ’s free gift as the basis of our salvation, the latter points us to rest directly in the finished work of Christ itself which actually accomplishes on our salvation.
We rightly respond to the Gospel, not by engaging in the transaction of receiving a gift, but by receiving the Person of Jesus Christ as He truly is and aligning ourselves with Him on every level of our existence. When we receive Him, He executes a transaction with the Father on our behalf and convinces us of this reality, thereby saving us and initiating the transformation process to recreate us into His likeness. This is a supernatural process which cannot be induced with a ritual or a technique.