the gospel – Snapshots

Fishers of Men

Christ says if we follow Him, He will make us fishers of men. (Mt 4:19) So, if we are following Him, He has indeed been doing this in us. What does it look like?

The fisherman’s mindset is focused on how to catch something that’s elusive; he’s always strategizing how to lure fish, more innovative ways to catch them. He wants to know what interests fish, studies their habits and anticipates their behavior, finding out how, when and where to maximize results. It’s an art as well as a science.

Fishing for souls is similar, yet significantly different. It feels like a stirring, a concern for the eternal health and safety of every soul we encounter. Christ is our supreme example, always mindful of the spiritual needs about Him (Jn 4:11), so we should study what He does; after all, He’s 100% successful. (Jn 6:39)

Christ’s ultimate goal is to glorify His Father by justifying, purifying and sanctifying His elect (Ro 8:29-30), and He is pleased to allow us to collaborate with Him in carrying out His redemptive plan. (2Co 6:1) Our mindset must be aligned with His purpose (1Co 2:16), making true disciples rather than filling pews. (Mt 28:19-20)

Wisdom says our general strategy should focus on seeking those who are pursuing truth and spiritual things, or who are at least open to them; in other words, we should be looking for those who are looking for God. For example, when Paul entered a new area, he typically began in the synagogue, where he expected to find those in the region who were earnestly seeking God (Ac 17:1-2); he would also go where people were praying (Ac 16:13) or engaging in spiritual or philosophical discussions. (Ac 17:17) He didn’t start out in taverns, brothels or places of amusement; he sought out those who were already pursuing eternity. (Jn 9:35)

How we approach evangelism should also be informed by our understanding of our expected audience. If we’re in the Third World where people have very limited access to information and have never heard of the Resurrection, presume ignorance and focus on the basics of the Gospel. But if we’re engaging a culture with churches on every corner, Bibles in every hotel room, where Easter is a national holiday, where anyone with a cell phone may conveniently download Bible apps and advanced study tools as they please, with unprecedented access to the Internet and AI … where anyone with a working brain can easily search for God, this suggests a much different strategy. (1Co 9:19-22)

This is where the heart of evangelism finds its loving nuance; we cannot see other people’s hearts, and we might at times find ourselves in very worldly, or otherwise unspiritual places. Wherever we are, every soul is an opportunity; and we should always be on the lookout for openings to steer conversations toward eternal things. (Ja 5:19-20) We might lead with, “Do you consider yourself to be a spiritual person?” Regardless how they answer, we can ask them why, and invite them to tell us their story, about their interests and values. A listening ear might be all that’s needed to soften a hardened or wounded heart. (2Ti 2:24-26)

Once we are engaged in spiritual discussion, we can look for places of common ground and build on them (Ac 17:28-29), or ask questions which might start them thinking (Jn 5:6), or point out an inconsistency or an insight to help them. (Mt 22:41-42) We should cast our net far and wide, as we have opportunity. (Ga 6:10)

And as we’re pondering about how to engage others in seeking Christ and His kingdom, we must be careful to not misrepresent Him, or appeal to interests which are contrary to or inconsistent with His nature (Ju 23); we should not dilute His message or compromise His heart. (2Co 2:12) We should never use the proverbial bait-and-switch; lay it out as it truly is, and God’s elect will eventually inquire further.

If a person has no interest in spiritual things and doesn’t want to talk about it, we should not be forcing the discussion, casting our pearls before swine (Mt 6:6); Jesus doesn’t push himself on people who aren’t listening: He doesn’t chase them down; He lets them go their way. (Mt 19:21-23) Our job is to let God’s light shine through us (Php 2:15), giving sight to the blind is His. (Jn 9:39)

And we should keep in mind that Jesus is not primarily interested in making people comfortable or happy. He healed, cast out demons and miraculously fed multitudes to help those who are seeking God find Him (Mt 7:7-8), to identify Him and understand who He is, not primarily to please them. (Ga 1:10)

People do need Jesus, no doubt about it, but telling people God loves them and that He has a wonderful plan for their life, implying He wants to make them happy and successful, is not the biblical message. (Jn 12:25) He did not come to send peace on Earth, but a sword (Mt 10:34-36); He did not come to call rich, pleasure-seeking worldlings to their best life now. (Php 3:18-19) He came to call all of us sinners to repentance (Lk 5:32), to radical transformation (Ga 6:15), to turn from our rebellion and willful Torah-violation (Mt 1:21), to forsake all (Lk 14:33), take up our cross and follow Him. (Lk 14:27)

Let’s follow His steps in reaching the lost (1Pe 2:21), prepared with a sound grasp of the Gospel and how to present it (Ep 6:15), ready always to give an informed answer to those who are asking (1Pe 3:15), and leave the results to God. (1Co 3:7)

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Any Other Gospel

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 this evidence of saving faith is missing, we should not 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 the 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)

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Crucified Among You

A Being Who creates time and space must be beyond both space and time, inhabiting eternity, able to simultaneously experience all of time and space at once. (Ep 4:10) If there are 10 dimensions, or more, God has designed each one and exists within, through and outside them all (Ro 11:36), being both ever-present and omnipresent.

The Word gives us glimpses, windows into His unimaginable infinitude. As Christ walks the earth, He is yet in the heavenlies (Jn 3:13) holding everything together. (Col 1:17) He has already trodden down all who err from His statutes (Ps 119:118), as if the Day of Vengeance has already come and gone. (Is 63:3-5) In other words, anything and everything God will ever experience … He may have already experienced it, and He may always experience it.

This includes that mysterious moment nearly two millennia ago when Jesus Christ cried out: “My God, My God, Why hast Thou forsaken me?” (Mt 27:46) If any moment in all eternity is the most dreadful, the most intense, the most awesome and wondrous, perhaps it is when the deepest eternal communion within the very Godhead is disintegrating, breaking, being disrupted and marred by sin. This is the moment God is pleased to bruise His Son, to put Him to unspeakable grief, to make His Holy soul an offering for sin. (Is 53:10)

This darkest hour, when Christ became our sin, as He was treated as a sinner, as an abomination by His own Father, would certainly be an hour He might never want to experience again, ever, for all eternity. Yet, if this is Love, born of and revealing Love, the highest possible form and expression of Love, why would God forget it?

The fact that God is Love itself (1Jn 4:16) suggests that God accepts this infinite suffering as part of His eternal experience, ever mindful of the dreadful price He has paid to ransom us. It is immeasurable suffering on our behalf; we can never fully comprehend it.

So, when Paul claims Christ was crucified among the Galatians, decades after He rose from the dead (Ga 3:1), while he certainly wasn’t being literal in the sense that Christ had came back down to Earth to die again, it seems Paul may not have been entirely metaphorical either: there’s evidently a very real sense in which the atonement of Christ may a timeless, ongoing event from God’s perspective, though He has only offered up Himself once. (He 7:27)

And herein, within the infinitude of God, we may find the mystery of the Gospel laid out for us afresh and anew, how God can be angry with unbelievers, condemning them for their unbelief (Jn 3:18) and holding them guilty for breaking His laws (Ro 3:19) long after the Cross, yet assure all who believe on Christ that He bore our sins in His own body on the cross (1Pe 2:24), such that Christ cleansed us from all our sins long ago. (He 1:3)

To acknowledge this, as the scripture clearly states, is to admit that the atonement of Christ is both limited to those who have already believed (Is 53:11), yet also available to anyone (1Jn 2:2) who is willing to seek after God until they do believe. (Mt 7:7-8)

So it is, in the wisdom of God, how unbelievers remain condemned in their sin (Ja 5:19-20), how David believes on Christ long before Christ comes as if He has already died, such that sin is no longer imputed to him (Ro 4:6-8), and how we find all our sin laid on Christ only as we believe on Him, well after His work is completed. All this can only be true if the work of the Cross itself persists outside of time in some mysterious way.

Before the foundation of the world, Christ is slain (Re 13:8), and He lives this out over time in every holy sacrifice offered up in faith before the Cross itself, in all who see the Lamb of God taking away their sin. (Jn 1:29) It continues even now, with and without the visual aid of animal sacrifice, unto the end of the world, as each elected soul grasps the efficacious miracle of Christ’s substitutionary atonement, until the very last believer is welcomed, sin-debt paid in full, and the Bride of Christ is complete, new heavens and new Earth blaze with the ever-present glory of the greatest act of Love the universe has ever known.

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