A Call for Repentance by
Gary Ray
Branscome
But even if we, or an angel from heaven, preach any gospel to you other than what we have preached to you, let him be accursed (Galatians 1:8).
In a culture accustomed to post-modern
ideas of tolerance, Paul’s
pronouncement of a curse on those who teach a false gospel may sound
harsh and
intolerant. However, God is not fooling around! His Word gives us that
warning
because He loves us, and does not want us to end up in hell. And,
believe me, the danger of ending up in hell
because of a false, or
perverted, “gospel” is very real.
Over the centuries, Satan has introduced
false gospels time and again.
And, every false gospel involves relying on something other than faith
in Christ.
Satan has led people to trust in works, in riches, in self inflicted
pain, in
saints, and in sacraments. Now, he is leading people who have never
trusted in
Christ to think that they are saved because they have prayed a prayer.
One of the difficulties in coming to grips
with this error lies in the
fact that, those who come to faith in
Christ often
pray to God for mercy. There is nothing wrong with crying out to God
for mercy.
However, it is faith in Christ, not our prayer,
that
brings God’s mercy (Romans 5:2). It is not absolutely necessary for us
to ask
God to save us, but it is absolutely necessary that we trust in Christ.
It is
only because He died for our sins that we can be forgiven, and without
faith in
Him there is no mercy! “Without faith it is impossible to please God
(Hebrews
11:6).” And, that is just where the problem lies.
The people who place the stress on praying
a prayer may have the best
of intentions. They generally want people to trust in Christ. However,
because
the devil will twist and pervert everything he can, many who pray that
prayer
think that it is what they have done [i.e. praying a prayer] that saves
them,
not what Christ has done. That is why many who pray the sinner’s prayer
continue living as if they had never prayed it. They perform one simple
work of
praying a prayer, and believe that even though they live like the
devil, and
never darken the door of a church, they are saved and can never lose
their
salvation.
In trying to compensate for the problems
this causes others stress
works. They lead those who have prayed the prayer to believe that they
need
works in order to have God’s blessing on their lives, and to be happy
as
Christians. And, that is just another form of works righteousness. They
fail to
understand what it means to be justified by faith, how the Holy Spirit
works in
the hearts of believers, or what the Bible means when it tells us that
“Christ
is the end of the law for righteousness to every one who believes
(Romans
10:4).”
Those who come to faith in Christ
must believe that they are sinners who deserve hell, and they must be
sorry for
their sins. Otherwise, they would have nothing to trust in Christ for.
Our
faith in Christ is the belief that He took our place, that He died the
death
that we deserved, that because of what He did (not what we do) we have
forgiveness and eternal life.
Furthermore, one of the most important
doctrines of
Scripture, the doctrine of the Law and the Promises, makes it perfectly
clear
that faith in Christ has always been the way of salvation, and that
Abraham was
saved the same way we are saved, namely through believing God’s promise
of
forgiveness in Christ. In fact, the third chapter of Galatians is
devoted to
that doctrine. The words, “Abraham believed God, and it was accounted
to him
for righteousness,” tell us that Abraham’s sins were forgiven the
minute he
believed, for it is forgiveness and forgiveness alone that makes us
righteous
in the sight of God (Galatians 3:6).
If you look carefully at what Paul says in
the third
chapter of Galatians, you will notice that he tells us that the promise
that
Abraham believed was the gospel, the good news that his descendant
would die
for his sins and rise again (compare Galatians 3:6 and 8, and 1
Corinthians 15:1-4).
Going on in the same chapter, the words,
“the
covenant concerning faith in Christ, that was confirmed by God at the
time of
Abraham, cannot be nullified by the law, which came four hundred and
thirty
years later,” tell us that the law did not change the fact that
salvation came
through God’s promise of forgiveness in Christ (Galatians 3:17). The
law was
only given to show us our sin and need of that forgiveness (Romans
Although Christ died in time, because God
is not
bound by time, the forgiveness Christ won for us has been available to
believers from the foundation of the world (Revelation 13:8). This
truth is
very important, because if God’s forgiveness was limited by time, we
would need
another sacrifice to cover sins committed after Christ’s death.
PERVERTING THE GOSPEL
The
false gospel we are dealing with rests on an assumption regarding
Romans 10:13,
“Whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord
shall
be saved.” It is easy for those who are new to the faith to assume that
we get
saved by calling on the Lord. Now, as I pointed out before, many people
who
come to faith do call on the Lord, there is nothing wrong with that,
but it is
faith in Christ, not their act of calling, which brings salvation
(Romans 5:2).
And, that is where the error lies.
Paul’s
purpose in writing the words of Romans
Those
who emphasize prayer seem blind to the fact that some churches follow a
liturgy
that requires worshippers to pray the “sinner’s prayer” every Sunday.
In fact,
every time someone prays the “Lord’s Prayer” they are praying for
forgiveness.
Yet many from such backgrounds tell us that they were never saved until
they
came to faith in Christ.
I
have seen people, who could care less, pressured to pray the “sinner’s
prayer”.
They may do it out of curiosity, to see what will happen. Or, they may
do it to
get rid of the person urging them to pray. But, it is extremely rare
for
someone who has prayed the prayer that way to show up in church. The
only times
when it seems to work is when people (generally with some church
background)
pray the prayer when they come to faith in Christ.
Therefore,
let me make myself perfectly clear. We are not saved by asking Jesus
into our
heart, we are saved by what He did on the cross! We are not saved by
giving our
life to Christ, we are saved by believing
that He died
for our sins! We are not saved by praying the “sinners
prayer”, we are saved by our faith in Him!
The
bad fruit produced by this false gospel is scandalous. Shall I mention
a couple
in a church youth group who were committing fornication. When they were
confronted, the boy said, “When we went forward at camp and prayed to
accept
Christ they told us that no matter what we did we could not lose
salvation.”
Isn’t it obvious that those two were never repentant to begin with. Such stories are far too common. Years ago
almost one hundred
congregations that had been connected with Campus Crusade For
Christ decided to merge with the Eastern Orthodox. One of the reasons
they gave
was that they had become disillusioned with the idea that praying a
prayer
could save someone. And, the reason they had become disillusioned, was
because
they had worked so hard to get people to pray the prayer, only to have
them
never show up in church or reform their lives.
Some of those who put all the stress
on prayer, as if people are saved by praying a prayer, do so because
they have
a faulty understanding of the gospel. They wrongly assume that people
living
before the time of Christ could not receive forgiveness, and therefore
could
not get into heaven. I have already pointed out that God is not bound
by time,
and that those who lived before Christ were saved the same way that we
are
saved. The words, “Abraham believed God, and it was accounted to him
for
righteousness,” should make that obvious. Moreover, the numerous
references to
forgiveness that we find in the Old Testament should also make it
obvious that
forgiveness was available to the people living then.
Nevertheless, in order to
accommodate the Bible to their “theology”, they explain all this away,
and
create a bizarre mythology about the souls of believers who lived at
that time
being held in a hollow place deep in the earth. Of course none of that
is in
the Bible, but like every cult they “interpret” passage after passage
to
support their unbiblical ideas.
Because they assume that the thief on the
cross
could not be forgiven until after Christ rose from the dead, they also
assume
that when Jesus said to him, “Today you will be with me in paradise” He
was
talking about a hollow place deep in the earth (Luke 23:43). However,
if they
would simply let the Bible interpret itself, they would find that the
Bible
defines “paradise” as “Heaven” (compare verses 2 and 4 of 2 Corinthians
12).
They would also find that the words “even the Son of man who is in
heaven,”
plainly tell us that, because Christ is God, He was not only in heaven
on the
day He was crucified, He was in heaven all the time he was on the earth
(John
3:13).
The fact that He was in heaven while He was
on earth
also tells us that, when the Bible speaks of heaven being up, and hell
being
down, it is using the language of accommodation. In reality, heaven and
hell
are both in the spiritual realm. They are up and down in a spiritual
sense, not
in a physical sense. That is why Christ could be in heaven while He was
on the
earth, and why he did not have to leave the earth to communicate with
Moses and
Elijah (Matthew 17:3-4). [Notice that, even though Moses was buried and
Elijah
had been carried to heaven, spiritually they were both in the same
place.]
Because those who hold these views have
created a
myth about saints in hades, they twist the
words
“When He ascended up on high, He led captivity captive,” to mean that
He led
those saints to freedom (Ephesians 4:8). However, that is not what the
verse is
saying at all. What the verse is telling us is that Christ made
captives, not
that He freed them. Ask yourself. Where does that passage say anything
about
freeing captives? It does not! The phraseology being used is of an army
leading
its defeated captives into captivity. If you have any questions about
what I
say just look at Judges 5:12. “Awake, awake, Deborah: awake, awake,
utter a
song: arise, Barak, and lead thy captivity
captive.”
Another myth they have created is that when
Christ
descended into hell He preached to “Old Testament saints”. Of course
the Bible
says no such thing. Nevertheless they read their ideas into 1Peter
3:19, which
says, “He went and preached unto the spirits in prison.” Here again,
they
ignore the context! A quick look at the context tells us that the
“spirits” in
“prison” were those that God destroyed at the time of Noah, not saints.
And,
the passage says nothing about the gospel. On the contrary, the word
translated
“preached,” is “kerusso,” a Greek word that
means “to
proclaim as a herald.” It is the same Greek word that would be used if
a king
conquered a country, and then sent out heralds to tell everyone that
the
country had a new ruler. Christ was proclaiming His victory to His
enemies, not
offering them salvation. That is why the New American Standard
translates that
same verse as, “He [Christ] went and made proclamation to the spirits
now in
prison.”
If anyone thinks that these errors are not
serious,
let me remind you that whenever the doctrine being taught consists of
man–made
explanations of God’s Word, instead of what the Bible explicitly says,
people
are being led away from God’s Word. And, whenever the unrepentant are
being
given a false assurance of salvation, instead of being warned of God’s
judgement, a false gospel is being taught.
CONCLUSION
Although the danger posed by this
false gospel is very real, believers often do not recognize the
problem. They
assume that the people praying the prayer understand what is said
(about sin
and Christ) in the same way that they do. What they fail to realize is
that it
is impossible for someone to absorb everything being said to them in
two
minutes. Furthermore, pushing people to pray a prayer just hardens
them. It
turns them off to Christianity. They wind up feeling that they tried
it, and there
was nothing to it. What lost people need is solid Christ centered
preaching,
that lifts Him up as the source of forgiveness, not descriptions of
hell aimed
at scaring them into praying the “sinner’s prayer”.