The Truth of Man

 

Here is a sermon by the late Dr. John MacArthur.  He asks the important question, "what's wrong with the current presentation of the gospel?"  Here are (mostly) his words.

There was recently a survey of ‘evangelicals.’  People were defined as evangelicals if they believed four things: if they believed the divinity of the Bible, if they believed Jesus, believed the gospel, and if they felt they were responsible to communicate the gospel to other people.  Well, it seems that the majority of ‘evangelicals’ really have no idea what they believe.  One survey question, “everyone is born innocent, agree or disagree?" 65% of evangelicals agreed.  Another: “the Bible is not literally true,” agree or disagree?  55% of evangelicals agreed!  “God accepts worship from all religions.”  56% agreed.  Finally, “Jesus was a good teacher, but not God.”  43% of evangelicals agreed!

All the answers above should have been “0%.” They should not agree with any of those questions. This is so shocking, the idea that anybody who presumably has a sound sense of doctrine could answer “agreed” to these untruths. How did we get to this sad point--'evangelicals’ who don’t even believe what is necessary to be saved, in some answers?   Dr. MacArthur believes “this is the legacy of our pastoral leadership.”  People don’t rise above their teachers.  Truth is, the evangelical churches, over the last 30 years, have been too busy trying to find ways not to offend non-Christians, trying to take the offenses out of the message.  Many churches design approaches to non-believers that don’t create hostility, or rejection.  But that voids the gospel of the truth.  And it does more, as we shall see.

Why do they do this?  Because the gospel is offensive.  It tells of all of our evil being so bad that it drove Jesus to the Cross. So, it forces us into a choice: Hate our sin nature, and run to God, seeking mercy; or, continue assuming that we are not evil, but more good than evil; reject Jesus’ words that disagree, and try to say you are a Christian by compartmentalizing which verses you read about Him. But at some point, hopefully the reality of the depth of our sin according to God’s Word will be read or presented bluntly to us. Some may then reject Christianity, and hate the Gospel. If you chose that mode, you would then assume most “Christians” are hypocrites, and dislike them intensely. This is what’s done by people that are proud to admit that they are non-believers.

Let’s study this further; start with John 15:18:

“If the world hates you, you know that it hated Me before it hated you.

One thing that the disciples knew, the world hated Jesus.  We’re not just talking about pagans, but the Jews as well.  At that time, they professed to be followers of God.  Well, Jesus is God Incarnate.  But they were blind to that. Once they heard the message of Jesus and what He preached, they rejected it—and Him. But why the hate—toward Him who was (and is) the most merciful, compassionate, loving Person in all the world?  Here’s the answer, in blunt language in John 7:7:

The world…hates Me because I testify of it that its works are evil.

Looking into evil, a large group of Calvinists (John Calvin lived in the late 1500s) believe in the “Doctrine of Depravity.” It declares that everyone is sinful, and irreconcilable with God as such.  This agrees with Scripture. But teaching that doctrine brings out hate in Fallen Man--their dominant sin is Pride.  He creates an image of himself that escapes ultimate condemnation, spinning a web of delusions.  Man says that he is good—he will believe anything but that his ‘deeds are evil.’ This was compounded by Jesus telling the Jews, ‘You are even evil in your religion.’

You can see, in the Gospel of John, how their hate plays out.  In 5:16, the ‘offense’ was, He was healing people on the Sabbath.  He could have avoided much of the hate by only doing God’s work six days a week, but God doesn’t work under man’s restrictions.  Limiting God?  Who would do that?  In 5:18, He said the Jews were plotting already to kill Him.  Imagine, it’s only the fifth chapter of John!  And they wanted Him dead already.

Of equal offense to them was that He called God His Father, making Him equal with God.  They judged that as ‘blasphemy.’  Of course, that judgement was irrational, because His miraculous deeds, His extraordinary love for the downtrodden—and His resurrection from the dead-- proved He was more than human.  They had no proof of their challenge, ever.  Later in John, they tried to arrest Him, and they wanted to stone Him, but His time was not yet. That would come later.

Isaiah 53's prophecy says He was an offense, which came true. In their rejection of Jesus, they treated Him as nobody, nothing.  But He was popular. He was compassionate to widows, to the disabled, to the children.  He brought a message of eternal life and forgiveness. Because of that popularity, they couldn’t ignore Him. They challenged Him daily. When that didn’t work, there was nothing left except kill Him.  In John 8, Jesus tells them the nature of their hatred with another offensive declaration; He says “you cannot hear my words—you are of your father, the devil.” Many chose to not listen to another Word He said.  Now please don’t point the finger at the Jews in particular for their hate:  ALL OF US began life separated from God; our father was also the devil.  And he still is, unless we are truly saved.  We do not start out ‘innocent,’ you see?  A trait that we obtained from Adam. Jesus, in John 8:45, says, ‘Because it’s the truth, you can’t believe it.’ That truth, about our evil, always leads to a defensive irrationality. when we are told. We turn from Him, and we believe lies—because, as Jesus says, the devil—our father if we are not saved—is the father of lies.

This is a profound diagnosis of the human condition. The point is, we seldom hear it. More on that in a minute.

You may, like most, be offended at Dr. MacArthur’s words of your impossible condition as well.  Please don’t fall into the trap of excessive pride; face up to the truth.  Otherwise, it could cost you eternal life.

So the Jews concluded about Jesus, ‘you have a demon. Not us.’ But calling Him that is the worst blasphemy of all. Calling Him that was a terrible sin. Their world was inverted, perverse.

Dr. MacArthur gets back to his original point, the flaw in today's gospel.  Avoiding the offense. I don’t know what kind of strategy in evangelism you think you can devise to tell the truth and yet overcome irrational anger as soon as you hammer on the subject of evil; the truth is, you can’t strategize it.  The greatest Evangelist of all time, Jesus, had no strategy to bypass or soften reality.  He said we are sinful, dead, blind, ignorant, darkened to the Scriptural facts, and under satanic control. The truth is alien for most because it is seldom preached. .I can’t count the number of pastors I’ve heard who when they finally speak of sin, it was “the world’s sin.” As if his congregation is sinless and without doubt. “The world has horrible sins. Let me tell you about them”—but not you, they imply.

When we currently talk the gospel, we simply avoid certain subjects, like the depth of human sin--but that subject is covered vastly in Scripture. And it’s dangerous to dance around a critical subject; it’s not the whole Gospel anymore. Can we improve on God’s Gospel? You don’t change it saying that “culture is different”--but Man is the same in every culture.  To talk honestly about that takes courage, a willingness to obey Jesus who said we must tell the Truth and endure persecution like He did.  When their answer for the Truth is to hate us, we should train ourselves to say, that’s what we expect, a proof of the sinful characteristics of man. Let it roll off. You may lose a friend—but later events might make them remember your words. Be a good evangelist.  Jesus said we should rejoice upon rejection, even if our words seemingly had no effect; we presented the pure Gospel, not a watered-down half of the Gospel.  By telling the truth, we are willing to leave strategy to God. The Holy Spirit may give light to the sinner to whom we witnessed, or He may not. We did our part, sowing the Seed. It’s God who decides to bring light to the darkened mind.

(I must reveal my beliefs here; the hyper-beliefs of some Calvinists, namely, his acute belief in Total Depravity, leads to strange results.  The extremists of Calvin say that we have no capacity to receive the truth, until the Holy Spirit puts the spark of regeneration in us first.  The choice God makes is, who gets a spark by the Spirit, and who doesn’t. This decision is done by God randomly, without regard for our previous righteousness or non-righteousness.  Thus, God chooses who is picked to be saved and who is not saved (because if the Holy Spirit does not select us to ‘turn our light on,’ we end up in hell.)  I do not believe in this extreme; I consider it presents a non-Scriptural character of God as sending people to hell.  I follow Jacobus Arminius, who argued against Calvin in the late 1500s by stating that God gave us ‘prevenient grace,’ that He gave us free will to choose Him, even in our tragic sinful condition--if we desired to seek after Him.  Despite the bad news about the treatment of Arminius, and things done to him, he was a godly man.  But let’s not get sidetracked. 

Our subject in this paper is how our pastors have strayed from and watered down the whole gospel. They don’t talk about hell, or the severity of our sin and our need for repentance. We, as ‘laity,’ fear the hostility of people too—or, we don’t imagine people  getting saved from presenting a negative doctrine of their sin. So the feeling is, “how can we tell them about man's depravity, about hell and judgment?  They won’t think straight if we tell them that.  So let's try a different tact: Let’s avoid that subject.” 

Truth is, people in sin aren’t thinking straight to begin with.  You can’t do anything to cause them to think rationally or apply honestly. We are born that way. To deceive ourselves.

You, as a good evangelist, should turn away from this idea==burn the effort to make that bridge. You tell them that we begin our accountable life under eternal judgment.  Paul does that at the Areopagus on Mars Hill—as we wrote in our recent blog. It’s important that you see the city that God gave you as He sees it. Areopagus was reputed to be a city of great intellectual men. But God saw—and Paul saw--that the city was given over to idols (Acts 17). He preached from a position of recognizing their total ignorance of the Gospel. I’m sure many were turned off by his approach.

But what do you have now, instead? Here's the ‘current’ gospel:  Jesus wants you happy, He wants you successful. This is what you want.  He paid the price on the Cross for our sin—so He can set us free. Believing in Him means we gain heaven, so out of our love for Him, we should simply seek His will for all we do in all our lives. Out of our love we can also find true morality, and develop love for our Savior.

Notice that we left off the sinful condition that we’re born into, and how we need to beg mercy from Jesus from hell.  That is too important to miss. The problem with ‘emphasizing our benefits’ by ‘accepting’ Jesus is—what happens when the benefits don’t happen in this life? Then we can’t see a reason why we should continue to restrain the temptations of the world—because what do we need Jesus for? Well, from the certainty of hell. But nobody taught us that. Many churches are ruled by Satan; they teach we all have a divine spark. All we need to do is recognize it, and encourage its growth within us. Totally un-Scriptural. Total bull. A works-oriented version of the old ‘bring yourself up by your bootstraps’ fable. The truth is, we are incapable of self-reform. The Jews proved they couldn’t do it in the Old Testament. If we realize that, if we run to Jesus for mercy, that’s the first step of the real Gospel.

Also, how can we appreciate Jesus, truly love Him and worship Him, if all He does is pass out goodies like Santa Claus, just by a simple acceptance? Will there be enough incentive to stop sinning? I think not. Yet if we don’t be holy, how can we evangelize if our life and the pagan’s life are no different? The pagan won’t seek us for advice, if he feels the hurt from the devil’s treatment in the world system. They may be hurting, but why would they come to us, if they perceive that we are the same as them?

Pastors mention that in the second Coming, Jesus is the Judge, the Son of God, whose next appearance will give us the unchangeable decision of hell or heaven for us. Calvinistic pastors tell us that once we were saved, we are saved forever. So we don’t need to worry about hell or God’s judgment. But Scripture says otherwise. We should consider that once we are saved, but continue being ruled by sin, means we might never have been saved to begin with. Also, if we are not producing fruit for God, we could lose salvation too (John 15:5-6). Thus we shouldbe sober and spend time thinking about that: consider what Paul wrote in II Corinthians 13:5:

Examine yourselves as to whether you are in the faith. Test yourselves. Do you not know yourselves, that Jesus Christ is in you?—unless indeed you ar e disqualified. 

Disqualified means “rejected”—ie, rejected for heaven. Considering that we easily deceive ourselves, we should make a checklist of strengths and weaknesses of character, and be serious about asking God to show anywhere we have fallen short of holiness. Our goal is to be more holy, more like God, is it not? Well, that’s not a source of emphasis for many Calvinistic pastors. They say once we are saved, since we are always saved, our sin problem does not block us for heaven. I fear the lack of motivation to avoid sin might send many to hell. Explore your own mind. Is that what you believe too?  

The current 'gospel' twists the simple fact that Every word in Scripture—even the negative ones—are all true.  By pastors not preaching on some subjects, we follow along by not believing in those subjects. Pastors often cover God as an idol of their own making, a grandfatherly, forgiving type.  This is idolatry; it ignores the Old Testament God, who was a punisher of idolatry. And God doesn’t change. The 'gospel' today accepts pretended humility, and works, to gain righteousness; it even says He loves all religions—because Christians squirm to admit anything else (we don’t want to be intolerant)—so they assume, based on our scared silence, that it’s OK. Ah, the “fear of man.” But the fear of man is nothing compared to the fear of God. Jesus said we should never fear someone who could take our life; the Person we should fear is the One who can take our soul. And He is the same God, still jealous of our idols of greed, immorality, envy, etc. Contemplate on that.  We think “sincerity” is what counts. If we don’t get the gospel right, God will still appreciate our effort, and give us a pass. Today we believe “love” is an emotion. But love today is losing its backbone necessary for obedience to His commands. We think we abide in Him, yet we are not interested in what was important to Him, as it appears in Scripture. (See survey above).  It’s too hard to read for the ‘phone generation.’ So we fly by the seat of our emotions.

What pastors teach is a false and incomplete 'gospel' rampant in society.  Truth is, no other religion has the Bible's true doctrine, even false forms of ‘Christianity,’ even the Jews in Jesus’ time (they twisted the truths in Old Testament Scripture).  All popular gospels are based on works, or a feeble and mental-assent faith. This is dooming more people to hell, teaching that basically, we are good, or teaching that we can reform ourselves into a better life (or lives), and eventually, through purgatory or renewal or whatever, gain heaven. Most people go to church to relieve some guilt.  Most pastors don’t shake them from this fable.  People in the pews, who say they are Christian, if you give them hard questions (like, ‘tell us why you got a divorce’) show that they hate the truth—and thus reveal that they are NOT Christian.  Most pastors are deluded enough to believe that the people that are there regularly are Christian.  But the pew-sitters believe lies, like the survey above shows.  Many of their pastors would get fired if they preached the truth for more than one month straight. 

So it is in wealthy America. “We got our money because God loves us. God wouldn’t send to hell if He loves us.” Or will He? Consider Luke 19:41-4:

Now as He drew near, He saw the city and wept over it, ⁴² saying, “If you had known, even you, especially in this your day, the things that make for your peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes. ⁴³ For days will come upon you when your enemies will build an embankment around you, surround you and close you in on every side, ⁴⁴ and level you, and your children within you, to the ground

We make a big deal out of the resurrection of Jesus’ friend Lazarus, and how Jesus wept—and so we should. But Jesus wept over Jerusalem here, and look at the chilling words in v. 44: “and level you, and your children within you, to the ground.” Does Jesus love little children? Of course He does. But that did not stop God from judging Jerusalem, full of rebellious people. It is estimated that one million people died at the hands of Roman soldiers in 70 AD, what Jesus is prophesying. Many of them were children. But their children went straight to heaven, into the arms of loving saints and angels. Better that than to take a chance on their rejection of our Lord, as their parents did, and end up in hell. We only look at this life. We are ‘probies’ in this life. God will examine us, and we should examine us, too, to see whether our faith in Jesus results in action—or whether we are ‘faking it.’ 

The best Scriptural summary for the Truth of Man might be: They don’t believe the Scripture is God’s Word—thus they declare, unknowingly, the logical conclusion that God is a liar, and not to be believed. Or He will forgive us our ignorance of Scripture. But God’s Word is so clear, it doesn’t allow ignorance. In Ephesians 4:1-3:

And you He made alive, who were dead in trespasses and sins, ² in which you once walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air (Satan), the spirit who now works in the sons of disobedience, 3 among whom also we all once conducted ourselves in the lusts of our flesh, fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, just as the others.

We are all hell-bound, unless we grasp Christ as our Savior and Lord of our lives, and hang onto Him with all we have.  Ignorance is not given a path, but is treated as sin. See Ephesians 4:18:

…having their understanding darkened, being alienated from the life of God, because of the ignorance that is in them, because of the blindness of their heart;

Ephesians 4:19 adds the word “callous” in the ESV, which means our minds, unsaved, are scarred over so that we cannot sense the truth.  In Genesis 6, God destroyed humanity except eight people, saying all He saw was evil continually. Jeremiah 17:9 says our hearts are desperately wicked.  As we said in our recent blog, Paul laid out the whole Gospel.  The Old Testament does its part, too, in a complete presentation of the Gospel He is the same God, loving and judgmental.  Scripture spells out the sad facts and destination for us, without grasping closely to Him.  We don’t have to look far for it. 

Jesus raised the issues of hell and final judgment in EVERY chapter of Matthew, from chapter 3 to 25, for those who think He was meek and mild.

Just as Paul, Dr. MacArthur is laying out the Truth of Man: We must be reborn, as Jesus told Nicodemus. We cannot fix ourselves. Our “reforming,” trying to get 'good enough' for heaven, or not trying at all ‘because I got saved when I was 10,’ are not options.  Truly, we don’t know where the source that sparks our salvation comes from, that we ‘see the light,’ and get the real gospel. We are here maintaining simply the main point of the sermon; that we need to put the Truth of (sinful) Man back into our gospel.  We need it back into the gospel to appreciate the deep love and sacrifice of God, that He, sovereign and Creator, would even notice, even love our rebellious souls.  We need that aspect of the gospel to have the motivation to realize that we fall on Him for mercy. We want to forward His kingdom by anything He wants us to do.  Only by knowing all the gospel will we be eager to read Scripture to know more about our lover, if I may use the term.  Only with the true gospel will we be eager to follow our Lord’s commands, to please Him and to know what His morality really is. 

Today’s “gospel” leads to ‘mental assent’ salvation, not deep-rooted enough to fight off the worldliness.  If you still live in worldliness, you have idols—of materialism, of envy, of greed, of jealousy.  God does not save idolaters. Today’s gospel leads to a ‘Laodicean’ salvation, a lukewarm, mental assent, not a movement of the heart. Which is not a salvation at all; as Revelation 3 says, if that’s the case, He will vomit us out of His mouth.  We will not be part of His body when judgment day comes.  Let us spread the word.  The reason why churches have lost their power is because they mostly teach a false gospel. I urge you to read Scripture, and find out what Scripture really says.  Try the Gospel of Matthew first.  Your eternal life or hell depends on it. And if you communicate to others on this, you MUST include the Truth of Man.  Today's gospel doesn't work, so why not try something different?  Pray, and have your dedicated believers around you pray, that the Spirit will convert people's hearts, that they will see the light.  Come from death into life, if you read this and are unsaved.  Be free from sin, idolatry and pride.