A Revealing Poll

 

A great sermon by Dr. John MacArthur summarized:

There was recently a survey of ‘evangelicals.’  People were defined as evangelicals if they believed the Bible, if they believed Jesus and the resurrection, the gospel, and if they felt they were responsible to communicate the gospel to other people.  Those who believed this were considered evangelicals.

Check this, though: the survey revealed that the majority of ‘evangelicals’ really have no idea what they believe.  One survey question posed to evangelicals was, “The Holy Spirit is a Force, not a personal being”; 53% of evangelicals agreed. That would mean there is no Trinity. Another question: “the Bible is literally true,” agree or disagree?  Only 45% of evangelicals agreed. Evidently, they must feel that much of Scripture is fable. Probably when it records supernatural events, people are definitely less likely to believe it. They might say, ‘how can someone live 900 years?’  Finally, “Our God accepts worship from all religions.”  56% agreed. But truth is, every religion except one has the wrong view of Jesus, and He is the only Way to heaven. Here is the worst result of all: “Jesus was a good teacher, but not God.”  43% of evangelicals agreed! It seems that half of evangelicals care little about theology, and many are apostate—without knowing it.

This is so shocking, that anybody who presumably has a sound sense of Biblical doctrine could ever answer “agreed” to these untruths.  How did we get ‘evangelicals’ who don’t believe what is necessary to be saved, let alone be a true evangelical?   Dr. MacArthur believes “this is the legacy of their pastor or leaders.”  People don’t rise above their teachers.  Truth is, the evangelical pastors and churches, over the last 30 years, have been too busy trying to find ways not to offend non-Christians, and trying to take the offenses out of the message.  They design ‘salvation’ approaches to non-believers that don’t engender hostility, or rejection.  But that man-truth voids the gospel of the truth. Such pastors are man-scared—but not God-scared—for preaching a false gospel. In reality the gospel requires humility and submission to accept. But that’s a hard thing for people to do.

Why do they react this way?  Because, honestly, the gospel is offensive.  The ‘good news’ is hated by non-believers. For proof, see John 15:18:

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

One thing that the original disciples knew, people of the world hated Jesus.  Especially they hated the Jews.  (The “Christians” had a large part in causing this).  People professed that they followed God--but Jesus is God Incarnate, contrary to their ‘beliefs.’.  But once they heard the message of Jesus and He preached it, they rejected it—and Him. But why the hate—toward Him who was 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.

The whole human race is sinful.  But that ‘negative view of me’ brings out hate in everyone unsaved. People generally consider themselves ‘good enough,’ so they have a dominant sin of Pride. It’s easy to create an image of ourselves that seemingly escapes ultimate condemnation—by spinning a web of delusions about ourselves.  Man says that he is ‘better than most’—he will say anything without acknowledging that his ‘deeds are evil.’ This is pride in operation—we all are sinners, and unacceptable to God without a supernatural feat—being born again.

You can see, in the Gospel of John, how the hate plays out.  In 5:16, the offense was He was doing these miracles 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, Jesus said the Jews were plotting already to kill Him.  It’s only the fifth chapter of John and they want Him dead already. Note in those three verses that His persecutors were not listed as “Pharisees,” but Jews. And this: The crowd made quite a noise in demanding that Barabbas be freed. And think how many were even insulting Him at the Cross?

Of equal offense to them was that Jesus called God His Father, making Him equal with God in the Jewish religion.  They judged that ‘blasphemy.’  Of course, their thinking was irrational because His deeds were things that only God could do.  Later in John, they tried to arrest Him. They wanted to stone Him, but His time was not yet.

Isaiah 53 prophesied that He would be an offense. Definitely proven true; the Jewish leaders treated Him as nobody, nothing.  But He was compassionate to widows, to the disabled, to the children.  He brought a message of eternal life and forgiveness. In John 8, Jesus says “you cannot hear my words—you are of your father, the devil.” A hard slap against their character. But please don’t judge the Jews alone:  ALL OF US began life separated from God, and our father was the devil.  And he still is, unless we are truly saved.  We do not start out ‘innocent,’ you see?  We got this terrible trait from Adam.

Jesus, in John 8:45, says,

But because I tell the truth, you do not believe Me

The world’s minds have a natural tendency to be irrational on this subject. We are pre-programmed to 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. Please don’t fall into the trap of excessive pride; face up to the truth. We are sinners; in the eyes of a perfect, holy God we deserve hell. He is our Judge; we cannot change where we are by yelling “unfair.” Submit to the Lordship of Jeus over your life. He owns you, having given His life to buy you out of slavery to sin. Seek His will, since He loves you and knows what you need more than you. Otherwise, it could cost you eternal life.

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

Dr. MacArthur gets back to his original complaint:  I don’t know what kind of evangelistic strategy you, as an evangelist, can devise to tell the truth and yet overcome the natural human resistance that results; the truth is, you can’t.  Think of this:  Jesus had no strategy to bypass reality.  We are, before we reached out to Christ, sinful, dead, blind, ignorant, darkened to the Scriptural facts, and under satanic control. This truth is alien to our nature.

When we “evangelize,” we talk the gospel, but we have a fear of being ‘brutal’ and so we avoid certain subjects, like the depth of human sin.  To speak of that harsh truth takes courage, a willingness to obey Jesus who said we must endure persecution when we tell all the truth.  When they begin lashing back, we should train ourselves to think, that’s what we expect, a further evidence of the sinful characteristics of man.  Jesus said we should rejoice when this occurs—even though we kick ourselves because we could have said it better.  We hope for them to think rationally and grasp the truth. We thought that ‘that person seemed a wise thinker.’

A side thought: I must reveal the Calvinistic sway of Dr. MacArthur here, his belief in Total Depravity.  The words of Calvin say that we have no capacity to receive the truth, until the Holy Spirit puts the spark of regeneration in us first.  That work is done by God randomly, without regard for our previous moral behavior or not.  God chooses who is saved and who is not saved—and the latter is doomed to be hell-bound.  I do not believe in this, since I consider it a non-Scriptural characteristic of God.  I agree more with Jacob Arminius, who argued against Calvin in the 1600s by stating that God gave us ‘prevenient grace,’ that He gave us enough will to choose Him, even in our tragic condition, if we desired to seek after Him. 

But let’s not get sidetracked.  Our subject is how we have strayed from the whole gospel because people hate to hear it. Because people are so hostile--and the feeling is, “how can we convert them in this state of hostility?  Because of their hostility, they’re not thinking straight, so let’s avoid that subject.”  Truth is, people aren’t thinking straight to begin with.  You can’t do anything to prevent it.

You must let the Holy Spirit work in your prospects’ heart. We laid the seed—if we gave the whole truth, God will approve. That’s all that counts.

You should burn the bridge totally, by telling them that they are under eternal judgment of Judgment.  Paul does that at the Areopagus on Mars Hill, Acts 17:29-34:

…we ought not to think that the Divine Nature is like gold or silver or stone, something shaped by art and man’s devising. ³⁰ Truly, these times of ignorance God overlooked, but now commands all men everywhere to repent, ³¹ because He has appointed a day on which He will judge the world in righteousness by the Man whom He has ordained. He has given assurance of this to all by raising Him from the dead.”

³² And when they heard of the resurrection of the dead, some mocked, while others said, “We will hear you again on this matter.” ³³ So Paul departed from among them. ³⁴ However, some men joined him and believed, among them Dionysius the Areopagite, a woman named Damaris, and others with them.

He gently attacks idols, but turns the heat on and calls their beliefs in them “times of ignorance.” Then he suggests that they repent, or turn their mind away from this—because the real God will judge them, through a Man who has been raised from the dead. Likely they had heard of this “Jewish fantasy.” Paul was not as sophisticated as they were used to, as ‘everyday philosophers,’ but he did know how to present the whole truth.

Some mocked, some called him a “babbler.” But some would do some thinking, and a few believed.

That’s the way you should expect it to go. Matthew 7:13-14 says few are saved.

But what evangelistic preaching do you hear now? ‘Jesus wants you happy, He wants you successful.  They imply that He is willing to satisfy your carnal desires without pain, without inconvenience.  Truth is, He paid the price on the Cross for our sin—so we are His servants, we should avoid our carnal desires, but simply seek His will for all we do in all our lives.  We realize how we deserve hell (for ANY sin to a perfect God), but we who are willing to be His disciples can gain heaven if we endure, so we love Him for saving us from hell, and are willing to do that.  We aspire to the goal of seeking earnestly in Scripture for His commands, to find true godliness, and in developing love for our Savior.

Today’s sermons tend to leave off the sinful condition that we’re born into.  It avoids that Jesus is the Judge, the Son of God whose second coming will be for judgment as well.  When you die, your destination is fixed, hell or heaven, depending totally on your relationship with Christ while alive.  Today’s gospel twists the simple fact that Every word in Scripture—even the negative ones—are all true.  By not preaching on some subjects, we still think we ‘follow’—but we don’t believe in those subjects.

By doing this, we paint God as an idol of our own making, a grandfatherly, forgiving type, ignoring the Old Testament.   That god accepts pretended humility from all religions.  Hence the terrible answers that you see in the poll, as proof that what I’m saying is an accurate conveyance of this false and incomplete understanding rampant in society.  No other religion has this doctrine, even false forms of ‘Christianity,’ even the Jews in Jesus’ time (they twisted the truths in Old Testament Scripture).  They are all dooming more people to hell, teaching that basically, we are good, and we can reform ourselves into a better life (or lives), and eventually, through purgatory or temporary renewal, as long as we try, be sincere, can hopefully gain heaven.  Or universal peace. This way, they say, God will approve of our righteousness. 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, hate the bad news that they are sinful, according to God—and thus reveal that they don’t begin life Christian, even if baptized.  Most pastors are deluded enough to believe that the people that are there regularly are Christian.  But the pew-sitters believe lies, nuanced distortion of the truth, believe what’s convenient, like the survey above shows.  Many of their pastors would get fired if they preached the truth for more than three weeks straight.  So it has come to be in America. The best Scriptural summary for our history might be in Ephesians 2:1-3--you decide if you are before or after:

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.

The concluding statement says that we are all hell-bound, unless we grasp Christ as our Savior, and hang onto Him with all we have. Are you in 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. That means that our minds, if we remain unsaved, are scarred over by ignoring Him so that we cannot sense the truth. 

God can be a killer. In Genesis 6, God destroyed humanity except 8 people, saying all He saw was evil continually. Jeremiah 17 says our hearts are desperately wicked.  Scripture spells out the sad facts and destination for us, if we don’t dispose of pride and grasp Jesus, who is God, in humility to avoid hell.  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.

Dr. MacArthur simply finally says that we must be reborn, as Jesus told Nicodemus.  Truly we cannot fix ourselves, our ‘reforming ourselves’ to heaven is not an option.  Truly, we don’t know where the source that sparks our salvation comes from.  Maybe we can’t ‘see the light,’ and get the real gospel. We are here maintaining simply the main point of the sermon; that we need to get the truth of Man back into the gospel to appreciate the deep love and sacrifice of God.  We need that aspect of the gospel to have the motivation to realize that we need to cling to Him, that 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 all three Persons of God. Only with the true gospel will we be eager to follow our Lord’s commands, to please Him and to know what godliness really is.  Today’s preached “gospel” leads to ‘mental assent’ salvation, not deep-rooted enough to fight off the worldliness.  If you still have worldliness, you have idols—of materialism, of envy, of greed, of jealousy.  God does not save idolaters at the Judgment, because there is no love for Him there.  Today’s gospel leads to a Church of Laodicea salvation, which is not a salvation at all; as Revelation 3 says, He will vomit some of us out of His mouth—thus, we would not be part of His body.  Let us spread the word. The reason why churches have lost their power is because they most teach a false gospel. I urge you to read Scripture, and find out what Scripture really says.  Try reading the Gospels first.  Your eternal life or hell depends on it. May God bless you.