This essay, published in the CGG Weekly of September 7, 2001, was originally titled, “The True Gospel (Part Six).”
“I marvel that you are turning away so soon from Him who called you in the grace of Christ, to a different gospel.”
—Galatians 1:6
Maybe the most amazing fact gleaned from Christian history appears in Galatians 1:6: “I marvel that you are turning away so soon from Him who called you in the grace of Christ, to a different gospel.” When the apostle Paul penned this epistle in the early AD 50s, only two decades had passed since the death and resurrection of Christ and the founding of the church! It took only twenty years before someone perverted the gospel into something so different that it was no longer good news (verse 7)!
Paul continues in verses 11-12: “But I make known to you, brethren, that the gospel which was preached by me is not according to man. For I neither received it from man, nor was I taught it, but it came through the revelation of Jesus Christ.” The glad tidings Jesus, Paul, and the other apostles proclaimed throughout the world is revealed—that is, it comes from God and can be learned only through supernatural disclosure (John 6:44; Romans 16:25-26; I Corinthians 2:10; Colossians 1:26).
The true gospel message, then, is not readily available to all. In fact, a person cannot even pick up the Bible and find it there by himself. One cannot stumble over or happen upon it. God must open one’s mind to receive it (I Corinthians 2:7-16), “because the carnal mind is enmity against God” (Romans 8:7). Jesus says that He designed even His parables—seemingly simple stories with obvious lessons—to hide meaning rather than reveal it (Matthew 13:10-17)!
In the first century, the apostles battled two pernicious false gospels: legalism and Gnosticism. Legalism grew primarily out of Judaism, holding that salvation came through works of the law rather than by grace. Paul preached against this deception repeatedly (e.g., Galatians 5:1-6; Ephesians 2:8-10, etc.), affirming that salvation is by grace, though good works form a necessary part of Christian growth and are indeed what God is working with us to accomplish.
Gnosticism consists of a whole group of heresies, all with the central ideas that knowledge (gnosis) is the means to salvation and that spirit is good and flesh is evil. In practice, it soon devolved into the extremes of asceticism and hedonism, as well as peculiar ideas about the nature of God and Christ (e.g., Colossians 2:8, 18, 20-23; II Peter 2:4-22; I John 1:5-10; 2:18-23, etc.). Eventually, Gnostic ideas, particularly aspects of neo-Platonism, came to dominate Catholicism, and its modern descendants proclaim them under the guise of traditional doctrines.
When Jesus Himself preached the gospel, He did little trumpeting of His life story. Instead, He concentrated on revealing the way to the Kingdom of God. Click To TweetThe most pervasive false gospel today is quite deceptive: the gospel about Jesus alone. Churches that preach this gospel teach almost exclusively about the Messenger and largely ignore the Message He brought. Certainly, we are to study Christ’s life and character, for He is our example of Christian living (I Peter 2:21; I John 2:6, etc.). However, if we are to follow His example, then we need to realize that, when Jesus Himself preached the gospel, He did little trumpeting of His life story. Instead, He concentrated on revealing the way to the Kingdom of God, to entering into a relationship with the Father, and to growing in character and bearing godly fruit.
In commissioning His disciples, Jesus says: “And as you go, preach, saying, ‘The kingdom of heaven is at hand.’ Heal the sick, cleanse the lepers, raise the dead, cast out demons. Freely you have received, freely give” (Matthew 10:7-8). Nowhere does He tell them merely to “preach Jesus”; His concern is always in proclaiming God’s Kingdom! Before His ascension, He tells them “that repentance and remission of sins should be preached in [My] name to all nations” (Luke 24:47). He was so fixated on preaching the gospel of the Kingdom—and ensuring that His disciples understood it before He sent them out to preach it—that it filled His conversation during His post-resurrection appearances to them (Acts 1:3).
The apostles continued Christ’s focus, preaching the whole counsel of God (Acts 20:27), not a narrow slice of it. When the apostle Paul tells the Corinthians that he “determined not to know anything among you except Jesus Christ and Him crucified” (I Corinthians 2:2)—a verse many use to justify their Christ-only gospel—he does not imply that his gospel was about just the person of Christ and His crucifixion. The always-important context shows that he means he would not embellish the gospel with any of the then-popular rhetorical devices or human wisdom (verses 1, 4), but he would preach the unvarnished truth as he had received it from Christ. He wanted the Corinthians’ faith to be “in the power of God” (verse 5), a phrase he had already used to indicate the gospel, “the message of the cross” (see I Corinthians 1:18; Romans 1:16), which is the revelation of salvation through Christ’s finished work and eternal life in the coming Kingdom of God.
What gospel we learn is vitally important! We need to be sure that it is the entire gospel Jesus Christ brought, the revelation of the imminent Kingdom of God. Paul’s warning about false gospels should give us the proper perspective: “But even if we, or an angel from heaven, preach any other gospel to you than what we have preached to you, let him be accursed!” (Galatians 1:8).
