The Exclusiveness of the Gospel, Part 2 B

Whether or not we preach the gospel is a very critical matter. And if Satan can trivialize a clear understanding of the theology of the gospel and trivialize our understanding of the necessity to preach the gospel, then he has achieved an immense victory. And so we're going to fight back and we're going to make it very clear from the Scripture as to whether or not heathen people can be saved without the gospel. Welcome to Grace to You with John MacArthur.

I'm your host, Phil Johnson. The date was November 20, 1820. In the middle of the Pacific Ocean, a whale rammed the American ship Essex, forcing the crew to set adrift in a small boat. Incredibly, the first officer and two crewmen kept themselves alive for 89 days until a British ship rescued the drifting sailors. Hard to imagine anyone being rescued from a worse predicament, and yet if you're a Christian, you've already experienced a far greater deliverance than even the crew of the Essex. You've been rescued from spiritual death and eternal separation from God, and even more than that.

Helping you understand those truths is what John MacArthur's current study is all about. Follow along now as he continues his series called Delivered by God. The subject at hand is, can the heathen be saved without the gospel? Whether or not we preach the gospel is a very critical matter, and if Satan can trivialize a clear understanding of the theology of the gospel and trivialize our understanding of the necessity to preach the gospel, then he has achieved an immense victory.

And so we're going to fight back in this series, and we're going to make it very clear from the Scripture as to whether or not heathen people can be saved without the gospel. Jesus Himself said that the door into the eternal kingdom is narrow, narrow, Matthew 7, and few there be that find it. Those who advocate this sort of universal salvation through many means and many religions are hard pressed to fit that into Matthew 7 where Jesus clearly says that the door is very, very obscure.

It's hard to find, and it's very narrow so that few find it and few enter it. Of course, the New Testament goes on to say the only people who do enter it do so because they believe in and embrace the gospel of Jesus Christ. They must know about God. They must know about Christ.

They must know what He did. They must believe that and embrace that. But there is this new wave of theology today, or I guess the resuscitation of an old wave of theology, that wants to remove this duty, to remove the necessity for the Great Commission by stating that people don't need the Bible and they may not even need to know about Jesus Christ or the gospel to be saved. This ideology, some have labeled it as natural theology, that man by natural means, that is human intuition, human reason, can ascend to the knowledge of God.

He doesn't need a supernatural revelation coming down, natural reason going up is enough and he can with his natural reason and his natural religious inclination ascend to a saving knowledge of God even without the Bible and without the gospel and without any knowledge of Jesus Christ. It says people can be saved in many contexts of religion or in no religion at all if they will just do the best they can with the information they have and with their natural inclination. This is also labeled by some evangelicals as the wider mercy view that says that mercy is wider than we think. We think God's mercy may be confined to those who believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, but there is a wider mercy that includes those who don't know anything about the Bible or Jesus Christ.

If they just do the best they can with what they've got, they'll be all right. Here's the problem. A natural man that is unaided by supernatural revelation, unaided by Scripture, a natural man cannot know the things that only the Spirit of God knows. He can't know the deep things. To him, they are foolishness.

They are completely nonsense. He can't comprehend them. He can't understand them.

He can't grasp them because they are spiritually appraised. They are not rationally appraised. They can't be examined by a rational mind. They can't be examined by any empirical study. They can't be attained by any human intuition.

It's not available. So where does natural theology lead you? Here is the...here's the natural theologian's verse. The natural theology gets you nowhere. You can't accept the things of the Spirit of God. They are absolute folly.

They're just nonsense. You can't understand them because they can only be appraised through the power and the revelation of the Holy Spirit. Very important verse. But for those of us who know the Scripture, who have been taught by the Holy Spirit through the Scripture, the end of verse 16 says, we have the mind of Christ. And that really is critical because that completes the Trinity.

The Father is God. The Spirit of God knows exactly the deep things of God, the things that are not visible on the surface by the senses, the five senses, and by our human reason. He, the Spirit, knows the full depth of the spiritual truths which constitute the mind of Christ. What is the mind of Christ?

It's the way He thinks. We know how Christ thinks. You say, how do we know how Christ thinks?

Because it's revealed here, right? We know how He thinks. We know God's thoughts on salvation.

We know Christ's thoughts on salvation because the Holy Spirit has revealed them to us here in Scripture. Natural man, unaided by the mind of Christ, revealed through the Spirit, gets nowhere. He ends up with no understanding. Natural man is ignorant. Natural man is idolatrous.

That's where he is. That's what you see in Romans 1. He's there ignorant and idolatrous.

You see him in 1 Corinthians 1, and what is he? He's foolish and he thinks he's wise, but his wisdom is folly with God. And here he again is, the wisest of the wise, the literate, the elite, the brain trust of Athens, the most religious and most rational and most erudite, groping around trying to find God, end up as idolaters who better repent or be judged eternally by the One who offers them salvation through His death and resurrection. Natural man is ignorant. Natural man is idolatrous. Natural man is idolatrous. Natural man cannot by virtue of any natural effort know God.

But it's not just that he's left in limbo or some neutral position. Turn to 1 Corinthians chapter 10. This is...this is really shattering to this heresy, 1 Corinthians chapter 10.

Let me give you a little scenario. You're a Christian, you're living in Corinth. You've been converted out of false religion and you get married, of course. Your wife is maybe a Christian, let's say.

Two of you have come to Christ, you're in the church. But your mother-in-law is still worshiping Dionysius or somebody, some false god. And your mother-in-law says, you know, they're having a big banquet at the temple and it's really important that you come because they're going to honor your father in law. And the whole family is going to be there.

And it's really important for you to come. And so your wife, you know, as well-intentioned as she is as a Christian, feels the pressure of mom. And you say, well, you know, I don't want to go, but also I don't want to make things worse with my mother-in-law. What am I going to do? So you go drift over to the temple of Dionysius and you go in there and it's an orgy to a false god and it's a big eating thing and you eat part of the food and part of the food is offered as a sacrifice to the false god and you feel really badly about that.

But, you know, after all, you know, a lot of heat from your mother-in-law makes it difficult because your wife feels that and then she makes it difficult and, you know, if she's not happy, you're not happy and so you do it. I mean, you can imagine the pressure. That's just one possible scenario.

There could be many more. And then you come to the Lord's table the next time and you take the Lord's table. And you're sitting there and you're taking the bread and the cup and honoring the Lord and you've just come out of a place where you were at a feast that was honoring a false god. Now somebody might say, well, you know, those people don't know any better. Boy, it's a good attempt to find the true God. It's a nice effort and if they try to live a cut above the rest of the folks in their community, well, you know, maybe God will accept that.

I want you to get the picture here. Verse 20, this is exactly the scenario here in Corinth. Verse 20, no, he says, an idol isn't really anything, an idol itself, a stone idol isn't anything, but I say the things which the Gentiles sacrifice, they sacrifice to demons and not to God.

Do you get that? That's not a sacrifice to God. By the way, Gentiles, what are Gentiles? Anybody who's not Jewish, the nations, ethnos, the nations, everybody, the pagans, the heathens, the whole...the heathen, the whole world, all of them and everything they sacrifice to their supposed stone and silver and gold idols and wood idols and whatever, it isn't offered to God, it is offered to...they're not engaging the true God, they're engaging the forces of hell. They're linked with Satan and demons.

Don't ever misunderstand that. You say, well, those poor well-intentioned pagans, you know, they're just kind of working their way toward God the best way they know how. The fact of the matter is they're working their way toward hell. They're connecting with demonic forces that are impersonating the idols that don't exist. There are no other gods than the true God, right?

People believe there are because demons impersonate the gods they worship and do enough stuff to keep those people connected to those deities, false deities though they be. It's not just neutral. It's not just too bad they're ignorant. It's not just too bad they're sort of in limbo.

They're not. Natural reason trying to find God ends up ignorant. Natural reason trying to find God ends up idolatrous. Natural reason trying to find God ends up demonic. Demons are behind all false religions. They are behind all philosophical and religious systems.

They are behind, in that marvelous passage, 2 Corinthians 10, 3 to 5, they are behind every lofty thing lifted up against the knowledge of God. Any anti-God idea is demonic. It's demonic. Anything that's untrue about God, anything that's unbiblical, it's demonic. Satan is disguised along with his demons as angels or ministers of light.

It's all demonic. This goes way back to Deuteronomy, the Pentateuch, the old law. Deuteronomy 32, 17, Moses wrote, of those who sacrificed to demons who were not God. You can also compare Psalm 106, 37. They're not going to God.

They're going to Satan and demons. You know, a good way to illustrate this is in 2 John, there's three verses, 9, 10, and 11. And in 2 John, 9, 10, and 11, John writes that if you deviate from what the Bible teaches about Christ, if you deviate from what the Bible teaches about Christ, we're not saying that you deny Christ, that you deny that He lived, that you deny that He died, but if you deviate about what the Bible says concerning Christ, it says this, anybody who does that does not have God. Point being, you can believe in the Trinity, you can believe in the birth of Christ, you can believe in the life of Christ, you can believe in the death of Christ, but if you say He's not God, that detail. If you say He didn't live a sinless life, if you say, well, He didn't really die a substitutionary death, if you say He didn't literally raise from the dead, if you deny anything that is biblically revealed about Christ, you don't have God. So listen to this, if you're even wrong about Jesus, you don't know God.

To say nothing if you don't even know about Jesus. You're just engaging with demons. People have asked me, is there a lot of satanic religion in our society?

Yes, everything but the truth. Everything but true Christianity is satanic to one degree or another and in one manifestation or another. It's not that everybody, like some, worships Satan.

There are some people who just worship Satan as such, but anybody who doesn't worship the true and living God through Jesus Christ, in effect, worships Satan. You don't want to do that, I don't think, because God gets very jealous, verse 22. Do you want to provoke the Lord to jealousy?

You can't go to the table of demons and the table of the Lord says in verse 21. Verse 22, you don't want to provoke the Lord to jealousy. In Deuteronomy 32, 21, God said, Israel made me jealous with what is not God and they provoked me to anger with their idols. God doesn't look at an idol and say, oh, that's a good try.

I think that's a good enough try to get you in. God looks at an idol and says, that makes me jealous. That provokes me to anger. You don't want to provoke the Lord to anger.

Why? Because you're not stronger than He is. I don't think you want to engage God, do you? The only way you would want to take God on is if you were stronger than He is and you're not.

Pretty serious. So, the best that man can do, the best religion, his best reason, he comes up with foolishness, ignorance, idolatry and engages the forces of hell and pulls them into his life. One more passage of very great importance, Romans 3.

I don't have time to fully develop it, but I just need to make a few comments. Romans 3, 10, and then I'm going to give you one more and we'll be done. Romans 3, verse 10, here is the universal indictment of humanity. Romans 3, 10, there is none righteous...how many?

Not even one. Somebody, if that hadn't have been there, would have said, except me, and so God said, no, not you. There's none righteous, no, not one. Nobody. There's none who understands. We saw that in 1 Corinthians 2, 14.

There's none who seeks for God. They don't go that way. You don't get there on the natural path. Instead, all have turned aside. They all go the wrong way. They all become useless. There's none who does good.

There's not even one. They don't do good. It's not good. As John Gerstner used to say, it's bad good.

It may be good on a human level, it's kindness or being nice to somebody or charitable, but it's bad good because the motive is not to glorify God and anything less than that is a wrong motive. They don't do good. In fact, the truth of the matter is they're wretched on the inside. Their throat's like an open grave. Oh, they open their mouth and out comes the stench of death. With their tongues they keep deceiving. The poison of asps is under their lips. Their mouths are full of cursing and bitterness. Their feet are swift to shed blood, destruction and misery in their paths, and the path of peace they have not known. There's no fear of God before their eyes. That is a description of humanity.

What is this? Verse 19, at the end of the verse, it stops every mouth. Every mouth is closed. Don't open your mouth and try to defend yourself. Don't say, but God, I tried. I'm a pretty good person.

I'm certainly better than the people over here, and I'm a lot better than some folks that I know, and you know them too. You stop your mouth, close your mouth. You're just accountable to God. All that natural revelation does for you is make you accountable to God and inexcusable, and it shuts your mouth.

You have nothing to say. Because in verse 20, by your deeds, your works of the law, meaning your good deeds, your religious deeds, nobody's going to be justified in God's sight. You can't get there from the standpoint of works. And listen to me, if you can be saved without the gospel, then salvation is by works. Nobody's going to get justified that way, and there's only one way to be justified, and he goes on to describe it. Verse 22, the righteousness of God is through faith in Jesus Christ for all those who believe. You have to come to Christ. You have to believe in Christ. The only way of salvation, verse 23, all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, being justified as a gift of His grace through the redemption which is in Christ Jesus.

The only way to be saved is by faith in Jesus Christ. Okay, one more passage, 2 Thessalonians 1.8, and this is brief, but very potent, 2 Thessalonians 1.8. Actually, we probably should start in verse 7. Verse 7 talks about, middle of the verse, the Lord Jesus shall be revealed from heaven with His mighty angels and flaming fire. This is the second coming. This is when the...this is the day, remember the day of Acts 17, this is the day which He has appointed in which the man Jesus is going to be the judge. When that day comes, the Lord Jesus will be revealed from heaven with His mighty angels and flaming fire, and He's coming in furious final judgment.

Now notice verse 8, very, very important. He will deal out retribution. Retribution means judgment.

It means payment, punishment. To whom? To those who do not know God.

And who are they? Those who do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus. That is designed in the Greek language to be an explanation of those who do not know God.

The word and would be better translated even because it's a further description of the same people. This flaming final judgment falls on those who do not know God by virtue of the fact that they do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus and these will pay the penalty of eternal destruction away from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of His power. If you don't believe the gospel, you don't know God. If you don't know God, you're going to be judged. You can read the book of Revelation and the unfolding of this judgment in great detail. See, these heretical views of inclusivism and wider mercy, or as one writer called it, later light, or natural theology, later light referring to when you die and go to heaven, what you don't know gets straightened out up there.

All of that is frightening in its implications. It is a damning and deadly heresy because we must reach people with the gospel so they can hear and be saved. God Himself... Augustus Strong said this in his theology, not in these words, many, many years ago. God Himself is the only source of knowledge with regard to His own being and a relationship with Him. And God, as the only source, must disclose it to us.

And He has, by the Holy Spirit who knows the deep things of God, revealing it to the writers who wrote it down, and thus we have the mind of God and the mind of Christ. Natural theology reduces you to an ignorant idol worshiper engaged with demons and headed for divine judgment. It is sufficient to damn that natural revelation, that natural theology, but not to save.

It makes man without excuse, but not without condemnation. Our command and duty as responsible Christians then is still in place, go into all the world and do what? Preach the gospel to every creature. And that is a good place to close with the words of Jesus at the end of Mark's gospel, 15 and 16 of the 16th chapter, go into all the world preach the gospel to every creature. He who has believed and been baptized shall be saved. He who has disbelieved shall be condemned.

That is our commission. It stands and we're responsible to do that so that people can hear the saving truth. Father, thank You again for the clarity with which the Word speaks to these things.

There are many other passages that we can address, many others that weigh in on this important issue, but this is sufficient for us to know that You have left no doubt and no question to any legitimate mind concerning this matter. The reason we are sent to the ends of the earth with the gospel, the reason we go with such passion, conviction, and sacrifice is because it is necessary that they hear to be saved. And would You use us, Lord, to do that?

Would You make us sensitive and eager to present the gospel faithfully at all times to all people? This is our calling, our commission, our command. This is our duty. This is our great privilege. And would You exalt the truth and put down all the lies and confusion, protect Your people, that they might know Your will, which is revealed in Your Word.

Thank You for it. In Christ's name. Amen. That's John MacArthur, chancellor of the Masters University and Seminary, with his study here on Grace to You, titled Delivered by God.

His focus today? The exclusiveness of the gospel and what it means to follow Christ. And you know, if you simply take an honest look at Scripture, it's hard to understand how there can be so much confusion about what a Christian is and what he's not. And John, you've been writing about this for years. Where does all that confusion come from?

Well, it comes ultimately from the strategies of the enemy. And you go back to Matthew 13, where you see all of it. Jesus gives all those parables, and He says the kingdom of God is going to be like a dragnet. Or He said it's like a tree.

It's out of proportion. It's huge and large and full of birds. And it's another way to say that the kingdom is a lot of things. But maybe the most definitive one is the story he told about the farmer who sows wheat, and an enemy comes and sows tares. And they're so intertwined and indistinguishable that the Lord says, you can't tell till the harvest who's real and who's not. And that is a picture—all of that is a picture of the kingdom. All of that is a picture of the church. There are always going to be false believers.

Why? Because the enemy sows them in the field. Satan's strategy is not always to work against the church. That's one of his strategies, of course, to work against the true church. But his more clever strategy is to create a false church. That is what Paul says when he says that Satan appears as an angel of light, and his ministers are angels of light. In other words, they come declaring themselves as representatives of God and true teachers. That's why false teachers are so hard to unmask, and there's so much in the Bible about how we should unmask them. So Satan's strategy always is to create confusion among the people of God so that they can't distinguish the real from the false.

That's the enemy's strategy. But there are distinctions with regard to those who are truly converted. And what we've been looking at in this series on Delivered by God are the distinctions that define a true Christian as over against a false one. And what a great and significant series this has been. We've looked at important questions like what does it mean to be saved, and what does God save you from, and how do you know you're saved, and what truth is necessary for salvation, and what is the real definition of a Christian, and what are the signs, and what are the marks of a true believer?

All of this so very, very important. The series Delivered by God is available on eight CDs in a beautiful album. You can order it from Grace To You by phone or from our website. And of course you can always download the messages, both the audio and the written transcripts, free of charge anytime. Just go to the website gty.org.

That's right. And again, the study is called Delivered by God. In a day when so many pastors and churches have stretched the gospel beyond biblical bounds, this study gives you the clarity you need. Purchase your copy or download all the messages for free when you contact us today. You can call our toll-free number anytime, 800-55-GRACE, or go to our website, gty.org, where you can order the eight CD album. Our website is also where you go to download each lesson free of charge.

So again, take advantage of the free MP3s and transcripts at gty.org. And if you're looking to understand the doctrine of deliverance and all of Scripture with greater clarity, pick up the MacArthur Study Bible. With 25,000 footnotes by John, the Study Bible will help you interpret and apply virtually every passage of God's Word. It makes a great gift for any serious student of Scripture. To order the MacArthur Study Bible available in the English Standard, New King James, and New American Standard versions, you can call us toll-free, 800-55-GRACE, or shop online at gty.org. That's our website.

One more time, gty.org. Now for John MacArthur, I'm your host, Phil Johnson. Be watching for Grace to You Television this Sunday, and then tune in next week when John shows you what to do when you're tempted to question God's Word and His promises. John is starting a new series titled, When Believers Doubt, with another half hour of unleashing God's truth, one verse at a time, one verse at a time, on Grace to You.