Christianity Is not Mystical. Christianity is totally and utterly and completely and fully contrary to anything and everything that is mystical. Christianity believes in objective, historical, revealed, actual, rational truth from God. Welcome to Grace to You with John MacArthur. I'm your host, Phil Johnson.
Have you ever explained the gospel to a neighbor or a co-worker explaining that Jesus Christ is the only way to heaven? And you heard a response along these lines: God is who you want Him to be. Or, don't all religions basically teach the same thing? Don't all roads lead to heaven? How do you respond to claims like those?
How can you know that there's only one true God and only one way to heaven? Today on Grace to You, John MacArthur is going to clear up confusion about salvation and expose dangerous false teaching about the precious faith of the Christian. This series is titled Myths About Salvation. But before we get to today's lesson on the believer's precious faith, there are some precious people that we should mention. We're continually grateful for them at Grace to You, and John MacArthur always thanked the Lord for them.
And with that in mind, let's listen to these comments from John. He put it so well. Apart from two very special groups of people, there is no grace to you. One Yeah. Those who support this ministry.
Week after week, month after month, We hear from listeners, you folks who've benefited spiritually, and you express your thanks by supporting us financially. Apart from that, we don't exist. We depend on that support. To say we're grateful for it is a serious understatement. It is our lifeblood, it's oxygen, it's the blood that flows through this ministry that gives it life.
And also, I need to say, There wouldn't be any ministry if there weren't faithful Radio stations. All over this country, all over the planet, that are willing to carry and broadcast the teaching of the Word of God. It is that partnership between the stations, the owners and managers and staff of literally hundreds and hundreds, if not thousands of radio stations around the world that are willing to carry grace to you. And broadcast every day the teaching of the Word of God. And then the faithful folks on the other end who and stand with us with financial support.
That's why we're able to do what we're doing, what I'm doing even right now. Thank you to all of you radio stations and folks who serve those stations, and thank you for your listeners who stand with us, unleashing God's truth one verse at a time. Yes, friend, for all of us here at Grace TU, thank you for supporting our verse-by-verse Bible teaching. For more information on how you can partner with us and help equip believers around the world with biblical truth, visit our website, gty.org. I'll repeat those details before we close today.
But for now, here's John to clear up some myths about salvation. We are coming to the Word of God again and looking at 2 Peter. Chapter One. And as we come to 2 Peter chapter 1 again, I want us to major on verse... Two.
Let me just read it. To you, and then I want to digress for a rather lengthy time and then come back to it. I think when I come back you'll understand its meaning. Grace and peace be multiplied to you. In the knowledge of God.
and of Jesus Our Lord.
Now the key word in that verse is knowledge. Grace and peace are multiplied to those who have the knowledge of God. And of Jesus. Our Lord. Our precious faith is built on knowing the truth.
and knowing the source of truth.
Now you might think that's fairly obvious. And it is. But amazingly It does not appear to be so obvious to everyone today. In fact, in our day, it seems to be rather obscure. Let me show you why.
There's an article called Paganism American Style written by John Walk. This is what he said. The New Age movement is not about discovering reality. but about making it. It is about power.
rather than truth. End quote. That's a very insightful statement. That is a very encompassing statement. The culture in which we live is not interested in discovering what is.
It is interested in creating what it wants to be. They talk about mind power. The power of positive thinking. Because you believe it strongly enough to be so, it will be so. Because you say it is so, it will become so.
While all of this New Age stuff. has sort of an intellectual veneer. It is not about reality. It is not about objectivity. It is not about truth.
It is not about fact. It is about feeling. It is about Intuition. It is about experience. It is about Self-generated power.
Now in that system You have to create your own reality. You have to create your own values. What you choose to create with your mind power, whether it's the power of positive thinking or. Whether it's the power of personal Choice Whether it's the power of Spoken words. Whether it's the power of the imagination, They say What you choose doesn't really matter as long as you choose it.
And if you choose it, you can make it so. Spiritual power in your mind. is the key to controlling the perception. To controlling the perception to the degree where you can perceive something so clearly that you create the reality you want. In other words, Spiritual power in your mind.
Fine-tunes a perception of what you want. And wanting that perception clearly and strongly enough makes it a reality. Your mind can create. That's New Age thinking. That's popular today.
Now In the pursuit of this inner power, There is a combination of four things that sort of interplay a little bit or four ideologies. Let me just share them with you. The first one is evolution. There is an evolutionary principle behind this that says you can wish something to be. That's basically evolution.
Once there was a snake who wanted to fly, and so he wished himself wings. That's basic evolution. There's a few steps in the process, but that's basically it. Evolution also indicates that Everything that exists is equal. We're all in a long Chain man Is no more significant than anything else.
He's just the latest. Result of monkeys wishing. He is sort of the final accident. At least for now. But he has no more value than a rock.
No more value than a bird. No more value than a cat. No more value than a tree. No more value than a dolphin. Because that's evolution.
Evolution is just this process of wishing things to be, and so they came into existence in a long chain of all equal products of wishing. And that is why There is no particular concern for man as over against any other. part of this evolutionary chain. There's a second ideology bound up in this New Age thinking, and that's pantheism. Since there is no Creator, there is no God.
The creation itself is God. And since it created itself, it's the God of its own creation. And since everything in the process bears something of the power to create itself, it is all God. Pantheism sees the only God then as the energy that exists in everything. You hear people talk about pyramid power.
And some people will walk around with a wire pyramid on their head. or hang a pyramid over their door in their house. They talk about Free power. I don't know if you've read any about that.
Okay. Rock. Power. There's energy in all of these things. That's what mind power is.
It's the God energy that exists in everything. Everything is equal to everything else. And everything is God.
So everything has a right. To its own identity and a right to its own free course.
So there have to be human rights. But there also have to be Animal rights, there have to be tree rights. Everything is seen as having some kind of Theistic energy in it. Everything is God. Everything has power, everything has energy, and you want to plug into that energy.
There's another component, another ideology in this. Besides evolution and Pantheism, that's What we'll call ah moralism. If everything is equal to everything else, And everything is God. then all behavior is acceptable. Because it's just the energy of this pantheistic.
Religion. The only moral value is whatever you decide is moral. You're your own God. And if it feels good. And there's energy in it.
Then do it.
So, we have left in our society one moral law, and that is. That there are no binding moral laws, only whatever anybody feels is good for them. Morality is what I create. There's no standard outside of myself.
Now all of this stuff isn't intellectual at all. Facts. if you look at facts, would totally defy all of it. Facts tell us that an ah moral society will destroy itself. That's false knowledge.
That's neo-Gnostic paganism. That's the new Gnosticism. It masquerades as knowledge. It isn't knowledge at all.
Now, it is built on the fourth ideology and the fourth component, and that's mysticism. Mysticism is the foundation for all of this. kind of thinking we have today in the new age. You say, what is mysticism? Let me give you my MacArthur definition.
Mysticism is beliefs and ideas. which are the product of personal Intuition. Let me say it again. Mysticism is beliefs and ideas. which are the product of personal intuition.
Further, Assumed to transcend ordinary understanding. That's mysticism. It is a system of beliefs and ideas. Which are the product of my own personal intuition, which I assume transcends ordinary understanding. To put it simply, it is sheer speculation believed to be reality.
Sheer speculation believed to be reality. Mystical belief systems are Collections of ideas that have arisen out of emotion, out of self-authenticated ideas unrelated to objective fact. or evidence. Mystical belief systems then are collected. inside a person Arising out of self-authenticating ideas and emotions utterly unrelated to objective fact or evidence.
New ages will tell you that yoga Meditation. and even wordless New Age music. Induces These kinds of internal intuitions. No objectivity. No reality.
just inward, subjective, non-rational, intuitive feelings that then become fact. People come along and say, well. With your mind. You can accomplish healing. Oh?
How does that work? I can tell myself I am healed. I can tell myself I will never be ill, but that is purely my own imagination, has nothing to do with reality. Viruses don't know I said that. And even if they did.
There's no indication that they wouldn't go ahead and do whatever they were going to do. This is not knowledge. Such an internal Subjective experience provides no knowledge, no reality, and worse, it provides a silly. Illusion. Which becomes a false Hope.
To know something. is to have accurate fact about reality. Then you know it. Then you know it. You know, we border on this.
Sometimes we'll say, well, I think everything's going to be right.
Well, how do you know that?
Well, ah. I just kind of feel everything. You don't know that. That is an illusion induced by your own Mind. That is mysticism.
And it can concoct anything. A system of belief. A system of religion. A system of healing. Anything.
Now, what frightens me is This has wholesale invaded the church. where people are creating assumed illusory reality out of their own imaginations. Unrelated to fact. No doubt. There was stuff like this floating around in Peter's time?
No doubt Peter was writing to churches as he penned this letter who were dealing with some of this. kind of belief that You could transcend the natural, you could transcend objectivity, you could surpass normal understanding. Listen to me very carefully. Christianity Is not Mystical. Christianity is totally and utterly and completely and fully contrary to anything and everything that is mystical.
Contrary to Believing in imaginary feelings, Christianity believes in objective, historical, revealed, actual, rational truth from God. That must be understood. The mystic, he rejects reason. For experience, and the line between truth and lies is. Erased.
So the mystic Reads the Bible. And that's truth. And has an experience, and that's truth, and truth and lies overlap. The basic lie of mysticism. Is that my inner feelings tell me the truth about what is.
That is not true. My inner feelings do not tell me the truth about reality. The lie of mysticism is my experience self-interpreted. gives the truth. about reality.
That's not true. That's not so. What is really appalling about this is that it's in the church. And all of a sudden, Christianity, instead of being objective, historical, revealed, actual, rational truth from God, is literally a mishmash of revealed truth and intuition and experience. People say, well, the Lord showed me in my heart that this will not happen.
Oh? That has nothing to do with whether it'll happen or not. The Lord showed me in my heart that that won't happen. Oh, that has nothing to do with it.
Now those are mild forms. A stronger form is what is commonly called positive confession. We people who say if you verbalize it and if you say it and if your mind conjures it up, and you positively affirm it, you will create it. That is Sub-Christian mysticism. Not Christianity.
Another form of it that's come recently is called visualization. The idea that you can create reality with your mind. If you visualize it. His visualization was so important. You'd think the Bible would say something about it.
says absolutely nothing about it. It's mystical. But what is God saying?
Well, all of that To take you back to verse 2 of 2 Peter 1. If you don't understand this verse now, you haven't been listening. Grace And peace. be multiplied to you. In the what?
In the knowledge of God and of Jesus our Lord. We return to our First thought. Grace and peace. Come in unending Large, abundant. Streams.
to those who know God. and who know Jesus our Lord. Awesome. Peter, remember? is teaching us how to face false teachers.
In chapter 2, he presents those false teachers. In chapters 1 and 3, talks about our defenses. The first defense is to know our salvation. And that's what he's into here in chapter 1. Last time we talked about the fact we need to know the source of our salvation.
It's God.
Now in verse 2, we need to know the substance of our salvation. The substance of it. Let's begin at the end and just Go back through that verse. In the knowledge of God, and of Jesus our Lord. In could be through.
In the knowledge or through the knowledge, indicating the sphere. The word knowledge, listen carefully, is epignosis. It is a strengthened form of gnosis. It implies a personal complete knowledge. It's the strongest of the two words.
We could say gnosis would be sort of basic information. Epignosis would be full, exact, rich. intimate knowledge.
Sometimes epignosis appears to have A very special, unique meaning. But you cannot ascribe it to necessarily salvation. For the knowledge mentioned in Hebrews 10:26 and 2 Peter 2:20. was knowledge that did not save and in both cases it is epignosis.
So you don't want to make too much out of this word. But it does tend to convey the idea of a full knowledge. Most of its uses have to do with a saving knowledge. Generally, it has the idea of a real, complete, thorough knowledge involving some intimate understanding. Paul loves to use it in the pastoral epistles.
And he uses it. with relation to the truth. In 1 Timothy, 2 Timothy, and Titus. He talks about The knowledge of the truth. The knowledge of the truth.
One, two, three, four, five times. The knowledge of the truth. The knowledge of the truth. The substance of our salvation, beloved, is the knowledge of the truth. It is empirical, it is objective, it is rational.
You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free. You cannot become a Christian until you hear the truth. About Jesus, Romans 10, 17. The Bible says, Your heart will lie, your heart will deceive you, your emotions will deceive you, the truth is not in us. The truth is outside us.
A man is a fool. And not only does he not understand the objectives. and the power of salvation. He doesn't understand depravity. If he thinks that man can create divine truth out of his own fallen heart.
Salvation substance is not based on intuition, it's not based on emotion, it's not based on experience, it's based on the revealed truth. The knowledge of the truth. But Peter goes further. Truth does not come from non-rational urges. He says, it's not only the knowledge of the truth.
as Paul called it. But here he says it's the knowledge of a person, two persons, God and Jesus our Lord. The substance of our salvation, we know God through knowing Jesus, right? It is knowledge. We know the truth.
And we know the person. who revealed the truth. I'm sure Peter got this wonderful phrase. the knowledge of God from his Old Testament learning. The Old Testament uses the concept of knowing the Lord over and over and over.
Pharaoh is quoted in Exodus 5, 2 as saying, I do not know the Lord. Judges 2.10 speaks of a whole generation of people who didn't know the Lord. 1 Samuel 2:12 describes the sons of Eli as corrupt because they didn't know the Lord. Hosea describes the people as possessing the spirit of harlotry, and they didn't know the Lord. Hosea records that God said, I will betroth you to me in faithfulness, however, and you shall know the Lord.
Proverbs 2:5 says, You will understand the fear of the Lord and find the knowledge of God. That's an Old Testament concept. Man's relation to God is not only described as knowing the truth about God, but it's knowing God. Through his truth. I wish I had time to fully develop that.
That's why, at the end of this epistle in 2 Peter 3:18, he says, Grow in grace and in the what? The knowledge. The knowledge. Of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Beloved, the substance of our salvation is not mystical.
The substance of our salvation is knowing the God of truth, the Christ of truth, and the truth they revealed. There's no place for a passive mind. There's no place for mysticism, imagination, visualization, any of that other stuff. Continuing our backward trip through the verse, In the knowledge of God. And of Jesus our Lord.
Grace and peace are multiplied together. Yeah. That's the reality. We live in grace. Romans 5 says, In the sphere of grace, We have peace with God.
Grace That's Kaurus free Unmerited favor for sinners, giving them full forgiveness through Jesus Christ forever. Did you hear that statement? Grace is free, unmerited favor for sinners, giving them full forgiveness in Jesus Christ forever. Peace. Irene.
is the effect of grace. It is the state of blessing flowing out of the forgiveness that Christ has given. Be multiplied to you as a wish. My wish for you, and it is a reality. Is that in an ever-increasing greater abundance, grace and peace will be multiplied to you?
As the true, genuine, intimate knowledge of the truth of God and Christ. grows through the word. There is the multiplication of the blessings of grace and peace. More grace for every sin, more grace for every weakness, more peace for every temptation, more peace for every trial.
So, beloved, we must understand our salvation. If we're going to stand against false teaching, like the stuff floating around, you've got to know. The source of your salvation is God, and the substance of your salvation is knowledge. Knowledge. That'll help you put on what Paul in 1 Thessalonians 5.8 calls the helmet of the hope of salvation.
That's John MacArthur, featured Bible teacher on Grace to You. His current series is titled Myths About Salvation.
Now, as we said before the lesson, this ministry is made possible because of the faithful support of listeners like you. Your donations help keep this broadcast on the air in your area and around the world, encouraging believers and strengthening local churches. And if you want to partner with Grace to you, visit our website, gty.org, or give us a call today. Our phone number is 80055 GRACE. and our website again, gty.org.
You can also mail your tax-deductible donation to Grace2U. Post Office Box 4000, Panorama City, California. 91412. And even if you're unable to give today, you can still support this ministry for generations to come. By making grace to you part of your estate plan.
For details about legacy giving, visit our website gty.org. or call us at 800-55 GRACE. Our number again, 800-55 GRACE. And if John's Bible teaching has helped you grow spiritually, would you take a minute and let us know? Our email address is letters at gty.org.
That's Letters at gty.org. or you can reach us at PO Box4000, Panorama City, California. 91412. Now for the entire Grace to U staff, I'm Phil Johnson. Keep in mind Grace to You Television airs this Sunday on DirecTV Channel 378, or check your local listings for channel and times.
And join us tomorrow when we continue John MacArthur's series called Myths About Salvation. with a look at the great generosity of God. It's another half hour of unleashing God's truth one verse at a time. on Grace to You.
