Deliverance: From Error to the Truth, Part 1

The theology of deliverance and understanding of deliverance is a critical area of truth. And it becomes critical at the point of understanding who is a true Christian. And that is absolutely essential to the health and well-being and effectiveness of the church. Welcome to Grace To You with John MacArthur.

I'm your host, Phil Johnson. According to some people today, a person can receive salvation without understanding, without even believing, the gospel. The consequences of that view? People are confused about what it means to be a Christian. It's a serious issue. It's one that has gripped John MacArthur enough that he has addressed it head-on.

The result? John's current series of lessons here on Grace To You, titled Delivered By God. And now, follow along with John as he begins today's message by explaining why this topic of deliverance is so crucial for you and for every Christian to understand. One of the great words in the Bible is the word deliverance, though it is not commonly used in the Christian vocabulary. Sad to say, rarely do you hear theologians talk about, rarely do you read theologians write about the truth of deliverance. And yet it is nonetheless a profoundly important term for understanding God's redemptive work. God is in the business of deliverance. And deliverance may be the best, it may be the most clarifying, and it may actually be the most comprehensive word to explain God's gracious and powerful work in our lives. We were prompted to this discussion by the fact that Jesus came with a ministry of deliverance.

And when we began to see that in the case of Jesus, it drew us into the greater theme of deliverance which covers really all of God's redemptive purpose. Now the theology of deliverance is not just some academic exercise, it is not merely a matter for theological discussion. The theology of deliverance is practical.

It is intensely practical and it is extremely necessary for all believers to understand because it is the theology of deliverance that defines what salvation really does in the believer. A person who is a true Christian has been delivered from certain realities. True salvation we could say is deliverance. It is the dramatic rescue of the sinner from all of the elements of life that threaten to destroy and damn him. In fact, deliverance defines what it means to be a Christian.

There are the undelivered and the delivered. We are the delivered. In Romans 11 26, Paul writes, the deliverer will come and he will remove ungodliness and he will take away sin. The Messiah, the Lord Jesus Christ, is there identified as the deliverer. In fact, every time in the Bible you see the word save, saved, salvation, or Savior, you can translate it with some form of the word deliver.

Essentially it means the same thing. But deliver communicates well to us because we understand in the English the meaning of deliverance. The theology of deliverance and understanding of deliverance is a critical area of truth. And it becomes critical at the point of understanding who is a true Christian. And that is absolutely essential to the health and well-being and effectiveness of the church. If the church blurs the line between Christians and non-Christians, it then invites the enemy into the camp, totally distorts its own identity and allows Satan to gain a foothold.

It is a matter of being content or even inviting the tares to be sown among the wheat. And yet that is exactly what is happening in evangelicalism today. The evangelical church is inviting non-Christians in and then redefining them as Christians. The greatest failure of professing Christianity in this day and for this century past has been the failure to distinguish between true Christians and false. And it's worse now than it's ever been.

It's been going on all through this century and it's now worse than it's ever been. The true church is the society of the delivered. And we have to keep that distinction very clear because the Lord wants a pure church. He wants a chaste bride.

He wants a bride without blemish and without spot. The church must be made up of true believers and it must be clear who is a real Christian and who is not so that we protect the church from the encroachment of Satan and also so that we protect the lost from being deceived. Not only when we allow non-Christians to be defined as Christians do we pollute the church, but we also aid and abet the deception of Satan and people live as though they were Christians when in fact they are not. There are a number of categories in which we have to understand the nature of deliverance. Being a true Christian is being delivered and it's being delivered from several very important realities. The first one is the one I want to talk to you about, is true Christians have been delivered from error to truth...from error to truth. Now this is not an easy message for me to preach to you for a number of reasons. One, I have too much material in my head, too much to try to sort out so that it takes a tremendous amount of effort mentally and confidence in the Spirit of God to help the filtering process. Secondly, you're going to have to think with me because there are going to be some subtleties as well as some not so subtle things that you're going to need to have to comprehend as we go through.

But this is very, very important. Nothing is worse than a person thinking they're a Christian when they're not. Nothing is more deadly to the impact of the church than embracing non-Christians as if they were Christians. So we're dealing with an issue that is at the very center of what the church really is and it applies in all the lives of folks who come near the church. So the first thing we want to know about the doctrine of deliverance, or the theology of deliverance, is the true Christians have been delivered from error to truth. Turn with me in your Bible to Colossians chapter 1, and let's start there and we're going to try to go through this as rapidly as we can and I will have to leave some things out. But in Colossians chapter 1, I think we can get a good start. Here is a passage that expresses the great miracle of deliverance. And verse 13 is the notable verse. Verse 13, Colossians 1, 13, for He, that is the Father, mentioned in verse 12, to whom we give thanks, He, the Father, delivered us, rescued us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of His beloved Son.

Back in verse 12, Paul says, we therefore give Him thanks because He has qualified us to share in the inheritance of the saints in light. Now here you have that very familiar biblical contrast between darkness and light. We have been delivered out of the domain of darkness.

We have been delivered into the kingdom of the Son of His love, as the Greek literally says, which is a kingdom made up of saints in light. Darkness is synonymous with ignorance. Darkness is synonymous with error. Light is synonymous with truth. We have been taken out of error, out of darkness and delivered into a kingdom of light ruled by the beloved Son of God, Jesus Christ.

That's the first category of deliverance. True Christians understand the truth. They have come from darkness to light. They have come from error to truth. Psalm 119, 130, the entrance of Thy Word gives light. Thy Word, we read in Psalm 119, 105, is a lamp unto my feet, a light unto my path. That is the first great area of deliverance, out of the darkness of error into the bright light of truth. The Apostle Paul when he was commissioned to preach, according to Acts 26, 18, was sent to sinners to open their eyes that they might turn from darkness to light so that darkness and light are really symbols or metaphors of error and truth.

And notice, please, in verse 13 that truth is synonymous with Jesus Christ. We are delivered from the domain of darkness which is the kingdom of Satan into the kingdom of His beloved Son and He is the light of the world. Jesus said, I am the light of the world and whoever comes to me will never walk in darkness.

The light is synonymous with Jesus Christ. It is synonymous with entering into the kingdom of Jesus Christ. So the first thing that is true about the delivered, the true Christians, is that they do not believe error because they have come to the light.

They have come to the truth. To borrow the language of Ephesians chapter 6, they are engaged in a battle against the spiritual forces of darkness but they are triumphant because they have put on the armor of God and the first piece of armor is the belt, or the girdle, of truth. A Christian is someone then who understands the truth, who has been delivered from Satan's lies to God's truth. To be saved, according to 1 Timothy 2, 4, to be saved is to come to the knowledge of the truth. Being saved is not some kind of mystical, cryptic, some kind of inexplicable feeling. Being saved is to come to the knowledge of the truth. Luke tells us in the book of Acts that when the gospel was preached on the Day of Pentecost, three thousand people believed and they continued in the Apostles' doctrine.

They started there and they continued there. A true Christian is a person who has been deposited, rescued out of ignorance and deposited in the realm of truth. They came into the realm of truth and they continue in the realm of truth. To be saved is to come to the knowledge of the truth.

A Christian is someone who understands the truth, who believes the truth, who embraces the truth, who loves the truth, and who submits to the truth. And, you know, it amazes me that there are so many people in evangelicalism today, leaders in evangelicalism, pastors and writers who believe a person can be a Christian without ever being delivered from error to truth. I'm reading today that there are those saying that there are people in countries and obscure places and tribes and hidden back waters of the world who have never had a Bible and never hear the truth of Jesus Christ who are going to be saved because God is going to be gracious and kind to them and they're going to be saved even though they've never heard the truth.

Well that is a lie. If, according to Romans 1, they live up to the light they have, and if they see the Creator in the creation and through reason, and according to Romans 2, follow their conscience back to a lawgiver, if they live up to the light they have, Christ who is the light that lights every man that comes into the world, John 1.9 says, God will reveal more light to them and they'll come to a greater light because God will give them a greater light, but no one will ever be saved who doesn't come to the knowledge of the truth. They're saying today that you don't have to come to the knowledge of the truth.

Call all the missionaries home. Stop proclaiming the gospel to every creature even though Jesus told us to do that. But the Bible tells us that when you're delivered, you're delivered out of error into truth and you come literally into a paradigm, a realm, a domain, a kingdom of light. In the words of John 6 45, all believers are taught by God. They possess an enlightenment which sets apart the teaching of God from all the teaching of men. True believers understand the truth as opposed to error. They have received by regeneration a new nature and that new nature has a capacity for the truth. That new nature has an affinity for the truth. That new nature has a devotion to the truth.

It has a love for the truth. We have an anointing, 1 John 2 27, from God and it abides in us, he says, so that we don't need anybody to teach us. We don't need a human teacher to explain the world to us.

We don't need some human approach to life philosophically. We don't need some religion invented by men or devils because we have been delivered out of darkness into light. We live in a realm of truth. Listen, we have been given, according to John 14 17, the Spirit of truth who has taken up residence in us and we understand the truth. And it is that truth that saves.

So that 1 Timothy 2 4 is the sum of it all. You have been saved, meaning you have come to the knowledge of the truth. You've believed it. You've assented to it. You've embraced it.

You love it and you submit to it. In John 8, Jesus said, You shall know the truth and the truth shall...what?...set you free. The search is over. You're out of the darkness. You're no longer wandering around blind and dark because you've been liberated, you've been set free. The truth has made you free. And let me tell you something, folks, the only thing that will ever set the sinner free is the truth. Until the sinner comes to the truth, he's locked in darkness. Ephesians 5 8, Paul explained it this way.

I love this. Once you were darkness, now you are light in the Lord. Does that say it? Once you were darkness, now you are light in the Lord. Simply stated, being saved demands coming to believe wholeheartedly the truth that saves. And if you don't believe the truth that saves, you can't be saved.

You have to believe the delivering truth to be delivered. A woman once wrote to me and she said she thought Christianity was fine, but frankly she was into Zen. And she liked to listen to Christian radio, she says, because, quote, the music smoothed out her karma. But she said, I interrupted that karma because I am too narrow-minded and too narrow-minded toward other religions.

So she wrote to encourage me to be more broad-minded. And she said, here's a quote, God doesn't care what you believe as long as you believe. God doesn't care what you believe, she says, as long as you're sincere. She went on to say, all religions lead ultimately to the same reality, it doesn't matter which road you take.

That's pretty reflective of our generation, isn't it? That's a popular and pervasive lie that doesn't matter what you believe as long as you believe something and as long as you're sincere because everybody's going to get to the same end anyway. That's not what Matthew 7 records that Jesus said.

He said, the gate is wide and the way is broad. That's the religious road that most people are on and it leads to destruction. And in Proverbs 14, 12 it says, there's a way which seems right to a man but the ends thereof are the ways of death. Now I understand it's politically correct to have this kind of latitude. I understand it's politically correct to not say your religion is right and your faith is right and you believe right and everybody else is wrong.

That doesn't fly today, does it? In a post-modern world, disinterested in truth. The great goal of post-modernism is that everybody is accepted no matter what it is that they believe and they certainly have a right to believe that. And who are you to come along and say, you have the truth, we all know there is no such thing as real truth, it's only a matter of preference, whatever makes you feel better is fine for you to believe, but don't tell me it's the truth and everything other than that is error.

That's not popular. Well that kind of indiscriminate view of truth or a view of non-truth is so pervasive that it is literally infecting evangelicalism. And people are now saying that there are folks, as I said earlier, all over the world tucked off in little corners who never will know the truth and God will take them to heaven anyway. It is the nature of a fallen man. It is the nature of the undelivered to believe lies.

It is not the nature of the delivered. We have been delivered out of the lies into the...what?...the truth. We have been rescued from that. Turn to 2 Corinthians 10, I have to show you this passage.

I've referred to it before. It is pertinent to this discussion. 2 Corinthians chapter 10, I'm really going to have to hurry here. 2 Corinthians 10, verse 4, Paul says...well verse 3, he says, we are war...making war. We can't make war in the flesh.

That is with human weapons, human ingenuity, human cleverness, human thoughts, theories, techniques, marketing, whatever. We can't fight this battle with human weapons. Verse 4, the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh, they're not human, he means. But mighty unto God, divinely powerful for the destruction of fortresses.

He says, look, we're in a spiritual war, the spiritual war that we're in is a formidable thing. We're attacking these great fortifications. We're attacking these massive fortresses.

And the picture is of some huge granite fort. And he says, we've got to go in and destroy them. We've got to have pretty powerful weapons.

We can't go in there with all our little clever ideas. We've got to destroy those fortresses. What are those fortresses? Verse 5, here's what they are. Verse 4 ends the destruction of fortresses.

Verse 5 begins, we are destroying speculations, the NAS says. Imaginations, some other versions say. This is defining the fortresses. These great fortifications, these great prisons are nothing other than speculations. They are logismos is the Greek word, it means ideas, ideologies...ideologies.

What kind of ideologies? Follow verse 5. Every lofty idea raised up against the knowledge of God. Any unbiblical idea, anything contrary to the truth of God, we have to destroy.

Why? So verse 5, we can take every thought captive to Christ. In other words, the world is full of people imprisoned in ideological systems, in lies, in error, in darkness, in blindness.

And our responsibility is to go and smash those ideologies down in order that we can set the prisoners free because those fortresses become their prisons and eventually their tombs. Now how do you smash that? Well, it's very simple. What is the one thing that destroys error? Truth. That's why you have to preach the truth. People say, well, you know, your preaching is so dogmatic. I'm just trying to preach the truth.

It's the only thing that destroys error. And if we don't bring the truth and they don't come from darkness to light, they don't come from error to truth, they don't get delivered and they die in their sins and their perishing. The first thing that is true of a Christian is a Christian, a true Christian, not one who says he's a Christian.

A true Christian is somebody who has come from error to truth. Satan doesn't care what people believe. He doesn't care how sincerely they believe it as long as what they believe is wrong.

Do you get that? It's important. He doesn't care what they believe. He sponsors all kinds of religions. He sponsors every religion on the face of the earth that isn't true. He's behind them all. He's got enough diversity for everybody. He's provided an absolutely irresistible smorgasbord.

There's somewhere for everybody to plug in. He doesn't care what they believe. And frankly, he is really into sincerity. He doesn't care what you believe or how sincerely you believe it as long as what you believe is wrong because wrong damns, right saves. That's why Jesus said, I am the way, the truth, and the life and nobody comes to the Father...what?...but by Me. There isn't salvation in any other. And anybody who doesn't hold to the truth is damned.

Galatians chapter 1, look at it, verse 6. He talks about a different gospel. Somebody's coming along and preaching a different gospel. Well, listen, there isn't a different gospel. Gospel means good news. There's only one good news, all the rest is bad.

They may say it's good, but it's bad. So He says it's a different gospel, verse 7, which is really not another. There isn't any other good news than the true gospel in Christ. There isn't another gospel. The narrowness of the gospel is taking center stage in John MacArthur's current study. John's a pastor, a university chancellor, and the teacher each day here on Grace to You. He calls his current study delivered by God. Well, what we saw today about how God delivers sinners from error to the knowledge of the truth, that is not just theoretical stuff. That's a real change that you can see as God transforms us and shapes us. And John, that letter that you've got right there is just one example of how God is changing lives and working through Grace to You supporters to do it.

Well, there's no question about that. And as we've been saying in the last few days, we get thousands of these letters that report to us the deliverance that people have gone through. But one of them sort of jumped out at us, and it's from a lady named Joy.

And listen to what she said. For about five years, I was caught up in a church that focused on prosperity, health, and tithing. I'm almost ashamed to admit that I believe they were teaching the actual truth of God's Word. I was saved, quote, unquote, during that time, and I thought that heaven was guaranteed had I passed away. In those five years, I never read the Bible. I didn't understand it much, and there wasn't a lot of emphasis placed on its importance in my church.

Some problems arose at that church, and I left it about four years ago. Still, I felt that what the church preached was true. But a few months ago, I came across some teaching that explained the error and danger of the Word of Faith movement. So I found myself lost. If everything that I thought about God in the Bible was wrong, what was right?

It was then that I found grace to you on YouTube. I was filled with a host of emotions from what I was learning. Pure shock at the fact that what I thought to be truth was an utter lie from the pit of hell.

Anger at the people spewing these lies for their own benefit. Devastated at the thought that if I would have died, hell would have been my eternal home. At the same time, I was filled with thankfulness to God for pulling me out of the darkness. I now have watched so many of your sermons. I bought a bunch of your books and study guides. I have a MacArthur study Bible on its way that your ministry graciously offered to me for free. I've learned more in the small amount of time that I've been listening to grace to you than I ever did in the five years I attended my old church. The truth of God's Word has washed my mind of all the lies I was taught previously. It's because of your ministry that I learned what true salvation is. I can confidently proclaim that I am born again and my eternity is secure. I know it is Jesus who saved me from my sins. But if it wasn't for your ministry, I would have never heard the good news when I did, and for that I am forever grateful to you and your staff. And she signs her name, Joy.

Wow. Let me add that it's not only the people of grace to you who helped reach Joy with biblical truth that changed her life. If you have prayed for us as a ministry, if you have supported us financially, then you have been a partner in bringing God's truth to Joy and people like her. So thank you for trusting us with your gifts and praying for us faithfully. We're filling a great spiritual void with the most precious thing there is, the truth of God.

That's right. And friend, if you like Joy, look to this ministry for clear biblical teaching. Would you let us know? Your letters are a real encouragement to John and to all of us on the staff. So when you have a moment, jot a note and send it our way. You can email us at letters at gty dot org, or write to Grace to You, Box 4000, Panorama City, California 91412. And again, if you can point to a specific way this ministry has helped you grow spiritually, perhaps you or someone you know has become a Christian after listening to this broadcast, I would encourage you to get in touch with us.

Our email address, again, letters at gty dot org, and our regular mailing address, Box 4000, Panorama City, California 91412. And let me remind you about a number of free resources that we created with you in mind. At our website, gty.org, you can follow our blog, you can watch videos from John's various television and conference appearances, you can read daily devotionals written by John, and you can download the Grace to You app for your smartphone or tablet. You can also access John's entire sermon archive. That's more than 3,500 sermons, including John's current series, Delivered by God. They're all free to download in MP3 or transcript format. That website, again, gty.org. Now for John MacArthur and the entire Grace to You staff, I'm Phil Johnson. Thanks for listening, and join us at the same time tomorrow for another half hour of unleashing God's truth, one verse at a time, on Grace to You.