Deliverance: From Error to the Truth, Part 2

Let me say in a general way, salvation is a great subject. The subject of God's work in the lives of sinners is the great theme of redemptive history, and it is the great theme of Scripture. Welcome to Grace to You with John MacArthur.

I'm your host, Phil Johnson. You can probably think of cases where well-known athletes or entertainers were arrested for abusing drugs and they entered a rehabilitation program, and then after claiming to be clean, they continued to have problems again and again. Now, when you say one thing, but your actions tell a different story, you've got a problem. And yet, some people see no problem when a person claims he's a Christian, but his way of life bears no resemblance to what the Bible says a Christian should look like. That sort of thinking compelled John MacArthur to examine what being a Christian, what being delivered by God really means. Stay here now as John continues his study titled, Delivered by God. Let me say in a general way, salvation is a great subject. The subject of God's work in the lives of sinners is the great theme of redemptive history, and it is the great theme of Scripture.

It is not to be understood any way you want to understand it. It is to be understood the way God has revealed it. There are so many rich elements to the great truth of salvation, but they are divided, I would say, into two categories. There are those non-experiential realities in salvation, and then there are those experiential ones. There are those realities with regard to salvation that occur on the divine level, and there are those that occur on the human level. There are those which affect the way God views us, and there are those which affect the way we view God. There are realities in our salvation that are not experiential. That is, you can't feel them, you can't see them, you don't manifest them. There are realities in our salvation that we could say are divine perspectives or divine directives or divine adjudications or verdicts or decisions or choices or acts. As such, they are not manifest in our lives, such as justification, which is God declaring us righteous by virtue of the application of the righteousness of Christ to us because our sins have been paid for by Him on the cross, such as redemption, an act by which God buys us back from sin and death and hell.

That encompasses the idea of the ransom. There is also the idea of adoption. The Bible tells us that in salvation we are adopted into the family of God.

That is an official new legal status. And then there is the great truth of reconciliation, that the sinner has the enmity between himself and God removed so that he is suitable for God's presence and eternal life. Things like justification, redemption, ransom, adoption, reconciliation are ways in which God changes His relationship to us by the application of the work of Christ on our behalf through grace. They are not experiential and they are not manifest as such.

But accompanying those are some manifest experiential realities in salvation. They change not our status, they change not just what God thinks about us or how God views us, but they change us not just legally, but actually. They make a difference in our lives.

They are manifest. They change our nature. They change the way we think. They change our will. They change our desire. They change our speech.

They change our behavior. Now these spiritual realities in that second category are what make up the understanding of the great truth of deliverance. True Christians don't just have a change in status, they have a change in nature. They are not only new in terms of their position before God, but they are new in terms of their creation. That's why we use terms like regeneration, born again, new life, conversion.

We have not only a change in status, we have a change in nature. And to understand the doctrine of deliverance in its fullness, we need to understand the dramatic change that is manifest in the life of a delivered soul. This is the most critical matter in the life of the church. There isn't anything more important in the life of the church than being able to distinguish between who is a true Christian and who is a false one.

To know who is real and who is not is critical for a number of reasons. One, because we know the enemy would like to sow in the church as many false believers as possible to suck the life out of the church, to be leavened that leavens the lump, that is to be like a rotten apple and it spoils the whole barrel. And also, the devil would like the church to be confused about who a true Christian is in order that false Christians might live in a continued state of deception and false security. When the church fails to make this distinction, it gives place to the tears that the enemy would sow. It allows people to carry on their life under the delusion of belonging to God when in fact they don't.

And it literally destroys the great impact and power of the church in the world when it functions in its true purity of identity. So in this brief series, we have been looking at the matter of who is a Christian by examining this issue of deliverance, and in particular that element of deliverance which relates to the change in our person, the real change that takes place in a believer. We should be able to look at someone and see manifest characteristics of deliverance. The first element of deliverance that will be manifest in the life of a true Christian is that they have been delivered from error to truth.

They have been delivered from error to truth. And I pointed out to you that there is this new idea, this new notion, this new movement in Christianity that you can be a Christian and not embrace the truth. But when you look at the New Testament, what you see is quite different than that. You see the manifest work of God in delivering true believers from error to truth so that a true believer can be known by their affirmation of the truth. Let's go to Colossians chapter 1.

This is the text we looked at and this is the text that needs to be footnoted. Colossians 1, I take you back to verses 12 and 13, giving thanks to the Father, this is of course obvious, we thank God for our salvation, who has qualified us to share in the inheritance of the saints. Now that would be forensic, that would be non-experiential, that would be a change in our status, a change in our position. But we have been given the privilege of sharing in the inheritance of the saints in light. Now that becomes experiential, for He delivered us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of His beloved Son. We have been delivered out of darkness into light, and light is synonymous with Jesus Christ who said He is the light of the world. We have been delivered out of the domain of error, darkness synonymous with error, out of the domain of error into the domain of truth which is synonymous with the kingdom of His beloved Son who is Himself the truth.

So first of all, a delivered person has been delivered by the power of God through the work of the Holy Spirit from error to truth. Truth is our domain. We understand the truth. We believe the truth. We embrace the truth. We obey the truth. We love the truth. We proclaim the truth.

And we would even take up our cross and die for the truth. Truth is synonymous with Christ who is the way, the truth, and the life, who is the light. So it is not true to say that someone is going to be included in heaven, in the kingdom of God, that someone has a true relationship with the living God but does not believe the truth. There is only one way to enter into a relationship with God, and that is to be delivered from error to truth. Go back with me to John chapter 8, and I will remind you of a very notable and important chapter, John chapter 8. By the way, this matter of who is a Christian and who is not was a very significant and important truth in John's mind.

And by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, he pays a great amount of attention to it in his gospel as well as in his epistle. But in John chapter 8, verse 32 says, you shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free. Back to verse 31, if you abide in My Word, which is synonymous with the truth, then you are truly disciples of Mine. A true, a mathetes alethos, a true disciple of Christ abides in the Word because it is the truth that has set Him free from error. It is truth that is at the very heart of deliverance. Now drop down to verse 41, and the Jews are making a profession here. They say, we have one Father, even God.

That's what a lot of people are saying today. Oh, we all have one Father, we all worship the same God. It doesn't matter where you are on this religious spectrum, this sort of pantheon of monotheistic viewpoints, doesn't matter where you are in this thing, we all have one Father, even God. That's what the Jews are claiming.

And I suppose it's a reasonable thing to claim. After all, they believed in the Creator God of the Old Testament. They believed in Elohim, Yahweh.

They believed in the God who was the Creator and the God who was the Covenant God who granted the great covenant to Abraham and other covenants, the God of Israel, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. And they said, we have the same God. We have exactly the same God. And the modern mentality today, well, of course you have the same God. Isn't it wonderful we all have the same God?

Isn't that great? And Jesus said to them, if God were your Father, you would love Me. Plain and simple. If somebody doesn't love Jesus Christ, God is not their Father.

That couldn't be more clear. And when you say love Jesus Christ, what do you mean by that? You mean that you love Jesus Christ in the same way that you love God for, verse 42 says, I proceeded forth and have come from God, to love Christ as you love God.

Don't tell me that you worship the same God unless you love Jesus Christ as God of very God. Unless you believe the right thing about Christ, embrace the right thing about Christ and love Him. You don't know God. God is not your Father. You don't have a relationship with God. No man comes unto the Father but by Me.

In fact, it's very serious. Verse 44, actually you are of your Father whom? The devil. Anybody who doesn't believe in the true Christ, the true Christ and His true work and a true salvation by the true means which Scripture has identified, doesn't have God as their Father. Heir about the person of Christ, heir about the work of Christ, heir about the salvation that is provided in Christ and you don't have God as your Father. In fact, your Father is the devil. Now, Jesus couldn't have said it more starkly, could He? And He was speaking to those people who prided themselves on knowing the true God.

And the evidence in verse 44 is, you want to do the desires of your Father. And He was a murderer from the beginning, listen to this, and does not stand in the truth because there's no truth in Him. You show me somebody who is in error and I'll show you a child of the devil.

That's what Jesus is saying. The truth is the divining line. Nobody is a child of God who doesn't believe the truth about Jesus Christ. And then Jesus says in verse 45, because I speak the truth, you don't believe Me.

Now, listen to this. Nobody is a child of God who doesn't believe the truth about Jesus Christ and love Jesus Christ. And somebody who doesn't believe the truth about Christ inevitably, look at it, inevitably doesn't believe when somebody proclaims that truth.

In other words, they don't believe the truth and they don't believe people who try to make it understandable to them. Jesus says, the fact that I'm speaking the truth manifests who you really belong to because you can't connect with it. Truth is our domain. Truth is the sphere of our existence. Truth is synonymous with Jesus Christ. Verse 46, He says, if I speak truth, why don't you believe Me? And He answers the question in verse 47. He who is of God hears the words of God. For this reason, you don't hear them because you're not of God. You're very religious. You've got the Old Testament. You're very devout.

You're very fastidious about your legalism. You're very concerned that you are the elite in the world because you worship the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the Creator God. But I'm telling you right now, your father is the devil and you don't know God and you're not God's children, you're the devil's children. And the reason I know you're the devil's children is you don't love Me and you don't believe what I say. That is the initial definitive line to draw between a believer and a non-believer. It is not a matter of sincerity, it is a matter of truth.

Now let's take it a step further. Go to John's epistle, 1 John chapter 4. Now in verse 5 of 1 John 4, John speaking of unbelievers says, they're from the world, therefore they speak as from the world and the world listens to them.

And the world has its own frequency and all of the antenna are set to that frequency and the world understands itself and it listens to itself. We, verse 6, are from God. He who knows God listens to us.

Well this is so good. Now listen, let me build this little sequence for you. In John 8, Jesus said, if you belong to God, you love Me. You believe in Me as the very God of gods. You affirm the truth about Me and you love Me and you listen to Me and you obey Me. Here He says, if you're from God, you not only listen to Jesus, but you listen to John. That is to say, you affirm the truth of apostolic doctrine. You affirm the truth of the teaching of the apostles. He who is not from God doesn't listen to us. John is taking it a step beyond Christ and he is saying, if you're of God, you listen to what we say, the apostles, and by the apostles and those associated with them, the New Testament was written. And a true believer believes in the apostles' writings, believes the New Testament, believes that the message of salvation, the truth of God, is singularly revealed on the pages of the New Testament.

And whoever is not from God doesn't. And then in verse 6, He says, by this we know the Spirit of truth and the Spirit of error. There is the Spirit of truth. Who's that? There's only one Spirit of truth.

Who is it? It's the Holy Spirit, really. The Holy Spirit is the Spirit of truth.

It's called that in John's gospel. The Spirit of truth, when He comes, will lead you into all truth. Now there are many spirits of error. All of the demonic hosts and Satan himself are all spirits of error. And the Spirit of truth is in conflict with the Spirit of error.

And what does John say? He says, we know when somebody is under the power of the Holy Spirit, and when somebody is under the power of a lying spirit, the way we know it is how they view the apostles' teaching. What happened on the Day of Pentecost in Acts 2? The people were saved that day, instantaneously saved. These Jewish people on the Day of Pentecost, thousands of them, as we remember, were saved on that one day, and immediately it says they continued in the apostles' what?

How was that? How could they make such a transition of conviction, such a transition of confidence, such a transition of absolute, total trust? How could they come to grasp the complete authority of the New Testament so rapidly? Answer, the work of the Holy Spirit of truth who convicted their hearts and convinced them of truth.

So you're going to believe Christ to be exactly who He's revealed to be in the Scripture, and you're going to believe Him to the point where you love Him, which means you render to Him that which belongs only to God, whom we are to love with all our heart, soul, mind and strength. Not only that, you are going to believe and embrace the writing of the apostles, because the Spirit will do that in your heart. We have an anointing, 1 John 2 27, from God.

We don't need human teachers. The anointing from God the Holy Spirit teaches us all things. The Spirit of truth will lead you into all truth. The anointing, the Spirit of truth will teach you all things.

That's really not the end of it. Go to verse 7, and we take it to another step. "'Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. The one who doesn't love doesn't know God.'" Drop down to chapter 5, verse 1, "'Whoever believes that Jesus is the Christ is born of God, and whoever loves the Father loves the child born of Him, loves the one born of Him.'"

Now follow the thought here. John is saying, if you're born of God, first of all, you're going to listen to the apostles. You're going to believe what the apostles have written, because the Spirit of truth is going to convince you of that, and you're going to embrace apostolic teaching and apostolic truth. And one step further, you're going to love those that are born of God.

That would, of course, include Jesus Christ, but it goes beyond that. You're going to love the brethren. You're going to love because you've been taught to love by God, and because you know God, you're going to love those who also know God. True believers then believe all the claims of Jesus. They believe all the writings of the apostles. They love the truth in Jesus. They love the truth in Scripture, and they love the people who love the truth, because the truth is our domain. The light is where we live.

Those people who are content to sit in a system of darkness, they don't know the truth or they don't love the truth, and they don't love the people of the truth. That's the first area of deliverance. Pray with me. What can we say, Father? As Jonathan Edwards put it, we can't just stand around to try to figure out how it was that we came to the knowledge of the truth. All we can do is fall on our face and thank You. Thank You that once we were darkness and now we are light, that once we knew only error and now we know truth, the truth about Christ, the truth of apostolic doctrine. And we love the people of the truth, because we are subjects of the King of Truth, who dwell in the kingdom of light.

Oh, how glorious it is. This is Grace to You with John MacArthur. Today, John continued his study titled, Delivered by God. John, you said today that a person is not a child of God unless that person believes the truth about Jesus Christ. But I know that raises a question in some of our listeners' minds. How much do we have to know and believe? You're not saying we need to know and believe everything there is about Christ. I mean, I've been a Christian for 50 years, and I'm still learning.

So explain what you mean by that. Well, I think I would back off just the person of Christ to talk about God to start with, because you have to have the right God. He that cometh to God must believe that He is, it says in the book of Hebrews. So you can only come to God if you believe that He is who He really is. If you imagine God to be other than He is, you're not coming to God.

I mean, I don't think people get that. You know, I was reading about a certain person who had a girlfriend, a celebrity kind of girlfriend, and they're not married, but they've lived together for a number of years, and they thank God for everything that He's done in their life. So they're living in fornication openly and publicly and thanking God. I don't know what God that is, but it's not the true God. So it needs to be stated that you can't come to God unless you come to the God who is the true and living God, and that's not any other God.

That's not a God of your own manufacturing, your own fabrication. That's not any other God but the true God, the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the God, the triune God, the God who is one with his Son Christ and one with his Spirit. So that has to be a foundational reality, the true God. And then the true Christ, not a partially divine Jesus, but one who is truly man and truly God at the same time, the Christ of Scripture, the true Christ. Any other Christ is a false Christ. You also have to come understanding the true gospel. The Apostle Paul condemned the people in Galatia because they had believed another gospel, and with that other gospel came another Jesus.

And even the Apostle John talks about if anybody comes along and preaches anything other than the true gospel, they're condemned. So it isn't that you have to believe everything about the triune God and all that the Bible teaches will still be far short when we leave this world and arrive in heaven to find out how much we didn't know. But you must know the truth about the true God, the triune God, the true Son of God, the true Christ, and his true work on the cross and through the resurrection and that salvation comes by grace and faith in him alone. So somebody might say, well, do you have to believe in the virgin birth? Well, you may not have known about the virgin birth. I don't know if the thief on the cross believed in the virgin birth, but he knew that he was talking to the divine Son.

He knew that he was talking to the Messiah, to the Christ, because Christ invited him to heaven and said, I'll see you there. So you could not know about the virgin birth, and that wouldn't keep you from being saved. So that's much more important that you believe the truth as much of it as is necessary to embrace the gospel, and then as the rest unfolds, your own heart will embrace that because you've been transformed and given the ability to receive the truth. So it would be, in my mind, as an illustration, pretty ridiculous to think of something like this, a true believer who rejects the virgin birth.

Why? I mean, if you've already believed in the true God and the true Christ, why would the virgin birth be a stumbling block? So if you look at it that way, you could say when you meet somebody who says they're a Christian, but they start denying the Trinity, they deny the deity of Christ, or they hedge on that, or they deny the gospel of grace and faith alone, or they deny the doctrine of justification, that's a problem.

That's a problem. It's not necessarily going to prevent you from being saved, not to understand the fullness of all those things, but when you meet people who deny those things, that's when the New Testament apostles would rise up and say, you've got a false convert. Thank you, John. And, friend, if there are certain doctrines or parts of the Bible you want to know better, pick up the MacArthur Study Bible.

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Or you can give online at GTY.org. Now for John MacArthur and the entire Grace To You staff, I'm Phil Johnson. Thanks for tuning in today. Join us tomorrow when John looks at some telltale characteristics of genuine salvation. These are core beliefs that every Christian will have. John is continuing his study, Delivered By God, with another half hour of unleashing God's truth, one verse at a time, on Grace To You.