What False Religion Takes Away #2

Welcome to The Truth Pulpit with Don Green, Founding Pastor of Truth Community Church in Cincinnati, Ohio.

Hello again, I'm Bill Wright. It is our joy to continue our commitment to teaching God's people God's Word. Today Don is continuing with the second part of a message we started last time.

So let's get right to it. Open your Bible as we join Don now in The Truth Pulpit. Now, let me just illustrate two kinds of false authority in Revelation.

I've kind of already alluded to this. But false authority, false ideas about revelation, about how to know the truth of God and the truth of what Scripture teaches. And one of the primary ways in mainline religion, you might say, is a false view about proximity to the apostles. Proximity to the apostles. What I mean by that is that in religions that will teach that authority is found not in Scripture but by in the successors, the chronological successors to the apostles.

It's a technical term. Apostolic succession becomes how you know the truth. Or people will get interested in the writings of the early church fathers, the first century or two after the apostles.

And there's a presupposition about that that I will talk about in a moment. Now, Catholics are notorious for this. They argue for apostolic succession. The pope is supposedly the successor of Peter, never minding the fact that in the Middle Ages there were three different popes at the exact same time making claims to the papal throne, so to speak. Well, how do you trace your lineage?

Which one do you go through? You know, and there's no good answer for that. But Catholics will argue for apostolic succession as their basis for authority. Or they will build their claim to credibility around an early church father like Ignatius.

Now, I want you to be able to think rightly about this. There is a certain superficial appeal to that, to the carnal, unenlightened, unbiblical mind where that makes sense. You know, that just thinking on a natural realm apart from the revelation of God, you might think that, well, if you're calling close to an apostle, then you're going to be a closer, more reliable source of truth than somebody who comes 2,000 years later. You know, what's a guy like me 2,000 years after the fact? Who's a guy like you to teach about truth when there were guys that were, you know, just that were associates of the apostles or just one or two generations removed from them?

Isn't it obvious? That they would be, by definition, closer to the truth than someone is 2,000 years later? Well, let me take you to something that will dispel that false notion from your mind permanently. Under the grace of God, turn in your Bibles to the book of Galatians chapter 2. The book of Galatians chapter 2. One of the bad things when people start to dabble in Catholicism and start to look into it is that they often will do so without an awareness of the full picture, without an awareness of the fullness of things that need to be considered, without an awareness of the fact that all of these arguments have been decisively refuted for centuries by Protestant writers.

But they're ignorant of that and in their ignorance pursue things that they think, you know, are inevitable marks of truth when the exact opposite is the case. In Galatians chapter 2, verse 11, the apostle Paul is writing, and in the book of Galatians, he is defending the doctrine of justification by faith alone. He is defending the gospel of Jesus Christ.

And he makes a clear, definitive statement that shows that false religion is under condemnation and is not something that Christians should give heed to. In Galatians chapter 1, verse 6, I know I said Galatians chapter 2, Galatians chapter 1, verse 6, Paul said, I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting him who called you in the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel. Not that there is another one, but there are some who trouble you and want to distort the gospel of Christ. Now I find it greatly encouraging as I'm teaching on this topic tonight, 2,000 years after Paul wrote this, that in his own day that people that knew Paul were turning away from the gospel of Christ and he steps in to stop that momentum, to blunt the force of the false teaching, and to call them back to the truth. Paul says there is no other gospel. In fact, he says, verse 8, if we or an angel from heaven should preach to you a gospel contrary to the one we preached to you, let him be accursed. As we have said before, so now I say again.

He says, I'm going to repeat this for emphasis. If anyone is preaching to you a gospel contrary to the one you received, let him be accursed. Now my dear friends, just look at what Paul says there and realize that that is consistent with the things that I've told you, that false religion is satanic, it is sinful, and it is sentenced to judgment. Paul pronounces a curse on anyone who teaches a gospel other than the biblical gospel.

This is a serious matter. False religion is not something that is entitled to our respect. It is something that is under the judgment of God, and we should not view it as something that is harmless, undefiled, and just another way to do religion. Scripture does not consider it that way. Paul is profoundly clear on the matter and says that faithfulness to this is necessary to be a servant of Christ in verse 10. Now with that background, let's go over to chapter 2, verse 11 here in Galatians, and remember what we're dealing with here. I know it's, you know, I drill down deep and it's easy to lose sight of where I'm at. What we're talking about here is false authority, and one of the nature, one of the things about false religion is that it will appeal to their proximity to the apostles as vindication of their speaking the truth.

Not true. Paul here is talking about the apostle Peter in verse 11, and Peter had stumbled for a time, for a moment on the doctrine of justification, and Paul tells us about his confrontation with Peter, the apostle Peter. Verse 11, when Cephas, that was, you know, Peter's, one of Peter's alternate names, you might say, when Cephas came to Antioch, I opposed him to his face because he stood condemned. This is the apostle Peter, for before certain men came from James, he was eating with the Gentiles, but when they came, he drew back and separated himself fearing the circumcision party. So he'd eat with the Gentiles, which in the old way of Judaism, you weren't supposed to mingle with the Gentiles. Then God, in the book of Acts, revealed to Peter and used Peter as an instrument to bring Gentiles to saving faith, and Peter learned for a time that he was not to call unclean that which God had declared clean. And so he would eat with the Gentiles because they were fellow heirs of Christ with them. But then these Jews came along and Peter got cold feet, he drew back, he separated himself from the Gentiles that he formerly would eat with. And so in verse 13, and the rest of the Jews acted hypocritically along with him, so that even Barnabas was led astray by their hypocrisy. Now remember, this is at a time when the apostles were still living, and this error had creeped into the practice of even those in the apostolic circle, led by Peter, followed by Barnabas, who Scripture speaks well of in other places. But Paul says in verse 14, when I saw that their conduct was not in step with the truth of the gospel, I said to Cephas before them all.

In other words, in the presence of them all, if you, though a Jew, live like a Gentile and not like a Jew, how can you force the Gentiles to live like the Jews? And he goes on and says, we ourselves are Jews by birth and not Gentile sinners, yet we know that a person is not justified by works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ. So we also have believed in Christ Jesus in order to be justified by faith in Christ and not by works of the law, because by works of the law no one will be justified.

Now, take a little breath here. Peter had stumbled over the implications of the gospel. He was standing apart from people that he should have been embracing and defending and welcoming in. He had lost sight for a time of the truth of justification by faith alone. This is the apostle Peter, and Paul had to rebuke him. I respect the courage of Paul in rebuking Peter, and I respect Peter for obviously receiving the rebuke when it occurred. But here's what we need to think about in this context for tonight, beloved. And I remember when this truth first came to me through preaching of another man out in California, Phil Johnson, how it hit me like a thunderbolt, how clear and obvious this was, the point that was being made. If Peter could stumble on the matter of justification for a time, for a season, then we can draw some really important conclusions. Namely this.

Listen to me carefully. The presupposition that the early church fathers are the most reliable guides to the truth because of their chronological proximity to the apostles is utterly false. That is a false presupposition to think that a first or second century writer is more reliable by definition just because of chronology, just because they may have even known the apostles. Well, if Peter could stumble, then there is no promise of infallibility attached to the teaching of those who followed the apostles. Proximity to the apostles standing alone means nothing.

It means nothing standing alone. Paul rebuked Peter in another place in 2 Peter 3 verse 16. Peter himself said that there are things in the writings of the apostle Paul that are what?

Hard to understand. Peter says, I read Paul and I find some things that are hard to understand. Now, beloved, just to understand the fairly limited point that I'm making is that if an apostle could stray when he's not writing inspired Scripture, if an apostle would say about another apostle, you know, there's some stuff there that's kind of hard for me to get, and that's an apostle.

Well, how much more those who come after the apostles? These early church fathers were not inspired writers of Scripture. They were not guaranteed infallibility in what they wrote. Some of them, especially in the early years, they did not have the benefit of mature theological reflection.

They were learning and growing along the way. And that does not mean that we despise them, that we utterly ignore them, but we have to understand that they are not an infallible guide to what the true teaching of the apostles is. If Peter needed rebuked by Paul, then it is no surprise that men who came after the apostles were also subject to error.

This is such an important point for us to understand. We follow the Bible, not men. You say, well, how do we know truth then? We know truth by being able to recognize teaching that conforms to apostolic doctrine, not apostolic successors. We must know biblical doctrine, we must know apostolic doctrine, and we know truth by comparing teaching with the truth. If it's consistent with apostolic doctrine, then it's true. If it's not, it's false.

And it doesn't matter if it's brought by somebody that was a personal friend of one of the apostles or that wrote in the first century. That chronological time is no guarantee of truth. It is by doctrine that we know what is true.

And so this is fundamental. And what that does, as soon as you realize the things that we're talking about here, it's like taking a big fiskars, a big hedge trimmer, and it just cuts off the whole noxious root of all of that error and brings you back and points you back to Scripture. If you're not willing to take the fiskars to cut off the noxious root, what's going to happen is, you know, and people start to look into it and sniff the flowers, what happens is that vine grows around their neck and then it strangles them and cuts them off from the life-giving truth of Scripture. And so proximity to the apostles is no guarantee of truth. There is no such thing as apostolic succession.

Paul didn't hand off his office to someone else. There could not be such a thing as apostolic succession, beloved, because one of the requirements in Scripture found in the book of Acts is that an apostle had to be a direct eyewitness to the resurrection of Jesus Christ. And those people who came after the apostles were not eyewitnesses to Christ and therefore they did not hold apostolic authority. They were not part of the authorized foundation of the church from Jesus Christ.

They were mere men. And so we need to understand that. Now let me go to a second aspect of false religion taking away Scripture here in a whole different realm. And it's this, is that signs and wonders are no indication of truth whatsoever.

They're no indication of truth whatsoever. And people can fall into this in so many different ways. Sometimes they'll just look at a providence in their life and think, oh, it's a miracle, God's speaking to me through what happened. And I was driving in Costco and I got a parking spot just outside the door.

That never happens to anyone. And so obviously God was speaking to me then. More seriously, charismatic teachers, charismatic followers, charismatic church members or members of charismatic churches, they assume that somehow supernatural signs, what they think are supernatural signs, prove truth claims. And there used to be a whole thing about we need to do power evangelism and we evangelism and then the Lord blesses our ministry with supernatural signs. And that so impresses unbelievers that they believe the evangelism because of the signs that accompany it.

Not true. Miserably false way to think, beloved. And Jesus made this clear when he was speaking about the rich man and Lazarus. And the rich man said, you know, send Lazarus from the dead. They'll listen to a man if he comes back from the dead.

And Abraham said to him, he said, no. He said, they have the law and the prophets. They have the word of God.

Let them hear that. And if they won't believe the law and the prophets, they won't believe a man if he comes back from the dead. So immediately and so clearly and decisively Christ taught that a miraculous sign was not something that was superior to the revealed written word of God. Set aside the signs and turn attention to the word of God. And if a man won't receive the written word of God, then nothing else can help him. And so the whole premise, the whole presupposition that we need signs and wonders to electrify the crowd and to get them to listen and to prove that what we're teaching is true.

You know, come up, you know, if you've been pre-screened by my handlers, you know, come up and I'll heal you of your lower back pain or your headaches or things that you can't, you know, that can't be verified. But let's look at Matthew chapter 24 for a moment. Matthew 24, verse 24. Jesus is looking into the future, the end times, and how could this be any more explicit and clear than it is? Jesus said that false Christs and false prophets will arise and perform great signs and wonders so as to lead astray, if possible, even the elect. He says one of the marks of the end times will be people performing seemingly miraculous signs and perhaps, you know, genuinely supernatural things. Satan can do supernatural things, he says, but you cannot rely on signs and wonders and think that that's a mark, an authenticating reality that speaks to the truthfulness of the teaching and the doctrine that is being presented to you. False prophets will do that, false teachers, false Christs will do that, and in the process they will lead people astray. They will lead them into darkness, they will lead them into death, they will lead them into destruction. So that the very idea that signs and wonders are a reliable marker of truth is directly contradicted by the word of Jesus Christ himself.

We've looked at it so many times I won't even have you turn there. But scripture says that Satan can disguise himself as an angel of light. You know, and these foolish statements about people dying and going to heaven and coming back and reporting what they've seen. Beloved, none of you should be a sucker for that stuff, and if you have been, you know, shame on you for looking to something like that instead of the written word of God. Now, one other thing that I would turn you to in the book of Colossians chapter 2 verse 18.

Colossians chapter 2 verses 18 and 19, I need to pick up the speed here a bit. It says, let no one disqualify you, insisting on asceticism and worship of angels. Look at this, going on in detail about visions that they've seen, puffed up without reason by a sensual mind, and not holding fast to the head from whom the body, nourished and knit together through its joints and ligaments, grows with a growth that is from God. He said, don't be led astray by people who go on and prattle about visions that they've seen.

Don't do that. That is no sign of truth. That is the mark of false deception. And so, beloved, I kind of need to wrap this point up, but claims to new revelation, claims to authority beyond the Bible, are things that will take away the word of God from you. It is not an innocent addition to talk about new revelation from God. This is directly satanic, is something that as soon as you hear about the Bible plus, the Bible and, let me tell you about, you know, how God spoke to me. Beloved, the only thing I can encourage you to do as a pastor concerned for the protection of your soul is to turn around and to turn your back and walk away from that.

Don't listen to that nonsense. We are told so many times in Scripture, Scripture, the final authority, don't go beyond Scripture, don't listen to visions, false signs, false wonders. False religion will take the Scriptures away from you.

It's a bait with a big lethal hook in it, tossed into the water, looking for a Christian to swallow the bait, and that hook is going to take you out. Now, secondly, false religion takes away our Savior. False religion takes away our Savior. Not only does false religion have to displace Scripture, it must also displace the person of Christ.

And so in one way or another, again, we're speaking generally, broadly about these things, false religions can be marked and recognized by the fact that they challenge that in Jesus Christ all the fullness of deity dwells in bodily form. They deny his full deity. They deny his equality with God. They will say that, in so many words, that there was a time, this is a statement rooted deep in church history, there was a time when Christ was not.

That Christ, that there was God and then there was something happened, God did something, and then Christ was introduced into the world. Maybe they'll teach that Jesus Christ was God's first creation, but thereby making him a creature rather than God himself. And so they displace the person of Christ by subtly changing the biblical truth about him. Jehovah's Witnesses do this. Mormons do this. Others, liberal theology, liberal denominations, will patronize Christ by saying he was a good teacher.

Maybe he was one of the great prophets. But you pin them down and say, is Jesus Christ co-eternal with God the Father, fully equal and deserving of worship and obedience as God the Father? No, no, that's not what I would say. I wouldn't put it like that. You know, and these deceivers have to be pinned down.

They depend upon people, not asking them informed questions. And just being content with an outward form of words that is devoid of the reality that the terms are meant to convey. Now, beloved, just a few passages in the Gospel of John, and this won't take as long as the prior thing took. Jesus said in John 14, 9, he said, He who has seen Me has seen the Father. In John 12, 45, if you want to turn to these passages, we'll flip through them quickly. In John 12, 45, Jesus says, Whoever sees Me, sees Him who sent Me. Who sent Jesus?

God the Father. Jesus says, If you've seen Me, you've seen God the Father. You've seen the full nature and essence of the one true God when you have seen Me. In John 14, verse 7, He tells His disciples, If you had known Me, you would have known My Father also.

From now on, you do know Him and have seen Him. He says there is a one-to-one correspondence here. If you've known Me, you know the Father, because our character and essence is identical. We share the same essence together. So that when you hear Me, when you see Me, you have heard and seen the Father Himself.

One more. In John 15, 23, Jesus says, Whoever hates Me, hates My Father also, because there's no difference. There's no distinction of essence. The Father is a person, the Son is a person, the Spirit is a person, but it's one God in three persons. And so to see Christ is to see God the Father. Now, Beloved, the full deity of Christ, the full humanity of Christ, these things might seem to be abstract.

They're certainly, you know, truths that we don't know apart from Revelation. But what I want you to see as we talk about these things is that the two natures of Christ in one person, fully God, full humanity, my friends, this is essential to your salvation. If you are to believe unto salvation, you must believe in the true Christ. You can't believe in a false Christ and have a true salvation. A false Christ only can give you a false salvation. And the Bible says in 1 Timothy that there is one mediator between God and men, the man Jesus Christ.

Now follow me here. I'll give you a simple illustration. One mediator between God and man, creator and creature, holy and sinful. There is an unpassable, infinite gulf between God and us. We cannot get to God on our own. You cannot get to God through your own faithfulness and obedience to revealed principles. Your morality cannot take you to God. Forget even trying because the gulf is too vast.

It is infinite in nature. And so if you are to be saved, you need a mediator. You need someone that can fill that gap between God and you. There's a simple illustration that I've used in the past that I like. A bridge in order to carry you, convey you safely from one side to the other. A bridge must make contact with both shorelines in order to do that. It must, you know, just thinking about what I drove across to get here, the bridge has to be anchored on the Kentucky side of the river, and it has to be anchored on the Ohio side of the river both. That's easy for us to understand. You would not want a bridge that only went halfway.

That doesn't work out good. In like manner, in order for you to be reconciled with God, you need a mediator who has, so to speak, who has one foot fully in deity and one foot fully in humanity. Christ can reconcile us to God because he and he alone is fully God and fully man. When God saves you and brings you into that union with Christ, you are united with one who is full deity and therefore can reconcile you to God.

One person with two natures. Now, listen. A religion that denies the deity of Christ is false by definition and dangerously so. What they have done is they're promising you a bridge, even if they offer you Christ like the Jehovah's Witnesses sort of do, or they offer you a false Christ like the Mormons do, they're offering you a bridge that's broken, that does not connect with the other side. If Jesus Christ is not fully God, he can't get you there. If he's not the creator himself, if he's only a creature, he can't bridge that infinite gulf between you and your creator. He must be fully God.

He must be fully man. And a false Christ can only give you a false salvation. So when they say Christ was just a creature, even an exalted creature, just a teacher, beloved, they have just closed the door to salvation to you and locked you out.

And as hard as you rattle the door, that door will not open to you with a false Christ. And it becomes a complete denial of the words of Jesus that we looked at. God is uncreated. If Jesus were a creature and was not eternally existent, like God the Father is, there is no way that Jesus could say, if you see me, you've seen the Father. If Jesus is a mere creature, then you're just looking at a creature.

You're not looking at the uncreated essence of God. And so those teachings cannot stand, no matter how appealing they may first seem. I have people in the past that were close to me that taught me a false Christ, teaching things akin to the Jehovah's Witness view, publishing books titled, you know, Jesus Christ is Not God.

My friends, books like that are straight from hell. They take away your Savior from you. And eventually they take away, of course, the finished work of Christ and leave you to work out your own salvation.

And beloved, you can't do it. Now, false religion, we could go on to say, and I'll address this in a different way on Sunday, you know, false religion takes away salvation from you. It tells you to work for your own salvation. It tells you to keep these rules and God will accept you. Be faithful, be obedient, God will accept you. Be baptized, make your confession before men.

Do all of these different things and then you'll earn your way into heaven. Anathema, a curse upon it all. This is not me speaking. This is what Paul said. If anyone brings to you a gospel other than the one that I have given to you, let him be a curse. If anyone teaches you a way of salvation that is something other than by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone, based on the Scripture alone, to the glory of God alone, if their message of salvation is anything other than that, damnation upon them. This is what Scripture says. Now, beloved, in wrapping all of this up, we said what does false religion take away from you?

I taught it in two points, but there's really three. It takes away the Scripture from you, it takes the Savior away from you, and it takes salvation away from you. And that is why, that is why I plead with you, I warn you, I teach you to take false religion seriously and to not dabble in it as if it were an innocent intellectual pursuit that you can engage in without harm to your soul. False religion takes away the Bible, it takes away forgiveness, it takes away assurance. And in the place of those blessed gifts that God gives to us in the Lord Jesus Christ, in the place of a clear conscience and the knowledge of God and the forgiveness of sin and new life in Christ and a sure hope of heaven, you trade away all of that in false religion for darkness, doubt, death, and destruction. Darkness, doubt, death, and destruction. Why would you trade that?

Why would you pursue after that which you know in advance is contradicting the truth of the gospel of Jesus Christ? What possible good can come from that? I ask you, what kind of trade is that?

You know, it would be like having a big expensive car and trading it for a broken bicycle that can't take you anywhere. Beloved, I am about done here. Think about dominoes. I'm just setting up dominoes and you've seen those cool videos where they've got these elaborate structures and you knock over one domino and then they all fall. Well, beloved, every domino in your salvation falls when you push against Scripture, when you push against Christ, when you push against the true things of salvation.

Every domino falls and you can't build it back. Let me just say this. It is not unkind for a pastor to say these things. It is not unkind for a Christian to say these things to those whom they love and whom they have a relationship of influence. It is not unkind to tell false teachers that they are blind guides of the blind. It is not unkind to tell Charismatics to turn away from these false things of revelation that it is danger territory and to come out and away from it. It's not unkind to tell the truth. It's not unkind to hold to the truth. This is what we must do.

It's what we want to do. It's what conviction compels us to do. It's what accountability to God compels us to do to say these things in defense and in advancement of the great salvation that God gave to us when He caused us to be born again in the Lord Jesus Christ. The precious things of the cross, the precious things of new life, the precious things of heaven all depend on the truthfulness of these things and recognizing that that which contradicts them takes it all away from us.

So I can't speak for you. I don't care who this offends. I would to God that it would offend every unbeliever under the sound of my voice enough to provoke them to search the Scriptures for themselves to see if what I've said is true or not.

That would be great. I'll end with reading the Scripture in 2 John, that little, one of those little New Testament postcards in the back of your Bible. It says this in verse 6. John said, And this is love, that we walk according to His commandments. This is the commandment, just as you have heard from the beginning, so that you should walk in it.

John's talking about love. And then he goes on to say, For many deceivers, 2 John 6-11, For many deceivers have gone out into the world, those who do not confess the coming of Jesus Christ in the flesh. Such a one is the deceiver and the antichrist.

Watch yourselves, so that you may not lose what we have worked for, but may win a full reward. Everyone who goes on ahead and does not abide in the teaching of Christ does not have God. Whoever abides in the teaching has both the Father and the Son. And he goes on to say in verse 10, If anyone comes to you and does not bring this teaching, do not receive him into your house or give him any greeting, for whoever greets him takes part in his wicked works. It says you stand apart from that.

You don't engage it. You don't welcome them as brothers. You stand apart from that, recognizing that they are deceivers and antichrists who are a mortal threat to your eternal soul. So false religion takes away everything.

And that's why we have to have a right view of it. And we'll finish up next week by saying how you can protect yourself and how to conduct yourself in the face of false religion when it comes your way. Let's pray together. Dear Father, dear, dear Father, may you protect each one in this room and under the sound of my voice from false teaching. May a recognition of the realities of sin and damnation cause the unsaved to flee to Christ and those of us that know and love him through your redeeming grace at work in our hearts, that, dear Father, you would cause that to cause us to cling more closely to Christ, to pay closer attention to the things that we have heard, and that, Father, you would intervene before another person from our midst walks away after false religion. Father, have your protective hand upon us. Help us to see the truth, know the truth, believe the truth, and rest in the truth. May all of this be for the glory of God and the salvation and protection of the souls in this room. We pray in Jesus' name.

Amen. My friend, I want to let you know of a special ministry that we have at thetruthpulpit.com that's very near to my heart. We have a ministry to those who are in prison, and in the nature of life, sometimes we have loved ones that go astray and find themselves behind bars and spending significant time in incarceration. Well, we have a ministry today, and we send them transcripts of messages that I've preached from the Pulpit of Truth Community Church. We do it on a weekly basis.

They get mail every week. If you have a loved one in prison that you would like to have us reach out to in that way, do me a favor. Go to our website, thetruthpulpit.com. That's thetruthpulpit.com. Click on the link that says About, and you'll see a dropdown menu that will take you to our prison ministry. You can fill out the form, and we'll be happy to respond and then join in with you in ministering to that one who is outside the normal course of society. So that's thetruthpulpit.com, the About link for our prison ministry.

That will do it for today. We'll see you next time on The Truth Pulpit. That's Don Green, founding pastor of Truth Community Church in Cincinnati, Ohio. Thank you so much for listening to The Truth Pulpit. Join us next time for more as we continue teaching God's people God's Word.