Video Transcript: Other Gospels

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. But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach to you a gospel contrary to the one we preach to you, let him be accursed.

As we have said before, so now I say again, if anyone is preaching to you a gospel contrary to the one you received, let him be accursed. For am I now seeking the approval of man or of God or am I still trying to please man? If I were trying to please man, I would not be a servant of Christ. For I would have you know brothers that the gospel that was preached by me is not man's gospel, for I did not receive it from any man nor was I taught it, but I received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ.

A little later in the letter he says, you foolish Galatians, who has bewitched you? Before your very eyes Jesus Christ was clearly portrayed as crucified. I would like to learn just one thing from you. Did you receive the Spirit by the works of the law or by believing what you heard? Are you so foolish? After beginning by means of the Spirit, are you now trying to finish by means of the flesh? Have you experienced so much in vain if it really was in vain? So again I ask, does God give you his Spirit and work miracles among you by the works of the law or by your believing what you heard? And then Paul writes to the Corinthians in 2nd Corinthians 11, for I feel a divine jealousy for you since I betrothed you to one husband to present you as a pure virgin to Christ.

I'm afraid that as the serpent deceived Eve by his cunning, your thoughts will be led astray from a sincere and pure devotion to Christ. And the way he talks there, you understand that the gospel, that is the gospel. I introduced you to Christ, I gave you to Christ, and sincere and pure devotion to Christ and trust in Christ and loyalty to him, that's the supreme and central test of faithfulness to the gospel.

For if someone comes and proclaims another Jesus than the one we proclaimed, or if you receive a different Spirit from the one you received, or if you accept a different gospel from the one you accepted, you put up with it readily enough. Indeed I consider that I am not in the least inferior to these super apostles. For such men are false prophets, deceitful workmen, disguising themselves as apostles of Christ.

And no wonder, for even Satan disguises himself as an angel of light. So it is no surprise if his servants also disguise themselves as servants of righteousness. Their end will correspond to their deeds.

This ends the reading of God's Word, and God always blesses His Word to those who listen. Other Gospels were a problem and a threat at the time that the church was first being launched around the Mediterranean world in the New Testament time, and other Gospels are still a great danger today. And other Gospels take various forms.

The other gospel that Paul was talking about in writing to the Galatians was a legalistic gospel, a gospel that was a religious teaching, even a teaching that had a place for Jesus in it somewhere. But it was a gospel that was insisting that you still had to live by all of the things that the Jewish people had to live by under the Law of Moses. All of the ceremonies were binding, including circumcision.

All of the civil commands for running a society were binding. And not only binding, but were necessary for salvation. Salvation was equal to Jesus plus a bunch of other stuff.

And so Paul opposed that kind of gospel where people were trying to turn back the gospel revelation and the giving of the Holy Spirit and the sufficiency of Jesus' death and resurrection, and say that you really do need to do this and this and this and this. Certain behaviors, certain rules, certain rituals are the key to being right with God. And that still is a type of gospel that can threaten and divert people away from the true gospel still today.

It won't be identical to that. Sometimes it comes close to that where people are still trying to use various rituals and observances, but they may not be the ones that were the Law of Moses. Maybe it's worse, because instead it's just various invented behaviors.

And certain religious groups will have their practices. They'll define exactly how you ought to dress. They'll define exactly how you ought to behave.

They will explain that one drop of might be enough to ruin everything. And Islam is an example of a gospel that has done that, where they have a long list of regulations. And Islam has a place for Jesus.

Jesus was the third greatest prophet of all the prophets. That's pretty high up there, right? Third greatest, not bad. And so that is one version of a legalistic gospel that has now been embraced by hundreds of millions of people.

That Jesus is not a Savior. Jesus did not die for sin. He didn't die at all, because a great prophet like him, he was taken straight to heaven.

And you don't need him to die for you. So there are a variety of legalistic gospels. There are some versions of Christianity.

Of course, Islam is a version of Christianity in some ways. It comes after Christianity. It has a notion of who Jesus is.

It has some nice things to say about the biblical writings, although the Quran, of course, is correcting the mistakes that slipped in over time into the biblical writings. But you have a religion, an entire religion, that is based on proper behavior, putting you on a good standing before God. So that's one kind of religion, a legalistic approach where rules and rituals supplement or replace Jesus as the way to be right with God.

Another type of gospel is what I would label a magical gospel. And they don't talk about it as magic, but it's not seeking so much to be in a relationship with God, or even to be in a relationship with God through Jesus Christ, but realizing that supernatural powers are real. And if they're real, wouldn't it be nice if you could figure out how to harness them, how to get into them far enough to get information from those supernatural powers, and then to be able to put those supernatural powers to work in your favor.

And so sometimes you'll have people that are seeking supernatural revelations, and some who seek them, get them. Muhammad did. He had a supernatural revelation, he said, from the angel Gabriel, who gave him the content of the Quran straight from heaven.

Joseph Smith was kind of into the occult, and he was looking to make contact with various powers, and he got his wish, at least he said so, and he received from the angel Moroni certain revelations which became the Book of Mormon. And there were these ways of getting revelation. There are some people who are just plain interested in the occult, and what kind of powers, whether they're good powers or evil powers, is not of interest.

Powers. Powers that I can harness, that I can control. I want results.

Some religions will give you certain meditation techniques for getting in touch with divine power and divine enlightenment. And if you achieve that, if you, again, it's always, always, always, you're the one who actually discovers and brings it about and makes it happen, and you're doing it for you. So there are religious approaches to other Gospels.

There are other religions. The Spiritist religions and the Pantheist religions all have a notion that there is a divine power and a supernatural power at work in the world, and a key part to success in life is figuring out how that stuff works. And then bringing your own practices into line with it, discovering the secrets, and there are religious ways of harnessing the supernatural for your benefit.

Now, of course, the real God, the real Jesus, does have divine, miraculous, supernatural power, and does give revelation and has given it fully in His Word. So it's not false to say, yeah, there are, there are real powers and real revelation. But pay very careful attention to what the Apostle says to the Galatians.

If anybody brings you a different Gospel, even if it's an angel from heaven, even if it's an angel from heaven, keep in mind that Satan himself appears as an angel of light. The fact that somebody showed up with some sort of angelic shining about them would not guarantee that you were getting the true Gospel. So Paul is saying there are religious Gospels that will come, and that there may even be angel beings involved.

If you know your Bible, you know there's a couple kinds of angel beings. There are the holy kind and the fallen kind, and Paul says the fallen kind can come looking like angels of light and their servants as servants of righteousness. So other Gospels can come in religious form.

They can also come now and more and more commonly in the form of an ideology. That was true in the ancient world already too. Even where there was religion and gods and goddesses, the real operative religion was an ideology of nationalism.

If you were an Assyrian emperor, the Assyrian gods were the greatest gods around. If you were a Roman emperor, the Roman gods were the greatest gods around. And even if you had a little disagreement over which god or goddess you preferred the most, you know what? As long as you acknowledge the divine goddess Roma and knew that the Emperor was the chief representative of the gods here on earth, whatever other gods you worship didn't really matter very much.

As long as you knew that Rome is it, that the Empire is it, that my nation is the greatest that ever existed, that sure we've conquered everybody else, but what a blessing it was for them to be conquered. What a joy it is for them to be under our thumb. Boy, they are lucky.

And that wasn't just ancient times and ancient gods and goddesses. When you had Adolf Hitler come along, there was a whole movement called the German Christians. And they would confess right in church that Adolf Hitler was the Führer and the divinely appointed leader of the German people.

Whenever you have a Sandalist gospel that so many have fallen into, and I've mentioned before that it can happen in this country where people, where it's patriotism gone berserk. It can also happen in other nations. Even atheistic nations have other Gospels.

And you can tell it by the size of the pictures of the dear leader on the building. You know who they really worship now, don't you? It's not any divine or supernatural power. It is that person.

And unfortunately, Nationalists is not the only type of ideology that can become a false gospel. There are some people who don't like their own nation very much. But they know that if the new ideology were to get a hold, if the revolution and the resistance could just get its way, then we would have heaven on earth.

Oh, would it be nice if we could just demolish all the remnants of the past and start from scratch. That was the great attempt of the French Revolution. They were going to start the calendar in the year zero, dated by the beginning of the French Revolution, because that was when all things were made new.

Shortly after that, they were chopping everybody's heads off, but it was a joyous time while it lasted. You know, it gave way to the reign of terror and the military dictatorship of Napoleon within a couple years, but hey, it was heaven on earth. But you have this progressive ideology that if you can just demolish the past and start from scratch, that was the dream of the French Revolution and the philosopher Rousseau and of his heirs.

Karl Marx was one of those heirs. You follow my ideology, you want to know what? Things are going to turn into a worker's paradise. It will be beautiful.

We don't need God, because religion is the opium of people, to kind of keep them drugged up in their oppressed state. But if they have their consciousness raised and they realize how oppressed they are, they will rise up, they will get rid. Always in these dreams, there's a few people that are keeping you back from that paradise.

They got to go. You got to get rid of them, and it seems like their number always increases, but usually they believe people are basically good. We're all basically good, except, you know, there's a few that got to be sorted out because they're wrecking everything for everybody else.

And so, you get these ideologies. And, you know, in our own time, you get that kind of ideological talk where everything about our society is bad, but if only you replaced it with what the latest progressive ideology is, then you would get heaven on earth. If we could only get social justice instead of oppression.

If only we could have sexual liberation. If we could have marriage equality, which means, of course, defining marriage in a way never defined before in the history of the world, but we will redefine marriage equality. We will have reproductive freedom, which means that you don't reproduce, and if you do, you kill the results of reproduction.

And we're going to have equity. We're going to have climate justice. Climate justice.

Now we have somebody who will sit in judgment on climate and change it. What a glorious thing this is, to be able to run the weather, to control the climate, to undo human institutions for all of time, basically. And now we, in the last ten years or so, have figured it all out.

What a glorious thing that is. And, again, you'll find this in a couple of forms. Sometimes it comes in atheist form, where you just dispense with belief in God or any supernatural powers, and the ideology is what you're going to have.

Marx took that approach, and various forms of socialism have done so. But oftentimes it comes in religious form. And so you'll have churches that preach faithfully the doctrines of the Progressive Revolution.

But Jesus, wouldn't you know it, was a progressive revolutionary. And the Bible was revealing these things all along, but only now did we realize it. And so you can have a progressive ideology in religious form or in atheistic form, just as you can have a nationalist ideology that demotes everything about God and promotes the rulers.

But you also can have it where it just kind of co-opts the various religious groups in the service of the ideology. So, I trust you're getting the point that there are different forms that different Gospels, other Gospels, can take. And we need to be alert.

And I will just say, it's good to pay attention to your own situation and your own form. What would be the biggest danger for you? If you already dislike rules intensely and don't think much of rituals, you're probably not that endangered by a legalist gospel. But how about the magical one, where you take a more therapeutic approach and you're going to make sure everybody feels good and you're going to tap into all the powers of God and Spirit to bring about nice things.

On the other hand, you might be a very therapeutic person and you're really worried about that legalistic gospel. That's the last thing you need to worry about. There are some people who say, oh, nationalism is taking over the church.

And they're waving their progressive flag all over the place and they're planting it firmly in the middle of the church. And the other way around, too. So, if your danger, if your greatest leaning would be, my country right or wrong, my country's always correct, and you're so worried about the progressive impact on the church, beware that, you know, the reason you notice it might be you're a little bit too enthralled with the nationalist ideology.

On the other hand, if you can't stand seeing any flags waved or any patriotic displays and you want to bring down every statue in sight, you're not really much in danger of a nationalistic or a white supremacist ideology. You're in danger of identifying Christianity with a progressive ideology and agenda. So, we can, you know, I could do this message and just say, you know what, scholars have found that here are the type of opponents Paul was opposing back there in Galatia.

And that is very worthwhile to do and to understand what's the original context, what was going on, who were the Judaizers, who were those insisting on circumcision and other rights of the Jewish law. I'm just going to take a leap and say, I don't think that's your greatest danger here today. It's important to understand that, but it has a wider application.

There are going to be a lot of different directions that you can chase other Gospels besides that one, although that one still is a danger and the success of Islam alone ought to be enough to warn us that something very similar does have tremendous appeal for hundreds of millions of people. Paul says, who has bewitched you? Who has bewitched you? And then he speaks of other Gospels, of other Jesus or another Jesus, a different Jesus, of other spirits besides the Holy Spirit, and of other apostles. Now, when he speaks of other Gospels, I think it's interesting that he puts it that way because everybody claims to be bringing good news if they have an ideology or a religion.

Back in the day when Paul was writing, one of the most common declarations of the Gospel was, Caesar is Lord. And you burn a pinch of incense to Caesar because you recognize the lordship of Caesar, the Roman peace, the prosperity, glory, and wonder that Rome has brought to the whole world. Ain't it wonderful? And so you have that type of a Gospel.

And often you will find that there are slogans, doctrines, and proclamations. It's not just something that people happen to hold as a private opinion. The other Gospels will have very aggressive ambassadors.

Islam had conquered by the point of the sword much of the world within a hundred years of Muhammad's appearance on earth. When you hear of Jehovah's Witness doctrine, they don't keep it to themselves. They want to spread what they regard as the Gospel of Jesus as the highest angel and of earning your way to God by your good works.

If you listen to nationalists, you'll find that they've got their rallies, their noisy situations. It's ever been so. Nebuchadnezzar had his where everybody bows down to his idol, but it's really a bowing down to him as the supreme authority.

And you'll have progressive Gospels. And there it is interesting. I find in progressive Gospels the need to come out, the need to make yourself known.

Silence is violence. And so you have got to proclaim the new Gospel. You've got to make it known.

It's not a private identity. It is a public declaration. This is the truth.

This is my truth. And you need to know my truth. And you really should believe it and embrace it.

And there's not only this desire to proclaim to make known. You know, today we live in the age of social media. If you hold an opinion and it's good news, you want to make it known.

So you declare yourself, you declare your opinion, and often you will find a whole set of doctrines and doctrinal buzzwords. In progressive ideology, it might be critical theory, identity or identity politics, intersectionality, anti-racism, patriarchy. You know the drill by now.

And the converts, you know, within a little while will be spouting and they'll be proclaiming their individuality. And I can predict what they're going to say before they say it. Because I've heard the recitation of the Creed.

But the Creed must be recited and the new Gospel must be declared. So people who are bewitched have these other Gospels. They proclaim these other Gospels and they want to give testimony.

Generally, there is another Jesus. And the other Jesus that everybody's got to deal with Jesus, just about. Seems they got to say something about him.

And so the religious versions will have him as a great prophet. Mormonism has something nice to say about Jesus. Jehovah's Witnesses, hey, you can't, well, I guess you can be greatest angel, but it's up there.

Islam has third greatest prophet. Hinduism and Buddhism would say that he's an agent of enlightenment. Maybe a high-level Bodhisattva.

Somebody similar to the Buddha who brings you into enlightenment. He's a pretty great guy. So there is another Jesus.

And even the social progressives, like I said, will have Jesus as a social revolutionary, as one who upsets the apple cart and changes everything. There's going to be something said about Jesus. Now, some atheists, but even they would be in a minority, some atheists will say, well, yeah, Jesus was kind of deluded and clueless and he's certainly dead.

But even the atheists, a lot of the time, will try to say something nice about Jesus. Yeah, he had some overall good ideas for his time, but yeah, unfortunately he got killed. And so we've got to do better in our time.

But there's always another Jesus. And one thing it will not be is the Jesus who is both divine fully and human fully, who gave his life on the cross to pay for the sins of the world, and whose death and resurrection are sufficient for the salvation of everybody who trusts in him. That is not what the other Gospels will say about Jesus.

There will also be other spirits. Oftentimes, it's a spirit of self-improvement. And there may even be, in some religions, an attempt to redefine who the spirit is.

The spirit is not a who. The spirit isn't a power. The spirit, you know, in Jehovah's Witness theology, for instance, would be just another expression for divine power, certainly not the third person of the Trinity.

And so you'll have other spirits. You'll have new light from the Spirit. You'll find that often in progressive ideology, whether, especially in progressive ideology within churches.

You know, that Bible, it was nice in its time. It's done a lot of good. There's still quite a bit of good in it.

But the Holy Spirit is bringing fresh light. And in our time, we're seeing things that nobody saw in those previous ages. Because, you know what? Friday is always better than Thursday, because it's Friday.

That's the progressive mindset. And the Holy Spirit is always doing more on Friday than he did on Thursday, and always saying things on Friday that he wasn't saying on Thursday, because he's a progressive spirit. You'll even find an overlap between the more secular progressive ideology and the more religious progressive ideology.

I'll take an example. What is the Constitution? It is an ever-evolving document that had some good ideas in it, but will be adjusted a great deal for our time and be more useful if we do so. And, of course, the Constitution is not divinely inspired, but that's an approach to the Constitution as a written document.

It's ever-evolving. Moving to the realm of the church, you'll find a similar approach that is taken to the Bible. Its meaning is ever-evolving.

The Spirit is ever-revealing new things. And so, just because something is written in the New Testament, and written by an apostle, does not mean that it's 2022. Get with it! That's what we mean when we talk about other spirits.

And other spirits will help you feel better about yourself. They won't transform you or make you into the image of Jesus Christ, but there will be a spirit of... sometimes it's a nationalistic spirit, sometimes it's an individual therapeutic spirit that your therapist can help you unlock. Sometimes, ironically, nowadays, in such a secular age, you might have a spirit that is totally at odds with your body.

That body may have looked like a girl to everybody else, but you know you're not. You've got a different spirit. And so, there's other spirits.

And along with other Gospels, other Jesus, other spirits, there are always other apostles. Let me just point out a trademark that often accompanies other apostles, the different apostles with a different message. One test of a lot of them is, what do they say about Paul? Just try that one out, you know, try that one on for size.

The super apostles did not think much of Paul. They said he wasn't as good a speaker as they were. They were better at rhetoric.

Boy, that's really the test of truth, isn't it? They were more entertaining. People liked listening to them. And there were these apostles who knew so much better than Paul.

Read a progressive theologian today. Most of them cannot stand Paul. They don't like him.

They say, I'm a red-letter Christian. I follow Jesus. And Paul, he introduced things into Christianity that were contrary to Jesus and to the Spirit of Jesus.

And you know, isn't it nice you've got a super apostle like me 2,000 years later to tell you what Jesus really meant, instead of what that guy Paul, who, you know, he merely saw Jesus on the road to Damascus and spent three years in the desert listening to him. What does he know about Jesus? I'll tell you the real Jesus. But you'll, everybody who doesn't like the gospel hates Paul.

Okay, that, maybe that's an overstatement. But if you hear a writer start to say disparaging things about Paul, just let your ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, your alarm, your BS detector is going off, okay? When they don't like Paul, that's a real bad sign that they're on the wrong track with the gospel. When I preached through 1st Peter last year, one of the reasons why some people said that 1st Peter couldn't have been written by the Apostle Peter was because it sounded too much in agreement with Paul.

And we know that Peter couldn't have agreed with Paul. That would be a bad sign. So, you know, there you have it.

I'm just warning you, when you read something by, you know, I've read stuff by Brian McLaren and, you know, his title is, the title of his book says it all, A New Kind of Christianity. You know, he was one who used to claim to be an evangelical Christian, and he trots out a book called A New Kind of Christianity. And I read it and thought, boy, I think I read that when I was reading, you know, Harnack and those guys from over a hundred years ago, except they were a lot smarter.

You know, this new kind of Christianity was the old liberalism that came around in the, you know, right after the turn of the century in 1900, 1910. You know, even before that. It's all, this stuff, the progressives who say it's new, it's just they trust people have a short memory, or maybe they don't know diddly.

You know, that there's that possibility. They don't know what theologians a hundred years ago or two hundred years ago were saying. It's like the whole progressive ideology or even what's called modern science.

It's all stuff randomly falling through space and then banging into each other and stuff happens. Really? Modern science? Democritus was saying that kind of stuff 2,500 years ago, and he wasn't a scientist, and he's not very modern. But always you have these Gospels that claim to be something new, something, ooh, man, we've got insights nobody ever had before.

They're old, stale ideas that have been tried, but we don't know our own history. You know, I've said before, Satan believes in recycling, and his recycling often works because people don't pay attention to the claptrap he came up with in the past. So, you have just other apostles, and sometimes if you have legalistic apostles, we mentioned already Muhammad, Joseph Smith, others who came up with religious and legalistic stuff.

There were the super apostles of Paul's day who did that sort of thing. The other apostles might be a political leader who's very charismatic and gets everybody thinking that he's the greatest thing and the key to salvation to making you great. You get people, you know, Marx, Darwin, Freud, they were apostles.

They've had an enormous influence on people who believe their ideologies, and you'll have people today who say, man, we're here to free the oppressed. We are here to promote nothing but love, and if you happen not to agree with us, you will be canceled immediately, but we love you so much. And you'll find what Paul said, they come as angels of light.

Light in the sense of promising a better situation in society, promising good things happening to you personally, and also just oftentimes being kind of whimsome people in the way they talk. The super apostles were better talkers than Paul, and the super apostles sometimes sound very smart, and if you don't already know the stuff that they're trying to recycle, they'll sound pretty clever. You know, and be aware that you also, one reason why they're gonna sound smart is because they're very good at telling you what you want to hear.

Today that is more accessible than it's ever been. If you are uncomfortable with the real gospel, if there's something that makes you uneasy or don't like about the Bible, you might go looking elsewhere, and you can find it. Go to social media, go to the Internet.

If you're not well informed, the first voice you hear that says what you want to hear is going to sound like an angel of light, because finally you got what you wanted to hear. You believe what you want. It's called confirmation bias, but anyway, when you go searching around till you get somebody to say what you want, and you find the community that you want, not only do you get super apostles anymore, you get a whole community thrown in with it.

It used to be that you might feel kind of isolated or all alone. Now you get a community. If you have any kind of predilection toward variant sexuality, you can find a community for that.

If you identify as the opposite sex, you can find a community for that. If you identify as an animal, you can now find the furry community online. The furries identify as various types of animals, and you can find that.

If you have a major eating disorder, and somebody's trying to help you to get over that major eating disorder so that you cannot die, you can find a community that says it's not a disorder. It is a beautiful thing to be anorexic, to be emaciated. There are hundreds of thousands of us, and we are beautiful.

Don't you believe a word of it when they tell you there's something amiss about starving yourself. You can find a community for just about anything, and when it suits your taste, it will sound like an angel of light. And we have more access to our favorite personal angel of light than ever before in the history of the race.

So be aware of those things. And you know, if you've been troubled by Christianity, Christianity is troubling. It says that you're guilty before God, that you've fallen far short of the glory of God, that without God's help, you'd be lost forever.

You say, I like to believe nice things about myself. I like to believe that I'm good. I don't want to believe in sin.

Well, what better than atheism? If you have no standard and no God, why worry about it? So if you have something that sticks in your craw about Christianity, you can find a different gospel. And unfortunately, different gospels have a major downside. They're false, and they're deadly.

So lies sound good for a while, but truth has a way, reality has a way, of breaking through. We've heard the promises. Take the ideology of progressivism and socialism, for instance.

It sounds great, except when you look at every society in the world that ever tried it, turned into a hellhole. I mean, and I don't use that word lightly. It turns into a preliminary version of hell.

You try something, and it doesn't work. Or you say, boy, atheism, I really feel free now. I don't have to worry about God anymore.

I don't have to worry about anybody telling me I'm a sinner. I feel liberated. Yeah, except now you're a randomly evolved blob of slime.

Do you find that to be uplifting, encouraging, joy-bringing? When you die, you turn to dirt. When your children die, you turn to dirt. This is the new doctrine that you've taken.

It also means that those who hate and murder aren't doing anything more wrong than those who are kind, because it's just the way of evolution. It's the way things are. And I'm not going to go into all the detail on all the other Gospels.

I'd rather talk for a bit about the true Gospel, but we do need to be aware of the false ones. Because if I believed that I should only say the positive stuff all the time, then I would be different than every apostle in the New Testament, because they do identify false Gospels as well as the true Gospel. And Paul calls it the Gospel of God, or the Gospel of God's grace.

And it comes from God. It's revealed by God. It's accomplished by God.

And you know you're on the wrong track with your Gospel if it tells you that you're going to make your way up the ladder to God. The true Gospel says God comes down to us according to the divine wisdom and plan, according to His power, His grace. It comes from Him.

It exalts Him. And any Gospel that makes me big and God little, you know that it's false right then and there. Any Gospel that makes God big and you little has a pretty good chance of being on the right track.

And the true Gospel is a Gospel that introduces you to Christ. The Apostle says, the thing that I'm really concerned about isn't that you're not listening to me, but I introduced you to Christ. I betrothed you to Christ.

And everything about the Gospel connects you with Christ. If Christ becomes kind of a footnote and some other agenda is at the center and at the top, then you know that it's a Gospel gone wrong. The real Jesus in the real Gospel is known to be God.

And known to be God become human for our salvation and to become one of us. And the Gospel makes much of the cross, of Jesus crucified, of His blood. If you can sit in a church for years and years or if you can read through a book and it never mentions the blood of Christ, the atonement of Christ, the payment for sin, you've got a false Gospel.

Slam that book shut. Get out of that church. If it doesn't make much of Christ and of His cross, then it's a false Gospel.

If it doesn't mention Jesus as Lord, as ruler, as the one who commands and directs our lives, it's a false Gospel. If it doesn't mention that Jesus is coming again to judge the living and the dead, it's a false Gospel. The real Gospel introduces you to the real Jesus and brings you into union with the Lord Jesus Christ through the power of the Holy Spirit.

And the false Gospels have these different spirits, but the true Gospel brings you and introduces you and in fact fills you with the Spirit of truth, the Spirit of holiness, the Spirit who transforms you more and more to be like the Lord Jesus Christ and gives you more and more the fruit of the Spirit. We'll say more about that next week, Lord willing. But in Christ and in union with Him, there is the Holy Spirit of God who's making this difference.

And it depends on the apostles, not the super apostles, not the people who are smarter 2,000 years later than the people who personally knew Jesus Christ and received the Gospel directly from Him and witnessed Him crucified, saw the risen Christ. These people are people that you can count on. So we need to pay attention to the biblical apostles, those who claim to have improved on the Bible.

Books with a title like A New Kind of Christianity, you can throw that sucker in the fire before you even open it. If it's new, it isn't true. If it's true, it isn't new.

Okay? That's the Gospel. The Gospel is not recently invented by some guy who didn't really like the Apostle Paul very much. So we need to hold to the true Gospel.

And just a few of the statements that Paul makes in Galatians as the letter unfolds are going to keep us oriented and keep us in Christ. A person is not justified by the works of the law, but by faith in Jesus Christ. So we, too, have put our faith in Christ Jesus, that we may not be justified by faith in Christ, that we may be justified by faith in Christ, not by the works of the law.

Because by the works of the law, no one will be justified. You're not made right with God by your effort or by keeping rules. You're made right with God by trusting Jesus Christ, His blood to pay for your sins, His perfect righteousness credited to you and accepted by God.

And then the Apostle goes on to say, I've been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave Himself for me. I do not set aside the grace of God.

For if righteousness could be gained through the law, Christ died for nothing. What a terrible thing to say that Christ died for nothing. The whole religion of Islam can be summarized in that last sentence.

Righteousness can be gained by the works of the law. It can be gained by Sharia obedience, by doing what Muhammad and the Quran says. That's how you gain righteousness.

People are basically good and they just have to be told what to do. That is the summary of Islamic doctrine. But they don't say Christ died for nothing.

They say He didn't die. But you see how it flips the whole gospel upside down? You don't need the death of Jesus. You just need a law given to you and then do what it says and you're good to go.

So, the need to trust in Christ crucified. That is what it's all about. And then Christ lives in me.

Christianity is the life of God, the life of Christ within the human spirit. If you have an ideology or a gospel that does not bring you to the living Christ dwelling inside you by His Holy Spirit and living in union with Him, it's a false gospel. That's why Paul asks that question.

Now, how did you get the Spirit in the first place? You received the Spirit when you put your faith in Jesus Christ. When you trusted Him, He gave you His Spirit. Come on! Now that you started with Christ, are you going to go back to some other means of being saved and some other means of receiving the Spirit? There is no other means of receiving the Holy Spirit of Christ.

So, Christ lives in me. And then Paul makes this statement, in Christ Jesus you are all sons of God through faith. For as many as you have been baptized into Christ have put on Christ.

There's neither Jew nor Greek. There's neither slave nor free. There's no male or female.

For you're all one in Christ Jesus. What's your identity? You are in Christ. You, yeah, I'm a woman or I'm a man.

Yeah, that's a fact about you. That is not the main fact of your identity. Are you at the top of society, one of the 1%? Are you at the bottom of society, a wage slave? Who cares? I'm in Christ.

That, that's not to say that disparities don't matter. It's not to say there's no difference between male and female. It is to say that your identity and the core of who you are is in Christ or you haven't understood the gospel yet.

If you've got people who are saying, well, we can separate out people into this category and into that category. And we can separate them into male and female. And the male are the oppressors and the women are always the oppressed.

The, the Jews, this race is the oppressor race. That race is the non-oppressed race. This is the economically advantaged.

That's the economically disadvantaged. And they rattle on and on and on. Now, this doesn't mean that there are no such problems in society.

It means that if you're exalting that as to be the main thing, and some churches do, then you're forgetting the centrality of the Lord Jesus Christ. On the flip side, I will just add that when people do belong to Christ and men are predators or are cruel to women or women are being mistreated, you don't say, yeah, but we're all one in Christ. It doesn't matter if you're male or female.

When there are some groups of people who are being mistreated terribly and somebody stands up for them, don't right away say, oh, they're betraying the gospel because they want justice. Well, the gospel calls for fair treatment of people. There's no doubt about that.

So we have to be careful in, in finding certain use of words to say, well, now we know that it's a false gospel. I'll warn you right now, some of the heretics and false gospel will stick with Christian vocabulary. They'll still talk about Jesus.

They may even use the word Trinity here and there. They'll, they'll use a lot of the lingo of Christianity and give it a whole different content. On the other hand, there may be people who use a buzzword from another movement that you don't happen to like, but they're still Orthodox Christians.

The test is, do they believe in Jesus as God and man? Do they believe in the cross and in the blood atonement? Do they believe in the indwelling of the Holy Spirit? Do they believe in the authority of the Bible? Even if you think, well, they have an incorrect opinion on this or that, we are one in Christ Jesus if they hold to those cardinal central truths of being in Christ. And so we want to be aware of the danger of, of false gospels. We also want to be aware of the danger of unnecessary separation from those who believe the true gospel.

The apostle deals with that in Galatians 2, where Peter and Barnabas and some others were, were getting separatist over certain things. And Paul rebuked them because they weren't acting in line with the truth of the gospel. It's a very challenging thing.

We need the help of God. But we need to be able to identify and resist and reject false gospels. And we need, by God's grace, not to dismiss or depart from or reject people who hold to the true gospel, but have a different opinion from us on a secondary matter.

So when, when we think of all this, the apostle wrote these words to the Galatians. He wrote them to the Corinthians because he wanted them to be one with Christ and to be one with each other in Christ. So may God give us the grace to be faithful to that gospel and to be connected with those who share in that same gospel.

Let's pray together. We thank you, Father, for again and again reminding us what the true gospel is, for calling us again to be alert to those who are false apostles and doing that work of Satan, who appears as an angel of light sometimes. We pray, Lord, we know that we're going to get fooled if you aren't helping us by your Holy Spirit.

And if you're not correcting us by your word. And so we pray that we will hear this word and understand what it's saying to us in our own situation. Defend your flock from those who would deceive your sheep.

And we pray, Lord, that where there are wolves in sheep's clothing, you will just tear away the disguise so that false teaching may be recognized. We pray also, Lord, that we may recognize those who truly do belong to you and the things that over the centuries and in various cultures have divided believers from one another. May the walls and barriers come down so that we may be truly one in heart and mind with each other and with you, our Lord and Savior.

Lord, we pray for the discernment and the wisdom to be able to follow your path for Jesus' sake. Amen.