WHO HATH BELIEVED OUR REPORT  (PART 5)

 

The second part of the above objection is:

 

‘Are you also saying that simply because a person who does ‘believe’ the correct Gospel doctrines but also believes that many who are incorrect in their doctrinal viewpoint are saved as well, are also all lost?’

 

This is something that most of the people I have come across resent so vehemently. This is the ramification of not believing the Gospel that they simply cannot tolerate and which thereby causes them to resort to labelling us with such convenient and cultic sounding terms as hyper-Calvinist. Somehow it makes them feel good and even more comfortable with what they believe when they can come up with a label for those who differ from them. Their motto is: When you can’t attack the doctrines, label the ones who believe them! Those who cannot provide answers from the Scriptures always resort to childish name calling. The first thing I have to say to such people is: why would anyone who truly believed the doctrines which make up the Gospel of God want to believe that a person who did not believe all of those doctrines is just as saved by God as the ones who do. I mean, why did God bother to connect the words ‘believe’, ‘Gospel’, and ‘salvation’, if it did not matter whether a person believes the Gospel or not? He would have stopped at the word believe and not have gone on to explain what was to be believed. Why have so many ‘great’ men of the past given so much of their time, spent so much effort, and fought pitched battles, defending the doctrines of grace, only to say at the end of it all that men are saved who believe doctrines which diametrically oppose the truth of God! First they tell you what the truth is and presumably contrast it with error, and then they leave you with the impression that a man is saved believing either one! Its like a teacher spending all day teaching children the why’s and wherefore’s of an equation and why it can only add up to one number, and then at the end of the day say that even if you arrive at the wrong answer you will be rewarded equally with those who have the right answer. Or a man lecturing about his tried and true way to make a million dollars but at the end of his seminar tells his listeners that trying to make a million any other way is to faithfully adhere to his way! There is simply no sense to it. But apparently, the number of people to whom no sense makes sense continues to grow. The whole purpose of teaching is to instruct people in the right way and warn them of the wrong way. The right way has its consequences and the wrong way has its consequences. And when it comes to the Gospel, right teaching and wrong teaching is a matter of what God has said and what God has not said. What God has said is right and what He has not said is wrong. If you believe what God has said you are right and if you do not believe what God has said you are wrong. Now if salvation does not hinge on belief of the truth, then the truth simply does not matter. The truth of what God has done, of how He saves, would not be important enough to figure in the salvation of anyone. If God has said something, the onus is on us to believe it because you can be guaranteed that not believing what God has said will have dire and eternal consequences. No one has ever profited by not believing the Word of God, so how any can say that to not believe the Gospel, but to believe error concerning it, will still save a person, is beyond my comprehension. I mean, why preach the truth at all! Why warn of false preachers who come with false doctrines if one can be saved just as much by believing the lies they teach as believing what true men of God, who preach His Gospel, say? The reason why teaching is necessary at all is the fact that there is right and wrong, and the purpose behind proving that which is right as right is so a person will enjoy the truth and stay away from error, so that a person will enjoy the benefits of being blessed of God to believe the truth, as opposed to believing error and remaining in an accursed state for all eternity. But if whether one believes truth or error does not matter, that salvation does not hinge upon it, then there is no reason why anyone should teach anything, for believing whatever one believes to be the truth, as opposed to what actually is the truth, would be good enough! So good in fact that you can be saved regardless of whether you believe God or not! "Thus, in common with a fundamental tenet of the New Gnosticism—that there is no objective reality"—the Gospel can be anything a person wants it to be and thus how God saves is open to interpretation. Let us all live in and for existential experiences and form our own doctrines and believe what we want to believe. Thus we see the aim of Satan: to create a worldwide religious climate where there are virtually no rules, no standards of belief, where the lines between right and wrong, between true Gospel doctrine and the lies of false gospels, become indivisible. It is not enough to say one believes in the Gospel. It is not enough to say one believes in the Son of God, that this ‘confession’ will in some way protect the ‘believer’ from the consequences of believing any error. But one must actually believe the truth about the Gospel, one must believe the truth about the Son of God in order to be saved. One must remember that a person is not saved because they say they are saved, but only when GOD says they are saved!!!

 

Such people who believe that one can be saved whilst in ignorance of the Gospel, willful or otherwise, love to resort to the following age old argument: Those who are mere babes in Christ do not know as one who is mature in the things of the Lord, but we mustn’t forget they are babes and just as much in Christ as the mature are." Such thinking argues that we all start off with varying, even contradictory, beliefs about God and how He saves, ie what the Gospel is, but the fact that we all ‘turn to Him’ to be saved, or believe that only He can save, is enough to get us saved. Yes, there are babes in Christ, but where does anyone get the idea that this means they believe in error concerning God and the way He saves? Yes, the Bible speaks of the sincere milk of the Word (1 Pet. 2:2) and also of strong meat (Heb. 5:12), but where does anyone get the absurd notion that the milk contains error, that it is in some way curdled and representative of anything but the pure unadulterated Word of God, and that somehow the strong meat, alone, is representative of true doctrines? Most professing christians subscribe to the well-worn teaching that, as babes in Christ, we know little of Christ, that our view of the Gospel is obscured by much error, but as we grow and mature we eventually come into the right knowledge of Him and are corrected and instructed by Scripture as we go along and become adults in Christ. It is interesting to note that people who still don’t have a clue as to what the Gospel is, which is the state of those they claim to be babes in Christ, are, called the mature in Christ because they have been in the faith for a certain length of time! Erroneous doctrines are replaced by truer doctrines. But through even our doctrinally darkest days we were Christians, they insist. This all sounds so convincing and logical that no wonder those who believe it have no problem with such ‘reasoning’. Most have never heard anything different from this. They are convinced because it matches with most other experiences in life where man starts off in relative ignorance or having little knowledge of a matter, he later grows and becomes more knowledgeable and mature in what he practices or believes. Yet, the meaning of the key phrase ‘babe’ in Christ, often used in this line of reasoning as a defense for the religionists’ ignorant, but to their minds, nonetheless saved state, is totally misrepresented and misunderstood and is completely at odds with the fact that there is not a moment in the life of any true believer which is not spent abiding in the Doctrine of Christ, His Gospel. A CHRISTIAN NEVER COMES TO THE GOSPEL, FOR HE IS BORN OF THE GOSPEL! 2 John 9 shows clearly that it could not be otherwise, and that all who are not present, or stand not, in Christ’s doctrine have not God. This could never be said of a true believer, for whether he is a young Christian or one who has been in the faith for many years, he abides in the doctrine of Christ and no other. Whether it be his first day as a Christian or his last day on earth, there is not a moment in time which the Christian, does not spend abiding in Christ’s Gospel. If he is in Christ he stands with Christ’s doctrine, for it is CHRIST’S Voice which he has heard and does follow and not that of a stranger (Jn.10:4,5,27).

 

It must be asked, "How does one get to be a babe in Christ? What is it to be a babe in Christ? What makes the difference between one who is a religious, professing christian yet dead in his sins, and one who is a babe in Christ? How ignorant can one be and yet still be biblically referred to as a babe in Christ?" It might also be asked, "Where on earth did man ever get the idea that to be a babe in Christ meant that one was ignorant of the doctrine of Christ?" In light of 2 John 9 where it is stated that if one does not abide in the doctrine of Christ one does not have God, being a babe in Christ could not be a proper definition of one who is ignorant of the doctrine of Christ, that is, Who Christ is, what Christ has done and for whom He has done it. He could not possibly be ignorant of the Gospel, for he has been born of the Gospel! Remember, a babe in Christ is just as much a creature born again, born of God’s Seed, the Gospel, as one who is mature in Christ. If you are in Christ you are of Christ and your life is hid with Him in God (Col.3:3). If you are in Christ you abide in His doctrine and have God, if not, if you do not abide in the doctrine of Christ, you cannot be in Christ, babe, adult or adolescent, and therefore you simply cannot have God. To be a babe in Christ never has referred to, and never could be a proper description of, one who is ignorant of the Person and Work of Christ, for this would fly in the face of the Bible’s definition of what a truly born again new creature in Christ is: one who believes the Gospel.

 

The term ‘babe’ in the New Testament which refers to those ‘babes in Christ’ is found in Hebrews 5:13: "For every one that useth milk is unskilful in the word of righteousness: for he is a babe" (see also 1Cor.3:1ff.). It is important to note firstly that who the writer here refers to as ‘babes’ are Christians. All are agreed that the writer has addressed his Epistle to Hebrew converts to Christianity and that there is nothing in the Epistle which would suggest otherwise. That means they are all people who have been born again, born of that Holy Seed: the Gospel of Jesus Christ. It means that they have heard the Gospel and have understood it so as to give evidence that they are new creatures in Christ. "The Gospel had been preached and ‘confirmed’ unto them" (Heb.2:1-3). They recognize no gospel as having the power to save anyone other than God’s only Gospel. They are considered brethren throughout the Epistle (Heb.3:1,12; 10:19; 13:22) and if brethren, then they must be believers. Believers in what? Why, the Gospel of course! How do I know? Because every born again believer is born of the incorruptible Seed of God: the Gospel (1Pet.1:23-25). EVERYONE THAT IS SAVED IS A BELIEVER IN THE GOSPEL (Mk.16:16). Everyone alive today was born physically through the seed of man and everyone alive in Christ is born spiritually through the Seed of God: His Gospel. How can you be born of the truth if you do not believe the truth? How can one be physically born without being covered in afterbirth! The truth of God, which is the Seed of God, which is the Gospel of God, is the afterbirth that evidences spiritual birth that never comes off and that covers every Christian from the moment they are born again! If there is no afterbirth, there can be no evidence of a birth having taken place. Again, before hearing and understanding the Gospel, no one has any right to consider themselves a new creature in Christ, for the primary characteristic feature of a new creature in Christ is that he believes the Gospel. It is the principle form of judging a man saved, otherwise why would the Lord Jesus have stated in Mark 16 that a man is saved based on his belief of the Gospel? He did not say he was saved by what he does, but by what he believes. The works of a man are important, but they are not what is identified by Christ as THE prime distinguishing characteristic of a true believer. Just as faith without works is dead, so too, works without THE Faith of Christ is just as dead. (For more on this subject, including a study of the word unskilful from Heb. 5:13, please see the author’s booklet, ‘Born of the Gospel’).

 

‘Knowledge and belief in the right doctrines of the Gospel is a gradual thing learned over many, many years’ they say. But this whole argument is flawed because it suggests that eventually all will believe the true doctrines, the right doctrines, concerning the Gospel—GOD’S doctrines. It still works on the principle that one must believe the truth, for it says that every Christian will eventually believe the truth. But the question which stands out like a sore thumb is: what about those professing christians who die still ignorant of the Gospel of truth, revealing an absence of the love of the truth? Are they still saved? Are they saved because one is convinced they were going to believe the truth but died before they had a chance to? But what inkling do we have that they were going to believe the Gospel when they believed no differently to those who believe in false gospels! If one is saved who has died not believing the whole Gospel but only in some Gospel truths, what importance can we place on believing right doctrine when one can be saved without it, if one can be saved while still learning what the truth is but not be abiding in it. If it is finally acknowledged after their death that such people were not saved, based on their unbelief of Christ’s doctrine, then how could they have ever been saved in the first place? You’re saved while you believe error but you become lost if you die in this condition? AND THEY CALL ME WEIRD!!! Now, to many who have read my writings and who will read what I have just commented on, it makes perfect sense to conclude such things and I receive no protest over it. But, when people start to realise that men such as Charles Spurgeon and Martin Luther, or other ‘great’ names of the past or present, did not teach these things, they are rejected out of hand. ‘How could these things be true’, they think to themselves, ‘if those men didn’t teach them?’ Moreover, when they see that such teachings rule out the possibility that family members and friends are saved, especially the long lost departed ones, who did not agree with such thinking, I am immediately shunned and ‘excommunicated’, and labelled an extremist!! People just wipe me, and what I am saying, from their thinking after initially agreeing with me until some of their idols were mentioned or until they realise that my Gospel calls their long lost loved ones who did not believe it, lost! I have had people whom I considered friends and whom I had known for ten years and more, leave me without a word or whisper because of the Gospel I believe. If I were to act in the same way, they would no doubt see it as confirmation that I am in a cult and scared to hear of that which would seek to expose my thinking as erroneous. It is an absolute blight against the dignity of man to behave in such an unreasonable, irrational and vulgar way. And then these people have the gall to ‘pray’ for me and tell others how ‘concerned’ they are for me! Concerned? How concerned can they be when they refuse to sit with me and explain their position and why they believe me to be wrong? Such behavior exposes an extremely deep-seated bias against, and fear of, anything, EVEN IF IT IS TRUE, that would come against and seek to expose those things a person is comfortable believing and those persons whom they have listened to and loved for years. One question that must be asked of such people at this point is: if it could be proven that you were believing a false gospel, WOULD YOU WANT TO KNOW? If you hesitated, even for one moment, to answer this with a ‘yes’ then you have a problem. Many do not even try to understand the Gospel and its ramifications, because they simply do not want to believe it.

 

How anyone could be saved who believes that a man who does not know or does not believe the true Gospel, is another good question. What most who profess faith in Christ do not realise is the fact that to not believe in the Gospel of God does not only refer to those who believe nothing of what it says, but it also refers to those who do not believe ALL of what the Gospel says. If God has said that His Gospel is that which is to be believed, is that which He gives His faith to a person whereby they believe the Gospel in its entirety, for anyone to be saved, how can anyone say that a man is saved who does not believe all the Gospel which God has given? I mean, surely God gives His faith to man so that he will believe all His Gospel and not merely part of it. (See my booklet, ‘Faith to Believe What?’) The Seed of God is the whole Gospel and not merely part of it. "Being born again...of incorruptible (seed), by the Word of God....And this is the Word which BY THE GOSPEL is preached unto you" (1 Pet. 1:23,25). Therefore a man is born again when he is born of the whole Gospel, the whole Seed of God and not just part of it. Relevant to this is the fact that if one plants a whole apple seed, an apple tree will result, but if any part of that apple seed is cut off, even if it receives the slightest nick, nothing will grow from that seed! There is no part of anything in the physical world that is used symbolically in the Scriptures to represent a spiritual truth that will conflict with its spiritual counterpart. If a man could be saved by believing part of the Gospel, there would be room for him to believe wrongly about the part he remains ignorant of. And this would reveal his gospel as nothing but a false gospel, for none can say that the Gospel of God, the only Gospel which saves, contains or could contain any falsehood whatsoever. Having a faith which believes in only a few Gospel doctrines and not all, is to have a faith which is indistinguishable from the faith which is common to all men, by which God has never saved anyone. The only thing which severs the umbilical cord existing between an unregenerate man and his faith in false gospels is the grace of God, through which the faith of God is given that believes only in God’s Gospel and eternally attaches the lifeline between the true Gospel and everyone of God’s elect children. What would be the sense, and what would it achieve, for God to give a man the glorious gift of faith, whereby a man is justified, and with it only permit a portion of the Gospel to be believed, or see only a limited number of doctrines as being part of it, which would allow for the rejection of some Gospel doctrines and thereby leave him with the warped belief that a man can be saved without full knowledge and belief of God’s only Gospel?

 

Believe the Gospel and you WILL be saved, believe it not and you WILL perish. This is the rule, this is the governing principle, by which a man is to be judged saved or lost. Does he believe the Gospel to the exclusion of every false gospel as that which must be believed in order for a man to be saved, or does he believe that one can be just as saved when believing a gospel which teaches some truths but at the same time rejects others. Many who believe and teach Calvinist doctrine believe it to be the Gospel, but for some strange incomprehensible reason insist they were just as saved whilst believing in false gospels! Its as if they have said to themselves, ‘I will believe what God’s Gospel says because it is the truth and I want to be saved, but I am not going to consider myself lost when I believed error, or tell people they’ve got to believe the same thing I do or they will perish.’ Some of these men teach Gospel doctrines very well but refuse to judge saved and lost based on what a man believes, YET I NOTICE THEY HAVE MADE IT A PRIORITY IN THEIR LIVES TO MAKE SURE THAT WHAT THEY BELIEVE IS RIGHT!! They wouldn’t think of believing the doctrinal rubbish that many believe, but have made sure they believe what is true. Moreover, they would never dare to return to the lies they believed before ‘believing’ the Gospel, so how can they think that they were ever saved believing them? When Christ said that to believe His Gospel is to be saved and to believe it not is to be lost, He was not joking. He meant exactly what He said. If a person who believes in a false gospel is not lost, then it must mean that God saves people regardless of what they believe. This is in stark contrast with the first part of Jesus’ statement in Mark 16:16 where He pronounced that only those who believe His Gospel will be saved. Christ judged saved and lost by whether or not a man believed His Gospel, and everyone who fails to judge saved and lost by this same means does so at his own peril. Christ says: "He that rejecteth Me, and receiveth not My Words, hath One that judgeth him: THE WORD THAT I HAVE SPOKEN, THE SAME SHALL JUDGE HIM IN THE LAST DAY" (Jn. 12:48 cf. Rom. 2:16). "The word that Christ has spoken, the doctrines of His Gospel...will be that by which the sinner will be judged in the last day." Every man will be judged by that Message then, so how could it be that a man is not to be judged saved or lost by that same Message now? I mean, if a man is saved whilst believing lies, why change? What difference does it make what you believe if you were saved believing lies? This is what I find so very, very strange. This is what is so totally foreign to the Scriptures and which thing they cannot and do not support. This is that for which there is no biblical precedent at all, finding support only in the teaching manuals of Satan and in the deluded minds of those who believe him. If God says there is salvation only in His Gospel, if God says that the power unto salvation is His Gospel only, who do you think goes against this by saying that one can be saved believing other gospels too? Do you think the Holy Spirit does it? Who do you think is always the first in line to oppose any truth of God? Satan may appear as an angel of light and in many guises; his gospels may appear to be the very Gospel of Light, but Satan’s fingerprints always remain the same and these fingerprints are the very errors that are present in every satanically inspired false gospel.

 

For some reason, those ‘Christian’ groups which have taught the correct doctrines concerning the Gospel have baulked at the Scriptural ruling that those who do not believe the Gospel will perish. Many of them have taught, and continue to teach, the doctrines of grace including the righteousness of Christ and the fact that this is the only ground of salvation. They expose and fight with all their might the incorrect, and therefore invalid, doctrines of all those who oppose the Gospel. They call those messages ‘false gospels’ and ‘another gospel’ and yet refuse to call those who believe in such doctrines, or those that believe in belief of more than one Gospel as the power of God unto salvation, lost. Such people have betrayed the doctrines of the Gospel they claim to believe by saying one can be saved by believing other doctrines, doctrines which oppose the Gospel truths, as well. They have no qualms in calling erroneous gospels false gospels, but they refuse to call the people who believe them false christians!! How, it may well be asked, can one whose faith is in a false gospel not be a false christian? How can one have been born in one country and at the same time be said to have been given birth to in another? How can a true Christian be born from the seed of a false gospel? A man being born again of the seed of a false gospel and not of the Gospel of God, is like one man’s son being born from another man’s seed! Its just impossible. How can one be saved while believing a false gospel, which is a plan for salvation contrary to that unique plan of God’s which alone saves? God has only one Gospel and therefore He has designated only one Gospel to be believed in unto salvation. Anything which differs from it cannot be His Gospel and therefore cannot save. This is the only thing one can logically conclude about being saved and not being saved if one is to be faithful to the Word of God. Does a man’s believing in right doctrines automatically mean that he was always saved, even in the days of his believing false doctrine? What lunatic would answer ‘yes’ to such an absurd notion as this? Scripture makes clear that to be saved is to believe the Gospel of God which is HIS power unto salvation to everyone that believeth (see Rom. 1:16). And, to be lost is to not believe that Gospel at all or to claim that one does believe it but has in fact never repented of believing false gospels or of ever having trusted in them as the right way to God. How can one have rightly repented of believing a false gospel if they still believe they were saved whilst believing it? True repentance has never taken place if one continues to believe that one was, or can be, saved while believing a false gospel. Such teaching is looked upon as being unloving and without mercy. They say it makes God a God Who is without mercy and forgiveness towards man’s inability to accurately believe the Gospel of God. But please tell me which sin God has overlooked in order to let a man into heaven? Which sin was it that Christ did not have to make atonement for? EVERY sin had to be atoned for and at the top of that list was THE SIN OF UNBELIEF!! God overlooked no sin, for Christ had to pay the penalty of every last sin of His people and none can enter heaven lest they believe the Gospel of Jesus Christ. They say it would be unfair of God to cast a man into hell merely because he is wrong about a few doctrines. Yet they say it is right for God to condemn a man to hell because of his immorality. They fail to realise that their immorality comes from the same place as their unbelief: their sinful natures! They contend that God would be unfair in not making allowances for man’s sinfulness and proneness to error due to his imperfect nature. But if the Lord did this, would it not be right to expect Him to make the same allowances for their immoral acts! Wouldn’t salvation then just be a matter of God feeling sorry for, and making allowances for, sinful well-intentioned people who had a zeal for God but an incorrigible tendency to sinful acts and thoughts! But didn’t all imperfection—man’s sinfulness—need to be atoned for, did not a price have to be paid for man’s sin? Of course it did. So how much sense would it make for Christ to have died for the sin of unbelief, only to see His Father’s chosen ones walk into heaven with a faith that did not believe His Gospel!! This would be like expecting Christ to allow one to walk into heaven a saved man though he be a murderer. Some will say, ‘Yes, but though Christ died for our sins we still commit many of those sins, and so even though He died for the sin of unbelief it does not mean that His people won’t continue to believe error even when it comes to what the Gospel is.’ Well that may sound reasonable to you, friend, but nowhere in the Scriptures does it say that Christ’s death for His people would cause them to cease sinning. But it is obvious from the Scriptures that Christ’s death for His people would pave the way for them to believe the Gospel and therefore to be saved!! The fact that a person still sins after he is saved will not keep him out of heaven because the penalty those sins have incurred has been fully paid for by his Savior, his sins have all been atoned for. BUT a continuance in unbelief of the Gospel will keep a man out of heaven because the Word of God plainly states, and we have recorded many of these Scriptures, that if a man does not believe the Gospel of God he is lost. Just as a saved person is brought out of the kingdom of darkness, ignorance, and into God's Kingdom of Light, knowledge, understanding and belief of the Truth, is healed of spiritual blindness and is now no longer dead to God but has been made alive unto Him, the fact that Christ has died for a person is proven by that person’s BELIEF of the Gospel and not by any unbelief of it. The sin of unbelief, and any other sin which reveals an unregenerate state such as murder or homosexuality etc., which the Scriptures say WILL keep a man out of heaven, are sins which the Christian, the saved man, does not commit. To think that a man is saved, even though he does not believe the Gospel or believes only some of it correctly, because Christ has died for the unbelief the man still abides in, is to leave one in a quandary as to why God would give a man the gift of faith to believe His Gospel if even with that faith man could remain in unbelief of it. It just defies logic! If a man could be saved in unbelief, who is to say how far that unbelief could reach? Would it mean that a man was saved who had no belief in God whatsoever? Would such a man be saved because it was claimed Jesus died for his sin of unbelief even though the man did not evidence any belief in the Gospel? As soon as you bring one doctrine into the picture that must be believed for a person to be saved, you bring Scripture into the picture. Not only must you show why a certain doctrine must be believed for a person to be saved, but you must also prove that nothing else needs to be believed! Many so-called ‘pastors’ and alleged ‘ministers’ of God’s Word argue that because man is an imperfect creature he will believe the Gospel of God imperfectly. That is, he will believe enough of the Gospel correctly so that what he believes is recognizable as the Gospel, but because of his sinful nature, his believing, even with the faith of God, will always contain some error, some imperfection! How confusing it is though when one goes from pastor to pastor and finds out that each one has a different and conflicting idea as to what believing enough means and which doctrines are involved! One says, ‘It is enough to know that Christ died for the elect’, and another says, ’It is enough to know Christ died for all.’ Because of man’s imperfect nature, they claim God is tolerant of error in His people. Exactly how tolerant of the erroneous concepts of the Gospel man has fashioned in his mind and placed his faith in, is not known exactly, but they maintain that just as man cannot behave perfectly, he cannot believe perfectly, and so what he believes rightly is enough to save him. But what is perplexing to this writer is that to say man can only believe the Gospel imperfectly, suggests that man actually knows what the Gospel is, or at least has some idea of what it is, but just can’t believe it as accurately as he can know which doctrines actually make up the Gospel! But who is to say that what a man knows about what the Gospel is, isn’t in fact the Gospel he must believe? If we cannot know what it is, then surely it stands to reason that we cannot know what it is not! And if anyone claims to know what the Gospel is not then they must be making such a judgement based on some standard of what they believe the Gospel is. But how can this be when they claim no one knows what the Gospel actually is. One ‘pastor’ wrote to me saying, ‘If only we could put our finger on what the Gospel actually is, that would be something.’ Well, doubtless this will come as news to this man and others who are like-minded, but God has already put His finger on what the Gospel is and has commanded His people to preach it and therefore believe it! If these pastors claim is that we cannot believe the Gospel perfectly, upon what do they base their claim that what we believe now isn’t the whole Gospel? How can they say what we believe isn’t the Gospel if they admit they do not know exactly what it is!! One wonders who it was that came up with the idea that no one can believe the Gospel because none of us are perfect. One can just imagine such a viewpoint sprouting in the minds of lost people who became confused when confronted by people they could not deny were Christians, by their character and conduct, but who believed differently to them. This shows clearly the predicament that one will always find oneself in when one does not know the Gospel or does not judge saved and lost by the Gospel.