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Reading Galatians 1:9 in part 2 of this sermon where Pastor Gabe says that all of the religions in the world could be narrowed down to just two. Visit wwutt.com for all our videos!
The Apostle Paul emphasized with the Galatians that there is no other gospel except the one that was preached to them at first. If anyone believes another gospel, let him be accursed. When we understand the text.
This is When We Understand the Text, a daily Bible study in the word of Christ, that men and women of God may be complete, equipped for every good work. Tell your friends about our ministry at www .utt .com.
Here's your teacher, Pastor Gabe.
Thank you, Becky. I wasn't trying to rhyme with my introduction. It just kind of worked out that way. In Galatians chapter 1 verses 6 through 9, we read the following. 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 preached 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. There are all kinds of religions and beliefs in the world, but really when it comes down to it, there are only two religions.
You either worship the created or the creator. Now to illustrate this, Paul Washer provided the following example, and this is where we pick up in this message today, a sermon that was entitled, I will say it again, No Other Gospel.
So let's put it in this kind of exercise. This is something that I heard Paul Washer do when he was talking about there being only two religions on earth. So let's put it into this exercise. Let's say that you were a reporter and you were asking people how to get to heaven.
People from different beliefs and different religions. How do you get to heaven? And you went up to a man who was a Muslim and you asked of him, where do you think you will go when you die? That Muslim might say to you, I believe that I'm going to paradise.
And you ask him why? Why do you think that you're going to paradise? And he will say to you, because I read the Quran. Because I pay alms. Because I pray five times a day. Because I've made the pilgrimages to Mecca or wherever else.
So because I've done these things, I am a righteous man and Allah will give me paradise. You go to a Jewish man, an Orthodox Jew, and you say to him, where do you think you will go when you die? That Orthodox Jew is probably going to say to you, we really do not know where we're going to go when we die.
This is an exact quote, by the way. But if there is a life after this one and a reward for what we do, then surely it will be dependent upon the kind of life that we have lived. That's Rabbi Howard Jaffe.
So the Orthodox Jew doesn't even really know for sure if there's some kind of afterlife. But if there is one, we'll get there if we just do the right things. If you went to a Buddhist and asked him, where do you think you will go when you die?
He might say to you that he will achieve nirvana, or the end of suffering. How will you achieve that, you ask him, and he will say, by following the noble eightfold path. Or in other words, by just being a good person.
You go to the Hindu and you ask the Hindu where he believes he will go when he dies. And he will say to you, he hopes that he will break free from the cycle of reincarnation and attain moksha and will return to the Brahman.
How will you do that, you ask him, by being a good person. If you ask an atheist why he doesn't need God, why do you think that you don't need God, the atheist is going to tell you, I can be a good person without God.
You ask the atheist where he's going to go when he dies, he's just going to tell you, same thing that happened to me before I was born. I don't remember any sort of sense of consciousness before I came into existence.
There was even a couple of years of my life I don't remember at all, and then suddenly moments and things that I experienced. So I imagine death is going to be roughly the same way. My mind might go first, I'll just forget that I'm alive, and eventually my body will die, and I will be nothing.
There will be no consciousness, no existence of any kind. That's what the atheist believes. So the best that he can do in life is just be a good person. I asked my brother this one time, one of my brothers who does not believe in God or any sort of deity of any kind, but he says, if such a deity does exist, he has to let me into heaven.
And I asked him why. He said, because I'm a good person. And if he doesn't let me into heaven, he's an evil God. Proclaiming your own righteousness above God, that's really what every religion in the world does.
When you think that you can be good by your own merit, you're proclaiming your own righteousness above God. But let's say you go to the Christian, the true Christian, again, mind you, because as we said, Matthew 7, 21, Jesus says, not everyone who calls me Lord is going to enter the kingdom of heaven.
So you go to the true Christian and you ask him where he will go when he dies. And he will say to you, I will go to heaven. And you ask him why, why do you think you will go to heaven? And the true believer will say, because in sin did my mother conceive me.
And in sin was I born. I have broken God's laws. I was an enemy of God. I deserve to be destroyed for the rebellion that I had done against my Lord. I deserve nothing but death. And then you as a reporter, you are listening to this Christian say this and you say, well, hang on a second.
So I'm asking all these other guys how they think they're going to attain their afterlife, how they're going to get to paradise or, or get to this manner of perfection that they think that they can achieve this, this level of goodness.
And all of them are saying that they're going to get there because of their own merit or by their own virtue. This man says he's a righteous and the Muslim says he's a righteous man because he did this, this, and this.
The Jew says he's a righteous man because he did this, this, and this. The Hindu, the Buddhist, even the atheist proclaim their own righteousness. You say you're not righteous. So what makes you think you're going to get into heaven?
And the Christian is going to answer because I'm getting into heaven on someone's merit other than my own, and that's Jesus Christ, the righteous one. The only good man there ever was who never sinned, never did anything wrong, kept God's law perfectly.
God himself who took on human flesh for me and died on a cross for me, that my sins would be upon him and satisfied by the shedding of his blood and his righteousness would be given to me so that I may enter into the place of God on his virtue and not my own.
That's how I know that I am going to heaven. And that, my friends, is why Christianity is a religion of grace and no other religion is. No other religion falls into that category but Christianity alone.
Everyone else is trying to attain goodness by their own merit and in so doing are proclaiming their goodness above the goodness of God. I'm better than God. I don't need God. I can do this on my own. But only the Christian, by a revelation of the Holy Spirit, has come to realize his sin and his disqualification before God.
And because of his sinfulness and his wickedness, there is nothing that he could do to be able to attain a right standing with God. It is only by what Jesus has done for us and God in his grace to transmit to us all the reward and benefits that we get through Jesus Christ.
How do we get that? What do we have to do? Only this, my friends, believe. By grace are you saved through faith. Faith is the mechanism that God has given to us that we might just believe in him who died for us and rose again and we would receive eternal life, forgiveness of sins, and becoming a fellow heir of the kingdom of God with Christ.
Once an enemy of that kingdom, we've been made fellow heirs with Christ and this is all by grace through faith in him. And what he has done, and we are saved. Christianity is the religion of grace. Every other religion is a religion of works.
And as we come to know from the scriptures, you cannot be saved by your works. So here the Galatians are thinking that, well, I believe in Christ, but that isn't enough. I also have to do this. And they've shifted themselves over from the belief of justification by faith into justification by works.
And so now Paul is saying to them, you believe a different gospel. It doesn't save you, repent and return to the things that you were taught at first. That is the reason for this letter. And it's necessary for us to be reminded of it, my friends, because we are still people in the flesh and we are weak and we're prone to forgetfulness.
And a day may come when upon you, and that day may be now for you, but a day may come when upon you, you just heap this guilt and this shame and you begin to lack an understanding of your own salvation.
And that has probably come to you because of sin. As I've heard Alistair Begg say, that obedience and assurance do not share the same bed with one another. You can either have obedience in God and therefore the assurance of salvation, or you disobey God and you're wandering in sin and now you've lost that assurance of salvation.
And when that day comes for you, in order to try to get the assurance back, you will either morph or shift your understanding of Christianity to accommodate the sin that you are now in, or you will believe that you have to do something in order to forgive yourself and re-merit the salvation that you once believed that you had.
And you must remember that forgiveness only comes in Christ. And we have this grace that is given to us in 1 John 1 .9. If we ask forgiveness for our sins, God is faithful and just to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.
It is by faith in Christ that we're forgiven our sins and we have eternal life and no other way. I was watching an interview with Dr. John MacArthur and Larry King, and this was over a decade ago. One of the things that attracted me to John MacArthur at a young age was seeing these kinds of interviews like he would do with Larry King.
These secular reporters would interview MacArthur and MacArthur would always come back to the Bible. Like, he was a guy that was not ashamed to say, because the Bible says so. That is an answer that is being looked down upon more and more in our modern times.
You can't say because the Bible says so. That answer isn't good enough. You have to do all these apologetics or gymnastics to help a person understand because they don't believe the Bible. My friends, the Bible is the Word of God and is authoritative upon every person whether they believe it or not.
So you speak the Word of God and you let the Holy Spirit do His work. You remain obedient to this, God will do the work of transformation on a person's heart. So here John MacArthur is having this conversation with Larry King and Larry King said to him, they were talking about the nature of evil, where evil comes from, is evil really a thing?
Why do people do evil things? And there were several guests on the show, MacArthur being one of them, but at one point Larry King looks specifically at John MacArthur and he says to him, the golden rule, the golden rule is, do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
If I'm doing the golden rule, I'm going to be a nice guy whether or not I believe in the Lord. And John MacArthur looked at him and said, yeah, if you follow the golden rule, you'll be right with man, but the question is, how are you going to be right with God?
My friends, we could be doing nice things for one another and good works to other people and following this love your neighbor mantra with no biblical explanation for what that means for the rest of our lives and never get any closer to God.
On the day of judgment, we will still stand before him and you would be condemned because you said that I didn't need you and I could be good on my own. You had a nice comfortable life getting along with men and women, but you never saw it important to be right with God.
And it will be there that you will hear Christ say, depart from me, you worker of iniquity. I never knew you. For all these good works that you claim that you did were all self-righteous works. It was all to proclaim your own glory and goodness, not for the glory of God.
Jesus warned us in Matthew chapter 7 that there are many who are going to come in his name that were going to say that they spoke the truth, but he said they are wolves in sheep's clothing, beware false prophets, Jesus said.
So we must be aware as such things exist in the world, lest we be led astray by them. Not just the false major religions that exist, but even those who are going to say that they are from Christ and are not really of Christ.
Some of my ministry, not just in my teaching, you've heard it before in my sermons, but also in the videos that I produce that end up online, warn about false teachers. Not just in the church, people who say that they are of Christ but are not, but even in the secular realm.
People who claim that they are of, that they are Christians themselves, but in their lifestyle they show no evidence of it whatsoever. And one such video that I did recently was regarding a claim that the pop star Lady Gaga made of herself.
It's really weird saying that she had this self-ascribed name of Lady Gaga. Stephanie is her real first name, but anyway. She said that she is a Christian woman. And so in the video evaluating, is that true?
How can we see in a person's life whether or not they are really a Christian? There's nothing in her life that displays that. She lives an absolutely horrible, filthy life. Things that she does that are so bad, I wouldn't even dare to speak of them up here at the pulpit.
And when that video was produced and it ended up online, there was a woman that contacted me and she made the following comment. Her name was Kelly. She said, who or what she believes has zero impact on you, your life, or your religion.
If everyone worried about themselves, just think how much better off everyone would be. I responded to her and I said, all due respect, ma 'am, you don't believe what you just said. Because if you believe that, you would not have even bothered to tell me that.
You would have minded your own business and it wouldn't have mattered to you one bit, one way or the other. This is what happens when we think that we can proclaim our own goodness. We fall into this self-defeating sense of belief and morality that doesn't serve anyone else and it won't save you.
The only truth that we have comes from God. And the reason why we get so offended whenever somebody starts calling out false teachers is because we've probably united ourselves with that particular teacher and an attack on them feels like an attack on me.
Martin Lloyd-Jones, in his studies in the Sermon on the Mount, said the following, we do not like this kind of teaching against false prophets today. We are living in days when people say that as long as a man claims to be a Christian at all, we should regard him as a brother and go on together.
But the reply is that our Lord said, beware of false prophets. They will come to you in sheep's clothing. They may acknowledge God with their lips, but their hearts are far from Him. And such teachers have come to the church in Galatia, leading them to believe that their faith in Christ was not enough and they needed to do all these works.
Jesus was a Jew, so you needed to do all these other Jewish works in order to be saved. But Paul says, these people trouble you and they distort the gospel of Christ. And you have deserted Him who called you in the grace of Christ and instead have turned to a different gospel.
Verse 9, once again, as we have said before, so now I say again, if anyone is preaching to you a gospel contrary to the one that you received, let him be accursed. Why is it, I closed with this briefly last week.
I want to reiterate this again with a little bit more clarity. Why is it that God allows there to be so many, many lies? Why are there so many false teachings in the world, false religions, like Islam with two billion people following after that religion?
Why would God allow that to exist? Why are there people that claim a new version of Jesus that is not like the Jesus that we have in the Bible at all, like Joseph Smith with Mormonism? Or Charles Taze Russell with the Jehovah's Witnesses?
Why does God allow the Catholic Church to exist? And the Catholic Church, by the way, is kind of the quintessential example of this Christ plus something. You have to do all of these works. You have to pay penance.
You have to talk to the priest. You have to get baptized. By the way, you have to do that in the Catholic Church or it's not a real baptism. All of these works and things that they tell you that you have to do, it's Christ plus something else.
Why would God allow that to exist? Why are there so many, many false teachings? And the answer to that is two reasons. Number one, testing, and number two, judgment. The passage that I read to you in closing last week was from Deuteronomy 13, where we are told, If a prophet or a dreamer of dreams arises among you and gives you a sign or a wonder, and he says, let us go after other gods, you shall not listen to that false prophet, for the Lord your God is testing you to know whether you love the Lord with all your heart and with all your soul.
And the second reason is judgment. 2 Thessalonians 2, 9 -12, The coming of the lawless one is by the activity of Satan with all power and false signs and wonders and with all wicked deception for those who are perishing because they refuse to love the truth and so be saved.
Therefore, because they refuse to love the truth, God sends them a strong delusion so that they may believe what is false in order that all may be condemned who did not believe the truth but had pleasure in unrighteousness.
As I've shared with many, whether they are a believer or an unbeliever, I have said, God will be glorified through you. You exist for God's glory and he will have it through you, whether that's through delivering you by his mercy or judging you in his wrath, God will be glorified.
My friends, I hope that you believe the truth and you have repented of sin and you follow in righteousness so that you experience the glory of God in his mercy and not the glory of God in his wrath. To God be the glory in all things.
I pray that you are on the side of his mercy.
This has been When We Understand the Text with Pastor Gabriel Hughes. For all of our podcasts, episodes, videos, books, and more, visit our website at www .utt .com. If you'd like to submit a question to this broadcast or just send us a comment, email whenweunderstandthetext at gmail .com and let your friends know about our ministry.
Join us again tomorrow as we grow together in the study of God's Word when we understand the text.