Predestination And Free-Will

What Is The Gospel?

 
The whole Bible is the Gospel or Good News of Jesus Christ or in other words, God’s plan of salvation. However, God’s plan of salvation can be summarized as follows:

  1. We need to recognize who God is: God is man’s creator, and ruler and law giver. He values holiness and justice as much as love. His hatred towards sin is a great as his love for righteousness.

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  2. We need to recognize who we are in relation to God: We are hopelessly lost, rebellious, hell-deserving sinners who want God to be subject to us, our whims, our terms, our conditions, our brand of religion.

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  3. We need to recognize what God expects of us: God expects and deserves total obedience to all His commandments at all times, even though man, because of his sin nature, is incapable of faithful service to God. Man’s corrupt spiritual condition does not free himself from responsibility to God.

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  4. We need to recognize that we fall far short of what God expects of us: Even our greatest acts of kindness and charity are considered as filthy rags to God because our motives are tainted with sin until and unless God gives us a new heart and a new spirit. Even one sin can and will separate a person from God for all eternity.

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  5. We need to recognize the consequences of not living up to God’s expectations: Eternal damnation in hell is the punishment that God has prepared for those who die in their sins. Any punishment less severe than that would detract from the holiness of God.

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  6. We need to recognize the only way of escape from the consequences of not living up to God’s expectations: We need a supernatural scapegoat, who could meet God’s requirements for sinlessness and who could at the same time pay the complete penalty that we owe for all of our sins, past, present and future. We need God to rescue us from hell and make us fit for heaven in a way that is beyond our capability to reform.

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  7. We need to repent of our sins: We must cry out to God for mercy, imploring Him to enable us to stop sinning, realizing that we are incapable of changing without God’s help.

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  8. We need to believe on Christ: Throwing ourselves on the mercy of God, we must trust in Christ alone and the work HE ALREADY DID in subjecting Himself to the full fury of the terrible wrath of God when He suffered and died at Calvary. We need to believe that He was buried and on the third day He arose from the grave, claiming victory over death and proving that He is eternal God and proving that God the Father was completely satisfied with the work that Christ did on the behalf of the elect, that Christ’s work was the complete and all-sufficient payment for all the sins of all the elect.

Can we do any of the above things if we are spiritually dead? Absolutely not! God must enable us to do these things. He is the One who gives us eye salve and opens our blind eyes to the truth of who God is and who we are and He does this by resurrecting our spiritually dead soul, when a preacher preaches the God’s word – primarily through the preaching of the Law of God… “for by the law is the knowledge of sin.” [Romans 3:20]. The Holy Spirit then convicts and converts the sinner… Faith cometh by hearing and hearing by the word of God.” [Romans 10:17].
 
Summary: This article is a section of a much larger article on the Bible doctrines of Election and Predestination called “Who accepts Whom?“. You are urged to check out that larger article for many other thought provoking questions pertaining these “Doctrines of Grace”. — RM Kane