Keith Comparetto: What is the Gospel? Part 4

What is the "Gospel"?

by Keith Comparetto

Table of Contents

Part One: Preface & Introduction

Part Two: The Lessons of Church History

Part Three: A Closer Look at Scripture

Part Four: Seeing, but not Perceiving

Part Five: Closing Thoughts

Part Four: Seeing, But Not Perceiving

The truth has rarely been preserved in the large institutions of Christendom. God has indeed allowed error to rule the masses for nearly all of church history. His true church has existed as a small remnant, either outside of or within the large institutions, and it seems He has always allowed the insincere to be deceived. In Matthew 13:13-15, Jesus indicated that it was no different in His day than it was in earlier days, and we would argue that it is no different today:

Therefore speak I to them in parables: because they seeing see not; and hearing they hear not, neither do they understand. And in them is fulfilled the prophecy of Esaias, which saith, By hearing ye shall hear, and shall not understand; and seeing ye shall see, and shall not perceive: For this people’s heart is waxed gross, and their ears are dull of hearing, and their eyes they have closed; lest at any time they should see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and should understand with their heart, and should be converted, and I should heal them.

Eating the Bread of Deceit

“Bread of deceit is sweet to a man; but afterwards his mouth shall be filled with gravel” (Proverbs 20:17). Perhaps Satan has reserved his most clever ploy for the last days: for deceived individuals to sit in churches where the Bible is recognized as the inspired Word of God, often participating actively in its programs and mouthing its doctrinal beliefs, while remaining under the dominion of their sins, lacking in their spiritual affections, and deceived by an unregenerate heart. Often the church plays into Satan’s hands by too eagerly making the assumption that their new “converts” are truly saved before the furnace of affliction has proved them to be genuine, thus forgetting the teaching of our Lord in the parable of the sower, in which one of the responders exhibits a counterfeit conversion: “He heareth the word, and anon with joy receiveth it; Yet hath he not root in himself, but dureth for a while: for when tribulation or persecution ariseth because of the word, by and by he is offended.” The modern church is not blameless when we consider the reality that “conversions” like this, and the boastings in numbers of “converts” that often accompany them, are commonplace in our day.
My Bible education and all of my church experience took place in a number of “conservative, evangelical” institutions, and over the years I saved virtually every piece of literature, every tract, every preaching and teaching outline I had ever received. As I began to examine these things more closely, I looked back in my files through the personal evangelism materials I had collected, and found that in nearly all of them, repentance is barely even mentioned, and even when it is, it is given little more than lip service – not the serious, probing emphasis that it deserves. In its place are salesmanship and methods: “How to get in the door,” “How to break the ice,” “How to draw the net,” and other techniques and gimmicks to get people to make an emotional “decision.” Summaries of the Gospel abound, and it seems they become more and more oversimplified.

The results of this kind of “evangelism training” are often counterfeit converts. Consider what may be the typical new “convert” in most evangelical churches today. They are welcomed into the church through an outreach program such as a musical performance, outing, retreat, sports event or youth activity. They are given an appeal to “accept Christ” or “trust Christ as your personal Savior” and, often in an emotional moment, pray the sinner’s prayer and are “saved.” Or perhaps they come into the church already having a testimony of “accepting Christ” as a child (maybe even “led to Christ” by another child or young person, who himself had no true understanding of the New Birth), but have been “backsliding” or “away from God” for years, and now want to give their life for Christ. They are encouraged to join the church and, perhaps shortly after, asked to serve in a church ministry, often an outreach program like the one that drew them in. They then go out and invite others to “come to Christ” in the same manner in which they did.

An ABC Nightline broadcast a few years ago on the topic of “the making of an evangelist,” showed on camera an evangelist-in-training at a conservative Christian college supposedly “leading someone to Christ.” As the woman was led by the evangelist in a “sinner’s prayer,” her eyes were open and she showed little outward evidence of one going through true penitence and confession unto salvation. This is no criticism of the young evangelist, who was probably very sincere in his efforts; but perhaps it speaks much of his teachers and those who touted the program as a vehicle to reach the lost, who evidently did little to make this young man fear the devastating spiritual consequences of leaving an individual deceived into thinking she was saved, when she probably was not – not to mention those across the country who saw the broadcast and may also have been deceived. This is, after all, God’s work, and we must not deceive many even to win one, for “cursed be he that doeth the work of the Lord deceitfully” (Jer. 48:10).

But God is sovereign, and can work even when gross error and deceit are present. In some cases, one professing faith under the above conditions may have been truly saved and become a “new creation” in Christ (2 Corinthians 5:17). Yet often, it seems, such individuals never evidence true salvation, as manifested by a hungering and thirsting after God and the Bible, a desire to be separate from the world, a spirit of prayer, obedience to Christ, a decreasing pattern of sin in one’s life, etc. They may remain in the church, often “serving,” but their heart and life have never been truly transformed. Yes, we do have certain expectations about one who claims to be saved, but in most of our churches, as long as they don’t boast about their sin or do it too openly, such a person may sit for years, listening to message after message about forsaking their backsliding, getting “back into fellowship with God” or getting busy for God, and never again be challenged seriously to consider whether their salvation was genuine! We must be honest with ourselves and acknowledge that there are many such people in our churches today.

The children in our churches also frequently have empty professions of faith reinforced, often year after year, as they are rewarded with candy and prizes for memorizing the Bible or “evangelizing” by bringing others in. The children often learn a simplified Gospel, such as the wordless book or Gospel Hand: God loves me, I am a sinner, Christ died for me, if I receive Him, I may have eternal life. Since this presentation, if not qualified, makes no mention of repentance, it is teaching a partial truth which in effect is an untruth. If one makes a shallow profession, it is reinforced with songs like “If you’re saved and you know it, clap your hands,” and "I’m going to heaven, can’t wait!” When they are teenagers, we urge them to go to camp where they are worked up emotionally with fun, games, and camaraderie, then preached a message and encouraged to “make a decision” for Christ. When they come home, they give testimonies about how great their week at camp was and how great God worked. In the end, with all the tears and emotion aside, how much true, Biblical, lifelong repentance are we seeing? As Spurgeon rightly said, “The work that is done in regeneration is not a temporary work, by which a man is, for a time, reformed; but it is an everlasting work, by which the man is born for heaven.”

When we give people little idea of the need for a deep, soul-searching repentance or of the cost of being Jesus’ disciple, we should not be surprised if they never live up to it, for many of them were never truly saved—only deceived. This is why Jesus taught that "No one, having put his hand to the plow, and looking back, is fit for the kingdom of God” (Lu. 9:62); and on the same subject, “And whoseever doth not bear his cross, and come after Me, cannot be My disciple. For which of you, intending to build a tower, sitteth not down first, and counteth the cost, whether he have sufficient to finish it?” (Lu. 14:27-28) If they fall away from church, we will doubt their salvation based on 1 John 2:19: “They went out from us, but they were not of us; for it they had been of us, they would no doubt have continued with us.” But if they remain in the church, or return and get “serving” (and many will, especially as they grow up, have children, seek respectability or simply desire to be a “good person”), they will blend in just like tares among the wheat. John MacArthur comments,

You may have heard someone, when he is getting baptized, say, “I received Christ when I was twelve, but my life was a mess after that, and now I want to get back to the faith.” The truth probably is that he never received Christ at all when he was twelve. He went through some superficial religious activity and was deceived into thinking he was saved as a result.

Of course, the typical church unwittingly teaches clever ways for such unsaved people to avoid the implications of many passages of Scripture, thus allowing them to sit among the saved, often brimming with false assurance, and with little fear of God’s final judgment. When the church carelessly allows fruitless salvation testimonies to remain unchallenged, and these lost people find themselves condemned before a holy God, what legitimate accusations will they level at the churches that have led them to such a fate? And what responsibility do the leaders and members of these churches have to avoid such a charge?

The Simple Gospel

The church has indeed become too sophisticated in how it ignores or dispenses with the many passages that make worldly and ungodly professing believers comfortable within the body. In 2 Corinthians 11:1-4, Paul expressed the burden of his heart toward the Corinthian church:
“Would to God ye could bear with me a little in my folly: and indeed bear with me. For I am jealous over you with godly jealousy: for I have espoused you to one husband, that I may present you as a chaste virgin to Christ. But I fear, lest by any means, as the serpent beguiled Eve through his subtilty, so your minds should be corrupted from the simplicity that is in Christ. For if he that cometh preacheth another Jesus, whom we have not preached, or if ye receive another spirit, which ye have not received, or another gospel, which ye have not accepted, ye might well bear with him.”
I would contend that the church of today has also been corrupted from the simplicity that is in Christ, as modern ultra-dispensational theology has created a massive and complicated system which relies on the following arguments to explain away simple and basic Gospel truths:

1. Where Christ’s lordship is so clearly expressed in passages in the Gospels such as Matthew 16:24, "If any man will come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow Me,” modern theologians tell us Jesus is preaching the Gospel of the Kingdom, a dispensation of Law, not the Gospel Paul preached which is one of grace. (No pre-20th century commentator I know of holds this view.) Thus, there really are two Gospels, though Jesus never really told us so, and the one He Himself preached is not the one for us. This view of Scofield’s is the accepted view of probably the majority of evangelicals today, whether or not they openly articulate it or even recognize it. (We are not here taking issue with the basic dispensational concept that God’s plan for national Israel is different from His plan for the New Testament church; but when the Bible is divided and subdivided into dispensations not clearly marked in Scripture, average Christians become confused, while Christian “leaders” become exalted as the only ones “trained” enough to understand what the Bible really means. This is a kind of elitism that is incompatible with the fact that all true believers are said to have “the mind of Christ,” and have “more understanding than all their teachers.”)

2. When our Lord expresses the conditions of salvation in Matthew 11:28-30 (“Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”), modern theologians see in it not one rest but two: a rest in salvation and, for those who desire to go to the next level, a rest in service. We would suggest that this Scofield view requires assent to a complex set of assumptions, and it leads one away from the central truth that genuine salvation is all one needs to find true rest in Christ, and that one who has refused Christ’s yoke has no claim to the Christ’s saving benefits.

3. When repentance from one’s sin is stated as an essential element of salvation in Scripture, modern theologians use complex explanations from the Greek to say that the “repent” simply means to have a change of mind about one’s sin and about Christ; that if one has “believed,” he has in fact also “repented.” In one sense this is true: One whom God has drawn to “believe” savingly will indeed “repent” of his sins, and to do so more deeply as he grows in grace. But taken to the extreme, the Greek arguments often cloud the simple Gospel truth that when one is saved, there will and must be a corresponding dramatic change in one’s life. This was clearly expressed by John the Baptist who commanded to “Bring forth therefore fruits meet for repentance” (Mk. 3:8), and echoed by Paul who said, “[I] shewed first unto them of Damascus, and at Jerusalem, and throughout all the coasts of Judaea, and then to the Gentiles, that they should repent and turn to God, and do works meet for repentance.”

4. When Paul tells the Corinthians to “Examine yourselves, whether ye be in the faith” (2 Corinthians 13:5), many modern evangelical theologians contend that he was really saying, “Examine yourselves since ye be in the faith,” and thus he was not really challenging unsaved people in the church. Again, a complex Greek argument is put forth, and a simple warning goes unheeded. The fact is, virtually no significant Bible translation translates it “since,” and the old commentators would have taken this verse to mean what it says and say what it means.

5. When the Greek word spoudazo, translated “diligent” in passages such as Hebrews 4:11, “Let us therefore be diligent to enter that rest, lest anyone fall according to the same example of disobedience,” and 2 Peter 1:10, “Wherefore the rather, brethren, give diligence to make your calling and election sure,” is taken from the realm of the heart and defined as encouraging mere acts of “Christian service,” no matter how empty and heartless they may be, these and other serious warnings lose their impact. They are intended as warnings for professing believers to examine the condition of their souls, but their simple truths are explained away by gerrymandering the Greek in a way the old commentators could not have conceived.



	What is the "Gospel"? by Keith Comparetto Table of Contents Part One: Preface & Introduction Part Two: The Lessons of Church History Part Three: A Closer Look at Scripture Part Four: Seeing, but not Perceiving Part Five: Closing Thoughts Part Four: Seeing, But Not Perceiving The truth has rarely been preserved in the large institutions of Christendom. God has indeed allowed error to rule the masses for nearly all of church history. His true church has existed as a small remnant, either outside of or within the large institutions, and it seems He has always allowed the insincere to be deceived. In Matthew 13:13-15, Jesus indicated that it was no different in His day than it was in earlier days, and we would argue that it is no different today: Therefore speak I to them in parables: because they seeing see not; and hearing they hear not, neither do they understand. And in them is fulfilled the prophecy of Esaias, which saith, By hearing ye shall hear, and shall not understand; and seeing ye shall see, and shall not perceive: For this people’s heart is waxed gross, and their ears are dull of hearing, and their eyes they have closed; lest at any time they should see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and should understand with their heart, and should be converted, and I should heal them. Eating the Bread of Deceit “Bread of deceit is sweet to a man; but afterwards his mouth shall be filled with gravel” (Proverbs 20:17). Perhaps Satan has reserved his most clever ploy for the last days: for deceived individuals to sit in churches where the Bible is recognized as the inspired Word of God, often participating actively in its programs and mouthing its doctrinal beliefs, while remaining under the dominion of their sins, lacking in their spiritual affections, and deceived by an unregenerate heart. Often the church plays into Satan’s hands by too eagerly making the assumption that their new “converts” are truly saved before the furnace of affliction has proved them to be genuine, thus forgetting the teaching of our Lord in the parable of the sower, in which one of the responders exhibits a counterfeit conversion: “He heareth the word, and anon with joy receiveth it; Yet hath he not root in himself, but dureth for a while: for when tribulation or persecution ariseth because of the word, by and by he is offended.” The modern church is not blameless when we consider the reality that “conversions” like this, and the boastings in numbers of “converts” that often accompany them, are commonplace in our day. My Bible education and all of my church experience took place in a number of “conservative, evangelical” institutions, and over the years I saved virtually every piece of literature, every tract, every preaching and teaching outline I had ever received. As I began to examine these things more closely, I looked back in my files through the personal evangelism materials I had collected, and found that in nearly all of them, repentance is barely even mentioned, and even when it is, it is given little more than lip service – not the serious, probing emphasis that it deserves. In its place are salesmanship and methods: “How to get in the door,” “How to break the ice,” “How to draw the net,” and other techniques and gimmicks to get people to make an emotional “decision.” Summaries of the Gospel abound, and it seems they become more and more oversimplified. The results of this kind of “evangelism training” are often counterfeit converts. Consider what may be the typical new “convert” in most evangelical churches today. They are welcomed into the church through an outreach program such as a musical performance, outing, retreat, sports event or youth activity. They are given an appeal to “accept Christ” or “trust Christ as your personal Savior” and, often in an emotional moment, pray the sinner’s prayer and are “saved.” Or perhaps they come into the church already having a testimony of “accepting Christ” as a child (maybe even “led to Christ” by another child or young person, who himself had no true understanding of the New Birth), but have been “backsliding” or “away from God” for years, and now want to give their life for Christ. They are encouraged to join the church and, perhaps shortly after, asked to serve in a church ministry, often an outreach program like the one that drew them in. They then go out and invite others to “come to Christ” in the same manner in which they did. An ABC Nightline broadcast a few years ago on the topic of “the making of an evangelist,” showed on camera an evangelist-in-training at a conservative Christian college supposedly “leading someone to Christ.” As the woman was led by the evangelist in a “sinner’s prayer,” her eyes were open and she showed little outward evidence of one going through true penitence and confession unto salvation. This is no criticism of the young evangelist, who was probably very sincere in his efforts; but perhaps it speaks much of his teachers and those who touted the program as a vehicle to reach the lost, who evidently did little to make this young man fear the devastating spiritual consequences of leaving an individual deceived into thinking she was saved, when she probably was not – not to mention those across the country who saw the broadcast and may also have been deceived. *This is, after all, God’s* work, and we must not deceive many even to win one*, for “cursed be he that doeth the work of the Lord deceitfully”* (Jer. 48:10). But God is sovereign, and can work even when gross error and deceit are present. In some cases, one professing faith under the above conditions may have been truly saved and become a “new creation” in Christ (2 Corinthians 5:17). Yet often, it seems, such individuals never evidence true salvation, as manifested by a hungering and thirsting after God and the Bible, a desire to be separate from the world, a spirit of prayer, obedience to Christ, a decreasing pattern of sin in one’s life, etc. They may remain in the church, often “serving,” but their heart and life have never been truly transformed. Yes, we do have certain expectations about one who claims to be saved, but in most of our churches, as long as they don’t boast about their sin or do it too openly, such a person may sit for years, listening to message after message about forsaking their backsliding, getting “back into fellowship with God” or getting busy for God, and never again be challenged seriously to consider whether their salvation was genuine! We must be honest with ourselves and acknowledge that there are many such people in our churches today. The children in our churches also frequently have empty professions of faith reinforced, often year after year, as they are rewarded with candy and prizes for memorizing the Bible or “evangelizing” by bringing others in. The children often learn a simplified Gospel, such as the wordless book or Gospel Hand: God loves me, I am a sinner, Christ died for me, if I receive Him, I may have eternal life. Since this presentation, if not qualified, makes no mention of repentance, it is teaching a partial truth which in effect is an untruth. If one makes a shallow profession, it is reinforced with songs like “If you’re saved and you know it, clap your hands,” and "I’m going to heaven, can’t wait!” When they are teenagers, we urge them to go to camp where they are worked up emotionally with fun, games, and camaraderie, then preached a message and encouraged to “make a decision” for Christ. When they come home, they give testimonies about how great their week at camp was and how great God worked. In the end, with all the tears and emotion aside, how much true, Biblical, lifelong repentance are we seeing? As Spurgeon rightly said, “The work that is done in regeneration is not a temporary work, by which a man is, for a time, reformed; but it is an everlasting work, by which the man is born for heaven.” When we give people little idea of the need for a deep, soul-searching repentance or of the cost of being Jesus’ disciple, we should not be surprised if they never live up to it, for many of them were never truly saved—only deceived. This is why Jesus taught that "No one, having put his hand to the plow, and looking back, is fit for the kingdom of God” (Lu. 9:62); and on the same subject, “And whoseever doth not bear his cross, and come after Me, cannot be My disciple. For which of you, intending to build a tower, sitteth not down first, and counteth the cost, whether he have sufficient to finish it?” (Lu. 14:27-28) If they fall away from church, we will doubt their salvation based on 1 John 2:19: “They went out from us, but they were not of us; for it they had been of us, they would no doubt have continued with us.” But if they remain in the church, or return and get “serving” (and many will, especially as they grow up, have children, seek respectability or simply desire to be a “good person”), they will blend in just like tares among the wheat. John MacArthur comments, You may have heard someone, when he is getting baptized, say, “I received Christ when I was twelve, but my life was a mess after that, and now I want to get back to the faith.” The truth probably is that he never received Christ at all when he was twelve. He went through some superficial religious activity and was deceived into thinking he was saved as a result. Of course, the typical church unwittingly teaches clever ways for such unsaved people to avoid the implications of many passages of Scripture, thus allowing them to sit among the saved, often brimming with false assurance, and with little fear of God’s final judgment. When the church carelessly allows fruitless salvation testimonies to remain unchallenged, and these lost people find themselves condemned before a holy God, what legitimate accusations will they level at the churches that have led them to such a fate? And what responsibility do the leaders and members of these churches have to avoid such a charge? The Simple Gospel The church has indeed become too sophisticated in how it ignores or dispenses with the many passages that make worldly and ungodly professing believers comfortable within the body. In 2 Corinthians 11:1-4, Paul expressed the burden of his heart toward the Corinthian church: “Would to God ye could bear with me a little in my folly: and indeed bear with me. For I am jealous over you with godly jealousy: for I have espoused you to one husband, that I may present you as a chaste virgin to Christ. But I fear, lest by any means, as the serpent beguiled Eve through his subtilty, so your minds should be corrupted from the simplicity that is in Christ. For if he that cometh preacheth another Jesus, whom we have not preached, or if ye receive another spirit, which ye have not received, or another gospel, which ye have not accepted, ye might well bear with him.” I would contend that the church of today has also been corrupted from the simplicity that is in Christ, as modern ultra-dispensational theology has created a massive and complicated system which relies on the following arguments to explain away simple and basic Gospel truths: 1. Where Christ’s lordship is so clearly expressed in passages in the Gospels such as Matthew 16:24, "If any man will come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow Me,” modern theologians tell us Jesus is preaching the Gospel of the Kingdom, a dispensation of Law, not the Gospel Paul preached which is one of grace. (No pre-20th century commentator I know of holds this view.) Thus, there really are two Gospels, though Jesus never really told us so, and the one He Himself preached is not the one for us. This view of Scofield’s is the accepted view of probably the majority of evangelicals today, whether or not they openly articulate it or even recognize it. (We are not here taking issue with the basic dispensational concept that God’s plan for national Israel is different from His plan for the New Testament church; but when the Bible is divided and subdivided into dispensations not clearly marked in Scripture, average Christians become confused, while Christian “leaders” become exalted as the only ones “trained” enough to understand what the Bible really means. This is a kind of elitism that is incompatible with the fact that all true believers are said to have “the mind of Christ,” and have “more understanding than all their teachers.”) 2. When our Lord expresses the conditions of salvation in Matthew 11:28-30 (“Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”), modern theologians see in it not one rest but two: a rest in salvation and, for those who desire to go to the next level, a rest in service. We would suggest that this Scofield view requires assent to a complex set of assumptions, and it leads one away from the central truth that genuine salvation is all one needs to find true rest in Christ, and that one who has refused Christ’s yoke has no claim to the Christ’s saving benefits. 3. When repentance from one’s sin is stated as an essential element of salvation in Scripture, modern theologians use complex explanations from the Greek to say that the “repent” simply means to have a change of mind about one’s sin and about Christ; that if one has “believed,” he has in fact also “repented.” In one sense this is true: One whom God has drawn to “believe” savingly will indeed “repent” of his sins, and to do so more deeply as he grows in grace. But taken to the extreme, *the Greek arguments often cloud the simple Gospel truth that when one is saved, there will and must be* a corresponding dramatic change in one’s life*. This was clearly expressed by John the Baptist who commanded to “Bring forth therefore fruits meet for repentance”* (Mk. 3:8), and echoed by Paul who said, “[I] shewed first unto them of Damascus, and at Jerusalem, and throughout all the coasts of Judaea, and then to the Gentiles, that they should repent and turn to God, and do works meet for repentance.” 4. When Paul tells the Corinthians to “Examine yourselves, whether ye be in the faith” (2 Corinthians 13:5), many modern evangelical theologians contend that he was really saying, “Examine yourselves since* ye be in the faith,”* and thus he was not really challenging unsaved people in the church. Again, a complex Greek argument is put forth, and a simple warning goes unheeded. The fact is, virtually no significant Bible translation translates it “since,” and the old commentators would have taken this verse to mean what it says and say what it means. 5. When the Greek word spoudazo, translated “diligent” in passages such as Hebrews 4:11, “Let us therefore be diligent to enter that rest, lest anyone fall according to the same example of disobedience,” and 2 Peter 1:10, “Wherefore the rather, brethren, give diligence to make your calling and election sure,” is taken from the realm of the heart and defined as encouraging mere acts of “Christian service,” no matter how empty and heartless they may be, these and other serious warnings lose their impact. They are intended as warnings for professing believers to examine the condition of their souls, but their simple truths are explained away by gerrymandering the Greek in a way the old commentators could not have conceived.