THE HEDGE: Beware of False 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” (Gal. 1:6-7 ESV).

It’s easy for us to think that Paul was a little paranoid about the Galatians. He had been with them, shared the Gospel and had seen them believe in Christ. Why was he so bent out of shape so quickly in this letter?

In Galatians 2, Paul declared that he had been crucified with Christ. “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. I do not nullify the grace of God, for if righteousness were through the law, then Christ died for no purpose” (Gal. 2:20-21).

Paul worried that the Galatians would, having started off by faith in the true gospel, revert back to a kind of thinking that prioritized works as the means of righteousness. While that is a trap for the believer, it also has greater implications if those believers model or even begin to teach it to others. A works-based system of salvation nullifies grace, and grace is the gospel. Now, we might see why Paul was bent out of shape about that, and I think we should also be wary of any teaching that nullifies grace.

This month, I taught a couple of lessons on Tuesday nights about false gospels. One of those nights, we focused on something called moralistic therapeutic deism. This terminology was coined over a decade ago to describe this way of thinking: “If a person can believe in a god and basically do good things... then surely that person will go to Heaven” (Platt and Merida, 23). Deism means “that one simply needs to believe in a god, but not that such a god might be involved in a person’s life,” and the compound adjective “moralistic therapeutic” means a person believes he/she needs to “be good” in order to “feel good” (Ibid.). (Source cited: David Platt and Tony Merida, Exalting Jesus in Galatians (Nashville, TN: Holman Reference, 2014, pg. 23.)

I think this modern terminology gets really close to what Paul was warning against in Galatians, and, as I told the students, I think this may be the prevailing false gospel on the University of Arkansas campus. While this sounds right to our ears and our logic, this is a distortion of the true gospel: “For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast” (Eph. 2:8-9).

The gospel is not about doing good to feel good and believing that somewhere out there is a god who exists but isn’t all that invested or involved in creation. Far from it. The gospel is about a God who, having created image bearers who chose to rebel against Him, has made redemption possible as a gracious gift through the life, death and resurrection of His Son, Jesus Christ, to be received by faith. Anything other than that is a distortion of the truth.

After teaching about this false gospel, I had multiple conversations with different students about how this mentality is pervasive and about how they have concerns about their friends and family who think that way.

My call to action during that sermon for those who thought this was the gospel was to turn from it and to believe the true gospel that we are saved by grace through faith in Christ. For those who were believers, my call to action was to be bold the next time they heard a friend speaking as though they believed in the false gospel of moralistic therapeutic deism and share the true gospel with them. Lord willing, some of them will respond to these calls, and I pray that you might as well.

That’s what I see when I look back on the last month at The Hedge.

Please join us in praying for courage for initiating gospel conversations, wisdom for discipling student laborers and laborers in the harvest.

Ministry Highlight

“Life is more fun if you play games”or so goes the old saying by Roald Dahl. We’re finding that to be true on Tuesday nights at The Hedge. Every Tuesday night, a new student is tasked with picking a game for the group to play. In the picture above we are playing a game called Thirteen, which I would describe as a combination between Slap Jack and Uno. Maybe another way to think of it — a lot of confusion and a lot of slapping. We started incorporating games like this because we noticed we needed a quick way to make friends out of new people who attended, and there’s no quicker way to make someone feel included than to get them into a game with everyone else. It’s working pretty well so far, and no one has gotten hurt... yet.