I marvel that ye are so soon removed from Him that called you into the grace of Christ unto another gospel. Galatians 1:6
I remember one summer evening when Murray McCandless had his little Gospel tent pitched at a busy corner in Hampton, that a quartet of young men came to the Gospel meeting. Neatly dressed, polite, and smiling and wearing a little name tag on their shirt pocket, these men sat at the back of the tent and listened well. Sometime during the closing prayer, those young men slipped out the back and we never saw them again. Something about Murray’s message probably warned them that it would do them no good to remain and chat about doctrine. Knowing where those young men had come from, Murray used today’s text to preach clearly the dangers of those who would preach anything but the clear, simple Gospel of the grace of Christ.
The organization that those young men had come from certainly preach another gospel. They even have another book that purports to be on the same level with Scripture, a fairy tale book of nonsense written by an American criminal. Good living people, that organization teaches a gospel of works and religion that, when you strip away the fairy tales, is nothing more than the doctrine of Cain. Most of the other cults around us are the same, with their own twistings of Scripture to pervert the Gospel. As believers, we need to avoid the cults and their dangerous doctrines. It often does us little good to challenge them or engage them in discussion, because they are so steeped in their own teachers’ errors that they cannot see the truth of the Word of God.
Paul’s letter to the Assembly in Galatia shows he is primarily concerned about the judaizing teachers who promoted the error that faith in Christ must be supplemented by obedience to the law of Moses. This is what Paul describes in the next verse as perverting the Gospel of Christ. We still have the judaizing teachers around us today, insisting that, in addition to conversion, we must comply with various elements of the law, otherwise we are not saved, they say. Some will insist on a keeping of the Sabbath, others will require baptism as an essential of salvation, and others will declare that our salvation must be maintained through a sinless life or else be lost. These are all dangerous doctrines, because they add to the Gospel, and we should have no portion with those who hold such lies of the devil.
Some of the so-called evangelical groups around us have also adopted another Gospel, even as they preach what sounds like the truth. These groups promote a salvation that involves nothing more than being caught up in religious emotion, or a name signed on a pledge card, or a recital of a little prayer to ‘ask Jesus into your heart’. Such a prayer involves a concept not found in Scripture, so it is another gospel.
Like the Galatians, we have been saved through the Gospel of the grace of Christ. Let us avoid all other gospels and those who peddle them! -Jim MacIntosh