Question
I am constantly barraged by attacks on “the gospel of Christ” from preachers and organizations (like Catholicism) that pervert the gospel of Christ by making good works a requirement for salvation.
Response
Even though it bothered you to be exposed to that constantly, understand that it simply bothered you. It did not persuade you at all that ‘Catholic doctrine’ is right. Instead, the exact opposite took place. All the more, they clearly manifested themselves to you as being the wrong, perverse, and corrupt teachings that they are. For since you know that the Catholic ‘gospel’ is a perversion of “the gospel of Christ” when you read its teachings on those web sites you immediately recognized that what you were reading was an outright perversion. And even though it was presented with all of the same dogmatism and trappings that you remember growing up under (and even though this itself was uncomfortable for you) you were not ‘taken in’ by it at all. In other words, it did not fool you one bit, or entice you one bit, or seduce you one bit. Instead because of the effectual working of “the gospel of Christ” within you, you clearly and readily recognized the perversion of the gospel that you were reading. Plus, you also knew exactly what the perversion was and how it was being made. In fact, your analysis of how ‘Catholic doctrine’ perverts “the gospel of Christ” is not only completely accurate, it is also very insightful. Wherefore, as I said, I really do not think that I need to say much of anything regarding this.
What you have described is exactly what God has designed to take place with us, after having believed “the gospel of Christ” we get challenged and attacked by the very false system and teachings to which we used to belong. But you remember what God teaches us in Romans 5:3-4, right after declaring to us in verses 1 and 2 the reality of our justification in His sight and its results. He says, “And not only so, but we glory in tribulations also: knowing that tribulation worketh patience; And patience, experience; and experience, hope:” The “tribulations” that God has Paul speak of here are the ‘tribulations of the gospel’; i.e. they are the tribulations of coming under attacks and challenges from various perversions of the gospel, and from various contrary doctrines, which want to ‘shake our confidence’ in the fact that we really are justified in God’s sight, and that we really are saved from the debt and penalty of our sins, solely on the basis of simple faith in the Lord Jesus Christ as our all-sufficient Saviour. In other words, God knows that as soon as we believe “the gospel of Christ” and get ourselves justified, saved, and reconciled unto Him, that we are going to be subjected to challenges to our faith. Hence we are going to be attacked, so to speak, by perversions of the gospel and by contrary doctrines (especially by the ones belonging to whatever false system we may have come out from); and their attacks are designed to ‘trouble’ us and to shake our confidence in the truth of our justification, our salvation, and our at-one-ment with God. Wherefore, experiencing such attacks (whether by having them come to us, or by us running into them) is not abnormal or strange by any means. Rather, they are perfectly normal and they are to be expected. In other words, the ‘tribulations of the gospel’ are to be anticipated and expected by us. What’s more, because they are “tribulations” they therefore can be ‘troubling’ to us, just as the word indicates. Especially when they are cleverly presented and/or when they come from a perverse system that held us in bondage for a long time.
Now my point in bringing this up is not only to underscore that what you experienced is perfectly normal and to be expected, but to especially point out that you handled things properly according to the effectual working of what Romans 5:3-4 says. And in doing this what Romans 5:3-4 describes is exactly what took place with you. In other words, the ‘tribulations of the gospel’ that you experienced did not draw you away from the truth of the gospel. They did not ‘destroy your faith’. They did not cause you to conclude that justification in God’s sight is not by faith alone in Christ alone. They did not cause you to conclude that you really are not justified in God’s sight, and that you need to do the works of Catholicism in order to earn justification before God. In short, they did not cause you to seriously doubt that you truly possess justification in God’s sight and salvation from the debt and penalty of your sins, having believed in the Lord Jesus Christ as your all-sufficient Saviour as per the “gospel of Christ”. And so, they did not cause you to lose your rejoicing in the fact that being ‘justified by faith you have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ’, nor did they cause you to lose your ‘rejoicing in hope of the glory of God’. The challenges from Catholicism’s perversion of the gospel did none of these things to you. And why did they fail to draw you away from the truth of the gospel? And why do you continue to ‘glory’ in “the gospel of Christ” and ‘rejoice in hope of the glory of God’ in spite of them? Because what Romans 5:3-4 describes is exactly what took place with you.
In other words, when you were confronted with the ‘tribulation’, instead of immediately wilting in the face or it, or being bullied or browbeaten by its claims, you stood up to it on the basis of the power and authority of what the details of “the gospel of Christ” in Romans 1:16-4:25 says. Therefore, the ‘tribulation worked patience’ in you just as God designed for it to do, and you patiently stood up to the challenge of the tribulation and you made it subject itself to exactly what “the gospel of Christ” says to make it prove whether it was the truth or not. And in so doing your ‘patience worked experience’. In other words you not only gained the experience of standing up to a ‘tribulation of the gospel’ instead of being intimated by it, but by subjecting its claims to exactly what “the gospel of Christ” says you also gained the experiential proof that without a doubt it is a perversion of the gospel. And along with this you also proved to yourself again that “the gospel of Christ” that you have believed is “the gospel of Christ” in truth. Then with your ‘patience working this experience’ you also benefited from the rest of what God has designed for you to benefit from. That is, your ‘experience worked hope’ just as the verse says. With your experience of standing up to this ‘tribulation of the gospel’ and with the experiential proof that it gave to you that it is an outright perversion and that you have believed “the gospel of Christ” in truth, your experience has worked “hope” within you. That is, your experience has not only further confirmed to you that you have the God-given right to be ‘rejoicing in hope of the glory of God’, but it has also increased your hope and confidence when it comes to dealing with any subsequent ‘tribulations of the gospel’, whether they come from the same source or from some other source that likewise perverts the gospel of Christ.
Keith Blades
Enjoy The Bible Ministries
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