A False Gospel
The great writer C.S. Lewis in his book “The Last Battle” - the last book in the Chronicles of Narnia, begins the story with an Ape and a Donkey who discovered a dead lion in the woods. They had thought about burying it but the ape had the idea of making a lion skin out of the dead lion for the donkey to wear and pretend to be the great lion Aslan, the king of Narnia. The Donkey was very reluctant and didn’t want to wear it, but the Ape was offended by this: “I’ve worked so hard on this lion skin and you won’t even look at it or wear it” so the donkey gave in and agreed to put it on. From that moment onwards, the donkey found himself permanently clothed in the lion skin and residing in a stable whilst the ape managed to convince all the other animals in Narnia that the great lion Aslan was dwelling in a stable. So all the other animals would go along to the stable to pay homage to ‘Aslan,’ but they did not know that they were being deceived; it was not the great lion Aslan who they were meeting with, but a lowly donkey in a lion skin. [1]
Sound doctrine is knowing the difference between worshipping the Lion of Judah or a donkey in a lion skin.
Now a donkey in a lion skin might look like a lion from a distance, but the closer you get to it you realise that it only looks like a lion, but it is a completely different animal. A donkey in a lion skin has no power, and it can’t roar like a lion, it has none of the attributes of the lion that makes it such a beautiful yet fearsome animal. There is a form of religion that parades itself as Christianity, looks like Christianity, and even sounds like Christianity. Yet it denies human sinfulness, the judgement of God, the reality of hell and lacks any call to repentance and faith.
This is not Christianity at all, it is not the Lion of Judah, it is a donkey in a lion skin.
A false Jesus can’t save you, a false Jesus leaves you dead in sin and under judgement. That is why the devil, the enemy of our souls works tirelessly to subvert the true Gospel, infiltrate the church with false teaching, whilst undermining and silencing the faithful Gospel minister. The apostle Paul reminds the Church in Corinth of this spiritual fact:
“Now I would remind you, brothers, of the gospel I preached to you, which you received, in which you stand, and by which you are being saved, if you hold fast to the word I preached to you—unless you believed in vain.” (1 Corinthians 15:1–2 ESV)
The British theologian Michael Reeves in his book “Gospel People: A Call for Evangelical Integrity” makes this very important assertion:
“Evangelicals look to Scripture to know Christ, and there they find the unique Son of God, exclusive in His glorious identity and completely sufficient as Saviour.” [2]
The Christian faith is rooted in Scripture, our salvation hinges on what we believe and confess, that is why theology and doctrine are vitally important. What you believe about who Christ is, why He had to come to earth and die on the Cross is a salvation issue. I have heard so many professing Christians over the years saying: “Well I don’t believe that Christ died as a substitute to take the punishment for my sin on the Cross, I can’t believe in a God who punishes sin.” But we are saved by believing the Gospel — the good news that “on a hill there is a cross and on that cross is blood, for me” and the believer confesses that Christ died on that Cross, for them, in their place taking the punishment that their sin deserved.
The main theme running throughout scripture is that of man’s failure, sin, and rebellion and of God’s plan to rescue and redeem humanity back into a relationship with Him through the death and resurrection of His only begotten son Jesus Christ. The problem with the church today is that it often avoids the reality of God’s wrath and therefore the reality of the severity of sin and the substitutionary atonement of Christ is omitted. It is often a case of what isn’t preached with regards to the atonement, so the question of why Jesus had to go to the Cross is not dealt with, and the reality of Adam’s sin and rebellion towards God and His holiness, in which justice and the punishing of sin being necessary, is often excluded. The whole purpose of the Cross is to set the sinner free from divine punishment and judgement, so to consider the sacrifice of Christ on the Cross as merely a way of setting an example to humanity or identifying with them in their lostness is to completely disregard the central truth of the gospel. The great preacher and theologian Jonathan Edwards in his famous sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” puts it like this: ‘“Divine justice never stands in the way, it makes no objection against God using his power at any moment to destroy them. Yea, on the contrary, justice calls aloud for an infinite punishment of their sins.” [3]
The New Testament scholar Don Carson also explains that the consequences of sin are profoundly bound up with God’s solemn sentence and His holy wrath:
“You cannot fail to see that whatever else the cross does, it must rightly set aside God’s wrath, or it achieves nothing." [4]
To fully understand the idea of God’s wrath and punishment of sin, we need to go back to the Old Testament and look at the sacrificial system of Israel and in particular, the burnt offering. The main purpose of the burnt offering was to make atonement for the worshipper, to expiate his sin so that he would be accepted by the Lord. The worshipper would lay his hand on the head of the animal that was being offered on the altar as a symbol of transferring his sins onto the animal, he would then kill the animal and chop it up and the priest would collect the blood and splash it over the altar putting the pieces of the animal onto the altar fire. It was the blood of the animal that atoned for the worshipper’s sins, the offering was being made as a substitute for the worshipper and propitiated God’s forgiveness to the worshipper.
In the same way, Abraham sacrificed a ram as a burnt offering instead of his son Isaac and on a larger scale, King Hezekiah took seven bulls, rams, lambs, and male goats and made a sin offering with them to make atonement for all of Israel. Having briefly considered sacrifice in the Old Testament it is self-evident that in God’s holy law, there is no forgiveness of sins without the shedding of blood, John Stott in explaining the substitutionary sacrifice says:
“There had to be life for life or blood for blood. But the Old Testament blood sacrifices were only shadows; the substance was Christ. For a substitute to be effective, it must be an appropriate equivalent.” [5]
Jesus Christ was the perfect sacrifice for sin- the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world (John 1:29). In the same way that the worshipper in the Old Testament would take an animal without blemish and place their hands on the head of the animal symbolically transferring their sin onto the animal, so the sinless Son of God took all our sin on the Cross. In his “Institutes of the Christian Religion”, the great Reformer John Calvin writes:
“Our acquittal is in this— that the guilt which made us liable to punishment was transferred to the head of the Son of God.” [6]
Therefore a faithful proclamation of the Gospel requires the preacher to be faithful to the biblical truth about the sinfulness of humanity and the holiness of God. But once you start removing the offensive parts of the Gospel and replacing it with a culturally acceptable “self-help” message, then it is not the Gospel that you believe and therefore you are still dead in sin and under God’s judgement. Do not be fooled, one of the simplest ways to spot a false gospel is that it is man-centred, it is focused on you and not on God. It is all about your happiness rather than God’s holiness. The twentieth Century theologian Gresham Machen points out that:
“At the very root of the liberal movement is the loss of the consciousness of sin. The consciousness of sin was formally the starting point of all preaching, but today it is gone.” [7]
A false Gospel robs the sinner of the truth, soothes them into a false sense of security as it holds them under condemnation and facing the final judgement without the atoning blood of the Lamb.
Footnotes:
[1] C.S.Lewis “The Last Battle” (William Collins, 1956) pp8-17
[2] Michael Reeves “Gospel People: A Call for Evangelical Integrity” (Crossway, 2022) p46
[3] Jonathan Edwards “Sinners in the hands of an angry God” (Ed. D. Dutkanicz) “Puritan Sermons” (Dover Publications, 2005) p173
[4] D.A. Carson Article on Penal Substitution (2007) http://theocentricview.blogspot.com/2007/06/da-carson-on-penal-substitution.html
[5] John Stott, “The Cross of Christ” (IVP, 1986) p163
[6] John Calvin, "Institutes of the Christian Religion” Book II, Ch 16, Art. 6 (Hendicksen, 2008) p328
[7] J. Gresham Machen “Christianity & Liberalism” (Eerdmans, 1990) p64