No 21

(It saves and it condemns)

I was saved on Apr 5^th 1981 and my new found faith pushed me to do a lot of door-to-door evangelism. I was inexperienced, but my zeal largely outweighed my fear of confrontation. Jesus Christ was now my Saviour and my intention was to pass on this good news to others. My tools were the Bible and the pamphlet entitled The Four Spiritual Laws (see study # 10). I once spoke to a man who said that man created God and not the other way around. So I asked him “Are you God?” He said “In a way, I am” What he meant was that man uses God as a crutch. I didn’t know what to tell him back then other than John 3:16 and Rom 3:23; today I would know exactly what to tell him. What I should have said to him was: “Why would man create a God and write a book that condemns him?” In Romans 3:23, the Bible says “For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God;”

In his mind, the Bible was written by men to create a certain set of rules but in truth the Bible condemns man and the Bible saves man. For some, the words of the Bible condemn them; for others, the same words save them! Why? Because of the condition of their hearts and only God knows the heart. Jeremiah 17:9 tells us “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?”

The sun that softens the wax hardens the clay or to put it differently, the Bible is like water on a duck’s back for some people (like above) and other people are like sponges; they just gladly drink it up. The Gospel is good news to all mankind but only a very small portion of mankind is or will be saved. In Hebrews 9:28, we read “So Christ was once offered to bear the sins of many; and unto them that look for him shall he appear the second time without sin unto salvation.” In the end, Jesus will have died only for the saved, as this verse indicates. In Calvinism, this truth is said in the TULIPE; the letter L – Limited Atonement (see study # 102).

The Bible is God’s Word and it accomplishes what He wants it to “So shall my word be that goeth forth out of my mouth: it shall not return unto me void, but it shall accomplish that which I please, and it shall prosper in the thing whereto I sent it.” (Isaiah 55:11). Once, a young man who was looking for the truth walked into a church and listened to what the preacher had to say. This particular preacher always read a Psalm before his sermon and the young man was so touched in his heart by what the Psalm said, he didn’t even listen to the sermon. Afterwards, he went up to see the preacher and asked him to explain the Psalm; he accepted Jesus Christ as his personal Saviour at that moment.

So just hearing the Word of God is enough for a person to be saved and it is for this reason we, as believers, have been given the mandate “…to speak the truth in love” (Eph 4:15a).