The gospel of Jesus Christ is more than a collection of principles and operations. There is an order to everything, that when followed correctly, leads to eternal life for the believer.
If you’ve had a little algebra in school, you probably remember something about the importance of the order of operations. Remember PEMDAS? (Parentheses, Exponents, Multiplication, Division, Addition, Subtraction) Here you thought algebra had nothing to do with real life! Yes, with the Word of God, as with algebra, if you work the operations in the wrong order, you will get the wrong answer, even if you solved each of the individual operations correctly.
For example:
God loves us, and we love God. Both are very important ‘operations’. But, if you get them out of order, you would say that God loves us because we love Him; instead of the truth that we love Him, because He FIRST loved us. (1 John 4:19) Huge difference.
Another one… perhaps the most critical of all: The old covenant ‘operation’ of the law, and the new covenant ‘operation’ of grace. This one should be easy… old before new. If there is any uncertainty, we should study the book of Hebrews, chapters 6 thru 10. It even says in Chapter 10, verse 8, that “He taketh away the first, that he may establish the second.” Establishing one, taking away the other. The old and new covenants do not co-exist. You are either under one, or the other. That doesn’t mean you throw out the Old Testament scriptures. There is a lot to learn there… IF… you keep it all in the right order.
When you don’t keep them in proper order, you get the wrong answer. Here’s what that wrong answer sounds like: A preacher might say, “When you surrender your life to Jesus, and make Him your Lord… you are saved by grace… by faith… not of your own works, but by the shed blood of Jesus Christ. But AFTER you are born again, and all your past sins are washed away… NOW you must keep all God’s commandments in order to make it in… to have eternal life. Your past sins are forgiven, but from now on, everything you do and say will be recorded against you, and you could be cast into hell, if there’s too much bad recorded in the books, when you stand in the judgment.”
That may sound familiar, but it is WRONG! That is putting the old covenant law AFTER the new covenant work of the cross! If you really hold to that, the effect is what is described in Galatians 5:4. “Christ is become of no effect unto you, whosoever of you are justified by the law; ye are fallen from grace.”
You can include ALL of the Word in your teaching, and really feel confident that you are preaching the ‘full gospel’, or the ‘whole Word of God, from cover to cover’; but actually be preaching seriously harmful error, because you get the ‘truths’ in the wrong order! You didn’t really leave anything out, but you got the wrong answer!
What a tragic thing, to take a precious child of God, who just got saved by amazing grace, and delivered from the condemnation of sin… into peace with God, and an assurance of eternal life; and then put him right back under a law of works, that leaves him trying to be good enough to KEEP his salvation! Since he can see his own sins and failures, or even that he is falling short of a requirement of perfection, he comes right back under the same guilt and condemnation that he was delivered from. Many get so frustrated and discouraged that they give up, and go back into the world. Others try to escape the guilt and condemnation by seeking praise and acceptance from men. It’s a wrong answer! …that grieves God!
It is no wonder that Paul uses such strong language, when he says, “O foolish Galatians, who hath bewitched you, that ye should not obey the truth, before whose eyes Jesus Christ hath been evidently set forth, crucified among you? 2 This only would I learn of you, Received ye the Spirit by the works of the law, or by the hearing of faith? 3 Are ye so foolish? Having begun in the Spirit, are ye now made perfect by the flesh?” [Galatians 3:1-3 KJV]
To put things in the right order, Paul goes back to Abraham, and the original covenant of justification by FAITH… which he calls ‘the promise’. “And this I say, that the covenant, that was confirmed before of God in Christ, the law, which was four hundred and thirty years after, cannot disannul, that it should make the promise of none effect.”
I can only cover so much in a Facebook post, so I’ll have to continue later. Here’s a little primer for the next algebra lesson: ‘disannul’ means multiply times zero. And the old covenant law is an operation enclosed by parentheses.
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