The Two Gospels
All human thinking operates out from core assumptions and definitions that each one of us hold to be true without ever even thinking about those assumptions and definitions.Everyone knows what "God" is, or do they? What is God? Everyone knows what "man" is, or do they? What is man? Everyone knows what "salvation is, or do they? What is the salvation of the New Testament?
So many times over the years I have heard some claim about "What the Bible says." So I have taken my Bible and carefully written out every single verse on the topic only to discover that what they claimed "the Bible says" was nowhere to be found. Much of the time, I found that God actually said something quite different. Sometimes, even, God actually said the very opposite.
I wrote these letters from the fall of 2013 until the first of the year in 2014 in order to search out for myself the definitions of many of these basic assumptions that govern our thinking.
Every Christian on earth believes, sincerely, that his or her present knowledge of God and the Christian gospel is the true and correct gospel of Jesus Christ. Thus every Christian could actually write a personal definition of “The Two Gospels,” mine, the correct one, versus everyone else’s, the false.
But what if?
What if the problem is, in actuality, the definition of God.
What is God? — Don’t be too hasty to answer that question.
In John 16, Jesus said that everything said about God is figurative; then He said that now He would tell us plainly about the Father; then He stopped talking.
What happened next was not something God did, but God showing Himself in the human realms as He really is, a Man laying down His life for His friends.
Jesus said, “He who has seen Me has seen the Father.” In other words, the only description of God granted to either heaven or earth is a Man. We cannot know God without knowing this Man.
Then we must ask the next question — what is man?
God says that man is the likeness and image of God.
This is a bit strange, isn’t it? The only way we can know God is to know what man is. And the only way we can know man is to know what God is. This is the puzzle the Bible places before us, and there really is no other way to say it.
The core of the New Covenant, the agreement we signed with God and God with us are these words, from 1 John 3. We shall be like Him (Jesus), for we shall see Him as He is.
This is the same circular thinking God places before us in His definitions of God and man.
We imagine that right now, we are not like Jesus. But how can that be? If we are not just like Jesus right now, then it is apparent that we do NOT see Him as He is. But if we do not see Jesus as He is, then what is this imaginative Jesus we think we are “not like”?
If we are not just like Jesus, then we do not see Him as He is, and if we do not see Him as He is, then the Jesus we think we know is not the Jesus of the gospel in Whom we live.
But we are getting ahead of ourselves. If God is required by His own oath in the gospel to conform us to the image of His Son, to make us just like Jesus, what does that mean? Christianity holds a great argument that Jesus is “God the Son,” distinct from God the Father, yet an essential Person of “the Godhead.”
So, if Jesus is God, and you and I are “just” humans, how on earth could God ever keep His oath?
But what if God is so very different from what most people know? – And how can God not be very different since we do not yet see Him as He is?
Most don’t understand that the prevailing definitions of God, of man, of Christ Jesus, and of salvation, found in Christianity, were hammered out by powerful intellectuals at the express dictate of a psycopathic killer who intended to use those definitions to cement his absolute control over the Roman world.
That definition is the Nicene Creed, the gospel of the Nicolaitans.
In this book I wage open warfare against the Nicene Creed and the false knowing about God that it perpetrates through every strata of Christianity, historical and present day.
The gospel of Jesus Christ as taught by Paul and John exists in an entirely different realm than what most Christians know.
Salvation is not some place people “go” after their bodies are ripped away from their spirits; Salvation is a Person in whom we live.
More than that, the Gospel of Salvation begins only inside of two questions.
What is God? What does He WANT?
You will see that God’s desire, His heart, is not found in the Nicene Creed, thus all that comes out of that stark absence of God Himself in Person can be nothing other than another gospel.
More than that, you will see that the “gospel” of the Nicene Creed is simply a far worse version of the same lie out of which the serpent spoke. He was talking blither than; he is talking blither today.
This volume is a definitional approach to a number of key terms in the New Testament, words we imagine we know their meaning. However, when recast in the light of a description of God taken from the only picture we have of Him, a Man laying down His life, then these words take on an entirely different meaning, and impact our lives right now in ways many have never considered.
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God has an incredible purpose inside all the darkness of this world.
The Father is coming Home.