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What we believe and teach - The Gospel of God - |
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Jesus
Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, and He was buried, and
He rose again the third day for our justification according to the Scriptures,
and after He was raised from the dead God caused Him to be seen by witnesses
chosen before by God. |
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That is
the Gospel, that is, the Good News, we have accepted by faith, in which we
stand, by which we are saved and which we preach to all men imploring them on
Christ’s behalf to repent and to believe in it, that they might be saved. That
is the Gospel in which man must believe to be saved and reconciled to God, for
it is the word of our salvation Paul and the other apostles of the Lord (as
well as all the other servants of Christ) preached during the first century
after Christ and by which many Jews and Gentiles were set free from their
sins. Whoever says that it is not complete or it is not sufficient for
salvation because God, after the death of the apostles, revealed the fullness
of the Gospel (which is, as a matter of fact, another Gospel) to Tom or Dick
or Harry, is a deceiver, an idle talker, a man disapproved concerning the
faith whose end is destruction; such a person is an accursed child. He is a
poisonous snake and a ravenous wolf of whom we must
beware. We must also beware of all those who after beginning with the Spirit
are now trying to reach perfection by the flesh, that is to say, after they
believed in the Gospel of grace they began to follow Jewish customs and to
force others to do the same, so they began to impose circumcision, the Sabbath
day, the Jewish feasts, and precepts about foods written in the law of Moses
(to mention just some of the Jewish customs), which are all a shadow of the
things that were to come, because the law has a shadow of the good things to
come and not the very image of the things. These people set aside the grace
of God and make void the faith in Christ, and therefore they must be rebuked
sharply. |