The False Gospel of Prophecy

I want to talk today about a false gospel that was influential in my life, and that is the good news of prophecy. Now, I do not want to deny that the Bible predicts good news, and I believe that prophecy IS good news, but prophecy becomes a false gospel when it becomes the main focus of the Christian message.

To illustrate that, I’d like to comment on this little booklet, What Is the True Gospel? Some of you are familiar with it, and others not. Some of the things I say will be specific to this particular booklet, and some of the things I say will be applicable to other prophecy ministries as well – to anyone who makes prophecy the focus of the message.

Anyway, the booklet begins in the book of Galatians, with Paul saying that there will be a curse on anyone who has a different gospel – so it is very important to get it right. And then the booklet moves to Mark 16, which says that we must believe in order to be saved, and it says that we must believe the gospel in order to be saved, so it’s really important to believe the right gospel. So far the booklet is in the introduction, trying to get our interest, saying how important the subject is, and that’s OK.

The booklet picks up a scripture in Acts, and then goes to Mark 1, where Jesus begins preaching, and Mark 1 says that Jesus preached the gospel of the kingdom of God.

OK; now, armed with this description of the gospel as a message about the kingdom of God, the author then asks, What is a kingdom?, and he answers that it is a King, and a territory, and subjects, and laws. Jesus was preaching about a time when he would rule the world, a time when he would bring peace and salvation to everyone. It will be a really good time in human history, and this is truly good news for humanity.

So, to make a long story short, the author of this booklet says that the gospel is a message about the return of Christ, and the wonderful news that the problems we face today will be solved. In fact, the author built a big ministry around this idea, with a television program named “The world tomorrow.” The focus was on the future, and it was a good future, and it was presented in an interesting manner, and I believed it. The gospel, the good news, was that Christ was going to come back and fix the problems we struggle with today. I liked it.

The problem was, that this is not the gospel that Jesus preached. He did not come to earth just to tell us that he would come back. He did not fail in his first mission and have to schedule another one. Although he did predict his return, this was not the focus of his message, and although the apostles did say that Jesus was coming back, this was not the focus of their message, either. This sort of message did not originate with Jesus – it was found in the Old Testament prophets as well. They predicted that a day would come when God would intervene and set the world right again, and so if this is what Jesus preached, then it was not news at all, and if this is what he had preached, the Pharisees would have welcomed him as a good buddy.

So let’s go back to the booklet and ask, What went wrong? How was I misled by the author, and how might I avoid making similar mistakes in the future?

Well, to begin with, we might notice that the author was dancing all around the Bible. He went from Galatians to Mark to Acts and then back to Mark again. He was just picking out verses here and there that said what he wanted them to say. If he had stayed in Galatians, he would have gotten a better grasp of what the gospel is. And if he had stayed in Acts, he would have had a better foundation. And if he had stayed in Mark, he would have done better there, too. If a person jumps around from one part of the Bible to another, he might well be teaching something good, but he might not. That sort of method is easily misused. It’s a bit safer for us to stay with one passage for a while to be sure that we understand what it is saying.

Next, I notice that the author slipped a little something extra into the passage in Mark 16. The original says that we need to believe in order to be saved. The author then changed this to say that we need to believe the gospel in order to be saved. Now, that might seem like a reasonable inference, especially after we have just read Paul’s statement that people with a false gospel will be cursed. It is important to believe the gospel, but the emphasis of the New Testament is actually on something else.

If we look at New Testament verses about believing, we will find that we are told far more often to believe in Jesus – not just that we believe what Jesus said, but that we believe in him. The focus is on who Jesus is, and although we do believe what he said, especially when we understand who he is, the focus is really on who he is. Now, we do not need a theological explanation of what all that means right now. All we need to do is notice that when the Bible talks about believing, most of the time it talks about believing in Jesus, so when the booklet puts the emphasis on believing the gospel, we might wonder why he is picking up a minor theme instead of a major one.

A third problem – and this is probably the most serious problem of the booklet – is that the author gave his own definition of “kingdom.” He did not get that definition from the Bible. Yes, Jesus preached the gospel of the kingdom of God, but we have to examine the words of Jesus to see what he meant. On several occasions, Jesus told parables about the kingdom of God. He’d say the kingdom of God is like this, or it’s like that, and never once did he say that the kingdom had a king and laws and territory and subjects. That was not his focus at all, and the booklet took a major wrong turn when it tried to force Jesus’ message into a modern definition of kingdom.

Now, there are several clues in the Bible that could have told me that this booklet was heading down a wrong path. For one, Matthew and Mark talk about the kingdom of God a lot, but the book of John hardly mentions it at all. In John, the focus of the message is eternal life. That’s not exactly contradictory, but it does indicate a different focus, and it does give us a warning that we should not be too focused on any one particular way of describing the gospel.

And when we turn to the book of Acts, we will see several sermons from the apostles, and they hardly mentioned the kingdom of God either. Instead, the focus of their message was the death and resurrection of Jesus. What?! Did they get the message wrong, or did the booklet get it wrong? And if we turn to Galatians and the other epistles of Paul, we will see that his message focused on Jesus, too. And when he described the gospel, he usually used the phrase “gospel of Jesus Christ,” and he never used the phrase “gospel of the kingdom of God.” So it is wrong to focus on that one phrase as if it is the key to salvation. We might also note that Paul also talked about the gospel of grace, and the gospel of salvation. Maybe in these phrases we are getting a more rounded picture of what the gospel really is. Instead of just going to the verses that happen to use the phrase we like, like this booklet did, we should get the bigger picture first.

And when I realized that this booklet had made a major error on a topic of central importance to Christianity, it was really eye-opening for me that maybe this guy had gotten other stuff wrong, too. And that was a major step in my spiritual development. Some of you have had similar experiences, I’m sure.

However, I still have to stop and ask, Why did I believe this booklet? After all, I had read the whole New Testament before I read the booklet. I had read all the sermons in the book of Acts that focus on Jesus. I had read the epistles of Paul that focus on Jesus. So why was I willing to believe a different message, one that was built on scraps of Jesus’ teaching, rather than the whole picture?

I’m not sure. I do know that I was raised to be suspicious of regular churches, and so I was willing to believe a message that most of them were off-track. But I think the main thing was that I did not feel accepted by society, and that included the people who went to regular churches, and so when the booklet told me that the whole system was going to be replaced, I found that very good news. I liked a message that focused on the sweeping away of the old world order, and the bringing in a new world order that would be more like what I wanted. The booklet was presented in a vigorous manner, and the author sounded like he was sure of what he was saying, and because I liked the message, I didn’t have much incentive to investigate it more carefully.

Now, I’m not the only stupid person on earth. There are millions of people who are hurt by this world and are receptive to a message that says the world is really messed up and the best we can do is hope that it will be replaced soon. Jehovah’s Witnesses and Seventh-day Adventists still get a lot of people interested in prophecy.

Now, I am not saying that prophecy is wrong. It is part of the message. All I’m saying is that it is not the focus. Jesus is the focus; prophecy is just a bonus. And I still think the world is really messed up, and I still look forward to Jesus coming back and setting it right. All those things are good, but they are not the gospel.

Well then, what is the gospel? All I have is three minutes, so what can I say?

There are several ways to approach the gospel, depending on what your particular need and interest is. If your problem in life is that you don’t feel loved, then the gospel offers love. If you feel that life is pointless, then the gospel offers a purpose. If you feel dirty, then the gospel offers cleansing. If you feel anxiety, the gospel offers security. If you feel insignificant, the gospel offers glory. If you feel like you might die someday, the gospel offers you eternal life. If you feel like you have done something wrong, the gospel offers forgiveness – and in every case, the gospel offers this through Jesus Christ. He is the center-point of the message.

Now, there is a God in heaven who created us, and he wants us to get along with other people in love and peace. And someday, he’s going to call us into account to see how well we have done, and the problem is that all of us have messed up. There’s going to be a day of judgment, and we are going to be in trouble, unless we accept the forgiveness that Jesus offers.

You see, the kingdom of God is good news only if we can be in it. The return of Christ and the day of judgment is good news only if we are forgiven. Prophecy without forgiveness is terrible news, depressing news, but prophecy with forgiveness is wonderful news. Forgiveness makes all the difference in the world, and that is the focus of the gospel message. We are forgiven through Jesus Christ. That’s what we need to believe, and we are to trust him not only for the future, but also in day-to-day life right now. That’s what Jesus was talking about.