What is the gospel : straightforward talks on evangelism

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A Foreword S

By Arthur J. Smith, D.D., General Secretary of the Evangelistic Committee of New York City.

II How Men Are Saved God's Part in Salvation

SUPPOSE you should step out on to the street, and there, standing on the curbstone, roll up your sleeves, take a knife, open an artery in your arm, and let the blood gush out into the gutter; what would be the result? The answer is simple: after enough of the blood had left your body you would drop over unconscious; and a very short time after that you would be dead.

That is exactly what has happened, spiritually, to every one who has ever done anything wrong in his life. Rather, it was done for him before he was born, when the father of the human race sinned and in that act of sin let the spiritual life of himself and of all mankind pour out until he and the race were "dead in trespasses and sins" (Eph. 2:1).

This answers our question of the previous chapter, "Why Men Are Lost." The man from whose physical body all the life-blood has poured out is a lost man, so far as his physical life is concerned. The man from whose spirit the Godlife is gone is a lost man, so far as his spiritual life is concerned. Sin separates us from the life of God. Did you ever sin? Then, left to yourself, you are spiritually dead, a lost soul.

And how are you going to be saved ?

A reader of The Sunday School Times recently asked the question, "What do you consider the most dangerous heresy today?"

What answer would you have made? Christian Science? New Thought? Russellism, or Millennial Dawnism? Spiritualism, — or Spiritism? The New Theology? The Higher Criticism? All of these are dangerous enough! Bloodless beliefs, almost all of them, leaving out the cross of Christ and leading men away from the only hope and way of life, to remain dead and hopeless in their sins.

No; dangerous and deadly though all these and ot?ier false religions of today are, there is another heresy that may safely be called more dangerous still, because it is abroad in the church of Christ everywhere and among professing ♦ Christians on every hand.

The most dangerous heresy of today is the emphasis that is being made, within the church itself and by Christian leaders and teachers and ministers, upon activity as Christianity; upon service as salvation.

Get busy for God, we are told, and your salvation will take care of itself. Serve your fellowmen, and don't worry about creeds. Forget your creeds and do something worth while. Activity as the way of life : that is the most dangerous heresy today. For men are not saved by doing anything.

Stop a minute, and look at that man whose arteries were opened, and whose blood has poured out from his body, lying there dead in the gutter. Would it be a hopeful thing to step up to him and say, "Just get up and do something, and you will be all right" ?

Is a dead man going to be brought to life, saved, by doing something?

Or would the "kindly" counsel that his hope of "salvation," his life, lies in his activity for others, be only irony and mockery to him?

No ; it is not Good News — and the Gospel is Good News — to tell a dead man that he must do something. It is not evangelism to offer a man advice that he cannot possibly accept. The "get busy" slogan is as devilish a delusion, when offered as the way of salvation, as to encourage a hospital ward full of incurable paralytics to believe that a little while spent in vigorous "setting up" exercises will make them sound and healthy human beings.

If the dead man is going to live, he will have to be brought to life. And the only one who can bring the dead to life is God. God, then, has got to do something about man's salvation. Man cannot do anything for his own salvation.

And God has done it!

That, praise God, is the Gospel! That is the Good News.

We cannot too often remind ourselves of the truth of the old saying, "Law says do; grace says done." The law saves no one, for "There is none righteous, no, not one" (Rom. 3 :10) ; and it takes a righteous man to do the law of God. But grace, the grace of God, which gives to man, not requires from man, does for man that which man cannot do for himself.

God does not mock that wretched, sin-degraded, sin-destroyed dead man lying there in the gutter with no life in his veins. God would be mocking that man dead in trespasses and sins if He told him just to do the right thing and all would be well. No ; God says lovingly, and in a voice that even the dead can hear, "I have done it all for you ; will you accept this ?"

What is it that God has done?

When, through Adam's fall, mankind sinned and the whole human race went down into ruin, there were three things we can think of that God might do.

He might ignore man's sin, and, himself a perfect, sinless, and holy God, take into fellowship with himself for time and eternity sinful, sinning, sin-saturated human beings. But that is inconceivable. A holy, sinless God cannot ignore sin.

Well, then, God might let all men for time and eternity receive the full, inevitable consequences of their sin, thereby being forever separated and cut off from fellowship with Him. Thus all human beings would go to hell, forever lost. This also is unthinkable ; God did not create the human race in his own image to have that race, in its entirety, forever lost.

There is only one other possibility. God cannot ignore sin ; and God cannot ignore man. Then God himself must pay the penalty of man's sin in order that man may be saved, while at the same time sin is taken fully into account and dealt with as the black, heinous fact that it is.

God cannot condone sin ; he must condemn it. The wages of sin is death; and God cannot set aside or abrogate those wages while he continues to be a holy and righteous God. If only a single member of the human race is to be saved from paying the death penalty of sin, God must pay that penalty himself. And that is the necessity for the death of Christ. His death indeed showed forth the supreme love of God for men. But we see that it did infinitely more.

In our human way we may, as it were, think of the members of the Godhead, far back in the infinite reaches of eternity, before ever creation had begun, holding a loving council together over the question of how man's coming sin should be dealt with while man himself should be saved. And we can, as it were, see the only and eternal Son of God, loving that Father as no human child ever loved a parent, and loved by that Father as no human parent ever loved a child, agreeing with the Father to take the place of sinning, sinful man in order that God's holy and necessary wrath against sin might be visited to the needed uttermost upon — not sinful man, but the sinless Son of man standing in sinful man's place. Such a plan, agreed upon by the Godhead in the councils of eternity, meant such a heart-break of sorrow in the Godhead as no man can conceive. No human father or mother, giving their only son in this black hour of world war as their sacrifice to their nation, knows the meaning of heart-break as God the Father knew it when he gave his only begotten Son. No human son, loving his human father in the most perfect love known to the heart of man, and knowing that he is to be separated from that father for all of lifetime, knows anything of the heart-break of the Son as he, for our sakes and in our stead, was separated from the loving heart of his heavenly Father.

The plan agreed upon by the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit in the councils of eternity was, in the fulness of time, consummated. God the Son, "being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God : but made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men : and being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross" (Phil. 2 : 6-8).

And not only did God thus become man, continuing to be God while also he was man ; but he, sinless, actually became sin for our sakes. "For he hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin" (II Cor. 5:21). Thus becoming actually our sin, in a way that we cannot understand but that we can and must literally accept unless we are to make God a liar (I John 5 :10), the sinless Christ, because he had become sin, became actually a curse in the sight of God. For sin is a loathsome, accursed thing in God's sight; and it always must be so while God is God. Jesus Christ, "the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world" (John 1 : 29) was nailed to the cross and actually hung there, in his voluntarily accepted human body of humiliation, despised by men and accursed in the sight of the Father. He had really been "made a curse for us; for it is written. Cursed is every one that hangeth on a tree" (Gal. 3:13). God could not look in loving fellowship upon this supreme gathering together there, in that broken, bleeding human body, of the sin of all mankind. God, because he is sinless and holy and eternally hating the sin that destroys men and would if it could

Hozv Men Are Saved

destroy God, must turn away his face from the Lamb hanging there "who his own self bare our sins in his own body on the tree" (I Peter 2 : 24) ; and, for the first time in eternity, the Father turned away his face from his only Son.

It had to be so. Sin separates from God. The Son of God, having become the sin of the world, was separated from the Father. The black horror of that tragedy staggers our minds; we cannot conceive it. And then came the heart-broken, agonizing cry of time and eternity : "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?'^

We know the answer — God*s answer. He had turned away from his only begotten Son, made to be sin on our behalf, that he might visit upon him the wrath that must otherwise fall upon us. In order that zve might be spared, God "spared not his own Son, but delivered him up for us all" (Rom. 8:32).

And so the blow fell. God had struck ; struck at the most hateful thing in the universe, sin; struck at the sin of all mankind, as God must do because he is holy and loving. But that sin of all mankind was there in the body and person of his only Son!

Nineteen centuries before this blackest day in history another loving father and another loving son were together at the place of sacrifice. God was showing men, nineteen hundred years before it occurred, the meaning of Calvary. Acting in heart-broken obedience to the will of God, "Abraham stretched forth his hand, and took the knife to slay his son." Yet in that awful moment, when his son's life trembled in the balance, "the angel of the Lord called unto him out of heaven, and said, Abraham, Abraham." Then came the loving command from God, "Lay not thine hand upon the lad, neither do thou any thing unto him : for now I know that thou fearest God, seeing thou hast not withheld thy son, thine only son from me." And Abraham took the little animal that was there at hand, provided by God, "and offered him up for a burnt offering in the stead of his son."

But this day on Calvary, as God's hand was raised to strike the body of his Son, his only Son, there was no one to stay his hand. And so the blow fell ; and Jesus died. The necessary, righteous, loving wrath of God against the sin that would destroy God's children was visited in full upon that only Son who hung there in the sinner's place.

It has been said, and truly, that God never strikes twice for the same sin. The penalty of the sin of all mankind had been paid. "As by the offence of one judgment came upon all men to condemnation; even so by the righteousness of one the free gift came upon all men unto justification of Hfe" (Rom. 5:18). All men for all time were free from the condemnation of sin.

Free, that is, if they would accept God's unspeakable gift. The freedom was there for the taking, for the believing; but it was never to be forced upon them. Since the Lamb of God took away the sin of the world men go to hell, not because they are sinners, but because they will not accept God's freely offered pardon of their sin, purchased for them by the only begotten Son of God at such terrible cost to the Father and the Son.

This, then, is the meaning of the death of Christ. This is why the supreme mission of Christ was, not his LIFE here on earth, hut his DEATH here on earth. Not because he lived, hut he cause he died, we may live — if we accept the result of his death. Believers are "reconciled to God by the death of his Son'' (Rom. 5:10). This is why all eternity looked forzvard, and all eternity will continue to look backward, to the death of Jesus Christ as the supremest redemptive moment in the history of God and man.

That is what God has done for us dead men. He let his only begotten Son die as our Substitute, die in our place and for our sins, receiving in himself the full penalty that we deserve to receive because of our sins. And then, having been delivered "for our offences," that Son "was raised again for our justification" (Rom. 4:25).

Do you believe it? God is telling us this wonderful Good News, telling it in tones that can awaken even the hearing of the dead : that he has done it all, and if we will but believe, he, by the finished work of that crucified, raised, and ascended Son, will raise us from the dead, give us new life in his Son Christ Jesus, and we shall be saved.

May the Holy Spirit make new to us all, with the unsearchable riches of the love of God, the meaning of the marvelous Good News, that "God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life."

Will you accept the Father's unspeakable gift of his Son as your Substitute and your Saviour? Do you so accept him? If you do, tell him so now.

The substancfr of this chapter, from pages 18 to 25, njay be had as a separate pamphlet, entitled, "Was Jesus' Life or Death the More Important?" It is published by The Sunday- School Times Company, Philadelphia, at 20 cents a dozen copies; fifty or more, one cent each; single copies, 2 cents each, postpaid.

Ill

How Men Are Saved Man's Part in Salvation

A FRIEND of mine, who is a young business man, recently asked twenty-five different Sunday-school teachers in Philadelphia if they knew whether they were saved. Twenty-three of the twenty-five did not know. And they are — or they are supposed to be — teaching others the way of salvation !

Suppose you were walking along the street and a stranger stepped up to you and asked if you could tell him how to get to a certain place. Suppose your reply was, "Come with me." And then, when the stranger asked, "Are you going there yourself?" suppose you replied, "I don't know." What would the stranger think of you as a dependable guide?

Perhaps those twenty-three "agnostic" Sunday-school teachers ("agnostic," you remember, means "I don't know") are not sure whether they have done their part in being saved.

What is man's part in salvation? We saw in the preceding chapter what is God*s part.

Do you remember the story of the man who was lost in a snowstorm in the mountains? He pushed on his way, hoping against hope ; finally his strength began to fail, and the darkness came on, and before long he realized that he could not go much farther. When he was about to drop down in exhaustion, knowing full well that if he did so he would never get up again, he stumbled against something, and leaning over and brushing away the snow he found that it was another man, lying there unconscious. Eagerly he sought to bring this man back to consciousness ; and he succeeded. Then he got him to sit up, then to kneel, then on to his feet, then to walk a few steps ; and now he urged the man to keep moving as he valued his life. Together they forced their way through the blinding snowstorm ; finally they saw a light ahead, staggered into the house from which it came, and both were saved.

The point of that story is : if you want salvation, go out and do something for somebody else. You will save yourself by forgetting yourself and saving others.

Don't ever tell that story, in an evangelistic message, as an illustration of the Gospel. If you do, you will be lying. We could not have a better illustration of what the Gospel is not. No soul, since Adam sinned, has ever saved himself that way — by saving another.

Let us set it down, then, that service is not salvation. Man's part in salvation is not to serve others.

Trying to serve others spiritually, without a Saviour, and finding that we cannot be of any spiritual service to them, may indeed force us into the realization that we and they need a Saviour. One of the greatest Christian leaders of our generation says that he came to believe in the deity of Christ in just that way ; he was doing work among men in prison, and he found that those men needed supernatural help, help that he could not possibly give them, and so he was driven to accept the deity of Christ.

Turning over a new leaf is not man's part in salvation. That is, a man does not get saved by reforming, by saying "I will clean up my life, and take a new start." For man gets saved only by a Saviour ; and if he could clean up his life himself he would need no Saviour.

Some years ago, when a certain group of Unitarian churches in Boston were doing special work together, they asked a Methodist Episcopal church to be responsible for the people in a section of the city which included some of the lowest slums. They decided that the Methodists had better take charge of the rescue work there ; for somehow, said the Unitarians, the Methodists seemed to reach those who were lowest down more effectively; they could bring these "down and outs" up to a certain point, and then the Unitarians could take hold and help.

Exactly! The evangelical believers, counting upon Christ as Saviour, could reach those whom "liberal" workers, appealing only to men to clean up and reform themselves, could never reach. What an unconscious tribute of the hopeless "Gospel" of "salvation by character" to the true Gospel of character by salvation !

Asserting one's manhood is not man's part in salvation. If a man would be saved, the first thing he is to do is not to "be a man." Yet we often hear the appeal for Christ made in that mistaken way.

An evangelist who preaches the true Gospel, who is true to the shed blood of Jesus, and whose work God has abundantly honored in using him to bring thousands to salvation through personal faith in Christ as Saviour, nevertheless often puts a regrettable emphasis upon the mistaken appeal to the unsaved. "Be a man, not a mutt or a mollycoddle!" "Hit the trail and show your manhood !" is the cry. "Hold up your head, throw back your shoulders, look the world straight in the eye, and make your decision for Christ."

These and other such appeals are constantly heard, even in true evangelistic work ; the emphasis being upon the idea that man's part in salvation is to do the strong thing instead of the weak thing; do right and stop doing wrong; prove his manhood by enlisting on the side of righteousness ; and so on. But that is not the Gospel. That is not the way of salvation. That is not man's part in salvation.

Thinking back for a moment to that man who was discussed in the preceding chapter, whose arteries were opened, whose life-blood had poured out, and who was lying dead in the gutter, — is his part in salvation to assert his manhood? To lift up his head, throw back his shoulders, step forward and enlist in the cause of righteousness? No: dead men cannot do that.

The cross of Christ does not call upon men to assert their manhood. The cross of Christ exposes men's degradation. That is part of "the offence of the cross" (Gal. 5:11); it does not appeal to the natural man's pride ; it unsparingly shows him that he cannot do anything for himself ; that he has no manhood, no righteousness, no decency to offer God.

Right thinking is not man's part in salvation. New Thought would tell us that it is. Concentrate your mind on all that is clean, and true, and pure, and good, and holy, says New Thought, and you will be saved, — rather, you will save yourself, for "the divine spark" is within you, and needs only to be cultivated. Keep a picture of your mother, or your wife, or your sister or sweetheart, in your watch, and look at it frequently.

Think high thoughts. This "right thinking" plan of salvation even quotes Scripture to a man, and says, "Whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, . . . whatsoever things are of good report . . . think on these things," and your salvation will take care of itself. Those who would pervert and misuse God's Word in this way fail to mention the fact that that passage of Scripture is addressed, not to those who would be saved, but to those who, through faith in Jesus Christ as Saviour and in his shed blood and finished work on Calvary, already have been saved. The verse begins with the words, "Finally, brethren" ; and "brethren" means believers. Men cannot be saved by thinking right.

Man's part in salvation is not to deny the existence of sin. Another false religion tells him to do so. Deny sin, says Christian Science, and it will not bother you. Suppose the Allied Armies simply denied the existence of the German armies for a while, and took up their daily life as though Germans and German armies did not exist. How soon would victory come to the Allies!

No, salvation does not come by any such suicidal insanity as the denial of the existence of sin. God does not deny the existence of sin; he declares it in words of righteous wrath and indignation, and in expression of his eternal enmity against this terrible reality. Sin. The cross of Christ the Son of God is God's recognition of sin. "The Lord hath laid on him the iniquity of us all" (Isa. 53:6). "But the scripture hath concluded all under sin" (Gal. 3:22). One of the first steps for man to take, for his salvation, is not to deny but to recognize his sin.

To deny self is not man's part in salvation. Many an ascetic has thought that it is. In heathen lands and in Christian lands we see men vainly trying to save themselves by attempting to crucify self, put self to death. Is a thing desirable to them naturally? — ^they give it up. Is a thing hard to do? — they do it. But no one ever has been, and no one ever will be, saved that way. After we have been saved, it is, indeed, a duty and a privilege to deny self, — the self that was crucified with Christ on the cross. But this denial of self is not a condition of salvation, it is a result of salvation. And even the Christian's denial of self is possible only by faith in Christ for this: letting Christ put to death that self which we can never put to death for ourselves.

Finally, even sacrifice is not man's part in salvation. The utter sacrifice of himself will save no man. Let us keep clear on this, in these days of sacrificial living and sacrificial giving and sacrificial dying because of the world war. The sacrifices that are being so lavishly, unreservedly made now, on both sides of the Atlantic, to win this war against the forces of unrighteousness are blessed to see, and we may well thank God for them. Both the world and the church are being taught lessons in sacrifice to an extent never seen before. But may God defend hs from the subtle and devilish plausibility of the lie, which has been preached even in some so-called Christian pulpits, that the soldier who lays down his life on the battlefield in the cause of the Allies is, by that sacrificial act, assured of going straight to heaven.

Some few soldiers may believe this; some are writing magazine articles in which the untruth is declared that the discipline and sacrifice of soldier life in this awful struggle cleanses a man from all sin and atones for any past wrong in his life, squaring him with God, so that he can face God fearlessly. But there are plenty of soldiers who are not deceived by this. They are keen enough to see and to say, as some one has pointed out, that this battlefield-death-salvation theory would give more efficacy to a German bullet than to the blood of Christ.

No, sacrifice is not the way of salvation, though it may be a blessed result of salvation. But, says some one, did not our Lord Jesus himself say, "Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his Hfe for his friends" (John 15:13) ? Yes, our Lord said that. But he nowhere said that the man who lays down his life for his friends wins his salvation in that way. Sacrifice is one thing ; salvation is another ; and the Word of God never confuses them, though men often do. There is a specious appeal in that favorite bit of characteristic American verse, "Ji^ Bludso," the godless, blasphemous, adulterous engineer of a Mississippi steamboat who, one night when his steamer took fire, held her bow against the river bank until every last soul was safe ashore, while Jim himself gave up his life on the burning boat; and the moral of it all is this, that

"He seen his duty, a dead sure thing, — And went for it thar and then; And Christ ain't agoing to be too hard On a man that died for men."

It is very appealing to the natural pride of the unsaved man, but even Jim Bludso's death is not sufficient to set aside God's Word and make God a liar,

A Christian woman said the other day to a friend that she had a pet conviction of her own, though she said she knew it was not Scriptural : ic was that a good many lovely, unselfish people whom she knew, but who have no use for religion, were going to get into heaven in some way, so there must be some "side-door" for them. There have been times when all of us would like to have been able to believe that, for the sake of some one we have known. But God knows that it is not possible ; and he has made this very plain. There is no side-door to heaven. There is only one door, and that is Christ. "I am the door,"

said he; "by me if any man enter in, he shall be saved." And he had just said, "Verily, verily, I say unto you. He that entereth not by the door into the sheep fold, but climbeth up some other way, the same is a thief and a robber," — and heaven is a place "where thieves do not break through" (Matt. 6:20; John 10:1-9). There is only one way into heaven : "Jesus saith unto him, I am the way, ... no man cometh unto the Father, but by me" (John 14:6). "Neither is there salvation in any other: for there is none other name under heaven given among men, whereby we must be saved" (Acts 4:12).

Why is it that none of those seven ways, nor all of them together, will save a man: service, reformation, being a man, right thinking, denying the existence of sin, denying self, and sacrifice?