Reconciliated Truths

Do you believe God raised Jesus from the dead? Yes? Well, my friend, that is the gospel of your salvation and you just accepted it. Rejoice!

Ask a Christian how a person is saved, and the answer depends on whom you ask.

A Roman Catholic will tell you that salvation comes through the Church and its sacraments, beginning with baptism, and is worked out through a life of faith and love. An Eastern Orthodox believer will tell you that salvation is a lifelong process of being drawn into union with God through the life of the Church. An Anglican will tell you it comes by grace through faith, received and nourished in baptism and the sacraments. A Lutheran will tell you that you are saved by grace alone, through faith alone, and that God Himself works that faith through His Word and the sacraments.

A Baptist or evangelical will tell you that you are saved when you are born again by personally accepting Christ as your Savior. A Pentecostal may add that you should also receive the baptism of the Holy Spirit. A Oneness Pentecostal will tell you that you must repent, be baptized in the name of Jesus only, and receive the Spirit with the evidence of speaking in tongues. A Methodist will tell you that you are saved by grace through faith, and that a saved life keeps growing in holiness.

The Churches of Christ teach that to be saved you must hear, believe, repent, confess, and be baptized for the remission of sins. A Reformed Calvinist will tell you that salvation belongs only to those God sovereignly chose as His elect. A Seventh-day Adventist will tell you that you are saved by faith, and that a saved life shows itself in keeping God’s commandments, including the Sabbath. A Hebrew Roots believer will tell you that faith in Yeshua is shown by keeping the Torah, the Sabbath, the feasts, and the dietary laws.

A Jehovah’s Witness will tell you that you must have faith in Christ’s ransom and prove it through obedience, baptism as a Witness, sharing the message, and remaining faithful to the end. A Latter-day Saint will tell you that you are saved by grace after all you can do, through faith, repentance, baptism, temple ordinances, and enduring to the end.

And that is only a sample. Walk into any other church and you will hear yet another version.

And a Concordant believer will tell you that you cannot simply choose to believe. God must first approach you, having foreknown you, and give you the faith to believe. Until He does, no amount of hearing the Gospel will make a difference. Which leaves you wondering why Paul spent his life traveling the world just to announce it?

Every one of these is a “doctrine” built by interpreting Paul’s message in light of whatever else that sect holds to the scriptures. Yet beneath every one of them is a single fact they all affirm: Jesus Christ was raised from the dead and is Lord.

And that is exactly how simple God made it. Paul did not hand the nations a system. He handed them an announcement. Christ died, He was buried, He was raised on the third day, and He now lives as Lord. If you believe God raised Him from the dead, you are in. That is the whole entrance into the Body of Christ.

Paul calls it the gospel of your salvation, in Ephesians 1:13.

Belief is not what earns that standing. Christ’s death and resurrection accomplished it, and no one can take credit for it. Belief is simply how God gathers His people into the Body during this age of grace. That includes Christians who still think they must work for their salvation. If they believe Christ died and rose, they are in the Body.

Peter preached a different message, to Israel, and we will get to that. But how does someone who is working for it get into the Body? Isn’t that Peter’s evangel? Yes, it is. But guess what? The administration Peter’s evangel belongs to is not the one running today. Paul’s is. So when you add works to your belief, Paul says they are reckoned as a debt owed, not as a favor, in Romans 4:4. That does not put you out of the Body. It puts you under a weight Christ already carried.

In simple terms, all of mankind was saved from the moment God the Father, Elohim Yahweh, raised Jesus from the dead. Israel’s covenant sins were paid for on the cross, and the Gentiles’ redemption from death was achieved by His resurrection.

What we do with that belief is measured later, at the Dais of Christ. That is not for our salvation, but for the Prize: the reward of reigning in the heavenly administration to come.

Some will hear all of this and ask, so can I do anything? Paul answers that himself, twice. In 1 Corinthians 6:12, and again in chapter 10, verse 23, he writes,

“All is allowed me.”

He means it. The nations were never handed a law to keep, so there is no rulebook to follow to stay in and no list of sins that can put you out. That holds even for the thing we fight over most: doctrine.

But look at what he adds both times. Not everything is expedient. Not everything is edifying. And in chapter 6, he will not be mastered by anything. Those are not new laws. They are what a free person weighs: does this help, does this build up, does this own me. In chapter 10, verse 24, he points that weighing outward, toward the good of the other person. And what we build is tested at the Dais of Christ. Freedom does not remove the Dais. It means the Dais is where it counts.

Paul does warn that those who practice certain things will not enjoy the allotment of God’s kingdom, in Galatians 5:21, and Ephesians 5:5. But in 1 Corinthians 6:11, right after his own list, he tells the Corinthians that such were some of them, and that they were washed, sanctified, and justified. Their standing was settled. What a life costs is the Prize, and membership is never on the line.

And this Body will not be a small, exclusive few. It will be a multitude too large to count, a new creation with its own celestial government. One day it will be snatched away to meet our Head, the Lord Christ Jesus, in the air.

Let’s look at what Paul actually wrote.

“Now I am making known to you, brethren, the Gospel which I bring to you, which also you accepted, in which also you stand, through which also you are saved, if you are retaining what I said in bringing the Gospel to you, outside and except you believe feignedly. For I give over to you among the first what also I accepted, that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures, and that He was entombed, and that He has been roused the third day according to the scriptures” – 1 Corinthians 15:1-4

Notice something subtle about the historical order. If you have read Acts, you know Paul went to the Jews in their synagogues and assemblies first, and only then to the Gentiles, just as he says in Romans 1:16, to the Jew first. So notice how Paul frames the Gospel here. Here he states:

“…among the first…”

and notice how Paul frames it. Twice he says:

“…according to the scriptures”

That phrase points to Israel’s scriptures: the Law, the sacrifices, and the prophets. The nations were never entrusted with those. Romans 3:2 says the oracles of God were entrusted to the Jews, and the synagogue was Israel’s house. A Gentile who sat in it was a guest hearing someone else’s scriptures. It is the Jew who held them, who read them, and who needed to see that Jesus fulfilled them.

Paul lays the evidence out like a legal record, built to be checked against what Israel already held. Christ died for our sins: the sacrifice the Law pointed to. He was entombed: His death was verified and official. He was roused the third day: just as the scriptures foretold. And in the verses that follow, Paul lists the witnesses, Peter, the twelve, more than 500 brethren at once, and finally himself. Under the Law, a matter was established by two or three witnesses. Paul gives far more than enough.

This is the Jew’s ledger. It is the case a Jew needed in order to come into the realization that Jesus truly is the Christ. Paul handed it to the Corinthians too, among them Crispus, the ruler of the synagogue, and it stands there for anyone who asks why. But the nations are not saved by checking the ledger. They are saved by what the ledger proves.

But for the Gentile, Paul reduces it to its core.

“If we are believing that Jesus died and rose.”

“If you should be believing in your heart that God rouses Him from among the dead, you shall be saved.”

That is all the Gentile needs: God raised Jesus from the dead, and He is Lord.

So what does that mean when you share the Gospel? Think of a car. The car itself is the announcement: Christ died, and God raised Him from the dead. That is what you hand to someone. 1 Corinthians 15 is what is under the hood. It shows the why: the scriptures, the burial, the witnesses, the record that makes the announcement trustworthy. Paul laid it out to people who were wavering about the resurrection, to show how the engine works. It was never meant to be the script you read to a stranger. Nobody needs the hood opened just to get a ride. But if someone asks why they should trust it, the hood is there, and the record stands.

Paul writes the chapter because some in Corinth were saying there is no resurrection of the dead, so he is giving grounds, not a pitch. That is also what the warning in verse 2 is about. Believing in vain, as verses 14 & 17 show, means believing in a Christ who was not raised. The condition was never a performance test. It was the resurrection itself.

To the Thessalonians, Paul writes:

“For, if we are believing that Jesus died and rose, thus also, those who are put to repose, will God, through Jesus, lead forth together with Him.” – 1 Thessalonians 4:14

Who was Paul writing to? In the very first chapter he tells us. These were people who “turn back to God from idols, to be slaving for the living and true God.” Jews did not worship idols. These were Gentiles. And the hope Paul gives them here is not Israel’s earthly kingdom. It is the snatching away, being caught up to meet the Lord in the air. This is the Body of Christ’s hope, written to Gentiles, resting on one simple belief: that Jesus died and rose.

Then to the Romans, Paul writes:

“that, if ever you should be avowing with your mouth the declaration that Jesus is Lord, and should be believing in your heart that God rouses Him from among the dead, you shall be saved.“ – Romans 10:9

Some will say that Romans 9-11 are only about Israel, so this verse belongs to Israel. It’s true that Paul opens chapter 10 with his prayer for Israel. But look at what he says just three verses later:

“For there is no distinction between Jew as well as Greek, for the same One is Lord of all, being rich for all who are invoking Him.”

And in the next chapter, still inside that same section, he turns and says plainly, “Now to you I am saying, to the nations.”

Paul is not giving Israel a private formula. He is describing how anyone, Jew or Gentile, comes to believe: hearing that God raised Jesus from the dead, and trusting it in the heart. That’s not a ritual of one administration. It’s simply what believing is.

So whether you read Paul to the Thessalonians or Paul to the Romans, the message for the nations is the same. God raised Jesus from the dead, and He is Lord. That is all the Gentile needs.

Two questions come up right away. First: didn’t Paul preach repentance to the nations? He did. In Acts 17:30, God tells the nations everywhere to repent, and in Acts 20:21, Paul says he testified to Jews and Greeks alike of repentance toward God and faith toward our Lord Jesus Christ. But look at what it meant for the nations. The Thessalonians turned back to God from idols, 1 Thessalonians 1:9. Repentance is a change of mind, and for them it was a change of mind about who God is. It was never a list of sins to confess and quit.

Second: what about baptism? In 1 Corinthians 1:17, Paul says Christ did not send him to baptize, but to announce the evangel. That would be a strange thing to say if baptism were part of what saves. The baptism that places a believer in the Body is the one in 1 Corinthians 12:13, in one Spirit, and God does the baptizing.

The First Thing Ever Written

Here is something that rarely gets mentioned. Most scholars date 1 Thessalonians to around the year 50. That is roughly 20 years after the cross, and well before any of the four Gospels was written down.

So ask yourself a simple question. When the first Christian letter went out to the nations, what did it say?

You just read it. Jesus died and rose, and those who believe it will be gathered to meet Him in the air. That is the whole entrance. Not a checklist. Not a sinner’s prayer. Not a list of requirements to keep your place.

Many of us were taught the story in the other order. The Gospels came first, then Paul came along and built a system on top of them. But the writing runs the other way. The first thing the Gentile world ever received in writing was the announcement, and everything else came after.

That fits what Paul says himself. He did not assemble this from the Gospels. It was revealed to him by the risen Lord.

And realizing this brings joy, peace, freedom, and rest, by the truth of God’s plan for all of life’s creation.

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What makes the Gospel life-giving?

1. Christ died for all. Opposed by the religious system of His day, Jesus was put to death. Unlike Adam, who disobeyed, He bore no sin of His own. Sin, as God counts it, was a matter of covenant between God and the Jewish people under the law of Moses, and through His faithful obedience Jesus fulfilled that covenant for them. The rest of the world was never under it. What the nations carried was the death that came through Adam, and His death undid that too. We benefit alongside Israel from a work that was done for Israel.
2. He was buried. His burial proves the reality of His death. Jesus was fully dead, asleep in the tomb, not floating in some mystical realm and not suffering in an underworld on our behalf. He was awaiting the life God had promised through the scriptures of the forefathers.
3. He was raised. God raised Jesus physically back to life on the third day, proving that death is defeated and has no final place over all creation, which was subjected to its curse through Adam’s disobedience.
4. The Gospel produces freedom and life. This message is given to awaken trust, hope, rest, and love. It was never meant to produce the fear, shame, anxiety, or condemnation that religion uses to control people. It is the promise of life, leading to the vivification of all things at the end of the eons.
5. Where it came from. Not from the earthly Jesus, who at that time served only the Jews of Israel. This good news was announced from the heavens by the risen Christ Jesus, who sits at the right hand of God, and given to the Apostle Paul to announce what has been done. The war to prove yourself righteous before God is over.

In short: Jesus was raised from the dead and lives today. Do you believe it?

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The Tale of the Two Gospels: The Great Confusion

To fully grasp why the religious world is so confused, mixing law with grace and fear with faith, we must recognize a distinction that most of Christendom completely ignores.

The Scriptures do not present one generic message woven smoothly from Matthew to Revelation. Rather, they reveal a distinct division of administration, explicitly stated by the Apostle Paul. In Galatians 2:7-9, he writes:

“But, on the contrary, perceiving that I have been entrusted with the evangel of the uncircumcision, according as Peter of the circumcision, for He Who operates in Peter for the apostleship of the circumcision operates in me also for the nations, and knowing the grace that is given to me, James and Cephas and John, who are reputed to be pillars, give to me and Barnabas the right hand of fellowship, that we are to be for the nations, yet they for the Circumcision.”

Here, the Spirit of God identifies two distinct commissions. The Gospel of the Circumcision, the Kingdom, was entrusted to Peter and the Twelve, for the Jews of Israel. The Gospel of the Uncircumcision, the Grace of God, was entrusted to Paul, for Jews and Gentiles of all the nations.

Someone will point to Galatians 1:7, where Paul says there is not another evangel. But the same letter, one chapter later, names the evangel of the circumcision and the evangel of the uncircumcision. So Paul cannot mean there is only one commission. What he refuses is a rival: men adding the Law to grace and calling it the same announcement.

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The Gospel of the Kingdom: Peter’s Commission

This message was preached by Jesus of Nazareth and the Twelve to Israel. It concerned the prophetic hope of the Jewish nation: the earthly Kingdom, the restoration of David’s throne, and the Messiah ruling the nations with a rod of iron.

Its target was the lost sheep of the house of Israel, as Jesus Himself said in Matthew 15. Its requirements were repentance, water baptism, keeping the Law, and forgiving others in order to be forgiven, as Acts 2 and Matthew 5 show. Its focus was the King coming to reign on earth. And its status was faith working together with works, as James wrote, shown by enduring to the end.

And notice: even Peter’s gospel stood on the resurrection. On the day of Pentecost he proclaimed that God raised up this Jesus, and made Him both Lord and Christ. The difference was everything Israel had to add to it.

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The Gospel of the Grace of God: Paul’s Commission

This message was a secret, kept hidden from the eons, as Paul tells us at the end of Romans, until it was revealed to him by the resurrected, ascended, and glorified Lord Jesus Christ. It is not about an earthly kingdom, but a celestial calling for a new body of believers: the Body of Christ.

Its target is the nations, Jews and Gentiles alike, the uncircumcision, as Paul explains in Ephesians 3. Its requirement is belief alone in the finished work of Christ. As Romans 4 says, to the one who is not working, but believing, his faith is reckoned for righteousness. Its focus is a Savior who has already dealt with sin and conciliated the world to Himself, not reckoning their offenses to them. And its status is this:

“For in grace, through faith, are you saved, and this is not out of you; it is God’s approach present, not of works, lest anyone should be boasting.”

The two messages also point to two destinations. Peter’s message looks forward to a kingdom on the earth, with the Messiah ruling and the 12 tribes judged from 12 thrones. You can see it in Matthew 19:28, and in Daniel 7:27. Paul’s message looks to the heavens, where the Body is already seated with Christ. You can see it in Ephesians 2:6, and in 2 Timothy 4:18. Different commissions, different destinations.

You can see the turn in Acts. Peter and John are threatened in chapter 4, the apostles are beaten in chapter 5, and in chapter 7 the Spirit’s witness is answered with stones when Stephen is killed. Stephen sees Jesus standing at God’s right hand, and a young man named Saul stands by approving, with the coats of the executioners at his feet. In chapter 9 that same Saul is stopped on the road to Damascus by the risen Christ, who tells him that He is the one Saul is persecuting, and sends him to the nations, and to Israel too. The man who watched Israel’s leaders push away the Spirit’s witness became the one sent to everyone else.

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The Deadly Mixture

The reason we see so much fear, condemnation, and uncertainty in the church today is that religious leaders, through enforced tradition, have blended these two gospels into one, through heavy mistranslation and a misunderstanding of Jewish culture and its poetic way of describing the world.

They take the warnings meant for Israel under the Law and yoke them onto the backs of Gentile believers, who are meant to be free under grace. The truth most people miss is that God never gave the Law to the Gentiles. He gave it only to the nation of Israel, through Moses.

This began with the Jews of that time. They were given a season to accept Jesus as Lord and receive Him as their nation’s Messiah. Instead, they rejected Him, and they blasphemed the holy spirit. That rejection is what brought about the secret entrusted to Paul.

But many Jews of that era did not understand that Israel’s season for Peter’s evangel was giving way to Paul’s commission. So when Paul took his message to the Gentiles, some of these Jews followed him abroad, skeptical of his work, insisting the Gentiles must take on their requirements. They did not realize Paul had been given a different announcement. It no longer centered on their earthly kingdom, because their nation had rejected Jesus as the Christ.

Luke records this in Acts 15:1. Men came down from Judea and taught the brethren that unless they were circumcised after the custom of Moses, they could not be saved. Paul called them false brethren, smuggled in to spy out our freedom in Christ Jesus. That’s Galatians 2:4.

These Judaizers are the ones who brought faith plus works to the Galatians. And that mixture has carried on into the teachings of the “Christian” sects ever since.

And it has never stopped. Today, religious tradition still steals from Peter to burden Paul. They take the endurance required of Israel during the indignation and preach it as a requirement for your salvation today. This creates a hybrid gospel, what Paul calls in Galatians 1 a different evangel. It produces neither Kingdom righteousness nor grace-filled rest and truly humbled hearts. It produces only confusion and fear.

To stand in the truth is to rightly divide these messages. We do not despise Peter’s gospel for the circumcision, because we recognize it was for the nation of Israel. But we rejoice that we have been called into the Evangel of Grace, where the work is already finished. Our standing before God rests solely on the finished work and faith of Christ Jesus, accomplished on the cross and proven true by His Resurrection.

Not on our performance, as it stands for Israel to fulfill through the coming indignation of Jacob’s trouble, which begins only after the restrainer, the Body of Christ, has been removed from the earth.

Some will ask what happens to a person who believes Peter’s message instead of Paul’s. Look at what that message already contains: that God raised Jesus from the dead. Peter says it in Acts 2:32. And Paul’s promise in Romans 10:9, has no exception for which sermon you heard first. We do not place ourselves in the Body by getting the doctrine right. 1 Corinthians 12:13 says it is done in one Spirit. God does the placing. What a wrong understanding costs is the Prize, never membership.

Which brings us to the heaviest piece of that mixture, and the one that may change how you read your Bible.

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The Weight of “Sin” You Were Never Ever Meant to Carry

I want to speak to two kinds of listeners here, and I want to be clear about who is who.

If you are not Jewish, this part is for you. If you are Jewish, stay with me, because this is about you too, and nothing in it is taken from you.

Start with Israel. In Romans 3:1, Paul asks what advantage the Jew has. His answer is much, in every way, first of all that the oracles of God were entrusted to them. In Romans 9:4-5, he lists it: the adoption, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the promises, the fathers, and from them, according to the flesh, the Christ. The covenant was real. The law was real. God Himself gave it to Israel, with terms, and under those terms sin was counted. Paul never takes that back. In Romans 11:29, he says the gifts and the calling of God are not regretted.

Jesus stepped into that. Romans 15:8: He became a servant of the circumcision, for the truth of God, to confirm the promises made to the fathers. He was faithful where Israel was not, and He fulfilled that covenant on their behalf. And verse 9 tells you why it matters to the rest of us: so that the nations might glorify God for mercy. The nations were never the debtors. We are the ones who received the mercy.

Now, the rest of us. Whose covenant was it? Not ours. Paul writes to the nations in Ephesians 2:11-12, and tells them they were at one time alienated from the commonwealth of Israel and strangers to the covenants of the promise. He does not say it to shame us. He says it to show how far the grace traveled. And this is why Paul, the apostle of the nations, can say in Romans 5:13, that sin is not reckoned when there is no law. In Romans 3:19, whatever the law says, it says to those who are in the law.

If you were never in the law, you were never on that ledger. What the nations carried was death, the death that came through Adam. 1 Corinthians 15:22:

“as in Adam all die, so also in the Christ shall all be made alive.”

And 2 Corinthians 5:19:

“God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself, not reckoning to them their trespasses.”

Now, someone is already thinking of Romans 3:23:

“all sinned and fall short of the glory of God.”

Fair. Let’s take it head on.

Paul never says the nations were innocent. He says they were dead. Romans 2:12: those who sinned without law will also perish without law. And in Romans 5:12-14, sin entered the world through one man and death through sin, and death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over people who did not sin in the likeness of Adam’s transgression. Death ruled the nations with no law to break. In verse 21 he says sin reigns in death. That is sin as a condition we were born into, not an account being kept against us.

Yes, Romans 3:9 says Jews and Greeks alike are all under sin, and verse 19 says every mouth is stopped and the whole world is held accountable to God. Notice the point of it. Nobody, Jew or Greek, has a righteousness of their own to bring. The very next verses say God’s righteousness comes through faith to all who believe, for there is no distinction. That levels the boasting. It does not move the nations onto Israel’s ledger.

And yes, Paul uses the words sins and offenses when he writes to the nations, as in Ephesians 2:1. He is describing what dead people do. What he never says is that God is writing it down. He says the opposite. 2 Corinthians 5:19:

“God was in Christ conciliating the world to Himself, not reckoning to them their trespasses.”

He does not say they had none. He says God is not counting them.

So here is the claim, stated as carefully as the text allows. The nations are not reckoned as covenant-breakers, and God is not counting their trespasses. What they carry is death, and the answer to death is the resurrection. That is why the announcement is that God raised Him.

Think about how long you, a non-Jew, have spent keeping a ledger on yourself. Everything in the Bible that sounded like disapproval of behavior, you labeled “sin” and stamped on your own name. But God never once reckoned that account to your kind. The Gentiles.

Christians are so worked up about “sin” that they do not realize what they are doing. To Christ and to God, they are roleplaying their entire lives as though they were reckoned as Jews of Israel. And you never were. Not ever.

So if your church is preaching sin at you and condemning you for it, realize this: you were never part of the nation of Israel. Do not give one iota of a damn about it. Abolish the ledger. Sin, as the law counts it, is not the lens God looks at you through, and never has been. Not counting. Not keeping your file. That account belongs to Israel alone, under the covenant He made with them. The sin language of the Old Testament especially was written to and for the Jewish people of the nation of Israel, not the world at large.

Now notice what this does to the way the Gospel gets announced. Walk into almost any church in the West and the message arrives wrapped in sin. You are a sinner. Jesus died for your sins. Repent of your sins. The nations are being told to apologize for a debt that was never written in their name, and they repeat it to one another as if it meant something to them.

Look at what the nations actually told each other. They turned from idols to wait for the Son God raised from the dead. They believed that Jesus died and rose. No sin inventory. No confession list. Even where Paul recites that Christ died for sins, the thing the nations believed was that God raised Him.

That was the whole announcement. He died. God raised Him. He lives.

Wow! What a relief! Right!?

And to my Jewish audience, hear me clearly. You are not a footnote in this story, and you are not the villain. This was your covenant, your Messiah, and your promises, and He did it for you first. The rest of us receive the overflow with gratitude, not entitlement. Paul says it himself in Romans 11:18, to the nations: “we do not bear the root. The root bears us.”

And if you are Jewish and you believe that God raised Jesus from the dead, you are not waiting outside of anything. Paul himself was a Hebrew of Hebrews, and he counted everything he had in that covenant as loss for this very thing. In 1 Corinthians 12:13, Jews and Greeks were baptized into one body. One body, no second tier.

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Sharing the Gospel

True sharing of the Gospel is all about “Promise and Rest“ via announcement, not performance, nor a threat. You do not need to rely on religious institutions or human approval to be saved. You already are. Your belief in accepting that “event” through realizing that simple fact makes all the difference in the world!

The message is:
“What Christ has done is already complete. You cannot earn it. Everyone was graced by God’s approach, which was given as a free gift through Christ’s sacrifice on the cross. This is a reality no one can boast in or take credit for, simply because we are completely incapable of achieving it ourselves. All we do is live by trusting that His faith accomplished it for us through His resurrection.”

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What are examples of sharing The Gospel?

These examples are seen in Marz who does not rely on religious institutions. He lives freely and lovingly, without facades or the need to perform. His confidence rests not in what they might accomplish, but in what is already accomplished because of Jesus Christ and the testimony of what is truth about God the Father.

The Gospel is the recognition of what was done for us, never a call to prove ourselves by what we must now do for Him.

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The Funeral Test

Here is a test you can run on any gospel. Say it out loud at a funeral.

Picture a mother whose son has just died. He never went to church. He never said the prayer. Now picture the gospel you were taught, spoken to her face. What does it say?

For many, it comes down to two choices. Either the speaker softens it, and tells her he is with God anyway, even though their own doctrine says otherwise. Or the speaker tells the truth as the doctrine has it, and condemns her child to her face on the worst day of her life.

If a message can only be spoken by softening it or by wounding the grieving, it is not good news. It is a message that has to be hidden from the very people who need it most.

Now try Paul’s. Christ died. He was buried. He was raised. And because God raised Him, God will make all alive in Christ. Paul says so in 1 Corinthians 15:22. That is a message you can say to them honestly. You don’t have to soften it, and you don’t have to hide it.

That is the test. A good announcement can be spoken to anyone, at any time, with nothing to hide. If it can’t, ask why.

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The Worldly Response: Hearing the Good News

Paul said this in the synagogue at Pisidian Antioch, to Israelites and God-fearing Gentiles, while Israel’s season was still open.

“Let it be known to you, then, men, brethren, that through This One is being announced to you the pardon of sins, and that from all from which you could not be justified by the law of Moses, in This One everyone who is believing is being justified.” – Acts 13:38-39

Years later, Paul wrote this to Timothy.

“…that we rely on the living God, Who is the Saviour of all mankind, especially of believers. These things be charging and teaching.” – 1 Timothy 4:10-11

Now let’s watch what happens when truth lands on a room built to protect itself. This scene from the TV series The Chosen is a dramatization, drawn from Matthew 23 and Luke 11. Jesus is speaking to Israel’s religious leaders under the Law, so His woes are for them. What carries over to us is not the words. It is the reaction. It is what believers still meet today when the grace of God is shared with people who hold to ritual and tradition.

Notice what He is not doing. He is not losing His temper. He is showing them the gap between the outside of the cup and the inside, between tithing mint and dill and cumin and neglecting justice, mercy, and faithfulness. They have a perfect record on paper and nothing underneath it.

Notice what they do with it. They do not examine the claim. They defend the institution. He is dangerous. He is leading you astray. His words are blasphemous. Take it back right now. When performance is exposed, the performers do not repent. They call the truth a threat and demand a retraction.

This truth was meant for all Israel to see about the Father, especially those who claimed to honor Him in the synagogues of that day. And the pattern has not changed. Tell a room that the entrance is simply that God raised Jesus from the dead, with nothing to add and nothing to prove, and you will hear the same thing. That is dangerous. That is not enough. Take it back.

This is exactly what Paul met. He went to the synagogue first, as he always did, with the announcement of grace. In Acts 13:46, when Israel’s leaders pushed it away, he told them it had been necessary to speak to them first, and since they thrust it from them, he was turning to the nations. Nobody ever recorded an announcement that the Kingdom was on pause. When the disciples asked in Acts 1:6, whether He would restore the kingdom to Israel at that time, the answer was that the times were not theirs to know. What changed was seen on Paul’s road. Each time Israel pushed back, the door swung wider toward the nations, until Rome, where he said it plainly in Acts 28:28.

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The Friendly Fire of the “Indoctrinated”

I am not tearing down the entire Christian faith here. But it is undeniable that many raised in religious “Christianity” mirror the very Pharisees and Sadducees Jesus confronted. So, I want to look at Christianity the way Jesus looked at the religious leaders of His own day.

We see it constantly. Outward self-righteousness, pious pride, and masking, from the faith’s leaders, its congregations, its street preachers, and its content creators. They boast publicly of a spiritual standing they did not earn, while implying that those outside their faith are more dangerous and more sinful. Yet Jesus Himself said, in Mark 10:18:

“Why are you calling Me good? No one is good except One, God.”

Luke records the very same words.

Christians continually miss the mark when they posture as representatives of Jesus Christ to the public. Paul described this exactly in 2 Timothy 3:5:

“having a form of devoutness, yet denying its power.”

They lean on fear, damnation, and doctrinal accuracy as the driving motivators for belief, and in doing so they hide God’s loving character.

This fear-based posture comes straight from the deadly mixture: taking the strict, performance-based requirements meant for Israel’s earthly kingdom and strapping them onto a body of believers meant to live freely under pure grace. The friendly fire we see in the church today is the tragic symptom. Believers shooting at one another, because they are terrified their salvation is always on thin ice. This kind of tradition discourages real participation in life. It trains people to resent, shame, and condemn the very lives they were meant to live, and to love freely with everyone on this earth.

When Jesus confronted the religious elite, His primary concern was how man’s systems distort God’s character. Fear-based religion produces surface compliance while leaving the heart untouched. It leaves the heart proud, and unable to simply live and let live. It builds people who look righteous on the outside, while remaining anxious, resentful, and unchanged within. Religious people can certainly do loving things. But when that behavior comes from institutional pressure, it becomes a performance.

That is exactly what the word hypocrisy meant. In Greek, a hypocrite was a stage actor, someone wearing a mask for an audience. And Paul used that very word in Galatians 2:13, when Peter pulled away from eating with the Gentiles to please those from Jerusalem, and even Barnabas was led away with their hypocrisy. The mask came from the deadly mixture itself.

Paul also warned in Ephesians 6:12, that we are not wrestling with blood and flesh, but with sovereignties and authorities. He wasn’t speaking of mythological ghosts or winged monsters in a heavenly realm. Using the Jewish idioms of his day, he was pointing to the earthly hostile systems of religious and governing authority. Not the people themselves, but the systematic structures they serve. The true spiritual warfare of our time right now on earth is surviving the friendly fire of varying doctrines brought about by institutional religion.

And tragically, every sect of “Christianity” runs on the same mechanism. That includes the Concordant groups, who fiercely reject the label, yet operate the same way. They build walls around their own vocabulary, declare superior insight, and spend their energy fighting over who holds the “correct doctrine.”

Religion markets “sound doctrine” as a positive trainer, but it so often turns into indoctrination. And many who insist they are not part of any religion have simply built a new one. It is still a religion. True instruction frees the mind and produces love. Indoctrination trains people to defend a system and look down on others, turning the study of Scripture into a competitive blood sport, driven by both fear and hate. When doctrine becomes an identity test instead of a guide for the heart, it fails to produce any real growth.

I never had an identity to defend in any of this. I wasn’t raised in a religious household. Church was not part of my upbringing, and no one handed me a lens for judging the world. I had to make sense of it from what I could see for myself, apart from the conversations I had with the people I crossed paths with. So I came to these questions as an outsider, and I never quite fit into any of these camps. Still today, I do not.

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The Cookie Test

Let me put it a simpler way.

Imagine every sect of Christianity as a baker. Every one of them knows what a cookie is. Every one of them knows how to bake it. They are all making the same thing.

The Roman Catholics bake chocolate chip. The Eastern Orthodox bake shortbread. The Baptists and evangelicals bake peanut butter. The Pentecostals bake sugar cookies. The Churches of Christ bake oatmeal. The Reformed bake oatmeal raisin. The Seventh-day Adventists bake pumpkin. The Concordant groups bake snickerdoodles. The Jehovah’s Witnesses bake with sprinkles. The Latter-day Saints bake gingerbread. And if I left out your church, you already know your recipe, and there is room on the plate.

Each one is convinced that theirs is the only real recipe. Each one holds out the plate and says, this is the cookie, and everything else is a counterfeit. They argue over the ingredients, over the oven temperature, over who is allowed at the table.

Now try something. Walk up to every one of those bakers and ask the same plain question: do you believe that Jesus died, and that God raised Him from the dead? Every one of them will tell you yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. All the way down the line.

That is the cookie. Jesus Christ was raised from the dead and is Lord. It is the one ingredient none of them can leave out. Take it out, and you no longer have a cookie. But as long as it is there, it is a cookie, however it was baked.

Ask them how, and that is when the arguing starts. What kind of body. What it means. What comes next. Those are the ingredients, and the ingredients are where every recipe differs.

So put down the plate. Stop telling the world that yours is the only cookie. Offer it with love, and let the baker next to you offer theirs.

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In reality, those factional wars mean nothing. At the Dais, Christ will examine what every believer did with their heart after receiving the Evangel of Grace. He will assess whether we rightly divided the Scripture, not to hand out bragging rights, but to prepare us to teach as He taught. Those awarded the highest Prize will understand the ultimate message: no one is condemned to eternal torment, God loves all equally, and denominational labels mean nothing to Christ or the Father.

My desire is to see believers reconciled in the shared confession that Jesus was raised from the dead. Whether someone holds traditional afterlife views, or even believes the unsaved deserve eternal punishment, none of those arguments threaten their place in the Body. We can afford to extend this grace, because God’s celestial administration vastly supersedes human understanding. Just as love within a marriage carries a spouse who doesn’t share the believer’s faith, the Evangel carries believers even when their doctrines are mixed and their understanding is clouded. The administration of Grace is an objective reality. It does not collapse just because the occupant misunderstands the engineering of the building. Otherwise, where is the Grace when we all need it? Where is it, if we claim we have it, but not for everyone?

Paul made this clear with the Galatians. They had deeply erred, mixing his Evangel of Grace with Peter’s earthly requirements for Israel. Paul asked them in Galatians 3:3: having begun in spirit, are you now being completed in flesh? He even warned them in chapter 5, verse 4, that those seeking to be justified by law fall out of grace. Some will say that means they lost their salvation. But notice what they fell out of. Not the Body. They fell out of living in grace, and back under the weight of law. The curse in chapter 1, verses 8 and 9, falls on whoever preaches another evangel, not on the believers who were being misled. In the very same letter, Paul calls them all sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus, and says he has confidence in them in the Lord. He fiercely rebuked their doctrine, but he never revoked their standing. Belief that God raised Jesus from the dead was the unshakable foundation. Paul’s Evangel is about the event, not the doctrine of it.

So the friendly fire we engage in today is a pointless war. Doctrinal mistakes do not threaten a believer’s rescue. They are only the measure of what we will receive. Paul says in 1 Corinthians 3, that whatever is built on the foundation with wood, hay, and stubble will be burned up. But in verse 15, he says the builder himself shall be saved, yet so as through fire. The flawed doctrines and fear-based systems will be consumed in the light of the Dais. The believer will be saved, corrected, and held safely by the very Grace they misunderstood.

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Conclusion

Neither Jesus nor Paul motivated people through fear of abandonment. If they had, we would read it plain as day in the Scriptures. There would be no need for leaders to force their own twisted interpretations onto the text to coerce people and hold onto power.

Jesus revealed the Father as already present, already loving, and already giving life. His call to repentance was not a threat. It was an invitation to the people of Israel to see life differently: to turn away from dead assumptions about who God was, and to realize that He has loved everyone all along, through a mighty promise fulfilled in His Son, Christ Jesus.

The same is true of the Apostle Paul. Christ Jesus, from the heavens, revealed to Saul, who became Paul, the secret of the administration, and the new creation open to all nations during this undisclosed period of grace. Paul was given to complete the word of God. He says so in Colossians 1:25. And in all 13 of his letters, Paul never once warned mankind of a hell, or a place of endless torment. He does write of indignation and eonian punishment, as in 2 Thessalonians 1:6-9, but eonian means age-lasting, and an age ends. Everything he wrote proclaimed the utter goodness of God, and what Christ accomplished on the cross for humanity, proven true when God raised Him from the dead.

I believe Paul wrote with Israel in mind as well as the nations. He was a Hebrew of Hebrews, and no other apostle wrote as much of the New Testament. When the Body is snatched away, the many who believed what he heralded will be gone in an instant, and to Israel it will look as though the world has died. The restrainer will be out of the way, and Jacob’s trouble will begin. Then the Two Witnesses will speak, and I believe many in Israel will pick up the New Testament, Paul included, and read it straight through. In Romans 11:25-26, they will find how their story ends. In 2 Thessalonians 2, they will find the man of lawlessness named before he arrives. They will see how what they once held was fulfilled, and how much more was promised than they had in their hands.

And here is the irony. So many build their doctrine on how right they are. They boast, not in what they did, but in how correctly they believe. As if believing the right way were itself the achievement that justifies them. But that is just another work, wearing different clothes. Paul shut that door in Romans 3:27:

“Where, then, is boasting? It is debarred.“

And again in Ephesians 2:8-9:

“it is not of yourselves, it is God’s approach present, not of works, lest anyone should be boasting.”

The Concordant groups fall into the very same trap, just from the other side. They teach that faith itself is God’s gift, that no one can simply choose to believe unless God approaches you with His presence. But the gift was Jesus Himself. Make faith the gift, and faith becomes the thing everyone inspects instead of the One it rests on. Faith becomes an idol of its own to boast in. And still they speak as though one must come to realize the reconciliation of all, to truly be in. But that realization is not part of the requirement. Paul never made it one. It is a blessing to see it, a wonderful one. But it counts toward nothing more than a measure of how rightly we cut the word of truth. And that belongs to the Dais, and the Prize. Not to whether we belong.

None of that is the gospel. The gospel is not about how well we understand, especially when it comes to “doctrine”. It is about what God did with Jesus Christ, and what He has promised to do for everyone.

Then there is the “sound doctrine” Paul wrote of. The word he uses for sound, as in Titus 2:1, means healthy. It is teaching that produces good health in the heart of the believer. If a doctrine poisons the heart with hate, envy, jealousy, strife, malice, and contempt, that doctrine is demonic. If a doctrine is sound, it produces love, kindness, meekness, gentleness, and most profoundly, rest. No one who is speaking loudly is demonstrating that, or proclaiming it. A doctrine that says all of humanity is one family of brothers and sisters is sound, and Christlike at heart.

The sooner you realize this, the more relief you will feel when you see someone speaking things that are untrue. You can say, “It’s okay. They haven’t found it out yet.” But they will, at the Dais.

So what is the gospel? It is not a system. It is not a performance. It is not a doctrine. It is an announcement. Christ died, He was entombed, and He was raised. Believe that God raised Him from the dead, and you are in. Everything else is the measure of what you’ll receive, not whether you belong.

Before I end this, I want you to hear how good this news is for anyone who is just casually listening in, especially if you belong to another faith. If you are a Muslim, a Jew, a Hindu, a Buddhist, a Scientologist, a Satanist, or anything else, and you come to believe in your heart that God raised Jesus from the dead and is Lord, guess what? You do not have to leave your family, your culture, or your community first. You can live the life you choose, love whom you will, and no one needs to know it! What you do with that life is measured at the Dais, never at the door. And one day you will be snatched away into the clouds among all the believers, to meet Christ in the air and receive the allotment of immortality as part of one collective body in a New Creation, while the world below goes on into the Day of the Lord.

The faith you possess is nothing to boast about. It is a matter of your own heart, and God places you in the Body the moment you believe it. Romans 10:9 says to avow it with the mouth, and the word means to say the same thing God says. You can say it in the quiet privacy of your own room. No witnesses. It is a truth you do not have to speak to anyone. For all have been saved. They will just find out much later, after the fact. Therefore, there is nothing to fear.

Jesus did not come to scare people into obedience. He came to show them who God truly is. Love. And when that love is seen clearly, as it was shown in Jesus, fear loses all its power. That loving truth is what sets you free.

I look forward to meeting you one day in the air, and in the heavens.

With love, grace, and peace to you all. Matthew.

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