Word of Salvation – Vol. 45 No. 04 – January 2000

 

Saved by Christ, Through Faith

 

Sermon by Rev. M. P. Geluk on Lord’s Day 7 (Heidelberg Catechism)

Scripture Reading: Matthew 7:13-23; Romans 11: 11-24

Suggested Hymns: BoW 217; 372; 427; 528

 

Beloved in the Lord.

Lord’s Day 7 speaks about the faith with which the Christian believer believes.

It’s always obvious when people are believers.  They draw the Bible and God into their lives.  It is not just a matter of saying the right words, nor of just being familiar with what the Bible teaches.  No, they face the issues of life, their joys and sorrows, the difficult times, the big decisions with lots of consequences, by looking to God.  They search the Bible, they pray, they think things through, and it shows that in their whole life there is a living relationship between them and God.

Ever since Adam and Eve fell into sin, God has come with His love and mercy to the sinful people of this world and offers them His salvation in Christ His Son.  More than anyone else, God knows what will happen to the unsaved when He has to judge them in His holy and pure justice.  But there is a way out.  Christ standing in for them can make sinners right with God.  When people believe that, then God and heaven rejoice.  We are looking then at this all-important Bible teaching:
             SAVED BY CHRIST THROUGH FAITH.
We will deal with this under three questions:
            Who are saved?
            What is true faith?
            And, what must the saved believe?

1.  Who are saved?

Has it ever struck you how few people are saved?  Mind you, the Bible says that when Christ returns the saved are a vast multitude that no man can number.  But many more are the lost.  The Catechism asks: “Are all saved through Christ just as all were lost through Adam?” And the answer is, no!

The whole human race came from Adam and Eve.  As time went on, more and more people filled the earth.  But already early in human history the great majority did one evil thing after another.  In fact, they so much plunged themselves into wickedness that they became accustomed to only think evil continually.  It grieved God so much that He destroyed the world of that time with a global flood.  Only Noah and his family were saved, on the ark.  Why only they?  Because they believed in God.  Their faith saved them from destruction.  The great flood was already a clear indication that not all sinners were going to be automatically saved.

From Noah the earth was populated once more.  The confusion of languages at the tower of Babel forced people to live in different places.  But from all these people only Abraham stands out as a believer.  God destroyed many people in Sodom and Gomorrah because of their wickedness and, again, only a few survived that judgment because they believed in God.

After Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and their families, God mainly concerned Himself with Israel.  He chose them to be the people of His covenant.  They received His laws, were given prophets, priests and kings, and the whole sacrificial system, to help them look forward to the coming of Christ the Saviour.  God by-passed the Philistines, the Moabites, the Amalekites, and many more nations.  Thousands of people, if not millions, were left in their wickedness.  Mind you, they heard from Israel what God had done for His covenant people – how He had saved His people from Egypt, led them miraculously through the Red Sea and the wilderness, providing for all their needs.  But Israel’s neighbours preferred to stay with their own false religions and despised God, the Maker of heaven and earth.  Only some individuals from these nations, like Rahab and Ruth, came to believe in the true God.  Again, not all descendants from Adam were saved.

Then, as we further trace the history of God’s Old Testament covenant people, it becomes painfully clear that only a portion of them were saved.  A great number of those who were given the privileges and responsibilities of the covenant were lost because of their wickedness against God.  And many times God expressed His grief through His prophets that so few were willing to serve and obey Him.  Because so many stubbornly refused to obey God, His justice had to prevail and the captivity took place.  All the tribes of Israel and Judah were carried away into foreign lands.  There they were dispersed and after seventy years only a few returned to Israel under Ezra and Nehemiah.  God’s covenant people struggled on for several hundreds of years until finally John the Baptist came on the scene and he called them back to repentance.  He prepared the way for Jesus, the long-awaited Messiah.

It was a wonderful time.  The Son of God, yes, God Himself, had come on earth.  As the second Adam, Christ was the perfect one who remained obedient and did not sin.  And He brought with Him the kingdom of God.  It consisted of God’s ways being taught completely and of people being made whole through wonderful miracles.  The lame walked, the blind saw, the deaf heard, lepers were healed and demons were driven out.  But when the Saviour died on the cross for the sins of others, how many were His followers?  There were quite a few.  But the Gospels point to many more not wanting to follow Him.  They could not bring themselves to believe in Him.  Their whole history pointed to the coming of Christ but when He finally came, thousands rejected Him.  “Away with Him,” they cried.

Christ’s resurrection took place but again only few believed it.  When the Lord returned to heaven He gave the great commission to only a few disciples.  And after they were empowered by the Holy Spirit to spread the gospel, thousands came to faith.  God no longer limited Himself to the Jews.  The gospel went also to the Gentiles.  Churches were planted all over the place.  By 330 AD, the Roman Empire had a Christian emperor on the throne.

Yet, Christians have always been a small group over against the masses of the world who prefer to remain in the darkness of sin.  God has revealed His light in nature and in the human conscience and above all in His Word where He speaks about Christ, yet many reject this light and go their own way.  Even today, the number of true Christian believers is small when compared to the great number of people who decidedly do not want Christ to rule them.

So what the Lord Jesus once said has come true many times, “…wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it.  But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it” (Mat.7:13-14).  All are lost through the first Adam, but not all are saved through Christ, the second Adam.

Now you can put an unscriptural stamp on that and say that the reason only few are saved is because God must have only elected to save a few.  But to say that is to be untrue to Him.  The Bible clearly says, “God so loved the world that He gave His one and only Son and whoever believes in Him shall not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16).  The gospel is to be preached to all people.  Yes, in Old Testament times God mainly concerned Himself with Israel.  But Israel’s neighbours of that time heard of God and were challenged to believe in Him.

Yes, there were peoples living in other parts of the world, across the oceans, in other continents, and many of them never got to hear of Christ because the gospel reached them through Christian missionaries many centuries later.  We don’t know why Australian aborigines, or the ancient Chinese civilisations, and other peoples, for a long time did not get to hear the gospel.  Europe, too, had to wait for a long time.  So also the Americas.  We don’t know why God went to the Jews first.  But we do know that we can’t go to God and say, “why did you do it like this?  Why did you wait for so long before the gospel of Christ was propagated throughout the whole world?” It is not for us to say.  Salvation is by grace.  No one has any right to it.  No one can demand it.  Don’t ever say that it is unfair that only a few are saved.  God punishing whoever sins is fair.  If God in His mercy decides to show His grace, then whoever is saved by it can only stammer, “why me?”  The whole of Adam’s race deserves God’s justice.

The Bible says this: Israel was God’s chosen nation but by and large they rejected Him.  God then went to the Gentiles and began saving countless numbers from among them.  Israel was God’s tree and its branches were supposed to bear fruit.  But they did not, and so God broke off these fruitless branches and grafted new ones in.  These new branches are the Gentiles whom God is saving instead (Rom.11:16-21).

We and all who hear the gospel of Christ can only be thankful that we have heard it at all.  It is only by the grace of God that anyone comes to faith in Christ.  So do not question God as to how He works His plan of salvation.  Just rejoice and be glad that the Lord has come to you.  So to our first question, ‘Who are saved?’, the answer is, “Only those are saved who by true faith are grafted into Christ and accept His blessing.”

2.  What is true faith?

The Catechism answers that question beautifully.  Look at Answer 21: True faith is having a knowledge.  It is having a conviction that all what God has revealed in the Bible is true.  True faith is also a deep-rooted assurance, which the Holy Spirit creates in the believer through the gospel, that out of sheer grace earned for us by Christ, not only others, but I, too, have had my sins forgiven, have been made forever right with God, and have been granted salvation.

So, true faith rests on knowledge.  We’ll leave it to our last point as to how much knowledge you need.  Here we want to emphasise the simple fact that faith needs knowledge.

Do you believe that your legs will carry you for yet another day when you get up in the morning?  Yes, you believe that because you know that your legs are capable.  Cripples don’t believe they can walk because they know they can’t.  It is impossible to believe in something of which you know nothing.  God does not say that we are to have a blind faith in Him.  He makes Himself known to us in His Word and on that basis we believe Him.

Why does God require faith?  Because it honours Him.  His Word is read and preached and it imparts knowledge.  It tells us who God is.  We hear that God is the Creator.  We hear about the fall into sin and its consequences.  The Word gives the knowledge about Christ and how He saves sinners.

Now people are not like dumb animals that can’t think.  People were made in the image of God and are able to understand many things in the Bible.  And when they, on the basis of what they have come to know from the Bible, begin to believe that they can be saved through Christ, then God is honoured.

So Christ has come.  And His gospel is to be made known to the whole world.  When sinners believe in Christ, then not only are they saved but God is honoured an adored by the worship and faith of the saved.  Certainly that is the scene in heaven in the book of Revelation.  Angels and the all the saved singing God’s praise as they stand around His throne acknowledging His mighty works of salvation in Christ.

God, then, reveals Himself as the living God whom men can know from His Word.  Faith needs that knowledge.  There is no faith without knowledge.

But faith is also having a conviction that everything God reveals in His Word is true.  Creation out of nothing, a global flood, His dealings with His covenant people Israel, the Person and the Work of Christ, the reality of the church, God performing miracles to achieve His purposes, and so on.  In all this you can’t pick and choose out of the Bible what appeals to you and leave the rest which you find hard to believe.  There may be differences in the interpretation of difficult parts.  But you cannot re-interpret the plain teachings of the Bible so that you end up with an entirely different message than God intended.  True faith is having a conviction that the whole Word is true because it is the Word of God.

The Lord Jesus said, referring to the Scriptures, “Your word is truth” (John 17:7).  If God’s own Son, who had a perfect faith, said that, then we with our faith cannot say anything less.  The Hebrew letter says that faith “is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see” (11:1).

But true faith is even more than knowledge and conviction.  True faith is also a deep-rooted assurance.  There are church members who would not doubt for a moment that the Bible is true.  But do they believe it is true for them?  Do you, deep in your heart, believe that the Bible’s message of salvation is true for you?  So not just what it says about God as Creator, not just that the world was destroyed by the flood, not just God’s dealings with Israel, not just what Jesus did for the poor, blind, lame and the dumb, not just that He changed water into wine and that He calmed the sea and walked on the waves, not just that His resurrection and ascension are true.  But a deep-rooted assurance that Christ has also come for you, that your sins are forgiven, that you have been made forever right with God, and that you have been granted salvation.

True faith does not despair and say: “oh, if it only could be true for me.” Nor does it gloat with arrogance, “Yes, of course I am saved.” True faith is humble because true believers become aware that the Spirit of God is working that assurance of salvation in their hearts as they get to know the Word of God better.

Are there examples of true faith in the Bible?  For that would help you to see if your faith is a true faith.  We can go to Hebrews 11.  We’re told about believers long before our time who believed that “the universe was formed at God’s command, so that what is seen was not made out of what was visible” (vs 3).  You know that evolutionists reject God the Creator and say that all living things of the present come from earlier, primitive forms of life.  But true faith says, “No, the Bible says different and I believe the Bible because it is the Word of God.”

Noah had true faith because he believed God’s warnings about the flood and built a boat to save his family.  Abraham had true faith because he obeyed God and went to a land the whereabouts he didn’t even know.  Other people were living in it but he believed God’s promise about giving that land as his inheritance at a time when he didn’t even have children yet.  As you know, there are many examples of faith in Hebrews 11, and we haven’t got the time to look at them all.

But surely the truest example of faith is Jesus whilst on earth.  Being fully human, He, too, was called to believe in God.  Satan tempted Him.  He was often ridiculed.  He gave His life over to death, trusting that His heavenly Father would not leave Him in death but raise Him up again.  And now do you truly believe that you are a saved child of God?  Do you truly believe that when you die you will live again?  You have nothing to go by except faith in Christ who went before you and that the Word of God can be trusted.  But that’s all you need.  Just God and His Word!

From where do we get this faith?  It is given to us as we hear the Word of God.  Through the Word the Spirit of God takes hold of you.  But how come it does not always happen when we think it’s the right time for others to believe?  God’s Spirit is sovereign and He works according to His own good pleasure.

If you’re hoping and praying for someone close to you to be given that faith, then keep on praying and witnessing.  You can’t believe for them.  They have to believe the gospel themselves.  But you can keep on pointing them to Christ.  If you are the one who is hoping for true faith, then the matter is straightforward.  Believe now.  Humble yourself before God today, repent of your sins and obey the Lord’s commands as from this moment.  Turn away from whatever barrier there still is between you and the Lord and believe now that Christ makes you right with God.

3.  What must the saved believe?

The simplest answer is, all that God has promised in His Word.  That includes His promise about forgiveness, the new life in Christ, Him granting believers the Holy Spirit, the coming of Christ’s kingdom, the new heaven and earth.

But even these essentials of the Christian faith are linked to a lot of other biblical teachings.  It is not always so easy to know what to include and what can be left out.  The thief on the cross next to Jesus had no time left to learn a lot about Christ.  His earthly life was finished.  He just trusted that Christ could save Him for the life to come.

So to someone about to die, you best only talk about the very basic thrust of the gospel.  But to you who are reasonably healthy and can come to church regularly, and able to attend the catechism classes, the Bible studies and the other education programmes in the church, you’d better learn as much as you can.

Jesus taught His disciples a lot of things.  And they needed it all to help them face all the challenges of life.  There are a lot of different beliefs in the world and each one claims to be the best.  And there is also Satan, the power of sin and the sinfulness of your own human nature.

Yes, what must the saved believe?  Sometimes the answer might be this: just trust God in what He has done for sinners in Christ.  But at other times the answer may have to be this: you’d better get stuck into some solid biblical teachings because if you don’t, you will get bowled over by the world and its false beliefs.  A baby has milk from its mother’s breast.  Then as the child grows you add some solids.  An adult needs a food intake that has substance and variety.  It seems to me that it is similar with our spiritual food.

Many teachings of God’s Word help you in your faith and in your Christian growth.  So keep on consuming the spiritual food that God’s Word provides.  You will need it because your faith will undergo many tests and trials before you enter heaven.

Amen.