Mar 19
24
FALSE CHRISTS
“If any man shall say unto you, Lo, here is Christ, or there; believe it
not. For there shall arise false Christs, and false prophets, and shall
shew great signs and wonders” Matthew24:23,24
The vast majority of so-called ‘Christian’ religion in the world today
is actually proclaiming ‘false Christs’. It is not that they proclaim
and interact with the true Christ in a wrong way; their ‘Christ’ is
actually false, exactly as the Lord Jesus Christ warned his disciples in
Matthew 24. The question you should always ask of the those who try to
persuade you to follow their ‘Christ’ is whether he is the Christ of the
Bible. For example, is he a Christ who offers salvation to all without
exception in the hope that they will exercise faith and believe him?
That is a false Christ, an utterly impotent Christ when it comes to
securing the eternal salvation of even one hell-deserving sinner. The
Christ of scripture is the one who came to save his people from their
sins (Matt1:21); they are the people, the elect of God, that the Father
gave to Christ before the foundation of the world. He redeemed them
alone, a multitude which no man can number and he accomplished his
mission completely leaving nothing to the whim of human will.
Then ask if the ‘Christ’ they point to is one who is trying his best to
make this world a better place if only people will learn to cooperate
with each other. If he is, then he too is a false ‘Christ’ because the
word of God declares clearly that God’s purpose is to bring this present
evil world to an end in judgment for sin and to bring in his glorious
and unrivalled kingdom, the Kingdom of God, in which violated divine law
and justice has been completely satisfied in the doing and dying of the
Son of God as Substitute for God’s elect; hence true believers are
called to pray sincerely, “Thy Kingdom come!”.
Look at their methods, their programmes, their social objectives and ask
whether these reflect the truth of scripture concerning the Christ of
God. The salvation he has accomplished is certain; it depends in no way
on human gimmicks to get people to ‘follow’ it. All that God requires of
his true people is faithfully to declare what he has revealed of
salvation accomplished for it is ‘by the foolishness of preaching that
it pleased God to save those who believe’. He, in sovereign grace, gives
each and every one of the multitude he loved with ‘everlasting love’ a
new nature and a new will to trust Christ and the salvation he has
finished for them.
God calls his people simply to preach the Christ of scripture as
faithfully as we can to the text of the Bible as we have it and leave
the quickening, the calling, the regeneration of dead sinners to God’s
Holy Spirit.
Pastor Allan Jellett