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Scripture evinces a tendency to distrust the gospel.  This reveals itself in trying other means than the gospel for salvations or increased numbers of conversions.  When Paul writes, “the gospel is the power of God unto salvation,” he says that it is only the gospel that is the power of God unto salvation.  No human instrument helps the gospel.

I explained the harmony of the working of the Holy Spirit with the gospel, their being the same.  Love, compassion, and all of that, which accompany the gospel, are not accomplished by human means.  They are God working “in you both to will and to do of his good pleasure” (Philip 2:13).  God uses believers as instruments.  As before mentioned, they are messengers (cf. Malachi 3:1).  He uses hard or blessed providences to prepare men’s hearts.

Jesus said, “Blessed are the poor in spirit” (Matt 5:3).  The infliction of hard providences conditions hearts for reception.  As Jesus said (Matt 9:12), “They that be whole need not a physician.”  In Mark 2:17, He portrays the same truth:  “They that are whole have no need of the physician, but they that are sick: I came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.”  We know that hard, worldly, and superficial heartedness affects reception of the gospel seed (Matthew 13:1-23).  None of these truths detract from the truth of “the gospel is the power of God unto salvation.

Many different ways professing believers or perhaps non-believers show their unbelief in the gospel as the power of God unto salvation, represented by various categories of manifestations of their unbelief.

Human Means or Methods Better Than the Gospel

For many and from a human perspective, the gospel is ineffective.  It doesn’t work.  Paul pointed out this error in 1 Corinthians 1-2.  To the lost, he says “the preaching of the cross,” the gospel, “is foolishness” (1 Cor 1:18).  They want either something more clever, inventive, or scholarly, what Paul calls “wisdom” (1:18-21), a human type, or a kind of ecstatic experience, quasi supernatural, that would indicate divine power, what Paul calls “signs” or “might” (1 Cor 1:19-27).  The gospel doesn’t fit either demand of the world for persuasion.

The gospel is the prescribed method of God for salvation because it gives glory to God.  Its inexplicability leaves God only as the source of its work and effects.  Then “no flesh should glory in his presence” (1 Cor 1:29).  “He that glorieth. . . glorie(s) in the Lord” (1 Cor 1:31).

Part of the wisdom of man, his personal nobility, manifests itself in impressive rhetorical flourish or “excellency of speech or of wisdom” (1 Cor 2:1).  The speech is the style and the wisdom is the superior intellect.  The gospel is not an exercise in amazing speech and human ingenuity.  It is a fulfillment of faithfulness, the one rowing in the galley of the ship (cf. 1 Cor 4:1-2), keeping his hands on the oar.  It isn’t beyond a believer to do.

God gifts some more to do it (gifts of prophecy and teaching, verbal gifts, 1 Cor 12, Rom 12, 1 Pet 4), but everyone can do it because it requires only faithfulness.  This may and does include studying scripture to the extent that he shows himself a “workman that needeth not to be ashamed” (2 Timothy 2:15).

Playing Along with Unbelievers

Using other means than the gospel plays along with unbelievers, accrediting their rejection of or indifference to it.  The world wants something smart and something amazing to it.  A professing believer or just an unbeliever, who claims to be a believer, thinks or says:

The world likes this.  It likes this when I do it.  The world then responds to this.  My group gets bigger because of this.  It’s smart and amazing. The world recognizes this.  This is what I should.

This too is human wisdom and seeking after signs, when no one is getting signs.  It glorifies the one who came up with the acceptable idea, going along with the world liking what it accepts.  This doesn’t glorify the Lord though and it doesn’t even work, even though it looks like it’s working, part of its deceit.

What really works makes someone the offscouring of the world and hated, as Christ talked about to begin the Sermon on the Mount (1 Cor 4:13, Matt 5:10-12).  Depending on God for His work gets a reaction like someone in the world would never want to have.  He knows he will get it, so he moves a different direction, the broad road, to avoid it.  Becoming hated doesn’t seem like an effective method.  Being liked looks more like what will work, so instead of faithful service, professing believers and probably unbelievers signal their own virtue with their methods.

More to Come