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We have been asking What is the saving Gospel of Jesus Christ? (207) In order to answer that question, we must back up a step and ask a more basic question: Where shall we find the content of the saving Gospel of Jesus Christ? This is the question that we want to consider in this article.
How do the vast majority of people answer that question? When pressed to reality, and not theory, where do most people find their content for the saving Gospel of Christ? The answer is their church. The vast majority of people simply accept the answers their church gives--if they accept answers at all. Of course, these days most people simply don't accept answers and don't bother themselves with the question, they just go about their daily rat-killing and hope that they don't drop dead and discover that Hell is real. So we have an enormous host of people who can't defend their beliefs about the Gospel because they aren't particularly interested in it.
But there are a few who are interested and of those few, the majority simply follow the line their church hands out. But is this safe? If you were God and you had gone to an enormous amount of labor to make sure that people had a written record of what you had to say, would you accept their loyalty to their religion above their study of your Word? Well, whether you would or not, God will not. There are countless places in the Bible where its readers are commanded, cajoled, encouraged, begged, and enjoined to study its contents in order not to be deceived by religious leaders who have an agenda.
Most people do not realize that religious leaders have an agenda, and that most religious leaders' agendas are not God's agenda. For example, God's agenda is that people come to know Him by relating to Him through trust in what they discover to be true in His Word. But there are a whole host of religious leaders who know that they will never accomplish their agenda if the people they lead get into the Bible, so they set themselves up as infallible guides for the dummies in the pews who are too mentally incapacitated to read the Bible for themselves. And the sad thing is that most of the people in the pews accept this insult and agree with it and go along with the nonsense of the church being an infallible guide.
But it is nonsense. Think about it. If God can only be understood through some infallible interpreter, how can we ever understand Him? God has spoken and made what He has said available in plain English. But some churches tell us that it isn't plain English; we need to let them tell us what it means. If I can't understand God, how will I be able to understand some so-called infallible interpreter. God speaks...some infallible interpreter then speaks...and I am supposed to believe the interpreter because God hasn't been plain? I need some infallible interpreter to understand my native language? Nonsense; this is a deceptive subterfuge designed to keep me ignorant of God.