GOSPEL-UNIVERSAL
There is one
Gospel, and it is universal and applicable to all cultures. The Gospel is universally applicable because
the one great need of all human beings is the same: they all need to be
reconciled with the Creator.
Who Will Be Saved? Edited
by: House, Paul and Thornbury, Gregory, Crossway,
2000, p. 185.
Universalism,
fashionable as it is today, is incompatible with the teaching of Christ and His
apostles, and is a deadly enemy of evangelism.
The true universalism of the Bible is the call to universal evangelism
in obedience to Christ’s universal commission.
It is the conviction that not all men will be saved in the end, but that
all men must hear the gospel of salvation before the end.
John Stott
Quoted in: Who Will Be Saved? Edited by:
House, Paul and Thornbury, Gregory, Crossway, 2000,
p. 104
On the one
hand, Christianity is the most exclusive religion imaginable. It insists that belief in Jesus Christ is
absolutely necessary for salvation.
Jesus is the only way. You
must go to Him to get eternal life. On
the other hand, Christianity is the most inclusive religion possible because it
makes salvation accessible to everyone.
Salvation is offered for all people through one Person. Whoever believes in Him will not perish. Anyone who receives or believes in Jesus will
live forever with God. There are no
racial, social, intellectual, or economic criteria that prevent anyone from
joining God’s family. One of the
problems with the other religions of the world is that they all smack of
elitism….Only Christianity offers salvation to everyone as a free gift.
Philip Graham Ryken
Is Jesus the Only Way? Crossway, 1999, p.
36-37.
While the Gospel is a proclamation of pardon addressed to sinners without
exception, an unlimited invitation to the guilty to take shelter in the blood
of atonement, it is the power of God unto salvation, only to those who
believe.
James Haldane
The
Gospel – What is it?
The gospel is
open to all; the most respectable sinner has no more claim
on it than the worst.
Martyn Lloyd-Jones
Moreover, it
is the promise of the gospel that whoever believes in Christ crucified shall
not perish but have eternal life. This
promise, together with the command to repent and believe, ought to be announced
and declared without differentiation or discrimination to all nations and
people, to whom God in his good pleasure sends the gospel.
The Canons of Dort
The Second
Main Point of Doctrine: Christ’s Death and Human Redemption Through
It. Article 5- The Mandate to Proclaim the Gospel to All.