84. Salvation Good News, not Good Advice

Salvation Good News, not Good Advice The question may now be forcing itself upon you, Why should salvation depend on believing only; why is there nothing else to do?

Because salvation is not good advice to be followed, but simply good news to be believed. For just as there is nothing else we can do with good news but to believe and act upon it, so, also, there is nothing we can possibly do with the Gospel but to believe it and show it by acting on the good news it brings. “Be” and “lifan” are the two old Anglo-Saxon words that make up the word “believe.” And the meaning is “to live in accordance with.” That is, to act by receiving the gift that is offered. That the Gospel is good news—just that and nothing else, comes out in the fact that good news used to be “good spell” in old Anglo-Saxon, which was finally shortened into “gospel.” So every time “gospel” is found in the New Testament it is “good news.”

Now how does one act toward good news? If he believes it, he acts according to its terms. If you received the good news from a wholly reliable source that a great sum of money had been deposited to your account in a certain bank, and that it would become your personal possession the moment you accepted it, you would let no time be lost before you gladly accepted the gift, and you would show you had accepted it by beginning at once to make use of it. But suppose you refused the gift. There could be but two reasons for such a refusal. It would have to be because you either did not believe the gift was actually yours without all condition but that of acceptance, or else that you had something in your heart against the giver, and would therefore receive no gift from him under any consideration whatever. In either case you would be guilty of the insult supreme! For you would be saying that the giver was either a liar, or that he was dishonorable, and that you therefore refused to commit yourself to him. That is, you would not believe in him, and so would not obey the good news.

Paul mourned in his letter to the Romans that not all had “obeyed the gospel” (Romans 10:16). By that he meant that, by refusal to act on the good news, they were offering God the supreme insult. That attitude makes salvation impossible. It is such a barrier between God and the soul that He can go no farther until it is removed. We know that between us humans, our attitude toward another is determined by what we do with his word. And the attitude of unbelief in God’s Word is a barrier of such wilfully blind, unreasoning, insulting prejudice, that He is rendered utterly helpless to do a thing for the one who holds it, as long as it continues. This is reason enough why the one condition for receiving the gift of eternal life is simply to believe.

It is also reason enough why God is forced to announce that at the last He will be compelled, “in flaming fire,” to take “vengeance on them that obey not the gospel (refuse to act on the good news) of our Lord Jesus Christ” (2 Thessalonians 1:8). There is nothing else for Him to do.