Non-Negotiables: Primary Doctrines

For the month of March, we are looking at one of the most common rebuttals against the Christian faith: If it’s true then why are we so divided? Last week we introduced the conversation with Jesus’ command, that’s right – COMMAND, to love one another. Unity within the body of believers is critically important and yet, we also looked at the big and seemingly small issues that caused the church to split into the 6 primary branches that just about all of the almost 40,000 modern denominations are descending out of. Love and unity are meant to be distinctives which set apart the Christian Church from the rest of the divided world. Our faith in Jesus transcends our cultures, our nations, our politics, our families and even our lives and binds us together in, what Romans 12 describes as “one body in Christ.” This is the way it ought to be.

Unfortunately, this isn’t the way that it always is or has been throughout Church history. So, are we saying that all separation in the Church is always wrong? No. There are good biblical reasons that we are told not only that we should, but that we must separate ourselves from individual teachers or even groups in order to actually maintain the unity of the faith. These clear dividing lines are the non-negotiables of Christianity, also known as primary doctrines. These are the top-tier beliefs that a person must affirm to be considered a Christian. Now comes the tricky part: if the primary doctrines are the non-negotiable beliefs we need to have in order to be saved, then what are they?

In short, the primary doctrine, the big one that all professing Christians have to hold to basically boils down to the Gospel. The Gospel, not the gospels as in the four books that start the New Testament, is the good news about Jesus. The Gospel tells us about God, who He is, who we are in relation to Him and what is necessary for salvation. Already, this is starting to get kind of theologically wordy, so let’s break it up into a narrative structure with a problem and a solution.

Let’s start with the problem. I mean, this whole conversation is about salvation – being saved. So, what are we being saved from? Well, first we have to recognize that God is good! Jerrod talked a little bit about this in one of our shorts from last month, but when we say that “God is good,” we are not saying simply that “God does good things” or “God chooses to do good or be good.” We are saying very precisely that He is good. Now, it’s actually His goodness, His perfection, which brings up a clear challenge for us. God is good; us? Not so much. God’s goodness is completely unlike us. He is separate, in a category all His own. He is Holy. We, however, are willfully imperfect. We sin. The original concept of sin really means to fall short of the standard or to miss the mark. He is good and holy and perfect, we are sinful. These two truths bring us to the problem.

God is good, perfect, holy and just. He wouldn’t be good if He allowed sin to go unanswered. Judges that don’t do their job are not good judges and judges who show partiality are crooked judges. God is good, so He must judge sin and He must hold all of us to the same standard. This is when all of our sins, all of our lies, our hatefulness, our lust, all of it finally come back to haunt us. Sin, any amount and any level of it, is rebellion against our Creator. The wages of sin is death. He is the one who gave us life, He is also the one with the authority to take it away, but we’re not just talking about losing our lives here on this earth, but it’s our souls that stand to be judged after we die. Unlike a lot of pop-culture depictions, this is not a trial where we will get to make our case and explain ourselves. Our own conscience bears witness against us; we know that we are guilty. Every one of us has sinned and fallen short of God’s perfect standard and, again, the wages of sin is death! Are you starting to see the problem? Thankfully, that verse found in Romans 6:23 doesn’t end there.

“For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

So, how can we become the recipients of this free gift? This is where we move to the solution for the problem; God’s plan of Salvation.

First, we need to recognize that the wages of sin must be paid. We have an outstanding balance and the penalty has to be enacted. This isn’t a bloodthirst dictator response from God, this is justice. The problem is, we don’t have what it takes to pay the penalty for our sins, much less could any other normal person pay on our behalf. Psalm 49:7-9 makes this point clear:

"Truly no man can ransom another, or give to God the price of his life, for the ransom of their life is costly and can never suffice, that he should live on forever and never see the pit."

We can’t save ourselves and we can’t be rescued by any other sinful person either; they have their own debts to pay. But, the psalmist goes on. In verse 15, he writes,

“But God will ransom my soul from the power of Sheol, for he will receive me.”

God is the One who pays our debts, and the way that He does is through Jesus.

Jesus is God the Son, one person in the Trinity. Christianity is a monotheistic religion, meaning that we believe in one God, but we believe that God is eternally co-existent as three distinct persons, God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. That is definitely a difficult and even impossible truth to fully comprehend, but if man were able to fully understand ever facet of God, it would be much more likely that the god we were worshipping was just fabricated by man. This doesn’t mean that God can be anything we want or anything anyone could think of. We, as humans, are limited in our understanding of God by what He has revealed about Himself to us through the revelation of scripture. If I was supposed to meet you for coffee but we had never previously met, I would give you a description of myself in order to help you find me when you arrive. If you chose to ignore what I told you and decided that my voice sounded like someone wearing a blue shirt rather than the black one I said I was wearing, you would never find me and it would be your fault. The same is true in a much more meaningful sense with God; He has chosen to reveal aspects of His divine nature through His creation, through His word and, primarily, through the incarnation of Jesus. He told us what He is wearing, we don’t have the freedom to redefine Him according to what feels right to us. He has revealed Himself in these 3 distinct persons, all co-existing and yet all one God.

Since Jesus is God, He is good and perfect and holy. Since He was miraculously born as a man, He can take the penalty for our sins on Himself. This means that He had to die for us. In 2 Corinthians, this substitutional atonement is described like this:

For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. - 2 Cor. 5:21

Now, there have been countless false messiah’s, even fake Jesus’, before and after that time who claimed to have the authority of God or the ability to save His people. The thing that separates Jesus from all of the phonies and the seal of authenticity that He is the one true Christ, is that He didn’t stay dead. 3 days from His crucifixion, He literally, physically, rose from the dead and for the next 40 days went around showing that He truly was God in the flesh, risen from the dead with the ability to pay for our sins. One of the most amazing things about all of this is that we have the privilege to be the recipients of this incredible gift of eternal life with God only by believing it. We are saved by grace, through faith, and not the result of our own works. You don’t have to be “good enough” in order to receive salvation, all that is required is for you to believe!

So, to recap; what are the core doctrines of Christianity?

- The Problem

· God is Holy/without sin

· We are sinners

· God is just and will judge us

· Because of our sins, we deserve His wrath/Hell/eternal death

- The Solution

· Jesus is God the Son, one person of the Trinity

· Jesus lived a perfect and sinless life, the life we could not live

· He died in our place as the just payment for our sins on the cross

· He physically, literally rose from the dead 3 days later

· We are saved by faith, through grace and not by any of our works

These are the core doctrines of the Christian faith. All of this was revealed to us through His holy and inspired word, which we call the Bible. Now, some people might tweak the wording here or there, but this is the basic gist and what is necessary for any of us to believe to be saved. These beliefs also form the primary dividing line which separates Christianity from other religions which might seem similar. When God tells us in Isaiah 44 and 45 that He is the only God, then when someone else tells you that there are millions of gods, or infinite gods or that even you and I could potentially become gods ourselves, we know right away to reject those teachings. When others try to tell us that Jesus was a good man, or even a great prophet, but not God, we know that isn’t the Gospel either. If someone else tries to tell you that you need to believe in Jesus but also do good works in order to pay for your sins or give them money to receive God’s blessing, these are again false gospels. Paul tells us how to respond to false gospels in the book of Galatians chapter 1:

"I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting him who called you in the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel— not that there is another one, but there are some who trouble you and want to distort the gospel of Christ. But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach to you a gospel contrary to the one we preached to you, let him be accursed. As we have said before, so now I say again: If anyone is preaching to you a gospel contrary to the one you received, let him be accursed."

That being said, if the true Gospel is intact, but we disagree on baptism, or healing, or soteriology (So-teer-ey-ology) then we must strive for unity. These are examples of secondary and even tertiary doctrines – they are important and we should seek to develop true and healthy understandings of what the Bible says so that we can know God more, but differences in opinions at these levels are not the types of things that we should be dividing over. Thinking back to the Church splits that we discussed last week, how different would the Church look today if we were able to keep the non-negotiables intact and strive for unity over separation for everything else? This may seem like an impossible task, but isn’t that what makes it so much more of a sign to the truth of our faith to the world around us?