The danger of wavering on gospel basics

 Posted at Reformation Scotland:

New ideas and teachings are constantly cropping up in and around the church. Although believers, and the church as a whole, are meant to grow in knowledge, it has to be knowledge of the truth. The truth of the gospel is what we stake our souls on for eternity, and we cannot afford to be enticed into wavering on the gospel basics and swallowing false teachings. George Gillespie was particularly earnest in emphasising the duty of remaining loyal to the truths which God has plainly revealed in Scripture. In the following updated excerpt, he provides several reasons why instability is so dangerous.

Fluctuating and wavering over those things which God has revealed for us either to believe or do, is a sin, while to be firm, fixed and established in the truth (to “hold fast the profession of it,” to “stand fast in the faith”) is a duty commanded. It is good theology to maintain this.

THE VALUE OF BEING COMMITTED TO THE TRUTH

We see the value of steadfastness from the very light of nature. “Hath a nation changed their gods, which are yet no gods?” (Jer. 2:11). The heathen Greeks used to say that he who goes wrong in his religion is drinking out of a cup that is full of holes. How firm and constant the heathen philosophers were in maintaining their opinions! They could not only displease their friends, but suffer the heaviest things for their opinions.

But set aside the light of nature. Every one of the earliest churches, to which the apostles wrote epistles, was expressly warned, either to stand fast in the faith, and to hold fast their profession, or to beware of and to avoid false teachers, and not to be carried about with diverse and strange doctrines.

It must be not only a truth, but a most special and necessary truth, when the apostles thought fit to impress it on the churches in all their epistles (see Rom. 16:17-18; 1 Cor. 16:13; 2 Cor. 11:3-4; Gal. 1:6-8; Eph. 4:14; Phil. 3:2, 18; Col. 2:6-8; 2 Thess. 2:2-3; Heb. 10:23; 13:9; Jam. 5:19-20; 2 Pet. 2:1-3; 3:16-18; 1 Jn. 4:1; Jud. 3-4). All these verses are full and plain on this point, and most worthy of our frequent thoughts and observations, especially at a time when this corner of the world is so full of new and strange doctrines.

Continue here.