One
of the things that makes up the training of a chef is learning the basic
ingredients for the staple foods. That is because there are certain standard
ingredients in each type of food. Bread has water, flour, sugar, yeast and salt.
If you leave out one of those ingredients, you won’t get bread. You can choose
which type of flour to use, and the proportions, but the rest stays the same.
There
are many parts to a car, but many of them can be left out. But some of the
essentials for combustion are ‘must haves’ if you want the engine to function.
You have to have fuel, air, and spark. If one of these is missing, then you have
a pretty, shiny, lawn ornament. If you refuse to put fuel in the tank, the car
will never fulfill its purpose.
You
can take the leaders of the world’s religions out of the picture and their
religion stays the same. But if we take Jesus out of Christianity, we end up
with nothing. Without the reality of Jesus’ incarnation, birth, life, death,
resurrection, appearances, and ascension, Christianity is an empty shell.
Everything in the Gospel centers on the person of Jesus.
The
false teachers of every era leave out Jesus. Or they so diminish their picture
of Jesus to the point that the Gospel becomes powerless. Once you chop away the
root, the rest must stay afloat by the strength of the human spirit. This is what
keeps other world religions going. They are human efforts reaching toward God. They
lack the power inherent in the Gospel.
We
can see the diluting of the Gospel today. We see it among those who embrace “tolerance”
as a way to get along. No one is asked to compromise on their beliefs except
Christians. We aren’t allowed to hold our opinions on lifestyle choices. As
soon as we express them, we are labeled and marginalized. As our society is
falling off a cliff, the society is pulling at the only fingers that prevent it
from falling to the bottom. One by one the fingers are being pulled away from
anything solid.
John
tells us that Jesus in the key ingredient in the Gospel. Without Him, fully God
and fully man, the Gospel is empty. One of the false teachings of his day made
Jesus some kind of being somewhere between God and man. He had a body, but not
like ours. It was more ghostly, appearance only, lacking real human substance. Or
it was more angelic, less divine, merely symbolic. But for John, this cut to
the very core of the Gospel he had received, the Gospel he preached and created
the explosion that was Early Christianity.
You
can tell if some teaching is true by what it does with Jesus. John tells us
that when we degrade Jesus, then we are following in the spirit of the antichrist.
We stand opposed to the Gospel. We are excluded from the family of God. We are
in darkness. We lie and don’t practice the Truth.