Introduction

God throughout time has created a division in the world—the division between the seed of the woman and the seed of the serpent, the truth and the lie, Christ and Belial, the true church and the false church. The difference between the true and the false church is expounded in articles 28 and 29 of the Belgic Confession.

We must be able to discern the lie today, just as our fathers before us have, and join ourselves to the true church, a visible manifestation of the holy, catholic church of all time—a church that proclaims the truth that Christ in his work at the cross has paid for our sins and given to us all our salvation and that man does nothing for salvation, a church that condemns the lie that takes away from Christ’s work and gives glory to man. The devil has worked from the beginning to deceive man with the lie, and throughout time the devil has made the lie more deceptive.

Lie in Biblical Times

Right away in the garden of Eden, Satan brought in the lie.

4. And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die:

5. For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil. (Gen. 3:4–5)

From the beginning the doctrine of the lie has been man as God, and the result of that doctrine is man’s reliance upon himself and his good works for salvation. Adam and his yet unnamed wife built from their own works coverings for their sin (v. 7).

But God did not leave his church lost in the lie. He brought the gospel to his children, and he brought it entirely unconditionally. Adam deserved hell. He had just transgressed the almighty God, yet God brought the mother promise to Adam in Genesis 3:15: “I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.” God promised Christ. That was all Adam and Eve needed to go forth in comfort. As a sign that one must die to cover sin, a picture of Christ, God also removed their works as a covering for their nakedness, which represented their sin, and slayed an animal to make clothes for them. Their nakedness was covered by the sacrifice of another, picturing Christ’s ultimate sacrifice at the cross that covers our sins.

It was not long until a man presented himself as worthy to bring his works to God in worship. Cain brought his labors as a sacrifice, and God said that Cain’s sacrifice was not good. By faith Abel offered a blood sacrifice, for he understood that blood was necessary to cover sin.

Throughout the Old Testament idols of all kinds were made, idols that were crafted after man’s imagination and desires. Man created a god and worshiped him as he saw fit. Man boasted himself as a god. Yet God repeatedly showed himself to be the only true God. Israel failed to keep the law, and God told his people to be ungodly before him. The Israelites tried to save themselves, to follow the law for their salvation, and to make themselves as God. But God saved his people. God turned them and showed them the sacrifices, which pointed to Christ as their salvation.

Jesus dealt with the Pharisees, the vipers of the new dispensation. The Pharisees would save themselves by their law-keeping. But Christ combatted their doctrine of salvation by works with his words in Matthew 5:20: “I say unto you, That except your righteousness shall exceed the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, ye shall in no case enter into the kingdom of heaven.” You cannot reach the perfection that God requires in the law. Even if outwardly you could perfectly obey the first nine laws, the tenth breaks into the heart, which is only evil continually. Those who do not perfectly keep every commandment have broken every one of the commandments. Jesus gave the gospel in John 14:6: “I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me.”

Not long after Jesus’ ascension, the Christian church needed to defend against the lie from within its own church doors. The Judaizers, a group of Jews who had converted to Christianity, preached the necessity of circumcision for salvation. They taught the people that “Except ye be circumcised after the manner of Moses, ye cannot be saved” and “That it was needful to circumcise them, and to command them to keep the law of Moses” (Acts 15:1, 5). The Judaizers knew of Christ and his work. They agreed that Christ had died for sins and that the Holy Spirit works in God’s people. The false doctrine of the false apostles, as Paul called them in Galatians, taught that to be saved, to have righteousness, or to enjoy fellowship with God, one must have faith and obey the law of Moses.

At the Jerusalem Council Peter defended the uncircumcised Gentiles, saying,

8. And God, which knoweth the hearts, bare them witness, giving them the Holy Ghost, even as he did unto us;

9. And put no difference between us and them, purifying their hearts by faith.

10. Now therefore why tempt ye God, to put a yoke upon the neck of the disciples, which neither our fathers nor we were able to bear?

11. But we believe that through the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ we shall be saved, even as they. (Acts 15:8–11)

God cares not whether one is a Jew or a Gentile, circumcised or uncircumcised. God saves sinners through the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and frees them from the burden of the law. God knows that Christ bore the yoke of the law and that his people cannot bear that yoke. He put that responsibility onto Christ. Salvation is of Christ and Christ alone; the law bears no part in salvation.

Throughout the Bible we see how the devil worked his same lie of man as God. Adam tried to cover his sin with fig leaves; Cain tried to bring his works; the Pharisees were to be saved by obeying the law; and the Judaizers taught that following the law was necessary for salvation. Yet God preserved his truth.

Early Church History

After the apostles died controversy about the divinity of Christ spread in the Christian church. Arius was a large spreader of the lie that Christ, the Son of God, was not truly God with the Father. For hundreds of years, the church battled over the natures of Christ. The lie spread through the whole church until Athanasius, the one man who believed that Christ was fully God and fully man, seemed to be against the whole church world. Athanasius was brought up by God to uphold the truth of his Son. Athanasius taught that to deny Christ’s humanity was to take away Christ’s ability fully to complete salvation, making man’s work necessary. Man as God. Today, the church has a powerful confession about Christ’s natures in the Nicene Creed.

Pelagius taught that man is able to choose good and evil. He is able to choose the good and be saved. Grace was still a part of Pelagius’ doctrine as grace that God gave to man to assist him in choosing the good. God helps man by giving grace to him, and with God’s help man can be enlightened. God gives grace that enables man to do what man must do to be saved.

Pelagius is mentioned several times in the Reformed creeds. The title of this article is a reference to Canons 2, error and rejection 3:

That Christ, by His satisfaction, merited neither salvation itself for anyone, nor faith, whereby this satisfaction of Christ unto salvation is effectually appropriated; but that He merited for the Father only the authority or the perfect will to deal again with man, and to prescribe new conditions as he might desire, obedience to which, however, depended on the free will of man, so that it therefore might have come to pass that either none or all should fulfill these conditions.

Rejection: For these adjudge too contemptuously of the death of Christ, do in no wise acknowledge the most important fruit or benefit thereby gained, and bring again out of hell the Pelagian error. (Confessions and Church Order, 165)

Pelagius taught that Christ cannot save his people and that salvation depends on man’s choosing the good and working out his own salvation. The lie has become that Christ has enabled you; now go and work for your salvation. The lie continues to push down Christ and his work and to raise up man as responsible, making man as God.

Although Rome opposed Pelagius at first, the Roman Catholics soon found themselves in semi-Pelagianism. This error developed into their doctrine of repentance or, as they call it, “contrition.”

Contrition, which holds the first place amongst the aforesaid acts of the penitent, is a sorrow of mind, and a detestation for sin committed, with the purpose of not sinning for the future. This movement of contrition was at all times necessary for obtaining the pardon of sins; and, in one who has fallen after baptism, it then at length prepares for the remission of sins, when it is united with confidence in the divine mercy, and with the desire of performing the other things which are required for rightly receiving this sacrament.¹

The devil brought in the doctrine that repentance must come before God forgives. Repentance is “necessary for obtaining the pardon of sins.” You are saved by faith and repentance. Christ forgives you, but you just need repentance to have forgiveness.

John Calvin, by God’s sovereign plan, brought a reformation to the church. He brought back the truth of forgiveness by faith alone and the proper place of repentance.

From this doctrine [of the kingdom of God], as its source, is drawn the exhortation to repentance. For John [the Baptist] does not say [in Matthew 3:2], “Repent ye, and in this way, the kingdom of heaven will afterwards be at hand;” but first brings forward the grace of God, and then exhorts men to repent. Hence it is evident, that the foundation of repentance is the mercy of God, by which he restores the lost. In no other sense is it stated by Mark and Luke, that he preached repentance for the forgiveness of sins. Repentance is not placed first, as some ignorantly suppose, as if it were the ground of the forgiveness of sins, or as if it induced God to begin to be gracious to us.²

Jacob Arminius invented Arminianism, which is the same error and lie as that of Pelagius. This is proven by Canons 2, error and rejection 3. Our church fathers knew it was the same man-as-God lie out of hell. The doctrine of the Arminians is that Christ has obtained the right to eternal life. God’s predestination is his choosing those who work faith and his rejecting those who work unbelief. One must work faith and repentance, then God will give the blessings of salvation. The Arminians’ doctrine as expressed in error 3 must reject the truth in Canons 2.8.

Homer C. Hoeksema wrote the following on that article:

The Arminian is forced to reject the line of the truth which maintains that Christ through His perfect satisfaction of his divine justice, and because His death was the perfect satisfaction of God’s justice with respect to our sin, obtained, actually purchased, for all the elect all the blessings of salvation, including the faith whereby these blessings are actually applied to us. He must reject this line because it would mean that the elect inevitably come into possession of those blessings, and that, too, not through any merit or work of their own, but solely through the merit of Christ and the work of divine grace.³

Arminians believe that in order to come into the possession of their salvation or its blessings that a work of man—performed by grace, of course—must precede. This man-as-God lie was pushed out of the church, and the truth was exalted. Christ has perfectly accomplished, actually obtained, and inevitably gives to his people all their salvation. God determines from eternity who is saved, and he gives them faith and works in them repentance.

An important point of the Arminians’ position is their fourth article regarding resistible grace. The article ends with “but as for the manner of co-operation, this grace is not irresistible, for many resist the Holy Ghost (Acts vii).”⁴ They make the Holy Spirit to be an offer, and man can reject the Spirit. But the Spirit does not depend on man; the Spirit works independently of man. God is the creator, independent from the works of the believer.

Recent Church History

Although God used the creeds to preserve the truth in some Reformed churches, common grace and the well-meant offer of the gospel plague almost every nominally Reformed and Presbyterian church today. Abraham Kuyper, a Calvinist-turned-politician from the Netherlands, invented common grace. Prof. Ralph Janssen pushed common grace in the Christian Reformed Church until common grace was officially accepted in 1924. Common grace teaches that God gives a particular grace to his people, and he gives a common grace to every person, thus denying total depravity and irresistible grace. The first point of common grace contains the well-meant offer:

Concerning the first point, with regard to the favorable disposition of God toward mankind in general, and not only to the elect, Synod declares that according to the Scripture and the confessions it is determined that besides the saving grace of God, shown only to the elect unto eternal life, there is a certain kind of favor, or grace of God which He shows to His creatures in general. This is evidenced by the quoted Scripture passages and from the Canons of Dort II, 5 and III and IV, 8 and 9, which deals with the general offer of the Gospel; whereas the quoted declarations of Reformed writers from the golden age of Reformed theology, also give evidence that our Reformed fathers from of old have advocated these opinions.⁵

The general offer, or the well-meant offer, is the belief that God genuinely desires the salvation of every person, that God desires to save those whom he hates from eternity, and that salvation is offered to every person who hears that offer. You can see how this is the same heresy as Arminianism. God is no longer sovereign. What he wills—the salvation of all men—does not happen. Salvation is based upon the action of man to accept or reject the offer of the gospel. Man as God.

This doctrine is closely connected to the conditional covenant. Prof. William Heyns taught that children of believers must repent and believe to be saved and that the general offer of a general promise is given to all who hear the preaching. This doctrine limits God’s salvation to being conditioned on the believer’s acceptance of Christ into their hearts.

Because of their stand against these false doctrines, Rev. Herman Hoeksema, Rev. George Ophoff, and Rev. Henry Danhof were put out of the Christian Reformed Church. They knew the conditional covenant that came from Heyns’ doctrine and that common grace takes away from Christ’s work. God preserved his church and strengthened the truth of the covenant of grace in the Protestant Reformed Churches. God’s salvation is from eternity. God freely gives all the blessings of salvation to his people in the covenant. We receive those through Christ by faith, not by our acceptance of him.

Heyns died in the Christian Reformed Church, but his conditional covenant theology did not die. Klaas Schilder took up Heyns’ doctrine in the Netherlands. Schilder became a friend of the Protestant Reformed Churches, and many Protestant Reformed people began to adopt what Schilder taught. The Declaration of Principles was formed by the Protestant Reformed synod to defend against the conditional covenant theology of the emigrants from the Netherlands. However, some Protestant Reformed ministers, such as Hubert De Wolf, took the conditional theology of Klaas Schilder and the liberated churches in the Netherlands and developed it in the Protestant Reformed Churches. The following quotes show the sly nature of the false doctrine that De Wolf taught:

I don’t believe that it is ridiculous to say that if you believe, you will be saved. Then that salvation must mean salvation as conscious reality. And I believe that in that conscious sense, as we experience salvation, that that salvation is contingent on our believing and that that believing of ours is, of course, again, the fruit of the grace of God which he bestows sovereignly upon his people…

If it means, on the other hand, that in the initial sense, the Holy Spirit cannot assure us unless we first do something—if that’s the meaning of this question—is the assurance of the Holy Spirit that we are—that our salvation is wholly in Christ—if that assurance depends on something in you and me, then it is not conditional. Couldn’t be. That would simply be Pelagian…However, if you mean by assurance of the Holy Spirit the conscious personal assurance of our personal participation in that salvation, if that’s what you mean—but that’s really not what the Catechism is speaking of here. If that’s what you mean, then my answer is yes. It’s conditional. It is from the subjective point of view of our experience…

Now, I believe that those articles show, Mr. Chairman, that the assurance of the Holy Spirit, that is, the assurance which the Holy Spirit works concerning our personal participation in that salvation, is conditional, from the point of view of our experience, upon many things—upon sanctification, I would say, as long as we remember—as long as we remember, Mr. Chairman, that persevering is always the fruit of preservation. That’s my answer…

Mr. Chairman, I have never contended that there are conditions unto salvation in that comprehensive sense of the word. I believe, however, that there are conditions to the enjoyment of our salvation, and I think that that can be shown upon the basis of scripture. And I say once again, Mr. Chairman, conditions which we fulfill by the grace of God, not that we do anything of ourselves, not at all…

If you believe, you will be saved.⁶

This is Arminianism at its roots. Rev. H. Hoeksema and Rev. G. Ophoff used the following quotes from Thomas Ralston to describe the development of the Arminians’ lie applied to their present controversy. Ralston described salvation by grace in the eyes of an Arminian and a Calvinist:

That salvation is of grace, in the sense in which the term may be explained, is perhaps more than Arminians can admit, either in words or in effect. For if by salvation by grace Calvinists understand that faith and obedience have no connection whatever with salvation, either as conditions or otherwise, this view of salvation by grace must be rejected by Arminians, as directly contrary to the Scriptures. And this, we are persuaded, is the sense in which salvation by grace is understood, when it is said that the Arminian system does, in effect, destroy it.

The plain difference between Calvinism and Arminianism, on this subject, is this: Calvinists cannot see how salvation can be of grace, if it have any respect to faith, or anything else as a condition; whereas Arminians, while they understand that repentance toward God, and faith toward our Lord Jesus Christ, are indispensable conditions of salvation with all to whom the gospel is addressed, understand at the same time, that salvation is entirely from beginning to end, a work of God through grace.⁷

Faith and obedience have nothing whatsoever to do with attaining any part of our salvation. But the Arminian makes salvation dependent on faith and obedience. De Wolf made a condition. A condition is when A precedes B; and without A preceding B, B cannot come. De Wolf said that believing comes before the experience of salvation. Assurance, which the Spirit works, comes after sanctification and its effects. The Protestant Reformed Churches fought this conditional theology long ago. The Declaration of Principles denied faith or any other activity as a condition or prerequisite unto salvation. The Protestant Reformed Churches defended the unconditional promise, unconditional salvation, and the covenant of grace. This defense of the truth resulted in reducing the church to a third of its size.

The error of De Wolf never died in the Protestant Reformed Churches. The devil revived the same lie in the Protestant Reformed Churches in recent years and hid it behind other words. The same idea of a condition can be expressed with different words, as is evident from the following quotations:

There is an activity of the believer that is prior to the experience of a particular blessing from God.⁸

In fact, the more faithful the saints are to God’s law in the grace of Jesus Christ, the more they prosper in the great blessings of the covenant. They prosper in their marriages, in their family life, and in their church life. Above all, they prosper in the enjoyment of God’s covenant fellowship.⁹

First, a sinner believes by the grace of God, who gives him faith as a gift; then, he is saved or comes into the possession and enjoyment of his salvation.¹⁰

Justification is God’s act of declaring believers righteous, while faith is our activity of trusting Jesus for salvation, which is not God’s act.¹¹

He demands that we confess, and He forgives only after we confess our sins.¹²

When the child of God repents, God forgives his sin. Forgiveness follows repentance.¹³

What he is describing is a life lived in obedience to God’s ten commandments. God uses that in order to confirm in us the assurance of our election and salvation.¹⁴

Hence, I conclude, that sanctification and its effects, are by no means to be slighted, when we treat of assuring the soul as to its justification.¹⁵

The doctrine of the Protestant Reformed Churches is man precedes God. There is something man must do before God gives certain blessings of salvation. Repentance must come before forgiveness. Sanctification and its effects (works) are used for assurance. They give glory to man. It is the same lie as De Wolf’s. The same lie of Arminius. The same lie of Pelagius dragged out of hell. The lie of the serpent: man as God.

Yet God preserved his church. The wonderful truth that “unconditional salvation, unconditional promise, and unconditional covenant in every aspect is given to God’s children through Christ, the living head of the covenant, who continually makes intercession for us, totally depraved sinners,” lives on in the Reformed Protestant Churches. God is faithfully preserving us, resting us on Christ, and bestowing the blessings of salvation and the covenant to us who continually sin more and more.

The sword of Christ comes down with a mighty power, dividing the truth from the lie, cutting off cancerous heresy from the true church or removing his church from a corrupted body, and separating the world and the false church from his covenant children. Throughout all time God comes down and separates his people from the world, just as they have been separated in eternity by the Lamb slain before the foundation of the world. God as God.

We as a church find comfort in the controversies of which we are a part.

It is a biblical principle that where the gospel is most faithfully and strictly proclaimed, the forces of evil and apostasy are strongest in their contradiction of it. Where the truth is the sharpest, the lie is the strongest; where the lie is the strongest, the truth must be the sharpest.¹⁶

The devil does not stir up controversies over the truth and the lie where the lie has already gotten a stranglehold. He fights viciously to attack the true church. We must not dull our blades but put our trust in Christ and his words:

19. If ye were of the world, the world would love his own: but because ye are not of the world, but I have chosen you out of the world, therefore the world hateth you.

20. Remember the word that I said unto you, The servant is not greater than his lord. If they have persecuted me, they will also persecute you; if they have kept my saying, they will keep yours also.

21. But all these things will they do unto you for my name’s sake, because they know not him that sent me. (John 15:19–21)