Back in March of this year I commenced a series of articles in which I began delineating the manifold error on which the so-called “social gospel” and its theological twin, “Black Liberation Theology” are predicated from a Biblical standpoint. Numerous intervening current events, including the most recent—the George Zimmerman trial—interrupted that series, though my belief is that the topic of the series is central to the issues and events that have reemerged into the public discourse in the wake of the Zimmerman trial. What I mean is that it is the century or more of subversive and contempt-promoting indoctrination of African-Americans emanating from the tenets of the social gospel and Black Liberation Theology that has fueled the fire and fanned the flames of the current racial maelstrom motivated supposedly by the Zimmerman-Martin case and its controversial verdict.
I won’t reiterate the foundation I laid for the series in the previous articles in this post, but if you did not read those articles, I highly recommend that you do in order to understand where I am coming from and not be guilty of misconstruing my intent due to not having read the premise I laid out in the course of the series. [Click on these links to read the previous articles: Error of the Social Gospel -- http://mychal-massie.com/premium/error-of-the-social-gospel/; The Fallacy and Ineffectiveness of the "Social Gospel" -- http://mychal-massie.com/premium/the-fallacy-and-ineffectiveness-of..., The Laudable Legacy of MLK & CRM -- http://mychal-massie.com/premium/the-laudable-legacy-of-mlk-crm/.]
The following is a resumption of the series.
God Expects Believers to Earn Their Own Income to Provide For Their Own—No Work, No Eat
Such thinking is by no means right, proper, or Christian, in that the Word of God explicitly states: “But if anyone does not provide for his own, and especially for those of his household, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever” (1 Tim. 5:8). In his letter to the Thessalonians, Paul wrote by inspiration of the Spirit:
“For even when we were with you, we used to give you this order: if anyone is not willing to work, then he is not to eat, either. For we hear that some among you are leading an undisciplined life, doing no work at all, but acting like busybodies. Now such persons we command and exhort in the Lord Jesus Christ to work in quiet fashion and eat their own bread” (2 Thes. 3:10-12).
He went on to say, “If anyone does not obey our instruction in this letter, take special note of that person and do not associate with him, so that he will be put to shame” (2 Thes. 3:14). In other words, God is instructing us to not befriend or have any relationship with someone who refuses to work and earn money to support his own family, rather than be dependent on the charity and subsidies of others who have earned their money. Of course, there are times and circumstances in which anyone can find themselves out of money, employment, and income, and God is not forbidding believers to help and be gracious to other believers in particular who find themselves in such a predicament. But to incessantly live off the help and subsistence of others when one is able to work and earn their income is something God condemns and instructs believers to eschew. Moreover, none of this is applicable to support of ministers who are ordained, commanded, directed (depending on translation) by God to obtain their living from the preaching of the Gospel (1 Cor. 9:14).
Genuine, Obedient Believers Are Not Irresponsible Malingerers
Though neither space nor readers’ tolerance allows, I could readily cite fifty or more scriptures speaking to the matter of God’s intolerance and contempt for lazy, lax, indolent, slothful, undisciplined, irresponsible, negligent, malingering, uncaring, unloving, self-centered attitudes and behavior, especially by those who claim the assignation, “believer in Christ.” Genuine, Born Again, regenerated believers in Christ are motivated by the agape-love of God to work to make a living in order to feed themselves and their families, and even “so that always having all sufficiency in everything, you may have an abundance for every good deed,” as a result of the fact that “God is able to make all grace abound to you”(2 Cor. 9:8). In other words, it should be the desire of the believer to not only have enough for their own needs and those who they are responsible to provide for, but also to have enough to be able to be charitable and help others who are not at that place.
Nothing in the Word of God Authorizes Tax-Funded Governmental Charity Programs
But, this is primarily a personal and individual type of charity, not an organized charity or benevolence, and it certainly is not referring to funding extracted from people by governments who confiscate money from the citizenry under the name of taxes, and then use taxpayers money as their own colossal slush-fund for political means and advantage to gain the favor and political support of whole people-classes; namely, the poor, unemployed, and disadvantaged. To infer or state that such is the meaning of the Holy Words of God is a gross perversion and corruption of their intent.
God never intended that anything contained in His Word be twisted to by any means or purpose be justification for a multi-trillion dollar taxpayer-funded charity program to support a million or so freeloaders and malingerers who simply have no desire to work in order to feed and support themselves and their families, but are more inclined to steal what they want from others by illegal, criminal means. God never intended for the Church and individual Christians to bear the brunt of any society’s financial burdens. But, the Social Gospel purports that all of that is indeed the case.
Love Not the World, Neither the Things of the World
The fact is: the world and the societies are not the focus of the authentic Gospel of Christ. Indeed, God commands believers: “Do not love the world nor the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him.” (1 Jn. 2:15) The Social Gospel, and every offshoot of it, in direct contradiction of this command, is entirely focused on the societies of the world and the fallacious, though pious-sounding, goal of “making the world a better place.” But, when you take God literally at His Word, such a goal and every strategy in existence designed to accomplish it, is a totally illicit, not to mention unobtainable, goal and strategy, from a Biblical and Kingdom perspective.
I’m not talking here about the mundane matters and mechanisms of human life, such as inventions and scientific discoveries, and the like, that make human life better or more productive in a vast number of ways, but rather making the world itself—i.e., the unseen world system, in essence, the spiritual realm behind what we see of the world, which according to the Word of God has been under the control of Satan since the failure and precipitous fall of Man into apostasy in the Garden of Eden (cf., 2 Cor. 4:4; et al.)—a better place.
The arch-aim of the Social Gospel is to improve the plight of peoples. But, again, apart from the transformational power of the Gospel of Christ, improvement of the plight of people is ultimately only superficial, abstract, relative, transient, and limited. To whatever degree external conditions and circumstances may be improved, without improvement of the inner person, the quality and satisfaction of a person’s existence on Earth essentially will not be improved at all, nor, certainly, their eternal destiny and destination. Whereas, the internal transformation of the person who surrenders His life to Christ and legitimately experiences the transaction of regeneration, as well as yields to the sanctifying work of the Holy Spirit in their heart and life, experiences not only a better, more fruitful, and more satisfying life on Earth, but also attains unto fellowship and communion with the God-Head throughout the denouement of eternity, regardless of his/her circumstances.
In other words, the Gospel of Christ promises not only an “abundant life” (Jn. 10:10) here on Earth, but it also promises an exceedingly better destiny and destination to the obedient and faithful believer. As the writer of Hebrews put it, speaking of Jesus: “But now He has obtained a more excellent ministry, by as much as He is also the mediator of a better covenant, which has been enacted on better promises” (Heb 8:6). Promulgators of the Social Gospel can make no such claims concerning adherents’ after-life once their life on Earth ends. Once again, in this regard as well, the claim of the D.C. African-American pastor that precipitated this article series as well as all proponents of the Social Gospel that the Biblical Gospel and the Social Gospel are one and the same is irrefutably proven to be utterly false.
The Bottom-line Truth Every Believer Needs To Know
The bottom-line truth is that the so-called “Social Gospel” as well as the related theosophy of “Black Liberation Theology,” are faulty and anti-biblical, “ginned-up” theology, based entirely on twisted and corrupted Scripture. The overall goal of both is to take a bunch of cherry-picked Scripture verses, throw them into a blender, add some philosophical and quasi-religious-sounding mumbo-jumbo, plus some emotionally-charged rantings, throw in a good measure of rabble-rousing anger, bitterness, and race-mongering, churn it all up on high until it foams, and voila! you’ve got an extremely potent, highly volatile, poisonous drink of indoctrination to pour into vacuous, misinformed, deluded, culturally-duped, Spirit-vacant, and Truth-lacking minds.
And, what do you get from that? A hundred million or so totally deceived minorities who spend their entire lives espousing contempt and hatred, spouting off violent and vehement rhetoric centered on a contrived dogma about the conspiratorial desire and strategy of the rest of the population to oppress, mistreat, persecute, deter, and deny them access to the same opportunities accessible to them, and diligently looking for every possible opportunity to exact vengeance from same, to include extorting from those better off than they de facto financial reparations from tax-supported entitlement programs.
The Social Gospel as well as Black Liberation Theology are an outright counterfeit of the genuine Gospel of Christ as delineated in the Word of God, the Bible.
Though, of course, they would vehemently deny it, the fact of the matter is there are a myriad of people who proudly associate themselves with the Social Gospel and Social-Gospel-based organizations and their works in society, who have never partaken personally of the genuine Gospel of Christ themselves, and become a “new creature” in Christ by surrendering their hearts and lives to Christ, becoming obedient to him from the heart. They are as lost and undone and without God in their hearts and lives as the entire current population of Canadian geese. They evoke Christian/Biblical terminology, but it’s nothing more than regurgitation of learned cultural lexicon, rather than divine truth emanating from the Spirit resident within their human spirit. It’s carnal culture-speak, rather than Spiritual Spirit-speak, and thus a phenomenon that every true, Born Again, Spirit-infused believer needs to be apprised of and avoid at all cost.###
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