The second practice Paul avoided was the use of deception. This is pretending to do one thing, but actually doing something else. I regret to say that an application of this takes place even in the Christian church, where something will be put forward to attract people but which is really not what the church is all about. It will be done simply because it is believed that you have to do something to get them in, and then after you get them in, you can begin to work with them. That is a tragedy because that can be a form of deception. They pare off the hard edges of Christianity, including the difficult sayings of Jesus Christ about discipleship, because they say that if you talk about those things you turn people off and they will not even listen.
The tragedy with that kind of approach is that the other aspects of the Gospel never do get mentioned. When we look to Jesus Christ and His example, we find that He did not do that. Jesus always mentioned the difficulty from the very beginning. He said that if one is going to follow Him that person needs to be willing to give up everything else. They have to follow Jesus all the way to the very end. Jesus did not falsify His message, and neither did the apostle Paul.
The third thing he mentions maybe comes even closer to what many evangelicals do. Paul writes that we do not “distort the word of God.” It is possible to speak about things that are true and yet do it in a false way in the sense of stressing something to the neglect of another. People are interested in one piece of the truth and leave out things that are also part of the truth and therefore necessary for a well-rounded presentation of the faith.
Well, if Paul did not do these things in his ministry, what then did he do? The second half of verse 2 tells us: “On the contrary, by setting forth the truth plainly we commend ourselves to every man’s conscience in the sight of God.” It is simply setting forth the truth plainly. Oh, certainly we try to do it as winsomely as possible. We try to illustrate it when the particular theological subjects are difficult to comprehend. But the goal in all of it is to make it plain. Sometimes not all of what we hear is clear. These are about God’s ways and not our ways. There are some things that are difficult for us to understand. What we need to do is have the darkness in our minds dispelled, and the fog in our thinking removed, so that we can then see things better as God presents them to us in His Word.
Someone might suggest, “Well, if Paul did that, he did not do it very successfully because when he went about speaking the truth plainly, it was obviously rejected.” He himself gives testimony to this when he says later on in this very chapter that he was hard-pressed, perplexed, persecuted, struck down, given over to death, and other things. But the difficulty was not in Paul, nor was the difficulty in Paul’s message. The difficulty is in the heart of men and women, which does not want to submit itself to that truth.
We have a great example in the case of Jesus Himself. Jesus certainly spoke plainly, as we see, for example, in the Beatitudes. Jesus taught that the way to happiness is in God’s way and not our way. I also think of that occasion in John 10, when Jesus was teaching. John records some of the plainest teaching by Christ in all the gospels. He teaches there about the depravity of man, and about God’s electing grace and salvation, and God’s keeping power toward His saints. It is very clear what He has to say. But at the end of that, after He had talked plainly to them, we find that they took up stones to stone Him. They tried to seize Him, but He escaped from their hands. You see, the difficulty is not with the complexity of the Gospel. The Gospel is plain. Yes, there are parts of Scripture that we have to wrestle with and things we do not fully understand. But the Gospel is plain. The difficulty is that we do not want the Gospel.
That is what Paul talks about. He writes in verses 3 and 4 that if the Gospel is veiled to some people, it is to those who are perishing. And the reason for this is that the “god of this age has blinded the minds of unbelievers, so that they cannot see the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God.”
