How Many Gospels



Spiritual North Korea

Our world seems to get smaller and smaller. We know or can know often more than we want to know about what’s going on in the world. Three UCLA basketball players from detained by the Chinese authorities for shoplifting recently returned home from China. Who knows what would have happened had our President not been in China to request their release in person. Imagine the anxiety of those young men and their families as they waited to learn their fate in the wake of the Otto Warmbier tragedy? Last year the 21 year old college student was sentenced to fifteen years hard labor in a North Korean prison after being convicted of attempted theft of a propaganda poster from his hotel. When U. S. authorities finally obtained Warmbier’s release June, 2017, he was in a coma from brain injuries suffered in North Korea. He died six days later.

What do China and North Korea have to do with the gospel? Before we answer plainly, please consider what Jesus said to the Jews who believed Him in John 8:31-36, “If you abide in My word, you are My disciples indeed. And you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” Stay with us to see if you may be living in or heading toward spiritual North Korea, after our song…

How would you react if when you go to your mailbox tomorrow, there was an envelope for you that had printed on the front, “You are a winner!” But you notice an unusual return address – Pyongyang, North Korea. You open the envelope and learn the prize is an all-expense paid two week vacation to beautiful North Korea. You would laugh it off as a practical joke or tear it up in disgust. After all, “What kind of a fool would accept that kind of an offer?”

In light of what we know about North Korea, for any of us to travel to North Korea would be the equivalent of making a reservation to stay in one of the most inhumane prisons under one of the most – if the not THE most – barbaric dictators in the world. Who would want to be imprisoned anywhere? Who would be willing to subject himself to bondage accompanied by physical abuse, mental and emotional cruelty? Who would want to forfeit his freedom and expose his family to unimaginable anguish? 

The bitter reality is that billions, not millions, of people today are living in spiritual bondage. As of November, 2017, the world population numbered 7.6 billion.[i] Pew Forum research reports that there are 2.2 billion PROFESSING Christians (32% of the world’s population), 1.6 billion Muslims (23%), 1 billion Hindus (15%), nearly 500 million Buddhists (7%) and 14 million Jews (0.2%) around the world as of 2010.[ii] So who is in spiritual bondage? Even if all of the 2.2 billion who profess Christianity were legitimate disciples that would still leave 68% of the world’s population or 4.4 billion people outside of Christ and lost in sin. There is no salvation outside of Christ. Jesus said in John 14:6, "I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me.” While 2.2 billion profess to be followers of Jesus Christ, the masses of them blindly follow blind leaders as Jesus Himself puts it (Matthew 15:14) and do not live up to their claims. Jesus calls out these nominal disciples in Matthew 7:22, “Many will say to Me in that day, ‘Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in Your name, cast out demons in Your name, and done many wonders in Your name?'” The apostle Paul highlights the same problem in Titus 1:16, “They profess to know God, but in works they deny Him, being abominable, disobedient, and disqualified for every good work.” The point is: talk is cheap; it’s not enough to make a verbal confession, you must live the life! The Spirit says that professing believers deny God through their disobedience. As a result, the mass of so-called Christians today like the 4.4 billion Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Jews, and atheists are in spiritual North Korea – they are in bondage.

This may come as a shock to you but it has always been this way. There has always been just a remnant or sliver who genuinely served God. Millions rejected God while Noah and his family of eight toed the line (Genesis 6). Only Lot and his two daughters survived Sodom and Gomorrah (Genesis 19). So many had abandoned the true God to serve false gods in Elijah’s day, that he thought he was the only faithful man left (1 Kings 19). God tells Elijah that there were another 7,000 who had not been corrupted by false worship, but that was still a very small minority of Israel. We find in Numbers 32:11-12, "Surely none of the men who came up from Egypt, from twenty years old and above, shall see the land of which I swore to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, because they have not wholly followed Me, except Caleb the son of Jephunneh, the Kenizzite, and Joshua the son of Nun, for they have wholly followed the LORD.” Just a remnant of Jews prove faithful through the stream of time. Jesus emphasizes in the Sermon on the Mount that many will be destroyed and few will be saved (Matthew 7:13-14). The Holy Spirit (referencing Isaiah 10:22) says through the apostle in Romans 9:27, “Isaiah also cries out concerning Israel:  ‘Though the number of the children of Israel be as the sand of the sea, The remnant will be saved.’” Many will live and die in bondage; few will experience true freedom.

No one communicates this truth more frankly than Jesus in John 8:31-33, “‘IF you abide in My word, you are My disciples indeed. And you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.’ They answered Him, ‘We are Abraham's descendants, and have never been in bondage to anyone. How can You say, "You will be made free?”’" The Jews were indignant. How dare anyone suggest they were slaves! They said they never experienced bondage. Jesus lays it out in John 8:34-36 in a way everyone can understand if they have tender hearts and open minds: “Most assuredly, I say to you, whoever commits sin is a slave of sin. And a slave does not abide in the house forever, but a son abides forever. Therefore if the Son makes you free, you shall be free indeed.”

Jesus not only tells them they are under the bondage of sin, but insists only He can grant them freedom. Yes, you should do everything in your power to stay out of North Korea. Understand, though, once you commit sin you are in spiritual North Korea -- a far more dangerous place. Only Jesus can GET you out and only Jesus can KEEP you out when you abide in his word.

If Jesus seeks to set men free from sin, you know the devil and his henchmen constantly lure the spiritually sluggish and inattentive into his lair to be chained. Jesus says in John 10:10, “The thief does not come except to steal, and to kill, and to destroy.” The devil makes Kim Jung Un look like a teddy bear. Satan seeks to steal your freedom, to shackle you in misery, and finally to tie you to his eternal fate. We see in 2 Timothy 2:26 that the Christian maintains his own spiritual freedom so he may help others “come to their senses and escape the snare of the devil, having been taken captive by him to do his will.”

So what does the devil have in his bag of tricks to make spiritual North Korea enticing? When studying for this lesson I stumbled across an image that said the Torah or Law of Moses was the law of liberty. Stunning! The Bible speaks of the law of liberty, but never hits at it being the Law of Moses. James 1:25, “But he who looks into the perfect law of liberty and continues in it, and is not a forgetful hearer but a doer of the work, this one will be blessed in what he does.”  James 2:12, “So speak and so do as those who will be judged by the law of liberty.” These Scriptures do not refer, however, to the Torah or Law of Moses. In fact, we find Jesus came to free His people from the bondage of the Law of Moses (Galatians 2:3-5). The apostle Paul contrasts this bondage with the liberty we have in Jesus. He again speaks of the law of Moses with circumcision, etc., as bondage in Galatians 4:4-5, “But when the fullness of the time had come, God sent forth His Son, born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, that we might receive the adoption as sons.”

The Spirit illustrates this truth in Galatians 4:21, “Tell me, you who desire to be under the law, do you not hear the law?” The apostle then tells a story or allegory in which he speaks of Abraham’s two sons: one of Sarah, the free woman, of promise (Isaac); one of Hagar, the bondwomen, of the flesh (Ishmael). Each son represents one of the two major covenants; the spirit associates Ishmael, the son of the bondwoman, with Mt. Sinai. Mt. Sinai, of course, is where Moses received the Ten Commandments which are central to the Law of Moses and the old covenant (Exodus 31:18). To live under the Law of Moses is clearly to live in bondage while living under the law of Christ is to live in the Law of liberty (1 Corinthians 9:21).

The apostle Paul drives the same point home in Galatians 5:1-4, “Stand fast therefore in the liberty by which Christ has made us free, and do not be entangled again with a yoke of bondage. Indeed I, Paul, say to you that if you become circumcised, Christ will profit you nothing. And I testify again to every man who becomes circumcised that he is a debtor to keep the whole law. You have become estranged from Christ, you who attempt to be justified by law; you have fallen from grace.”

Those who try to keep the old law are certainly living in spiritual North Korea, but many more followers of Christ are dominated by the devil because they allow the flesh to overwhelm the spirit. The apostle Peter refers to these failures as the pollutions of the flesh in 2 Peter 2:19-20, “For when they speak great swelling words of emptiness, they allure through the lusts of the flesh, through lewdness, the ones who have actually escaped from those who live in error. While they promise them liberty, they themselves are slaves of corruption; for by whom a person is overcome, by him also he is brought into bondage. For if, after they have escaped the pollutions of the world through the knowledge of the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, they are again entangled in them and overcome, the latter end is worse for them than the beginning.”

Ironically, those who promote fleshly lusts say they are expressions of liberty. Meanwhile, the Holy Spirit exposes their pitchmen as “slaves of corruption” who lead others into bondage. There is no more pitiful citizen of spiritual North Korea than the man or woman enslaved to alcohol or some other drug. In 1 Peter 4:2-3, the Christian is told “no longer … live … for the lusts of men, but for the will of God. For we have spent enough of our past … in lewdness, lusts, drunkenness, revelries, drinking parties, and abominable idolatries.” Jesus freed us from all of that foolishness. Proverbs 20:1, “Wine is a mocker, Strong drink is a brawler, And whoever is led astray by it is not wise.” As a work of the flesh, not only does drunkenness condemn the soul (Galatians 5:19-21), but alcohol poisons the mind and body. The wise man Solomon warns that the man or woman who fails to avoid alcohol exposes himself to many woes, sorrows, and wounds (Proverbs 23:29-32). The medical community now validates that Scripture many times over.

The list we noticed in 1 Peter 4:2-3 also included “lewdness” and “lust.” These general words include a host of immoral behaviors. Can you imagine how much space would be required to cover all the perversions practiced today? The ungodly insist that by engaging in these behaviors, one expresses his freedom. The second Greek word translated “lust” is epithumia. Bauer, Danker, Arndt and Gingrich Lexicon notes that “gambling, drinking and gluttony are called epithumiai.” Lewdness or lasciviousness comes from the Greek word “aselgeia.” Thayer’s Greek-English Lexicon includes in his definition: “…shamelessness…filthy words, indecent bodily movements [so prevalent in much of today’s dancing], [and] unchaste handling of males and females.” The Jamieson, Fausset, and Brown Commentary expands the definition to include “immodest, wantonness, [and] unbridled conduct.”

Even the world is by repulsed by some of the more extreme behaviors recently publicized among the Hollywood elite and major political figures. Professing Christians, however, commonly engage in many of these behaviors. When confronted, sometimes they shrug their shoulders and say, “So what?” Jesus offers freedom from this bondage. When a Christian wanders back into these behaviors, the Bible says in 2 Peter 2:22 that it is like “A dog return[ing] to his own vomit."

The flesh can be a conduit for animal-like behavior, but the body serves a higher purpose for the Christian. 1 Corinthians 6:18-20, “Flee sexual immorality. Every sin that a man does is outside the body, but he who commits sexual immorality sins against his own body. Or do you not know that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have from God, and you are not your own? For you were bought at a price; therefore glorify God in your body and in your spirit, which are God's.” You see, genuine Christians treat their body with great respect. Don’t let the devil bore a hole in your soul!

Many people are fettered to pornography, but glorifying God in our body includes our eyes. Jesus says in Matthew 5:27-29, “You have heard that it was said to those of old, ‘You shall not commit adultery.' But I say to you that whoever looks at a woman to lust for her has already committed adultery with her in his heart. If your right eye causes you to sin, pluck it out and cast it from you; for it is more profitable for you that one of your members perish, than for your whole body to be cast into hell.” Jesus is not promoting eyeball plucking. No! He’s merely emphasizing the urgency of self-control while stressing what is at stake.

Even from a secular standpoint, porn is not a harmless hobby. Associate professor of Psychology, Dr. William Struthers, writes that “viewing pornography hijacks the normal functioning of the brain and the maladaptive patterns we adopt have profound psychological and behavioral effects.”[iii] Joe Carter explains that exposure to porn “is correlated with social anxiety, depression, low motivation, …concentration problems, and negative self-perceptions in terms of physical appearance...”[iv] Pornography depersonalizes other human beings and greatly hinders healthy marriage relationships. Don’t allow the devil to chain your brain and bind your mind. Don’t allow him to poison your children’s mind through I-phones or computers. Rob Jackson with Focus on the Family writes, “Some researchers have stated that the average age of exposure to pornography is down to 8.”[v]

Seek the true freedom Christ promises to give you. Lay aside the manacles on your wrists and ankles and begin walking in the light! Commit yourself to the following pledge:

• 1 Corinthians 6:12, “I will not be brought under the power of any.” NKJV

• 1 Corinthians 6:12, “I will not let anything make me its slave.” New Century Version

• 1 Corinthians 6:12, “I will not be mastered by anything.” Christian Standard Bible

• 1 Corinthians 6:12, “I will not be controlled by anything.” Common English Bible

• 1 Corinthians 6:12, “I will not be dominated by anything.” English Standard Version

Henry Cloud has said, “Freedom comes from taking responsibility; bondage comes from giving it away.” Don’t let the devil rob you of the good life; take charge of your life today and turn it over to Jesus Christ.

Stay with us for a final word, after our song…

We hope you will contact us so we can help you obey the Lord according to the new covenant. Again, in some Let the Bible Speak markets you may pre-order our new six lesson correspondence or simply request a copy of this message, Spiritual North Korea, #1125. Sign in to our Facebook page for the daily Bible verse and subscribe to our YouTube channel to watch the weekly message at your convenience. Join us next week as we continue in our stand for truth in a world of religious confusion. We say with the apostle Paul in Romans 16:16, “the churches of Christ salute you.” Until next week, goodbye and God bless.

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