Mark 16:15-16 “And He said to them, "Go into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature. (16) He who believes and is baptized will be saved; but he who does not believe will be condemned.”
We have established in the previous section that God has made provision for all men to be saved. And so, it would also make God unjust, for Him to make provision for all men to be saved, and then not tell mankind about the salvation that He has made possible for them. But as I have already stated, God is not unjust. And so, in this section, we want to establish the truth from God’s word, that not only has God made provision for every man to be saved, but He has also made provision for that salvation message to be proclaimed throughout the earth. And so, in order to establish this truth, I have quoted three witnesses that all confirm the same truth to us, i.e. that God has provided for His salvation message to be proclaimed throughout the earth. The three witnesses are the Lord Jesus Christ, the apostle Paul and the apostle John. The first witness quoted above is our Lord Jesus Christ. In the above passage of scripture, our Lord Jesus leaves His church with no doubt as to whom we should preach the gospel. We are to preach it to every person in the entire world. In other words, we are not to be selective in who we preach the gospel too, for to do so would be to transgress the commandment of God. Clearly God wants His message of salvation to be proclaimed to all men. Initially the Lord’s disciples put their own interpretation on the Lord’s commandment, because they only preached the gospel to the Jews, thinking that when the Lord said all the world and every creature, that He really meant all the Jews. But thankfully the Lord got their thinking straightened out when they finally realised that when Jesus said all the world, that’s exactly what He meant, i.e. all the Jews and all the Gentiles.
Michael E.B. Maher
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