Is it necessary to fully understand the Gospel to go to heaven? Is it enough to believe it, even if we do not fully understand it?

Now tell me, Are the souls who are most advanced more truly and certainly saved than those who know little about Christ? Not a bit of it! The most advanced is not a bit more safe than the one who is only just beginning his journey. He may be happier, but he is not safer. Friend, if you tonight can say, I really believe on, and rest in Jesus, then you are saved. If you have found Christ, and have rested your guilty soul on Him, and His wondrous work — even if you know very little about Him — you are as safe as the most advanced Christian. The man of a day's knowledge of the Lord is as safe as the man with fifty years' experience. They have both found the same Saviour. Ah! but, you say, I do not appreciate Christ as I should. True, but God appreciates Him at His true value, that is the point, and He accepts you on His estimate of Christ, not yours. I value the Lord Jesus greatly, but God values Him infinitely more. Our value of Him does not regulate our acceptance, though it may, and does affect our joy. It is God's estimate of the work of Christ in which the believer is set before Him, and according to which he is accepted and blessed.

Further, the way in which this faith is here described is remarkable too. The apostle John does not here look at Christ in glory, as he did in 1 John 4:17. He does not even dwell on Christ's death and resurrection. There is no statement of redemption. It is the person of Jesus, and the person put in the simplest possible way as "the Christ." How good and wise on God's part! There are many that know a vast deal about the Lord's sayings and doings, who overlook His person. Such are not true believers. Here much is made of the simplest believer, if true to His person; and he who does not believe that Jesus is the Christ is no believer at all. He who does truly confess and believe Him thus might be quite ignorant of His many offices, and ignorant of God's purposes and counsels of glory, but he has the right object of faith before his soul as far as it goes. He might feebly apprehend Christ's priesthood, or His advocacy, and not at all His headship of the body the church, and His supremacy over all things, and any other grand truths and ways of the Lord, of which the New Testament is full. Such lack of knowledge is no proof that he is not a child of God; he has gradually to learn these things.

That is the great truth of the first gateway — apart even, so far, from the understanding of the work of Christ. It is not necessary that one could explain just how Christ saves. It is not our knowledge that saves us; it is not how He does it; but the first great thing before a sinner is, "Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners," and he as a sinner draws near through the gateway that is open wide for every one that will come. Thus he finds himself, through faith, a member of the company of God's people, and able to enter into their joys, to understand something of the happiness that fills their hearts — the happy company that is journeying on to glory into the manifest presence of God.

I was saying that all the blessings preached in the gospel are received by individual faith in Christ, and the believer possesses them. He may know little about the nature of them; he may not be quite sure they are his; he may even be praying for them; he may think it presumption to be quite sure that he is forgiven, but forgiven he is, if he is a true believer in Christ, and eternal life is his in the Son of God. These blessings are his, just as really as if he were able to write a treatise on every one of them. He may be very defective in the word of righteousness, and may not know that the old order has been brought to an end in the cross; he may have little idea of the true meaning of eternal life, but if he be only a babe in Christ (and he cannot be less if he has the Spirit) he knows the Father, and Jesus Christ the sent One of the Father, and in this lies eternal life. But he did not find these blessings in the saints; the gospel directed him to Christ, and in Him he found them. When he came amongst the people of God, he came into the sphere where divine affections dwelt, and where they were in activity and enjoyed; but he brought them with him into the assembly, as every bee brings the honey it gathers to the hive, and there everything is enjoyed in fellowship together.

You may not be very clear about all that is wrapt up in the wonderful truth of the incarnation, which is beyond any creature's finite grasp, but you must know the meaning, and the value, of the death of the Saviour, if you are going to be saved. Little does it matter what you know about creation, although "through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that things which are seen were not made of things that do appear" (Heb. 11:3), and this puts God into His place, and us into ours; but it is of vital importance to understand what is taught by the death of the Lord Jesus Christ.

There are souls who trust in the blood of Christ without having understood all the efficacy of that blood. That is what is particularly shown us in the sacrifices for sin. Unconverted people pass lightly over sin, and say that God will pardon our faults; but nothing will escape Him, neither wrongs toward others, nor sins committed in ignorance (Lev. 4:13), unknown to us. (Lev. 5:17-19.) It is impossible to be in ignorance without sin. If I sin in ignorance, it is because I am a sinner, and ignorance is one of its consequences. If I do not love as Christ loves, it is a sin. An error in judgment arises from the estrangement of our souls from God. Our affections govern our judgment; if thine eye be single, thy whole body is full of light. Thus, in the parable of those who are invited to a feast and excuse themselves on account of their oxen, in which they have put their affections, God shows us what He sees in us, and the more the light enters into our hearts, the more it makes us discover what we are.

Many a soul is drawn, we believe, to the Lord with practically little or no knowledge of the real meaning of Christ's death, yet trusting Him in a vague and childlike manner for blessing and eternal happiness, and from such a type as this we are encouraged to believe that such a case is met by the death of Christ.

You observe that I have spoken of a difference in these two things, and there is one. It is not understood generally, but I will tell you what and why it is. It is because salvation is not understood! Thanks be to God, people do not lose salvation because they do not understand it. Wretched were it so, that is, if God only blessed according to their measure, but He blesses according to Christ. And is there any measure there? On the contrary, what a fulness, fulness infinite, according to Himself, according to all His grace and His truth.

Here, alas, most people stop. They think this is all there is in our approach unto God — the knowledge of salvation through faith in the Lord Jesus; they go perhaps through life with little more knowledge than this.

We can thank God for that much; for it is not the amount of our knowledge that saves, but the One in whom our faith is. Faith may not be very clear or very strong, but if it is in the right Object, if it has linked us with Christ, it puts us among the saved who have entered into His courts, and true praise will surely follow.

This shows that faith is a very distinct thing from the ability to explain the figures of a passage, the general sense and certainty of which may yet be clearly seen. So much so that even now, if you were to take a Christian and ask him to explain all the particulars of that verse — what was meant by the Seed of the woman and that of the serpent, the enmity between them and the bruising of the head and of the heel, though he might be perfectly certain that it speaks of Christ, and might understand the general meaning of all, yet he would find a great deal of difficulty in explaining what each thing meant. But there lies the blessedness of God's word, that people are not saved by having clear thoughts on the obscure; but God knows how to direct every soul that is saved to the right object. Their hearts rest upon a Christ who has suffered for them and completely destroyed the destroyer. They may not be able to bring out their thoughts clearly to others; but the faith of the taught knows the truth perhaps as well as the teacher, though the latter alone can develop it with convincing plainness. This shows that even where God employs these figures, the general thought is sufficiently plain. To expound them by words might be an insuperable difficulty to the soul that has no question of the general sense.