A lady called me on the telephone the other day and she was talking to me about the plan of salvation. She had heard me read, or quote, Mark, chapter 16, verses 15 and 16: “Go ye into all the world, and preach the Gospel to every creature. He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved; [but he that believeth not shall be damned.”] She said, “But I read in my Bible that I’m saved by faith alone.” I said, “Where do you read that?” She said, “Well, ‘God so loved the world, that He gave His Only Begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life,’ [quoting John 3:16].” Of course, the Bible does say that we must believe. Jesus said, “He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved; [but hethatbelieveth not shall be damned,” Mark 16:16].” Of course, we can’t be saved without believing in the Lord Jesus Christ. But she said, “But I was saved before I was baptized.” I said, “Well, then Christ didn’t know about that, did He?” And she said, “No, He must not have known about it when He said that, because when He said that, He did not know about my experience of salvation before I was baptized.” Well, I went on to try to press her a bit further with that, but when I did, she said, “Well, you and I worship different Gods, because my God is not going to judge me. My God loves me and He does not judge me.” So her God is “love,” but she believes that He is not her Judge.

But the Bible teaches us that God is going to judge us through His Son Jesus Christ to Whom He gave “authority” to pass “judgment” upon all men, “because He is the Son of man,” John 5, verses 25 to 28 [“Verily, verily, I say unto you, The hour is coming, and now is, when the dead shall hear the voice of the Son of God: and they that hear shall live. For as the Father hath life in Himself; so hath He given to the Son to have life in Himself; And hath given Him authority to execute judgment also, because He is the Son of man. Marvel not at this: for the hour is coming, in the which all that are in the graves shall hear His voice.”]. So that being true, then, she has missed something about God.

Actually, I’ve often wondered: If in our personal evangelism and in our enthusiasm and our diligence about doing the work of the Lord—and we are to be respected for that and not condemned or criticized for it at all—but just remember that so many times in our enthusiasm in this kind of work, we go out to evangelize, and the first thing we want to do is teach our prospect, as we call him, that he must hear the Gospel, believe the Gospel, repent of his sins, and confess Christ and be baptized. Those “five” things! Well, he must do all of that alright, but we haven’t told him about God. We’ve told him he must hear the Gospel, he must believe in Christ, he must repent of his sins, he must confess Christ, and he must be baptized, but we haven’t mentioned God to him at all, have we?! And in some instances, that is true, and I wonder how many people have been baptized and have come into the church carrying their own idol. They have their own image about what God is and about what He’s like. It may differ from everyone else’s in the whole church! And so it may not be true, as Paul wrote in Ephesians, chapter 4, [verses 4-6], “There is one body, and one Spirit, even as ye are called in one hope of your calling; One Lord, one faith, one baptism, One God and Father of all, Who is above all, and through all, and in you all.”It may be that we’re serving many gods. I may have my perception of God; you may have your perception; and for that reason, then we may be, well…, we may be worshipping many gods. We may be polytheistic, and not [believe in or know] just the One God.

Well, we’re going to study our Bibles, and we’re going to learn differently, aren’t we. We need to begin to preach and to say more about God, because not only in our times, but in times past, we have seen people who were polytheistic, and they displeased God.

Solomon begins to make preparation for the building of the temple and he tells that he’s going to have 183,000 skilled men and craftsmen that are going to work diligently on this temple. It took him seven and a half years and 183,000 men to build it. This temple was not a big building. It didn’t have a lot of space in it. It wasn’t any bigger than this auditorium [that seats about 300 to 350 people], I suspect.

Well, it was a costly thing! A few years ago, the Illinois Association of Architects said that it was probably the most costly building that human hands had ever built! You can look about the world and can travel in Europe and see some of the cathedrals that have been built to Christianity. You can travel in some of the Bible lands and see the ruins of some of the great temples that were built to the various gods even then, and in New Testament times as well. At Ephesus, for example, we visited the ruins of the temple built to the goddess Diana, and other places like that. The Temple of Diana was one of the “seven wonders of the world” at that time! Well, you think of those expensive temples—the Taj Mahal, with all of its jewels and all of the precious stones that went into building it. But there has never been a building comparable in price to this temple of God built by Solomon.

Not only that, but it was a beautiful temple! It was said that, being overlaid with plates of pure gold, it defied a person to look upon it with unshaded eyes in brightness of the sun. You couldn’t look at it! The sun shined off of those gold plates so that you couldn’t look on it with unshaded eyes. You’d have to have dark glasses or sloped glass or something to look through. So it was a beautiful thing!