Here’s a warning from Paul’s epistles you won’t find too many preachers explain to you:

“Neither give heed to fables and endless genealogies (Editor’s Note: This means following a “Who’s Who” over God, as the Calvinists do with their “ancient fathers” from American history), which minister questions, rather than godly edifying which is in faith: so do.

“Now the end of the commandment is charity out of a pure heart, and of a good conscience, and of faith unfeigned: From which some having swerved have turned aside unto vain jangling.” (I Tim. 1:4-6)

“Vain jangling” means empty, worthless noise, and gives Paul’s estimation of what you hear today in the average pulpit, including what’s broadcast on TV and radio.

My pastor, Richard Jordan, explains, “Down South there’s an expression, ‘It sounds like a truckload of pots and pans hitting a truckload of pigs,’ and that’s what’s meant by ‘vain jangling.’ A pulpit that does not ‘rightly divide’ God’s word (II Tim. 2:15) uses the Bible but isn’t dispensational, and that’s what Paul says they shovel out as a result. I didn’t say it, Paul did. How do you know that? Look at the very next verse: ‘Desiring to be teachers of the law; understanding neither what they say, nor whereof they affirm.’ I would call that being an ignoramus.”

In Paul’s epistle to the Galatians, you learn there were some people trying to convince others that, instead of following the grace program Paul delineated, they needed to go back and mix in with it Israel’s law program if they wanted an acceptable standing before God.

“These people were telling the Galatians they needed to go back, get circumcised, keep Moses’ laws and rules and regulations, and so on, and Paul says, ‘When you do that you’re being disobedient to the Word of God,’ ” says Jordan. “When Paul says, ‘I’m not going to frustrate the grace of God,’ that’s what Satan wants to do. He can’t you get out of Christ, but if it isn’t Christ living in you, and you’re working back over there in your flesh—and in your own performance and your old sense of identity rather than your new identity in Christ—let’s face it, you live out of who you think you are. Every problem you have that you think talk therapy will cure you could cure with that bit of knowledge.”

Paul could not be clearer when he says in Gal. 1:8-9, “But though we, or an angel from heaven, preach any other gospel unto you than that which we have preached unto you, let him be accursed. As we said before, so say I now again, If any man preach any other gospel unto you than that ye have received, let him be accursed.”

Jordan explains, “When Paul says, ‘Let him be accursed,’ he means, ‘Cut that dude off! Don’t have anything to do with him!’ Now if you’ve got an NIV, it says, ‘Let him be eternally damned.’ And you know that can’t be right! If a guy comes and preaches the wrong gospel to you that doesn’t send him to hell! I know saved people who don’t preach Paul’s gospel. He’s not telling the Galatians, ‘You were saved but now you’re going to lose your salvation.’ The word ‘accursed’ means to be cut off.”

In a recent sermon on this whole matter of incorrectly following Jesus Christ’s ministry to the Jews under the prophetic law program (as opposed to Paul’s program of grace alone to both Jews and Gentiles), Jordan reported receiving a letter from a man who was “particularly mad at me. He wrote, ‘You’re saying there’s more than one gospel in the Bible!’ I wrote him back and said, ‘Well, Galatians 2:7 says there is. There’s the gospel of the circumcision and the gospel of uncircumcision.’

“You see there are a bunch of different gospels in the Bible, but there’s only one gospel in the Dispensation of Grace. Of course, when you don’t ‘rightly divide’ the Word, you don’t see that. You think there’s only one gospel.”

Indeed, it was specifically because of all the people in Galatia who wanted to corrupt Paul’s dispensational doctrine by putting everyone back under Israel’s law program that Paul used Gal. 1: 11-24 to lay out a certificate of his apostleship and defend the distinctiveness of his ministry.

“You simply can’t read the first two chapters of Galatians and think Paul was one of the 12 apostles, as a lot of people would have you believe,” says Jordan. “Again, it’s all about, if Satan can hide this and change it where you can’t see this new gospel given to Paul—and you don’t get it—then you’ll never understand what God’s doing today or who you are in Christ. Without ‘rightly dividing the word of truth,’ you can’t do it! It won’t happen! And you’ll wind up a Galatian. The Galatians were scriptural folks, they just weren’t dispensational. Keeping the Law of Moses is scriptural, it’s just not dispensational.”

As Paul argues so plainly in Galatians 3:1-5, “O foolish Galatians, who hath bewitched you, that ye should not obey the truth, before whose eyes Jesus Christ hath been evidently set forth, crucified among you?
[2] This only would I learn of you, Received ye the Spirit by the works of the law, or by the hearing of faith?
[3] Are ye so foolish? having begun in the Spirit, are ye now made perfect by the flesh?
[4] Have ye suffered so many things in vain? if it be yet in vain.
[5] He therefore that ministereth to you the Spirit, and worketh miracles among you, doeth he it by the works of the law, or by the hearing of faith?”

Jordan confirms, “When Paul says, ‘before whose eyes Jesus Christ hath been evidently set forth,’ they had heard the gospel so clear it was like they were right there seeing it happen! You’d think there’d be no excuse!”