Adetayo Adejuyigbe

Visuals + Tech

[Adeyinka J. Adeleke @RevYinkaAdeleke]

Don't let anybody use the "Once Saved, Forever Saved" doctrine to make a shipwreck of your faith.

Salvation CAN be lost!

A genuinely saved Christian CAN backslide and end up in hell!

Salvation is eternal ONLY when we daily work it out with fear and trembling.

Selah!

[TVA Inc. @tvanigeria]

This is an opportunity for us to wait on the Lord, and trust Him for renewal of strength, as we journey through the second half of the year.

Join us for this month's Covenant Fasting and Prayer service today, 1st July, 2026, at 5 pm at The SheepGate, km 8 New Oyo Road, Ibadan.

[Dunsin Oyekan of #Geni @DunsinOyekan]

God is Restoring the Order of Worship!

Family altars will come back to life. Genuine Love for God will be ignited once again!

A generation is rising! Those that seeks His face not His hands!

Are you ready? 1st of July to 7th..9pm daily on YouTube and Instagram!

Kindly share

[Adetayo Adejuyigbe @adetayoadj]

This is a good read: a biblically balanced exegesis of Luke 6:38.

[Adeyinka J. Adeleke @RevYinkaAdeleke]

ON GIVING, RECEIVING AND THE COMMERCIALISATION OF LUKE 6:38
Episode 117 of #AskPastorYinka

Let me begin today's conversation with a question.
How many times have you sat in a church service, watched a pastor hold up an offering envelope, and heard the following words quoted with great theatrical flair?

"Give, and it shall be given unto you - good measure, pressed down, shaken together and running over!"

If you have been in Pentecostal or Charismatic circles for any length of time, your answer is: more times than you can count.

And in virtually every one of those instances, the implication, either explicitly stated or simply allowed to hang in the air, was the same: give your money to God through this church, and God will give you more money back.

A divine investment scheme.
A spiritual ROI.
A cosmic pay-to-play arrangement with the Almighty.

Today, I want to submit to you, with all the respect I have for the men and women of God who have deployed this scripture in this manner, that this is one of the most consequential misappropriations of a Bible verse in the history of the modern church.

And I say that with all sense of responsibility.

Let's go to the Word.

WHAT DOES LUKE 6:38 ACTUALLY SAY?
Here is the verse in question, in the King James Version that most of us know and love:

"Give, and it shall be given unto you; good measure, pressed down, and shaken together, and running over shall men give into your bosom. For with the same measure that ye mete withal it shall be measured to you again." (Luke 6:38 KJV)

Now, before we attempt to interpret any verse of Scripture, we must apply one of the non-negotiable principles of biblical exegesis: the Law of Context. You simply cannot isolate a verse from its surrounding text and hope to arrive at its intended meaning. To do so is not Bible study; it is Bible abuse.

So, what is the context of Luke 6:38?

Let's back up one verse:

"Judge not, and ye shall not be judged: condemn not, and ye shall not be condemned: forgive, and ye shall be forgiven: Give, and it shall be given unto you..." (Luke 6:37-38 KJV)

Did you see that?

Read it again.

"Judge not... condemn not... forgive... Give."

Jesus is in the middle of a teaching about interpersonal relationships, about how we treat other human beings. He is talking about judgment, condemnation, forgiveness, and mercy. And then, in the very same breath, in the very same sentence, He says "Give."

The "giving" Jesus is talking about here is not the giving of a financial seed into a church offering basket. It is the giving of grace, mercy, forgiveness, and compassion to the people in your life.

Do not take my word for it. Let us read the passage from a more contemporary translation that strips away the beautiful but sometimes obscuring poetry of the King James Version.

"Don't pick on people, jump on their failures, criticize their faults — unless, of course, you want the same treatment. Don't condemn those who are down; that hardness can boomerang. Be easy on people; you'll find life a lot easier. Give away your life; you'll find life given back, but not merely given back — given back with bonus and blessing. Giving, not getting, is the way. Generosity begets generosity." (Luke 6:37-38 MSG)

There it is.

"Give away your life."

Not your naira. Not your dollar. Not your seed envelope.

Your life. Your mercy. Your forgiveness. Your grace. Your compassion. Your patience. Your generosity of spirit towards other human beings.

Jesus is essentially saying this: the way you treat people is the way life will treat you back. What you pour into relationships, God will ensure is poured back into yours: pressed down, shaken together, and running over.

That is what Luke 6:38 is about.

It has absolutely nothing, not even tangentially, to do with sowing a financial seed and expecting a financial windfall in return.

SO, DOES GOD NOT BLESS US WHEN WE GIVE?
Now, before someone runs to their keyboard to accuse me of undermining the doctrine of giving, let me be very clear: that is NOT what I am saying.

Giving works. Sowing works. The biblical principle of seedtime and harvest is as real and as operative as the law of gravity. I have written about this before, and I stand by it.

But we need to understand how it works, because the popular version being peddled from many pulpits today is, I am sorry to say, a theologically deficient counterfeit of the real thing. And it is this counterfeit that has produced a generation of disillusioned Christians who gave, waited, gave again, waited again, and when the promised financial windfall never arrived, concluded that the whole thing is a scam.

It is not a scam. But the version they were sold was.

Here is the problem at its root: God is not a money-changer.

Let me say it plainly. God never promised in the Bible to give anybody money. Not once. If I told you, "Come and sow a seed of fifty thousand naira and within one week, God will put five hundred thousand naira in your account", I would be lying to you. And I would be insulting God in the process.

What do you take Him for? NairaBet? Baba Ijebu? BetNaija?

Let's be serious!

WHAT DOES GOD ACTUALLY GIVE IN RESPONSE TO OUR GIVING?
Listen carefully, because this is the part that most people miss.

When you give, whether it is tithes, offerings, seeds, or alms to the poor, and you do so with a pure and willing heart, what God gives back to you is not money.

What God gives back to you is THE BLESSING.

And The Blessing is not a bank transfer. It is not a mysterious credit alert from heaven. The Blessing is something infinitely more valuable than money: it is the impartation of the power of optimal productivity into your spirit, soul, and body.

Deuteronomy 8:18 is the scripture that settles this once and for all:
"And you shall remember the LORD your God, for it is He who gives you power to get wealth, that He may establish His covenant which He swore to your fathers, as it is this day."

Did you see that?

God does not give wealth. God gives the power, the koach in Hebrew, meaning vigour, force, capacity, to get wealth. The distinction is everything.

So, what does The Blessing look like in practical terms?

It looks like productive thoughts, revelations, insights, ideas, and foresight that other people simply do not have access to. The kind of ideas that change an industry. The kind of insight that solves a problem nobody else could solve.

It looks like good health, so that you have the physical and mental vitality to bring those ideas to reality. A brilliant idea in the mind of a sick, tired, depleted person produces nothing.

It looks like productive relationships, destiny helpers, divine connections, people strategically placed in your path by a sovereign God to open doors, provide resources, and accelerate your journey. No man gets to his destiny alone.

It looks like peak performance in your work, no wasted effort, no spinning of wheels, no labouring in vain. That mysterious grace that makes your work punch above its weight.

It looks like the partnership of grace, that inexplicable factor that makes the difference between two people of equal intelligence, equal qualification, and equal effort, where one flourishes and the other merely survives.

All of these, when properly stewarded with diligence, wisdom, hard work, and good planning, can then produce money in your hands.

But here is what must be clearly understood: money is an output of The Blessing, not The Blessing itself.

If you plant a maize seed, what grows is not another seed; what grows is a stalk that produces many seeds. The seed is not the harvest. The seed produces the harvest. And the harvest, in God's economy, is The Blessing, that life-giving, multiplying, capacity-conferring power that then, through your faithful and diligent stewardship, translates into financial and material increase.

A WORD TO THOSE WHO HAVE BEEN DISAPPOINTED
If you have given and given, faithfully, sacrificially, expectantly, and you are sitting today with a sense of deep disappointment because the promised financial miracle never arrived, I want to speak to you directly.

You were not wrong to give. But you may have been given the wrong expectation of what giving produces.

God has not failed you. His principles have not malfunctioned. What may have happened is that you were handed a counterfeit theology, a "churchy" Ponzi scheme dressed in biblical language, that set you up for disappointment by promising you something God never promised.

The good news is that God's real economy is better than the counterfeit. The Blessing is worth infinitely more than a one-time financial windfall. A man who carries The Blessing does not need a supernatural credit alert; he becomes a generator of wealth, because the power to get wealth operates continuously in him.

That is what giving, done with the right heart, the right understanding, and the right expectation, actually produces.

AND BACK TO LUKE 6:38
So, the next time someone quotes Luke 6:38 as a warrant for a transactional, seed-sowing, God-owes-me-a-financial-return theology, remember what Jesus actually said.

Be merciful. Forgive freely. Give grace generously. Release judgment. Be compassionate.

And watch how life treats you in return.

That is the promise of Luke 6:38.

Not a cosmic vending machine. But something far richer - a life overflowing with the measure of grace, mercy, and goodness that you have freely given to others.

"Giving, not getting, is the way. Generosity begets generosity." (Luke 6:38 MSG)

Selah.

AND WITH THAT, WE DRAW THE CURTAIN.
I sincerely hope that this has been good value for your time, and that it has brought both clarity and freedom, freedom from the anxiety of a transactional relationship with God, and clarity about what His economy actually looks like.

God is not your debtor. He is your Father. And fathers do not do business with their children; they bless them.

Before I go, let me pray over you...

May the God of all grace open your eyes to see the true nature of His generosity towards you. May The Blessing of the LORD, that life-giving, capacity-conferring, destiny-accelerating power, rest upon your spirit, your mind, your health, your relationships, and your labours, in Jesus' holy name.

May you be a river, not a reservoir, giving freely, forgiving quickly, and extending mercy lavishly to all who cross your path. And may life return to you, in good measure, pressed down, shaken together and running over, everything that you have so generously poured into others.

Until I come your way again on another episode of #AskPastorYinka, keep growing in grace and in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Blessings!
#AskPastorYinka
#tvanigeria

[Adetayo Adejuyigbe @adetayoadj]

@RevYinkaAdeleke Amen 🙏
Thank you so much for these thorough exegeses, Sir. May your source of inspiration never run dry, in Jesus' name.

[Adeyinka J. Adeleke @RevYinkaAdeleke]

I humbly submit that Luke 6:38 is the most misunderstood, misapplied, and weaponised verse of the Bible, particularly in the Pentecostal/Charismatic circles.

If you believe that "Give, and it will be given to you" is talking about giving money to "God" and receiving multiple folds in return in your account, someone taught you wrong, and you have believed a BIG LIE.

[TVA Inc. @tvanigeria]

Movie Night!

This special evening is designed to share the love of Christ with our community, strengthen our faith, and provide a wonderful opportunity for fellowship in a relaxed and enjoyable atmosphere.

🗓️ Date: this Saturday, June 27
🕒 Time: 4 pm prompt
📍 Venue: SheepGate

[TVA Inc. @tvanigeria]

We had an amazing time celebrating fathers on Father's Day at The Vineyard Assembly, Inc.

Fathers carry the weight of responsibilities, and often they are not appreciated or celebrated enough.

[TVA Inc. @tvanigeria]

Join us this Sunday as we gather to celebrate and honour the great and invaluable fathers and father-figures in our lives in a spirit-filled atmosphere with our Patriarch, Ps Bukki Gbenro @PsBukki.

📅 Sunday, June 21, 2026
⏰ 8:00 AM
📍 The SheepGate, Km 8, New Oyo Road, Ibadan

[Adeyinka J. Adeleke @RevYinkaAdeleke]

IS ALLAH THE SAME AS YHWH? Do Christians and Muslims worship the same God, only in different ways? (Episode 116 of #AskPastorYinka)
Let me say from the outset that this is not a conversation driven by animosity towards Muslims or Islam. Far from it! The Bible is unambiguous about how we are to regard those who do not yet know the truth: with compassion, with prayer, and with the earnest desire that God would open their eyes to the light of the gospel of Jesus Christ (2Timothy 2:24-26). That is the spirit in which we approach this conversation.

But compassion must never be confused with compromise. And love for people must never become an excuse for abandoning the truth.

So, here is the question before us: Is Allah (the god of Islam) the same as YHWH, the God of the Bible?

My answer is an unequivocal and unapologetic NO. And I intend to show you why, not from sentiment or religious tribalism, but from four distinct vantage points: Grammatical/Semantic, Historical, Comparative Theology, and Christology.
Let's get into it.

POINT ONE: THE GRAMMATICAL/SEMANTIC ARGUMENT
The first thing we need to settle is a matter of linguistics, because a lot of the confusion around this subject begins right here.

"Allah" is an Arabic word. It is not an exclusively Islamic term. It is simply the Arabic word for "God", or more precisely, "the God." And here is what many people do not know: Arabic-speaking Christians and Jews have used the word "Allah" for centuries to refer to the God of the Bible. In fact, if you pick up an Arabic Bible today, you will find the word "Allah" on virtually every page.

So, at the purely linguistic level, "Allah" and "God" are functionally equivalent, in the same way that "Dieu" is French for God, "Gott" is German for God, and "Ọlọrun" is Yoruba for God. The word itself is simply a linguistic vehicle.

However, and this is where the conversation gets interesting, a word is never just a word in isolation. Words carry meaning, and meaning is always shaped by context, history, and the theological framework within which a word is deployed.

This is why Arabic-speaking Christians, when using the word "Allah," typically append the qualifier "al-Ab" to it: "Allah al-Ab," meaning "God the Father." They instinctively understood that without that qualification, the word "Allah" alone would be insufficient to convey the fullness of who the God of the Bible is.

And that instinct, as we shall see, is entirely correct.
Because while "Allah" and "YHWH" may, at the most superficial linguistic level, both mean "God," the beings they describe are, as we shall demonstrate, fundamentally, irreconcilably different.

POINT TWO: THE HISTORICAL ARGUMENT
To understand who Allah is, we need to understand where the concept of Allah came from. And that requires a brief history lesson.

Before the emergence of Islam in the 7th century AD, the Arabian Peninsula was predominantly polytheistic. The Arabs worshipped a pantheon of gods and goddesses: an entire spiritual ecosystem of deities, spirits, and tribal patron gods. Dominant among the religious practices of pre-Islamic Arabia was a form of fatalism: a belief in a powerful, impersonal, unknowable force that governed the affairs of men, a fate that could neither be petitioned nor altered by human effort.

Into this environment came Muhammad, whom Islam regards as the last and greatest of the prophets. The central thrust of Muhammad's message was tawhid: the absolute, radical, uncompromising oneness of God. He declared that the Arabs had strayed from the monotheistic faith of their forebears and called them back to the worship of one God.

Now, it is true that both Islam and Judaism trace their spiritual lineage to Abraham. And it is equally true that Muslims regard the God of Abraham as their God. On the surface, this seems to establish a common theological ancestry between Islam and the Judeo-Christian faith.
But here is where history and theology must be read together very carefully.

The God that Abraham knew, YHWH, was not a distant, impersonal sovereign. He was a God who spoke to Abraham, who walked with him, who called him "friend" (Isaiah 41:8, James 2:23). The covenant that YHWH established with Abraham was not a transactional arrangement based on human performance - it was a relationship rooted in grace, promise, and the electing love of a personal God.

The Allah of Islam, by contrast, is transcendent to the point of being fundamentally unknowable and relationally distant. He does not enter into friendship with man. He does not indwell his worshippers. He issues commands and evaluates compliance. The concept of a personal, indwelling, covenant God, which is absolutely central to the biblical narrative from Genesis to Revelation, is entirely foreign to Islamic theology.
Same name. Different God.

POINT THREE: COMPARATIVE THEOLOGY
Let us now place the two theological frameworks side by side and examine the differences with intellectual honesty.

There are, admittedly, some surface-level similarities. Both YHWH and Allah are described as omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent. Both are presented as the Creator of the universe. Both are described as merciful. These commonalities are real and should not be dismissed.

But similarities at the surface level are not the same as identity at the level of essence. And when we go deeper, the differences are not merely incidental: they are constitutive. They go to the very core of who each of these beings is said to be.

FIRST: The Nature of God.
The God of the Bible has revealed Himself as one God in three coequal, coeternal Persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. This is the doctrine of the Trinity, and it is not a peripheral Christian teaching. It is the backbone of the entire Christian theological edifice. Remove the Trinity, and the whole structure collapses.

Islam explicitly and emphatically rejects the Trinity. The Quran declares in Surah 4:171: "Say not 'Trinity'; desist — it will be better for you."

For Islam, the suggestion that God has a Son is not merely a theological error; it is shirk, the gravest sin in Islamic theology: the association of partners with Allah.

SECOND: The Nature of Mercy.
In both Islam and Judaism, God's mercy is, at least substantially, conditional. It is merit-based. It is earned, or at least influenced, by human performance and adherence to divine commands. A Muslim may love Allah and genuinely desire to please him, but the haunting question that shadows every sincere Muslim is: "Is it enough? Are my works enough?"

And the honest, terrible answer, by the internal logic of Islamic theology, is: you cannot know.

Salvation in Islam is never a settled assurance. It is a perpetual uncertainty, a ledger whose final balance is unknown until the Day of Judgment. This is not a peripheral feature of Islamic theology: it is intrinsic to it.

The God of the Bible, YHWH, operates on an entirely different economy. His mercy is not earned: it is given. Not because of what we have done, but because of what His Son has done on our behalf. "For by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God, not of works, lest anyone should boast." (Ephesians 2:8-9)

THIRD: The Person of the Holy Spirit.
Islamic theology has no concept of the Holy Spirit as a distinct Person of the Godhead. The Holy Spirit, who in Christian theology is the indwelling Presence of God in the life of every believer, the One who sanctifies, empowers, comforts, intercedes, and liberates, is entirely absent from Islamic theology as a divine Person.

And this absence has enormous consequences. Without the Holy Spirit, there is no sanctification (Romans 8:6). Without the Holy Spirit, there is no freedom, for it is the Spirit of the Lord who brings liberty (2 Corinthians 3:17). Without the Holy Spirit, religion becomes nothing more than an elaborate human effort to appease an inscrutable God. And that is precisely what Islam, at its core, is.

POINT FOUR: THE CHRISTOLOGICAL ARGUMENT
And now we arrive at the most decisive point of all. The one that, in my view, settles this question permanently and without appeal.
The question of who Jesus is.

The God of the Bible sent His Son into the world. That is not incidental to the biblical narrative: it IS the biblical narrative. The entire sweep of Scripture, from the protoevangelium in Genesis 3:15 to the Revelation of John, is the story of a God who loved a fallen world enough to enter it in human form, to live the life we could not live, to die the death we deserved to die, and to rise again in conquest over sin, death, and hell.
"For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life." (John 3:16)

Islam categorically denies this. Jesus, in Islamic theology, is merely a prophet, a significant one, perhaps, but a prophet nonetheless. Islam denies the Incarnation. It denies the crucifixion as an atoning sacrifice. It denies the Resurrection. And most critically, it denies the Sonship of Jesus Christ.

But here is the theological implication that must be faced squarely: a God who has no Son is a fundamentally different God from one who does.
Not slightly different. Not marginally different. Fundamentally different.
YHWH is, by His own self-revelation, a Father. The fatherhood of God is not an analogy in Scripture; it is an ontological reality. God is Father because He has a Son. Take away the Son, and you do not merely lose one Christian doctrine; you lose the Father. You are left with a completely different being.

And without the Son, there is no salvation. Not because God is unwilling to save, but because sin has a price that must be paid, and only the infinite, sinless Son of God was qualified to pay it. Either Jesus bears the wrath of God for your sin on the cross, or you bear the wrath of God for your sin in eternity. Those are the only two options on the table.
"Neither is there salvation in any other, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved." (Acts 4:12)

Allah offers no such salvation. He offers no Son. He offers no cross. He offers no resurrection. He offers no settled assurance of forgiveness. He offers a ledger, and the terrifying uncertainty of whether your entries on the right side will ever be enough to outweigh those on the left.
That is not the God of the Bible.

CONCLUSION
To those who, in a spirit of well-intentioned ecumenism, insist that Muslims and Christians worship the same God, I say this with all respect: the question is not merely "Do we both believe in one God?" The more precise and honest question is, "Do we both have a correct understanding of who God is?"

And to that question, the answer, when examined grammatically, historically, theologically, and christologically, is a clear and definitive NO.

YHWH and Allah are not the same God. They share some attributes at the surface level, in the same way that a painting of the sun and the sun itself both appear bright. But one gives life, and the other merely reflects it.

Muslims are not our enemies. They are precious souls for whom Christ died, whose eyes have been veiled from the truth by the god of this age (2 Corinthians 4:4). Our response to them must be what it has always been: prayer, compassion, and the proclamation of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Because it is only the truth that sets men free, and the truth has a name.
His name is Jesus.

[Adetayo Adejuyigbe @adetayoadj]

@RevYinkaAdeleke Wow, this is very insightful. More grace and wisdom to you, Sir.

[Adeyinka J. Adeleke @RevYinkaAdeleke]

If you will not listen to godly counsel from men, then you have cut yourself off from God's ability to speak to you.

#askpastoryinka
#growingupinchrist
#tvanigeria

[Adetayo Adejuyigbe @adetayoadj]

This service is for you. Don't miss it!

[Adeyinka J. Adeleke @RevYinkaAdeleke]

This Sunday at @tvanigeria, we gather again, not merely as a congregation, but as a people who have tasted of the Lord and know that He is good.
Expect heartfelt worship.
Expect prophetic prayer.
Expect rich, life-giving teaching from the Word of God.
And expect all of it bathed in an atmosphere of love that is genuine, deep, and without pretence.
Clear your schedule.
Guard your Sunday.
This is worth it!

[Adeyinka J. Adeleke @RevYinkaAdeleke]

Today on Episode 115 of #AskPastorYinka, I will be responding to the request from @gen_makarios to weigh in on this thread by @_OKJ__.

Basically, the premise of the question is, IF WE CLAIM THAT SALVATION IS THROUGH FAITH IN JESUS CHRIST ONLY, WHAT THEN HAPPENS TO THOSE WHO NEVER HAD THE OPPORTUNITY OF HEARING THE GOSPEL?

This is one of theology's most ancient and contested questions, and it is one that has produced no universal consensus among serious Christian thinkers across the centuries. However, three major positions have emerged over time, and it will do us good to understand each of them.

EXCLUSIVISM is the view that conscious, explicit faith in Jesus Christ is the only pathway to salvation. Exclusivists anchor their position in texts like Romans 10:14, which says, "How then shall they call on Him in whom they have not believed? And how shall they believe in Him of whom they have not heard?"
This position holds that without hearing and responding to the Gospel, a person remains under the condemnation of sin and is ultimately destined for hell.

INCLUSIVISM agrees with Exclusivism on the source of salvation (that it is solely and exclusively through the finished work of Jesus Christ), but parts ways on the scope of its application. Inclusivists argue that God, in His sovereignty and mercy, is able to apply the saving work of Christ to individuals who never explicitly heard His name, provided that they responded sincerely and positively to whatever measure of light they had access to: whether through natural revelation, conscience, or whatever understanding of God they possessed. They believe that the cross still saves; it just may reach further than we think.

UNIVERSALISM/POST-MORTEM EVANGELISM takes the most expansive view of the three. Proponents of this position argue that a God of infinite love and redemptive intent cannot allow geographical accident or historical circumstance to permanently foreclose a person's opportunity for salvation. As such, they suggest that those who never encountered the gospel in this life will be given a genuine opportunity to hear and respond to it, at the point of death, beyond death, or at the final judgment. No one, they insist, will be lost merely because they were born in the wrong place at the wrong time.

While each of these positions carries serious biblical and theological weight, and each raises its own set of profound questions, the preponderance of Biblical evidence forces us to alight on only one of these schools of thought as aligning strictly with the Holy Bible, and that is EXCLUSIVISM.

Let's establish this in the Bible:
Rom 10:[13] For "whoever calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved."
[14] How then shall they call on Him in whom they have not believed? And how shall they believe in Him of whom they have not heard? And how shall they hear without a preacher?
[15] And how shall they preach unless they are sent? As it is written: "How beautiful are the feet of those who preach the gospel of peace, Who bring glad tidings of good things!"
[16] But they have not all obeyed the gospel. For Isaiah says, "Lord, who has believed our report?"
[17] So then faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God.

The logical chain that Paul constructs in this passage is as elegant as it is airtight. Follow him carefully:
1. The only way to be saved is to call on the name of Christ.
2. The only way to call on His name is to believe the Gospel.
3. The only way to believe the Gospel is to hear the Gospel.
4. The only way to hear the Gospel is for someone to tell it.

Each link depends entirely on the one before it. Remove any single link and the chain collapses. And the inescapable conclusion that Paul is driving at is this: preaching is not optional! It is not a programme of the church; it is the lifeline of humanity.

And this is precisely what makes it so difficult, from a purely exegetical standpoint, to argue for an alternative route to salvation that bypasses explicit faith in "the word of Christ." If such a route existed, Paul's entire argument here loses its urgency and veracity!
Why send missionaries?
Why plant churches?
Why preach at all, if people can somehow arrive at salvation without the gospel ever reaching their ears?
The passage does not easily accommodate that conclusion.

And lest there be any ambiguity, the Apostle Peter settles the matter with surgical precision: "And there is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved." (Acts 4:12)

Now, do not miss what Peter is actually saying here, because the precision of his language is everything. He does not merely say there is no other Saviour, a statement with which even Inclusivists would readily agree, since they also affirm that Christ alone saves. No. Peter goes a crucial step further. He says there is no other name.

That single word, name, is doing enormous theological work in this verse.
It implies identity.
It implies specificity.
It implies that knowing who this Saviour is is not incidental to the transaction of salvation, but is in fact central to it. You cannot call on a name you do not know. You cannot believe in a person whose identity has never been made known to you.

If salvation were possible without knowledge of that name, without the specific revelation of who Jesus of Nazareth is and what He accomplished at Calvary, then Peter's declaration would be, at best, an overstatement, and at worst, a misdirection.

And then there is the Lord Jesus Himself, who leaves no room for creative interpretation: "I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me." (John 14:6)

Now, some Inclusivists have objected that this statement says nothing explicitly about faith, that Jesus is simply declaring Himself the exclusive channel to the Father, without necessarily specifying that one must consciously believe in Him to benefit from that channel. It is a clever argument. But it does not survive contact with the wider context of John's Gospel.

Consider what John himself tells us about the purpose of his entire Gospel: "These are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name." (John 20:30-31)

The whole architecture of John's Gospel is built around one relentless call: BELIEVE! It is not incidental to the book; it is the heartbeat of it. The Apostle deploys the word no fewer than 97 times across its 21 chapters. And throughout the preceding chapters, the same drum is beaten without apology: John 3:36, 5:23-24, 6:35, 8:24, 11:25, 12:46. Over and over and over again.

So when Jesus says "through me" in John 14:6, He is not speaking in a vacuum. He is speaking within a literary and theological context that has been relentlessly, consistently, and deliberately defining what "through me" means: and it means through faith in me.

To read it any other way is not exegesis. It is eisegesis: reading into the text what you want it to say, rather than drawing out what it actually says.

So, to be clear, SALVATION IS ONLY BY FAITH IN JESUS CHRIST!

But this position then brings up some uncomfortable theological questions...

Q: What of those who never had the opportunity to hear the Gospel preached?
A: According to the Bible, they will be condemned (Joh 3:18).

Q: What of good people who only happened to be born in the wrong era or place?
A: According to the Bible, there are no good people (Rom 3:10), and through Adam, all of us are sinners deserving of God's condemnation (Rom 3:23).

Q: How does this align with a view of a merciful God?
A: God is merciful, but also terrible in His righteous judgment, and that's why we must preach the Gospel aggressively, and with all urgency (2Co 5:11).

And Cornelius' experience in Acts 10 bears out this truth: the only way that God could show him mercy was to engineer a way for him to hear the Gospel. Without this, he would have died and gone to hell, despite all the good he did.

Q: How can all these be fair by any standard? Does this not make God unfair?
A: The honest answer is that it can feel that way. And I will not dismiss that feeling, because it comes from a genuine place of compassion for the millions who lived and died without ever once hearing the name of Jesus. That instinct is not wrong.

But feelings, however sincere, are not a sufficient foundation for theology.

In the final analysis, what we are being called to here is not intellectual surrender: it is humility. It is the recognition that we are finite, fallen creatures attempting to sit in judgment over an infinite, unfathomably good and merciful God. And that is a seat none of us is qualified to occupy.

"For My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways My ways, says the LORD. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are My ways higher than your ways and My thoughts than your thoughts." (Isaiah 55:8-9)

God needs no attorney.
He answers to no tribunal.
He does not submit His decisions to our court of appeal for ratification.
He is good, He does good (Psalm 119:68), and His judgments are beyond searching out (Romans 11:34).

Our task is not to audit Him, it is to trust Him.

And Abraham, that ancient friend of God, settled this question long before we arrived at it:
"Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?" (Genesis 18:25)

He shall. He always has. He always will.

But if you want the most devastating and irrefutable answer to the charge that God is unfair, do not look to a philosophical argument. Look at Calvary.

There, on a Roman cross, on a hill outside Jerusalem, the Judge of all the earth climbed down from His bench, took off His robes, and hung in the place of the very rebels who wanted absolutely nothing to do with Him. He did not do that for people He did not care about. He did not bleed for a world He was indifferent to.

That cross is the eternal, unimpeachable proof of the heart of God. And it is enough.

© Adeyinka J. Adeleke
11/06/2026
Ibadan, Nigeria

[Adeyinka J. Adeleke @RevYinkaAdeleke]

Whatever situation or condition you may find yourself in, the answer is still in the Word of God.

Don't curse the darkness, just continue shining the light of God’s Word upon it, and there will eventually be a supernatural turnaround.

The Word works!

#askpastoryinka
#tvanigeria

[Aproko Doctor Global @aproko_doctor]

Amaka went to get pads. She wanted to get 3. Then she checked her purse, looked at the price tag, and did the math. She could only afford 1. Last month, she could afford 3 packs. Today, only a single pack.

[Premier League India @PLforIndia]

TO EVERY ARSENAL FAN WHO WAITED 22 YEARS, THIS MOMENT IS YOURS ❤️ 🙌

@Arsenal

[TVA Inc. @tvanigeria]

Experience the rain of the undiluted Word of God at the SheepGate, Km. 8, New Oyo Road on Sunday, 24th May, 2026, by 8 am.

You can still be part of this great experience even though you are out of town. Just click https://t.co/u5wn8LATYk.

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[Dearest B 🦋 @BlehisBack]

I attended Ecobank training school in 2024.

Three months….. Bruhhhhh, it was intenseeee‼️‼️

I finished as the Best Graduating Student in my set of 42, but it didn’t come easy.

So many people in the class studied related courses—Accounting, Economics and finished with a first class, some were BGS of their uni set, others were even chartered.

I studied law and hadn’t held a calculator since SS3😭. I actually thought I’d just quench at some point.

Anyways, I was the least expected person to finish top cause I was that person who asked the most stupid questions in class. “Sir, please which side is debit side again”, “sir you said balance sheet before, now you are saying financial position, financial position of what?”.

I was actually clueless 😭

People frequently burst laugh after my “you-should-know-this” questions but it wasn’t my concern. I knew I was at a disadvantage and had to study twice as hard and ask as many questions as will make me get it.

These things that were revision to half of the class was new for me. I’d go home, open YouTube and watch “Accounting for dummies” by some Indian guys. I’d call my classmates from training school to please reexplain stuff to me. Omo I worked 💔

The shock when I just didn’t pass but had the highest grade in the class of 42. ♥️