The Simple Gospel: Does God Really Have a Five Step Plan?
Addicts are sometimes put on programs of rehabilitation involving “steps” to recovery. You may have seen advertised recently a three step program to cure tobacco addiction. There are also nine and twelve step plans for alcohol, drug and gambling addictions. In these programs, each step involves a specific action or behavior which typically is to be done before one advances to the next step. Step plans serve not only to help a person reach a desired goal, they are also an effective means of measuring progress towards that goal. Modern counselors and self-help specialists have discovered that step plans are very effective tools because they clarify for us what must be done to reach a goal and they help keep us focused on achieving it.
It has been said that pioneer preachers, in an effort to simplify the plan of salvation, condensed it down to a five step plan. Common people, addicted to sin, who heard restoration preaching could remember the five step plan simply by associating each step with a digit on one of their hands. They were told that they needed to Hear-Believe-Repent-Confess-and be Baptized (H-B-R-C-B) in order to be saved.
Some have suggested that the Bible does not actually contain these steps, and that insistence on following five steps amounts to binding where God has not bound and/or an oversimplification which leaves off other truths of equal or greater importance. Others think that if these are truly the steps one must take to be saved, surely God would have specifically stated this in a single passage of scripture; since no single Bible passage appears to contain all five steps, they conclude that God has no five step plan.

