Well, we’ve had an opportunity in this brief time together to hear some rather sophisticated
analyses of the threats that are clear and present dangers to the health of the church
in our day and in our nation: the marvelous analysis by Mike Horton, which John also seconded
in terms of his appreciation of it, John’s own analysis of some of the strange things
that we’re hearing over the airwaves and from some sources of Christianity in American
culture, and then of course, Peter Jones’ tour de force on the modern resurgence of
Gnosticism.
And so after all of this sophistication, I’ve been asked to close this by giving a message
on “Back to the Basics.”
And it reminds me, of course, of the famous incident that took place in the National Football
League with that great coach Vince Lombardi, whose
team was getting so caught up with sophisticated formations and drills that they were becoming
sloppy with the fundamentals, blocking and tackling right.
And so he called the team together for a meeting to get back to the basics, and he held up
a football, and he said, “Gentlemen, this is a football.
Am I going too fast?”
Well, that’s what I want to do today because one of the central problems with what we’re
calling Christless Christianity in our day is the phenomenon of a gospel-less gospel.
If anything has been obscured by all of these threats of Christless Christianity in our
day, it is the very gospel itself.
And so I want to close out today by going back to basics and asking the question fundamentally,
what is the gospel?
And I want to start by reading a brief portion from the writings of the Apostle Paul in his
letter to the church at Rome, beginning at the first chapter of Romans, verse 1.
I want to hear that Baptist air conditioning.
Paul begins his epistle with these words, Paul, a slave of Christ Jesus, called to be
an apostle, set apart for the gospel of God, which he promised beforehand through his prophets
in the holy Scriptures, concerning his Son, who was descended from David according to
the flesh and was declared to be the Son of God in power according to the Spirit of holiness
by his resurrection from the dead, Jesus Christ our Lord, through whom we have received grace
and apostleship to bring about the obedience of faith for the sake of his name among all
the nations, including you who are called to belong to Jesus Christ, to all who are
in Rome who are loved by God and called to be saints.
Here Paul identifies himself as the author of this epistle by referring to himself as
a slave.
The word that he uses here is a word that is inseparably connected to another Greek
word which means Lord.
There cannot be a doulos without a kurios, and there cannot be a kurios without at least
one doulos.
And so Paul said, “I am a slave of the Lord Jesus Christ.”
And he talks about being consecrated or set apart for a mission, for a particular task,
and that to which he has been called of God, ordained of God, and consecrated by God is
for the gospel of God.
Now that’s where we start.
It’s where Paul started as he unfolds the content of that gospel in this Magnum Opus
epistle of Romans.
But he begins by speaking of “the gospel of God.”
And that structure of the language there with respect to the word “of God” does not
mean the gospel about God.
This is a possessive reference, which means that Paul has been set apart to a gospel that
is God’s gospel.
God is the owner of the gospel.
He is the author of the gospel, and I guarantee you that He will judge us, particularly those
who are preachers and teachers, with regard to how we handle His gospel.
So I want to go back to the ABCs of exactly what is the gospel because if I’ve learned
anything over the last 30 years or so, [it] is that the vast majority of Christians are
fairly confident that they know what the gospel is, and yet without hyperbole, with no exaggeration,
when we investigate that knowledge, rarely do we find more than one professing Christian
out of a hundred who has an even passable understanding of what the gospel is.
Let me now say what the gospel is not.
The gospel is not the message that God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life.
That may be true.
It may not be true.
But whatever it is, it’s not the gospel.
It is not the gospel to proclaim that God can give you purpose and meaning to your life.
And certainly that is true, God can and does give purpose and meaning to your life, but
it’s not the gospel.
If you say to me the gospel is that you can have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ,
that’s true, and that’s a wonderful thing, but that’s not the gospel.
Your personal testimony may be meaningful and relevant to people that you know and speak
with, but your personal testimony is not the gospel.
And we could go on for a long time here defining what the gospel is not.
But what I want to do briefly is go back to the New Testament understanding of the meaning
of the word gospel.
And when we look at the word in Scripture, we see that it has at least three fundamental
usages.
If we examine the word itself, which is the word euangelion, which is one of those Greek
words that has a prefix and a root, the prefix, which is pronounced “ā-oo,” comes right
over into English with the prefix “eu-” – it’s “E-U.”
And we talk about euphemisms.
Do you know what a euphemism is?
When you go to the dentist, and the dentist says, “This is going to give you a little
bit of discomfort.”
That’s a euphemism, is this is going to hurt.
We hear music that is euphonious.
That is, it sounds good.
We go to funerals, where somebody will stand up and give a eulogy, which is a good word
about the one who is so recently deceased.
And so we understand the parts of the word beginning with the prefix “ā-oo-” or
“eu-,” which means good.
And the root, of course, is –angelion, which is the same root for the Biblical word for
angel.
And the reason why angels are called angeloi is because their chief function under the
service of God is to serve as messengers, to bear a message that comes from God.
And so in the broadest of all possible senses in the Bible the word euangelion means a “good
message,” a “good news,” that is declared from one source to another.
When Paul later on in this epistle to the Romans declares how important it is that anyone
who calls upon the name of the Lord can be saved, but how can believe on Him whom they
have not heard, how can they hear without a preacher, how can they have a preacher unless
he’s sent, and then he goes back to the Old Testament and to the language of how beautiful
on the mountain are the feet of those who bring good tidings.
There Paul is making use of an Old Testament text that celebrates something that was very
important to ancient communications.
We get real timed reports from battlefields around the world of how things are happening.
The ancient world did not have CNN or FOX or radio broadcasts, any of that sort of thing.
And when the armies of a nation would go out onto the battle field, for example, when the
Persians and the Greeks fought at Marathon, and the people of Athens waited in breathless
anticipation to get some word of the outcome of the battle, the news of the outcome would
be entrusted to a messenger.
And you all know the story of the Battle of Marathon where that messenger was dispatched
with the good news, and he ran 26 miles to report the outcome of the victory, after which
he immediately dropped over dead, which is a suitable consequence for anyone foolish
enough to run 26 miles.
These insane people gather every year in Boston and New York and other places, and some of
them drop dead at the end.
But in the ancient world, the individual villages would set up watchtowers, not only to look
out for the presence of invaders, but also to watch over the terrain for the appearance
of the messenger and to hear the outcome of the message.
And they became quite astute at reading the gait of the messenger before he ever arrived
at the town.
If it was bad news that the messenger was bringing, if it was the message of defeat,
you could tell from a great distance just by the gait of the messenger if he was in,
what we call, the survival shuffle, which is the way I used to run, you knew it was
bad news.
But if you could see his feet kicking and moving and pumping, you could see just in
the way he was running the sense of joy that was motivating him, and even before he arrived
at the city, the people were already celebrating the victory at which news he was bringing.
That’s why the prophet would say, “How beautiful on the mountain are the feet of
him who brings good tidings.”
How glorious is it to see one come with a message that is a good message.
Well, that’s one way in which the Bible speaks about gospel.
Any good message may be called gospel.
In secondary usage apart from the word to describe certain books of the New Testament
that were dedicated to giving us a synopsis of the life of Jesus – they call those books
gospels – but the secondary meaning is the meaning that is used initially by John the
Baptist and then by Jesus.
When both of them appeared on the scene for their public ministry, they prefaced their
earthly ministry with this announcement, “Repent, for the kingdom of God is at hand.”
The kingdom of God is ready to break through at any second, and so during the lifetime
of Jesus when He taught parable after parable after parable about this breakthrough of the
coming kingdom, the good news or the gospel was the gospel of the kingdom of God.
If you would have asked a first century Jew who had listened to the teaching of Jesus
and asked him, “What is Jesus’ gospel?” that person, if they had been paying attention,
would say, “It is the good message of the arrival of the kingdom of God in the form
of the crowned Prince who is now present and was on His way to His enthronement in His
ascension at the right hand of God in heaven to be the King of Kings and to be the Lord
of Lords.”
That was the good news that Jesus preached and that John preached.
But by the time the epistles were written, there was a shift in the focal point of this
good news and of the good news of the kingdom, and that shift was away from the kingdom in
general to the King in particular, so that the gospel writers after they gave their message,
and it was interpreted by the epistles, now the term gospel became a word that signified
the person and work of Christ, and now becomes known as the gospel of Jesus Christ.
So when we’re talking about the gospel, we’re not talking about you and your testimony.
We’re not talking about me or my testimony.
It’s a message about Jesus.
Now this message about Jesus is rooted very early in Biblical history, all the way back
to what is called the Protoevangel, or the first announcement of the gospel.
And that first announcement of the gospel, which I will refresh your memory with here
in a second, is drenched in irony because the first Biblical declaration of the gospel
was in the context of the pronouncement of a curse.
That is, there was bad news that was being announced, but on the flipside of that bad
news was the first expression of the gospel.
And it is found in Genesis, chapter 3, in the curse that God levels against the serpent
where we read this, “The Lord God said to the serpent, ‘Because you have done this,
cursed are you above all livestock and above all the beasts of the field.
On your belly you shall go and dust you shall eat.”
All the days of your life, you will crawl, you will slither, you will be the lowest,
most despised form of animal life, and your diet will be dust.
And I’m going to create estrangement for you.
I’m going to put enmity, hostility, hatred between you and the woman.
You see, this is all bad news for the serpent.
“I will put hatred between your offspring and her offspring, between you and the Seed
of the woman.
And the Seed of the woman will bruise your head, and you shall bruise His heel.”
At some point, O serpent, the Seed of the woman will crush your head into the ground,
and your last act of hostility will be to strike at His heel, but even in that, you
will suffer a death blow to your own head.
Centuries, millennia before the advent of Jesus Christ, the gospel was announced here
indirectly to the serpent of God because the bad news for the serpent was the good news
for us because the victory of our Savior is the annihilation and defeat of our enemy and
all that he commands, even death itself.
So we fast forward then to the New Testament, and let’s look at some of the early announcements
of the New Testament gospel, beginning in chapter 1 of the Gospel according to Luke,
in verse 26, we read, “In the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent from God to a city
of Galilee named Nazareth, to a virgin betrothed to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house
of David.
And the virgin’s name was Mary.”
Now this visitor to this peasant woman is identified as an angelos, a messenger.
In fact, he was an archangelos, an archangel, an angel that came from the very presence
of God Himself.
And he’s coming not to proclaim the gospel from the housetops of Nazareth to Athens to
Rome, but he comes to give God’s message to a single person, to this poverty stricken
maiden.
And he came to her, and he said, “Greetings, O favored one, the Lord is with you.”
You can tell this is a Protestant Bible because what he really said was, “Hail, Mary, full
of grace, the Lord is with you.”
That was a greeting that the angel gave to this girl.
“The Lord is with you.”
And she was greatly troubled by this saying and tried to discern what kind of greeting
this might be.
And the angel said to her, “Don’t be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God, and
behold you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and He will be called… you shall
call His name Jesus, the one who saves.
And He will be great, and He will be called the Son of the Most High God, and the Lord
God will give to Him the throne of His father David.
And this child of yours who will receive the throne of the father David will reign over
the house of Jacob for ever, and of His kingdom there will be no end.”
If Mary was troubled initially, this trouble now is exacerbated with a vengeance.
She says, “How can this be since I’m a virgin and know not a man.”
And the angel said, “The Holy Spirit…” – you remember, Mary, the same Spirit that
was at the dawn of creation, the same Spirit that hovered over the waters at a time when
all there was, was emptiness and formlessness and darkness on the face of the deep, that
same Spirit will hover over you and overshadow you, so that the child to be born will be
called holy, the Son of God.
This is really the first announcement of the gospel in the New Testament.
The Holy Spirit put a song in that woman’s heart when she got this news, and after she
visited her cousin Elizabeth, she began to sing under the power of the Holy Ghost, “My
soul doth magnify the Lord, and my Spirit doth rejoice in God my Savior.”
So in a sense, the first person that her Son will save is His mother.
“For He has noticed me, visited me as a woman of low degree and has exalted me.”
Throughout these birth narratives, the visit to the temple, and so on, we are told that
Mary pondered these things in her heart.
She still had only a nascent, inchoate, not completely formed understanding of what this
gospel she had heard would mean.
Then a few months later when she was of term, and her husband took her to Bethlehem for
the enrollment of the Roman Empire, when she gave birth to this child that the angel had
announced, the gospel was preached again on the plain outside of Bethlehem to the shepherds
when the angel came and announced the glory in excelsis Deo.
And the heavenly chorus began to sing, “Glory to God in the highest,” as the angel said,
“Don’t be afraid for I bring great tidings of peace on earth to men of good will.”
And so the angels became preachers of the gospel, and the gospel was about Jesus.
So if you want to know what the gospel is, if you look at all of the sermons in the book
of Acts and distill their essence, you can see what we call the Charigma, the basic structure
of apostolic preaching.
When the apostles went out and preached the gospel, they didn’t say, “Come to Jesus,
and all of your problems will be over.”
That wasn’t what they did.
They said that… as Paul opens up his letter to the Romans, that he was set apart for the
gospel of God, which God promised beforehand through his prophets in the Holy Spirit.
This good news had already been proclaimed in part through the prophets of the Old Testament,
concerning what?
What is the content matter of the gospel?
It’s not about you, and it’s not about me.
God’s gospel concerns His Son.
It always concerns His Son.
When it doesn’t concern His Son, whatever it is, it’s not the gospel.
“And was declared, who was descended from David…,” that’s the first really element
of the apostolic Charigma, that this Jesus was born of the seed of David, that this Jesus
is the Son of Man who pre-existed His incarnation in heaven.
And nobody ascends up to heaven except He who has descended from heaven.
And so the beginning of the gospel is the announcement that according to the Scriptures,
according to the Old Testament prophecies, out of the seed of David, the Son of God enters
into the world.
Without the message of the incarnation, there is no gospel.
And He was declared to be the Son of God in power according to the Spirit of holiness
by His resurrection from the dead.
The gospel has a content that is both objective and subjective.
The objective elements of the gospel refer to those elements that concern Him, His person,
and His work.
It is the good news of Jesus of Nazareth, the Son of God, who is born under the law
and lives a life of perfect obedience under that law, which is His mission.
When He had presented Himself at the Jordan River, and John saw Him coming, He sang the
Agnus Dei, “Behold the Lamb of God who comes to take away the sin of the world,” the
One whose sandals I’m not worthy to untie.
He must increase.
I must decrease.
And Jesus comes up to him and presents Himself for baptism.
And John the Baptist said, “No, no, no, no, Jesus, I’m afraid you don’t understand
here.
This rite that I’m doing here, it’s…
I’m applying proselyte baptism that used to be only for unclean Gentiles to the children
of Israel because with all of their covenants and with all of their sacrifices, and with
all of their religion, you see the kingdom of God is ready to come, and they’re not
ready.
They’re dirty.
They’re unclean just like the Gentiles.
And so God has required me to give them a bath and to call them to repentance from their
sin.
So this rite has to do with cleansing from sin, and I’ve just declared You to be the
Lamb of God, the Lamb without blemish.
No, no, no, Jesus, let’s go.
You baptize me, okay?
But I’m not going to baptize You.”
And Jesus said something like this to John the Baptist (we call him John the Presbyterian
where I go), He said, “John, I don’t have time for Christology 101.
I don’t have time to explain all of the implications to you of what it means to be
a Messiah, but look, suffer it now.
Shut up and do what I tell you to do and trust Me.
John, this has to happen because God has imposed a new requirement on everyone in Israel, and
if I am going to submit myself to the law at every point in behalf of my people, it’s
necessary to fulfill all righteousness that I submit to this baptism.”
Woe unto these people that are running around saying that Christ’s active obedience and
submission to the law of God is not a part of the Biblical witness.
A pox on them.
It’s at the very heart of the mission of Jesus to submit to the commands of God’s
righteousness at every point.
And so the gospel is not just about the death of Jesus.
The gospel is about the life of Jesus.
If all Jesus had to do to save you from your sins was to die on the cross in your place,
He could have come down from heaven in a parachute, landed at Golgotha, taken your sins upon Him,
paid the price on the cross, and gone back home.
No, He was born under the law, and it was necessary for Him to fulfill all righteousness.
So Jesus is born, and Jesus is baptized, and Jesus is anointed by the Holy Ghost for His
Messianic task, and He fulfills that task first of all by being sinless.
So the announcement of the sinlessness of Christ is essential to the gospel because
that’s what marks the significant difference between you and Him, between Him and me.
He was without sin.
And the perfect One, the sinless One then lays down His life as a perfect atonement
for sinners.
What does Paul say?
Scarcely will a man die for a good man.
But what kind of a good man will die for bad men?
But here is one who knew no sin, who gives His life for those who know nothing else but
sin.
And it pleased God to put upon Him the iniquity of us all.
And so He gives this atoning sacrifice, satisfying the demands of God’s justice and righteousness,
being a propitiation before God, and an expiation for us, where in His death He removes our
sins from us as far as the east is from the west.
And that transaction of atonement is central to the gospel.
Without it you don’t have a gospel.
But it doesn’t stop there.
If that’s the end of the good news, if that’s the end of the message, then what you have
is a dead Savior.
But by the power of the Holy Spirit, He was raised for our justification.
He ascends into heaven and sits at the right hand of the Father and promises to return
to consummate His kingdom at the end of the age.
All of those points are absolute essential elements of the gospel of Jesus Christ.
Together that portrait of Jesus, His person and His work, make up the content of the New
Testament gospel in terms of its objective dimension.
But what if you get all of that right, have a perfect Christology, follow the tenets of
the Council of Chalcedon or of Nicaea, “truly God, truly man, without mixture, confusion,
division or separation, each nature retaining its own attributes,” – it’s a beautiful
formulation – if you get His person down pat, and you have an orthodox, Biblical understanding
of His work of perfect obedience, of His sacrificial death, of the imputation of His righteousness
to us and so on, you still don’t have all the gospel.
At the end of all that information about Jesus, the question comes now, so what?
And if you don’t think that question is important, go back to the 16th century and
look at the greatest collapse of unity in the history of Christendom with the Protestant
Reformation.
And the vast majority of Protestants in our day have no idea what they are protesting.
The battle of the 16th century wasn’t about the fallibility or infallibility of the Pope.
It wasn’t about the function of Mary.
It wasn’t about whether you pray to the saints.
It wasn’t about holy water.
It wasn’t about even confession itself.
The issue was, what must I do to be saved?
The issue is, what’s the gospel?
Or to put it another way, how are the benefits of the work of Christ appropriated to us?
How does the objective activity impact me subjectively?
And there is where Paul labors his teaching in Romans, Ephesians, Galatians so clearly.
Honestly, I don’t know how anyone can miss it – that we are justified by faith alone,
which means, theological shorthand, is that only way I can enter into the kingdom of God
is by being justified by Christ alone, by His righteousness, not mine, even if mine
is a result of the help of grace, if the help of Jesus, and with the help of faith.
Orthodox Roman Catholicism has taught very clearly through the centuries, particularly
in the 16th century in the heat of this controversy that justification is by faith.
You can’t have justification without faith.
Justification is by grace.
You can’t have it without grace.
Justification is by Jesus, and you can’t have justification without Jesus.
But that little word upon which the church choked to death was the word alone, for the
New Testament says the moment, the very second, you put your trust in Christ, all that He
is and all that He’s accomplished is yours now and forever.
You’re not going to lose it the next time you sin, and if you die with impurities on
your soul, you don’t have to go to purgatory because you possess a righteousness that is
perfect right now, not because it is, as Trent declares inherens, inherent in you, no.
But the word that the two sides fought over and couldn’t agree upon and still can’t
is that word imputation.
Is the basis of your salvation your righteousness, no matter how you got it, or is it a righteousness
that Luther called a iustitia aliena, alien righteousness, a righteousness that is extra
nos, a righteousness that is apart from me, the righteousness of Christ that is appropriated
by faith alone?
You don’t mess with that.
The Judaizers of the first century tried to mess with it.
They tried to draw the Galatian Christians away from that by trying to mix works with
faith, not believing that by the works of the law shall not flesh be justified.
And when the Galatian community was disrupted, the Apostle Paul spoke in the harshest language
he ever does in the New Testament saying, “If anyone declares to you any other gospel
except which you have received, let him be a-na-the-ma, let him be accursed, let him
be damned.
If you didn’t get it the first time, he says it again.
“Again, I say to you, if anyone preaches any gospel to you, other than that which you
have received, even if it’s an angel from heaven,” you take that angel from heaven
and grab him by the tail of his celestial pants, and you kick him out of the door.
“Let him be accursed.”
But in every generation people have tried to do better than that with the gospel, have
tried to improve the gospel, tried to make it less offensive, tried to make it better
news.
You can’t possibly make it any better.
It doesn’t get any better than that, that my seat in heaven is assured for me right
now because my Savior – guess what He did?
– He saved me.
And I’m already saved.
I’m being sanctified.
I’m not yet glorified.
But my Savior has already purchased my salvation and has won my righteousness.
Without sola fide you don’t have the gospel, and without imputation you don’t have sola
fide.
So just as the life of Jesus, the death of Jesus, the resurrection of Jesus, the ascension
of Jesus, the session of Jesus at the right hand, the return of Jesus are all non-negotiable
elements of the gospel, so Luther was right, the article upon which the church stands or
falls is the gospel of justification by faith alone.
I hear men everyday tell me that they are in the gospel ministry, preaching the gospel,
and they’ve never preached the gospel in their life because they don’t even know
what it is.
It’s Jesus.
It’s Jesus, who He is, what He does, and what He gives to us.
Let’s pray.
It’s a fine and wonderful gospel that has been given to us, and we acknowledge this
day that it is not our gospel, it is not the church’s gospel, but O God, it is Your gospel.
Give us ears to ear it and hearts to love it.
In Jesus’ name we pray.
Amen.