A Message About God and Sin (Evangelism Series 3 of 6)
Message About the Kingdom
The Bible presents the gospel, the good news of Jesus Christ, to us from two perspectives. Both perspectives are found in Scripture so both must be affirmed. One perspective looks at the good new about Jesus Christ from the perspective of God’s redemption in history. This is the good news that the Father’s creation, ruined by the Fall, is being redeemed by Christ and restored by the Holy Spirit into the kingdom of God.
The Bible also presents the gospel to us from the perspective of personal salvation with an emphasis on what happens to individuals within the bigger historical cosmic salvation in history. This perspective presents the gospel in terms of key categories like a message about God, sin, Christ, and faith, and emphasizes key biblical concepts like personal justification and adoption.
These two perspectives need to be integrated in our thinking as they are in the Bible. This involves seeing God as the creator of all things, but especially humanity as the apex of his creation. It also means seeing the historic fall of humanity as linked to the biblical doctrine of sin that separates humanity from God. And God’s historic work in redeeming all things lost in the Fall through the person and work of Christ, should be linked with God’s individual saving work of believers through his sinless life, sinners’ death, resurrection, and ascension for them.
Notice in Mark 1:15 Jesus proclamation of the gospel saying, “The time has come. The kingdom of God is near. Repent and believe the good news.” When you find Jesus using the term ‘gospel’ or ‘good news,’ it is almost always used in the same breath as the concept of the kingdom.
The apostle Paul wrote in Colossians 1, “For God was pleased through Christ to reconcile to himself,” not just fallen people, but notice, “to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven.”
This concept of a theology of the kingdom or a gospel of the kingdom includes the good news that our God reigns through Jesus Christ. And he is now making all things new, and he’s calling everyone everywhere to repent and to be swept up in this cosmic renewal that includes the renewal of human hearts and the fulfillment of the promise of the new covenant of the prophets, that he will forgive our sins and take our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh and put his Spirit within us.
The two-fold impact of the fall was guilt and corruption. And the consummate fulfillment of the good news is ‘our God reigns.’ The new covenant in all of its riches is now here. You can be forgiven and you can have a new heart and a new spirit put within you as a part of God's cosmic renewal of all things.
These are the categories we're going to be looking at in this course. Tim Keller summarizes these categories this way: “God has entered the world in Jesus Christ to achieve a salvation that we could not achieve for ourselves which now converts and transforms individual, forming them into a new humanity, the church, and eventually will renew the whole world and all creation.” Notice the personal salvation perspective of the gospel. And notice the cosmic sense of the good news.
When you ask a lot of people “What is the gospel?” they will often respond to you with a 1 Corinthians 15:3 and 4 kind of answer. My encouragement to you is to see that kind of answer as true but incomplete. This means the gospel is more than simply the gospel events. It's more than simply Christ’s birth, life, death, resurrection, ascension, and promised return.
It's also the gospel affirmations that God now makes about Jesus Christ because of what he did. God says that because of what Jesus did God has now made him Lord and Savior.
And what is the highest blessing of the gospel? Most people would say forgiveness. Others would say adoption. The legal, forensic good news of justification is wonderful. It's wonderful to be declared legally right before God as our judge in the heavenly court.
But it's another far greater thing for the Father to take you to his home. So the highest blessing of the gospel is not forgiveness through justification but it would be adoption.
In his classic book, Knowing God, J. I. Packer argues that adoption is the highest blessing. But Calvin trumps Packer saying the highest blessing of the gospel is union with God through Christ.
The truth is Packer would also affirm this. He was just trying to say that adoption is a higher blessing than justification. Justification is forensic and legal. While adoption is deeply personal and familial.
Make no mistake that the highest blessing of the gospel is being in Christ. Paul writes, “Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in the heavenly realms with every spiritual blessing in Christ.” We’ll see later that those blessings include a new record, a new heart, a new world.
But the highest blessing that you could ever have is that, through faith, you are now in mystical union with the triune God, in Christ. You are in Christ. Therefore, the inner Trinitarian love and fellowship is now yours. It’s astonishing that you’re now a part of the deepest love in the universe.
What will really blow your mind is when you realize that the same love the Father had for eternity for the Son, and reciprocal, with the Spirit as well, is now the love that he has for you because you are in Christ.
It is impossible to break this love. That's the depth of what being “in Christ” means. You are in the Trinitarian relationship, and from that flows every spiritual blessing. What we're celebrating in this course is the triple blessing to all who are in Christ by faith: 1) a new record countering guilt, 2) a new heart replacing a corrupt heart, and 3) a new new world replacing the corrupt world when Jesus returns.
Later we’ll also look at what John Stott calls “the gospel demands” that answer the question, “How do I appropriate these promises?” We’ll see its through gospel repentance, faith, and gospel obedience.
Message about God
J.I. Packer writes, “The Gospel is a message about God. It tells us who He is, what His character is, what His standards are, what He requires of us, His creatures. It tells us what we owe our very existence to Him, that for good or ill, we are always in His hands and under His eye, and that He made us to worship and serve Him, to show forth His praise and to live for His glory.”
Francis Schaeffer used to say, “He is there and He is not silent.” Hear the good news: We are not in a closed system. We are in an open system. The good news is that an infinite personal God exists. And this God who has created all things has spoken. He has revealed himself.
How has He spoken? In two ways, primarily. He has spoken in what theologians call general revelation and special revelation.
General Revelation
What is general revelation? In Psalm 19 we see general revelation as God revealing Himself in all of of creation and nature.
Special Revelation
Special revelation is the good news that God has broken through throughout redemptive history and shown Himself consummated in the ultimate revelation of Himself in Jesus Christ, the incarnate Word and in scripture, the written Word. He has revealed Himself in nature, in the creation. He has broken through throughout redemptive history and shown Himself at different times, but the ultimate breakthrough was in the incarnate Word culminating in the written Word.
We can't focus on all of the attributes of God, but there are two attributes that are very critical to understand in light of the nature of the Gospel message itself: His holy justice and His holy love.
God’s Holy Justice
This concept of God's holy justice is the revelation of God that He is holy as judge and; therefore, a just judge who must punish sin. He also manifests love. He is a gracious Father who loves to show mercy. The dilemma is not the classic dilemma that's presented in most evangelicalism. The problem of God is up there and I'm down here. How can I ever reach God? Oh, no. That's a serious problem. The greater problem lies within the very nature of God himself. It is the profoundest of problems. God is a gracious Father who loves to show mercy. I have good news for you.
In love, God created us in His image to know Him, to honor Him, to enjoy Him above everything, to cherish Him. God is also a just judge who must punish sin. Although God is merciful and does not want to punish us, see the dilemma? He is just and must punish sin.
Profoundest of Problems
A common question, “Why does God find it difficult to forgive?”
I've had one unbeliever say to me, “Come on. I forgive all the time. Isn't it God's business to forgive? What's the big deal? Why does God find it difficult to forgive?” The real question I would propose is, “How can God find it possible to forgive when you understand His nature as both merciful and just?” In fact, it's been found the profoundest of problems.
Forgiveness to man is the plainest of duties; to God it is the profoundest of problems. You see, there is a duality in God's attributes. God's holy justice is a just judge who must punish sin. God's holy love is a gracious Father who loves to show mercy.
God's duality is shown in Hosea 11.
“My heart is turned over within me. All my compassions are kindled. I will not execute my fierce anger. I will not destroy Ephraim again. For I am God and not man, the holy one in your midst and I will not come in wrath.”
What you're actually getting a glimpse into is the remarkable, mysterious, intertrinitarian nature of God facing the profoundest of problems. “How can I be a just judge and at the same time be a loving Father?” How can God express His holy love? How can God express His love without compromising his holiness? On the flip side, how can God express His holiness without compromising His love?
Is the basic riddle of the universe how to preserve man's right and solve his problems, or is the basic riddle of the universe how an infinitely worthy God in complete freedom can display the full range of His perfections, what Paul calls the “riches of His glory,” His holiness, His power, His wisdom, His justice, His wrath, His goodness, His truth, and His grace. What we're saying here is how can God display the fullness of both His mercy and His justice? If you don't understand that, if you don't feel that, you will never understand the riches of the cross.
“God is a Father; but He is no less a judge. Shall the judge give way to the Father or the Father give way to the judge? Which is the more unchangeable and irreversible, the vow of pity that He has taken or the oath of justice? Law and love must be reconciled, the one cannot give way to the other. Both must stand, else the pillars of the universe will be shaken.”
Radical justice. He is more holy than you ever dared to believe.
Radical love. He is more loving than you ever dared to hope. This comes from one of my previous mentors, Jack Miller.
Here is Miller through Keller now, he had a huge influence on Tim. “The Gospel is that you are more sinful and flawed that you ever dared believe, yet you are more accepted and loved than you ever dared hope at the same time, because Jesus Christ lived and died in your place.”
Message about Sin
Notice each one of these sections begins with a quote from J.I. Packer. Here he says,
“The Gospel is a message about sin. It tells us how we have fallen short of God's standard, how we have become guilty, filthy and helpless in sin and now stand under the wrath of God. It tells us that the reason why we sin continually is that we are sinners by nature and that nothing we do or try to do for ourselves can put us right or bring us back into God's favor. It shows us ourselves as God sees us and teaches us to think of ourselves as God thinks of us. Thus, it leads us to self-despair. And this also is a necessary step. Not till we have learned our need to get right with God and our inability to do so by any effort of our own can we come to know the Christ who saves from sin.”
The degree to which you understand the nature of the fall will be the degree to which you understand the fullness of the nature of the Gospel as well.
What I want to do is talk to you about the threefold ramifications of the fall. This is a biblical theology of the impact of the fall on humanity and on creation.
The Problem of Guilt
Notice the problem of guilt, number one or we'll call that, Jack Miller used to call that, a problem of a bad record. I just need forgiveness of sin. I need the righteousness of another. Martin Luther again called this alien righteousness, an utter foreign righteousness. The righteousness, the law keeping record of the Son of God. His good record is the only antidote to my bad record.
The Problem of Corrupt Heart
The second one, the problem of corruption, heart. I not only have a bad record forensically and legally, but actually I have a corrupt, I have a bad heart and I need a new heart. And you can see where this is going with the Gospel. The fulfillment of the new covenant that was promised by the Old Testament prophets was not only I will forgive your sin, but I will take the heart of stone and I will give you a heart of flesh and I will put my spirit within you. Notice the promise of the new covenant is not just dealing with the problem of guilt. I will forgive you. I will forgive your sin and I will take the heart of stone and I will give you a heart of flesh. I will put my spirit within you.
Now revisit the courtroom with me. There the man is or to make it more personal, there you are, standing before the judge. You don't just have a forensic legal problem with guilt. You don't just stand before the judge with a bad record needing the record of another imputed to you through faith in Christ, that's in Romans one through five, chapters one through five. But you have another problem. You're standing there before the judge, not just with the problem of guilt, but you have a problem of corruption. You're not just standing in the courtroom before the judge having broken the law, like committing a heinous crime. As you stand before that judge, you have terminal cancer.
It's a completely different problem. One is external in the heavenly courts, one is forensic, one is legal. That's the problem of guilt. But you have another problem that's just as serious and that is the problem of spiritual disease. You are, and I am as a result of sin, morally corrupt. You don't just need a merciful judge. You need a merciful and gracious physician. There is a criminal that comes to the bar and is arranged for high treason. The same criminal has a mortal disease that he may die of, though there was no judge on the bench to pass sentence of death upon him for his crime.
If your understanding of the problem is merely guilt, then your understanding of the solution or the good news will merely be good news. You can be forgiven and you can have the record of another. I need to be delivered, not just from my guilty standing before God. I need to be delivered from my corrupt heart.
The Problem of a Corrupt World
Now, let's look at the last one, a corrupt world. And this is another one of those mysteries I don't understand, and we never will fully. But because of sin, man became guilty and corrupt, and for some reason God not only cursed man, humanity, but God also cursed the earth. And so not only is man corrupt because of the fall, but all of the cosmos is corrupt. We live in a broken and fallen world.
It is very common for people to lose, especially in this generation, the depth of the message we're bringing. We are not just simply bringing good news. You're under God's wrath and you can be forgiven. It's very truncated. We're also bringing the message, good news. You are, whether you realize it or not, worshiping something because you've been created in the image of God and so therefore you are intrinsically and inherently a worshiper. So everyone is always worshiping something, sometime. And in evangelism, we're not asking people to go from not worshiping anything to worshiping God through Christ because all people are image bearers, therefore all people are worshipers 24/7.
And when we're proclaiming the Gospel, what we are doing is we are calling people to repent, and that is, to turn their heart affections away from worshiping idols. And these are not graven images and primitive lands. These are the concepts of control and approval and pleasure and comfort. And we're calling them to turn from these idols who are making them false covenants, lies that they cannot fulfill, turn from that idolatry. And those affections are to be turned in repentance and in faith placed on the Living God through Christ.
So you do not fully understand conversion unless you understand it in the context of idolatry and worship because you're calling people to stop worshiping what they're worshiping and to begin to worship God alone through Christ. The greatest battle, the battle of all battles, the battle of the universe, is the battle for the affections of the human heart.