“But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Much more then, having now been justified by His blood, we shall be saved from the wrath of God through Him.” Romans 5:8-9
Fourth Indictment: An Ignorance of the Gospel of Jesus Christ
I submit to you tonight that this country is not gospel hardened; it is gospel ignorant, because most of its preachers are. Let me repeat this. The malady in this country is not liberal politicians, the root of socialism, Hollywood or anything else. It is the so called evangelical pastor, preacher, or evangelist of our day; that is where the malady is to be found. We do not know the gospel. We have taken the glorious Gospel of our blessed God and reduced it down to four spiritual laws, and five things God wants you to know, with a little superstitious prayer at the end. And if someone repeats it after us with enough sincerity, we popishly declare them to be born again! We have traded regeneration for decisionism.
First of all, I am amazed after I talk about this, how many godly believers of 30 and 40 years walking in the faith come up to me with tears, saying, “Brother Paul, I never heard this before in my life.” And yet it is the historical doctrine of redemption and propitiation.
Let us define the problem very clearly. The Gospel begins with the nature of God; it goes from there to the nature of man and its fallenness. And from there, these two great columns of the Gospel come to set up for us what should be known in every believer’s mouth as the great dilemma. And what is that dilemma? The greatest problem in all of Scripture is this. If God is just, He cannot forgive you of your sin. How can God be just and at the same time the justifier of wicked men, when Scripture throughout the Bible says (I will draw especially from one text in Proverbs):“ One who justifies the wicked and one who condemns the righteous, both of them alike are an abomination to the Lord.” (Pro 17:15) And yet all our Christian songs boast about how God justifies the wicked.
That is the greatest problem. That is the acropolis of the Christian’s faith, so said Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Charles Spurgeon, and anyone else who has read Romans chapter three. You see, you have got to set this before people. The great problem is that God is truly just and all men are truly wicked. God, to be just, must condemn wicked man. But then God, for his own glory, with a great love for us, sent forth his Son, who walked on this earth as a perfect man. And then, according to the eternal plan of God, He went to that tree on Calvary. And on that tree, He bore our sin; and standing in the law-place of His people, bearing our guilt, He became a curse. “Cursed is every one that continueth not in all things which are written in the book of the law to do them” (Gal 3:10). Christ redeemed us from the curse, becoming a curse in our place (Gal 3:13).
So many people have this romantic, powerless view of the Gospel: that the Christ is there hanging on the tree, suffering under the wounds of the Roman Empire, and the Father did not have the moral fortitude to bear the suffering of his Son, so he turned away. NO!! He turned away because his Son became sin.
And so, when He is in the garden and cries out, “Let this cup pass from Me,” (Mat 26:39), people speculate, “Well, what was in the cup? Oh, it is the Roman cross. It is the whip. It is the nails. It is all that suffering.” I do not want to take away from the physical sufferings of Christ on that tree, but the cup was the cup of God – the Father’s wrath that had to be poured out on the Son. Someone had to die, bearing the guilt of God’s people, forsaken of God by his justice, and crushed under the wrath of God – for it pleased the Lord to “crush him” (Isa 53:10).
I was in a Germanic seminary in Europe a while back, and saw a book, The Cross of Christ (not John Stott’s book, it was another). I pulled it down and began to read, and this is what it said: “The Father looked down from heaven at the suffering inflicted upon His Son by the hands of men, and counted that as payment for our sin.” That is heresy! That physical suffering, that nailing to the tree – that was all part of the wrath of God. It had to be a blood sacrifice; I will take nothing away from that. But, my friend, if you stop there, you don’t have the Gospel!
When the Gospel is preached today and shared in personal evangelism, do you ever hear of God’s justice and wrath? Almost never. It is seldom made clear that Christ was able to redeem because He was crushed under the justice of God – and having satisfied divine justice with His death, God is now just and the justifier of the wicked.
It is Gospel reductionism! We wonder why it has no power. What happened? I’ll tell you: When you leave the Gospel behind and there is no longer any power in your supposed gospel message, then you have to do all the little tricks of the trade that are so prominently used today to convert men – and we all know most of them. But none of them work!
Several years ago, graduating from seminary, I had to make a decision whether I was going to go for my Ph.D. God, in order to save my spiritual life, sent me to the middle of the jungles in Peru – as far away from the academic world as He could get me. And there I began to realize something. As Spurgeon said, “Greater men with greater minds than I have approached this doctrine of the Second Coming, but to no avail. It is a great and mighty doctrine.” He said, “I will set myself to this: seeking to comprehend something of Jesus Christ and him crucified.”
It makes me so angry when men treat the glorious Gospel of Christ as though it was the first step into Christianity that only takes about ten minutes to counseling – and after that you go on to greater stuff. That shows you how pathetic we are in our knowledge of the things of God.
My friend, on the day of the Second Coming you will understand absolutely everything about the Second Coming, but in the eternity of eternities of heaven, you will not even begin to comprehend the glory of God in Calvary. It is what everything is about. Young man, young preacher, listen to me. Get at the truth on that tree, what it means. You will need nothing to build strange fires in your oven, if you only catch a glimpse of what he did on that tree.
I love to say this. I have said it a million times. Abraham takes Isaac up that mountain – his son, his only son whom he loved. Do you suppose the Holy Spirit was trying to tell us about something future? And that son put up no struggle, but laid himself down. And when that Father gave his will in to the will of God, he brought that flint knife to pierce his own son’s heart. But his hand was stayed, and it was told the old man that God had provided a ram. So many Christians think, “Oh, what a beautiful end to that story.” It is not the end; it is only the intermission. Thousands of years later God the Father laid His hand upon the brow of His Son, His only Son whom He loved and took the flint knife out of the hand of Abraham and slaughtered His only begotten Son under the full force of wrath.
Now do you know why that little gospel you preach has no power? Because it is no gospel. Get to the Gospel; spend your life on your knees. Get away from men. Study the cross!
The fourth indictment is actually an ignorance of the doctrine of regeneration. I know that there are both Calvinists and Arminians here, and I know that there are all sorts of strange animals in between. I guess I call myself a “five point Spurgeonist.” But I want you to know this: Calvinism is not the issue. No, I’ll tell you what the issue is: it is regeneration! And that is why I can have fellowship with Wesley, Ravenhill, Tozer, and all the rest—because regardless of where they stood on the other issues, they believed that salvation could not be manipulated by the preacher, that it was a magnificent work of the power of almighty God. And with them, therefore, I stand.
There is a greater manifestation of the power of God in the regenerating work of the Holy Spirit than in the creation of the world, or even of the universe, because He created the world ex nihilo: out of nothing. But He re-creates a man out of a mass of corruption. It is parallel with the very resurrection of our Savior from the dead.
I understand that in preaching there are teachers, preachers, and expositors; and all of them are very necessary for the health of the Church. But you must understand this. I have heard of old G. Campbell Morgan (1863-1945) that when he would go up that majestic tower to preach, he would quote to himself, “as a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before his shearers” (Isa 53:7). He knew that apart from a magnificent manifestation of the regenerating work of the Holy Spirit, everything he said would be dead. It is the Spirit that gives life (Joh 6:63).
In that sense every one of us that proclaims the truth of God’s Word must proclaims as a prophet. What do I mean by that?—we are always Ezekiel standing in that valley of dry bones, and they are very dry (Eze 37:1-2)! And we walk out there and what do we do? We prophesy; we say, “Hear the Word of the Lord.” And we know that the wind of God must blow on these slain ones, or they will not rise again. And when you have fully grasped that in the innermost part of your being, you will no longer give yourself to the manipulation that is so often carried out in the name of evangelism. Instead, you will proclaim the Word of God—the doctrine of regeneration.
Look at the Wesleys; look at what they had to face. And look at my dear Whitefield too. Everybody at that time believed they were Christian, thoroughly Christian. Why?—because they were baptized as infants, brought into the “covenant,” and confirmed. But they lived like devils! Regeneration was traded for a type of credalism that was given authority by the religious leaders of that day. Then here come the Wesleys! No, they said, it is not right with your soul. You are not born again. There is no evidence of spiritual life. Examine yourself. Test yourself to see if you are in the faith (2 Co 13:5). Make your calling and election sure (2 Pe 1:10). “Ye must be born again” (Joh 3:7). Here in America, because of the last several decades of modern evangelism, the idea of “born again” is totally lost. Now it only means that at one time in a crusade, you made a decision and you think you were sincere. But there is no evidence of a supernatural recreated work of the Holy Spirit in your life. “If any man,” not if some men, “if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature” (2 Co 5:17).
Great read brother, thanks
Very important reading here. Thank you.
I found the best illustration to this question of the Gospel was spoken by a Welsh minister Christmas Evans while preaching on the depravity of man ..I can hardly read it without tears flowing freely. Can’t really describe it well enough but it came from the “Shorter Catechism Illustrated ” Its a powerful illustration of Christ executing the office of a Priest.
Thanks! I’ll have to look into it. Did I ever tell you that I may be related to Christmas Evans?