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Transcript 203A — The Nature of the Gospel
HC: Good evening. Welcome to Open Forum
CALLER: Hello. I'm writing a paper, analyzing the content of the Gospel. And I wanted to discuss a few points with relation to my study. Under the content of the Gospel, I was wondering if you felt that it came through the apostles. You know, Christ came preaching the Gospel, and then the apostles also preached the Gospel, which was Christ crucified, dead, buried, risen and exalted. And what was the content of Christ's Gospel?
HC: In other words, your question is, did the apostles have one Gospel and Christ another Gospel? Now that's putting it pretty crassly, of course.
CALLER: Well, I wondered if . . .
HC: If there was a change in the Gospel, to put it a little more kindly.
CALLER: Yes.
HC: No. There's only one Gospel. There is only one Gospel, and that is the Gospel of salvation through the Lord Jesus Christ. And whether you read the Old Testament or read the New Testament, and whether you're reading the Law or the Prophets or the Psalms, or the four Gospels, or the Book of Acts, or Revelation, or Ephesians, it's always one Gospel.
However, sometimes chapters or verses would emphasize certain aspects of the Gospel to a higher degree than others. And therefore in one paragraph you might find that the blood of Christ, the fact that there is no remission except through the shedding of blood, is particularly in view. You see this particularly when you read Leviticus and read about the blood sacrifices, o read the Book of Hebrews, where we have commentary on the Book of Leviticus. The blood sacrifices are in view.
In another place it may stress the washing away of our sins. This is seen very beautifully in the Gospel of John in a number of places. In another paragraph the wrath of God against sin is particularly in view. The Book of Romans its replete with this.
In another place the depravity of man shines through with great clarity. You see this, for example, in Ephesians 2, or in Romans 3. But none of these passages, none of these sentences or paragraphs stand alone. We may never say, "Well, this is what Peter said," or "This is what Paul said." Now I know we do that once in a while, because we find it in a book that Paul wrote. But we have to be careful with that, because Paul was not really the author of that statement. Neither was Peter. It was God who was the Author. And Paul and Peter and Isaiah and Moses were simply the instruments in God's hand to write the Bible. They wrote, of course, out of their own personality and their own personal experiences, and so on. But what they wrote was exactly, down to the very letter and the very word, what God wanted them to write.
And so God wrote through Luke about this salvation. And it was the identical salvation that God wrote through Moses about, or that God wrote through the apostle Paul about. It was the identical salvation that Jesus Christ spoke about, when we find the quotations of what He declared.
CALLER: Would the statement be correct to say that the Gospel is the proclamation of a Person, and that when Christ came He, in a sense, presented Himself? And then the apostles presented the facts about Christ, before Christ died and was resurrected, although Christ did say that this was what He was going to do. Was that then part of His Gospel, His saying that He was going to die and rise again?
HC: I think you might be somewhat proper in saying that the apostle Paul and the apostle Peter and the prophet Isaiah, and so on, were instruments in God's hand to write about the Gospel (or Good News, which the word Gospel means) that God was giving to mankind, but that the Lord Jesus came to be the Gospel. He is the one who is the very Personality of the Gospel, because He went to the cross, and so on. He is the Word become flesh, as we read in John 1. I think yes, you could make that kind of a distinction.
CALLER: Also we were discussing how the Gospel is communicated. And I don't know how broad to make it, or how broad the New Testament presents it. But the comments I have written down so far are, "verbally, through preaching and teaching, and also personally. A person is a witness, telling what happened to him." But how broad should it be, when I discuss how the Gospel is communicated?
HC: One of the nicest verses in the Bible that speaks beautifully to this question is I Peter 2:9 and 10: "Ye are an elect race, a holy nation, God's own people, that ye may declare forth the wonderful excellencies of Him who called you out of darkness into His marvelous light. Once you were no people, but now you are God's people," and so on.
God's program was that born again believers would be the custodians of the Gospel, would be the vehicles of the Gospel, to get it out into the world. Now Jesus put it, in Matthew 28, "Go ye into all the world and make disciples." He said it in II Corinthians 5 that we are His ambassadors, "Christ as it were making His appeal through us." This is the means that God has established.
Now the Holy Spirit was poured out at Pentecost, and we must remember that the Holy Spirit is Eternal God, and the Holy Spirit has always been present in the world. The Bible is not suggesting that at Pentecost in AD 33 the Third Person of the Godhead, the Holy Spirit, finally put in His appearance on the earth. There are all kinds of references throughout the Old Testament concerning the Holy Spirit, and the fact that He was active in the lives of the born again believers, as well as in the lives of the prophets, and in the creation, and so on.
But when the Bible speaks about the Holy Spirit being poured out, it means by that, that at Pentecost in AD 33, this was the moment in time when God began His task to evangelize the world. And this would be the task of God the Holy Spirit, to take that Word that is brought by born again believers throughout the world, and apply it to the hearts of men, so that Christ would build His church, which He had already begun, of course, way back with Adam and Eve, and Abel, and so on. But now He's going to expand it. He's going to build it, so that it is a complete temple of God. And He said in Matthew 16, "The gates of hell shall not prevail against it . . . I will build My church."
CALLER: In this proclaiming of the Gospel, it doesn't carry with it the connotation of arguing or persuading, but more of just presenting the facts.
HC: Yes. You made an interesting observation about witnessing. Actually, witnessing is witnessing of what the Bible teaches. The message we have is not "me." I'm not the message. I'm not the subject of the message. Oh, I can tell someone, "I was a sinner. Now I'm saved." But having said that, now let's get on with the main message.
The main message is the message of the Bible. This is a mistake that a lot of people make, I think. They spend all their time talking about themselves, and how ugly their sins were, and how they were in this and that and the other thing. And now look what a glorious salvation God has given me. And really, effectively, they've put themselves as the center of attention. The glory is going to themselves, and they're giving a very incomplete message of salvation, because our life is not the Bible.
The message of salvation, the witnessing that we are to do, is concerning the Word of God. This is what we are to send forth into the world. And so we read the Bible, read about God's wrath and His justice, about His love, His grace, His mercy. And this is what we declare forth to the world as witnesses.
Now it is God who does the saving. It is God who is going to apply this Word. Now the Bible does indicate, through the apostle Paul, that we persuade, we counsel, yes, we might even debate just a little bit. But we must always remember that we can never argue someone into the Kingdom of God. We can never open somebody's eyes. We can never con somebody into the Kingdom of God. And at various times all of us try to do these things. We cannot do that.
What we have to do is be as faithful as possible to the whole counsel of God, that is, to the Word of God itself. And God will bring the increase. Isaiah 55 is so pertinent. God's Word will not return void, but will accomplish the purpose for which it was sent. This we can absolutely depend upon.
CALLER: Some of your statements would make the content of the Gospel very broad, then, bringing in the wrath of God . . .
HC: How can you present the Gospel of salvation without talking about the wrath of God?
CALLER: Well, I agree.
HC: You see, this is a very important aspect of bringing the Gospel. We have to bring the whole counsel of God. If we are only going to talk about the love of God, then we have no way of telling somebody about salvation, because if we say, "God loves you," and now we're going to talk about salvation, what do they have to be saved from? God loves me. I'm already under the love of God. And I'm living in adultery, I take my drugs, I . . . But God loves me. And now you tell me that I have to be saved, that I ought to accept Jesus Christ as my Savior. Well, God loves me. Yes, I'd like to accept Jesus as my Savior. I think that's a pretty neat idea. God loves me, and I'll accept Jesus as my Savior.
But now if someone came to me a half-hour later and said, "Now Jesus is your Savior, but what are you saved from?" "Oh, I don't know. I don't know. I feel a lot better, because Jesus is my Savior. I've got a purpose in my life now. I've got a goal to live for. Jesus is my Savior. And so I've been saved out of some of my misery."
Well, that's not the Gospel, is it? That's not the Gospel a bit. This man, before he's saved, and I don't care who he is (he could be the mayor of the city, or the preacher in the church, or he could be anybody else), if he's not born again, he's a sinner. And he's under the wrath of God. And he's heading for hell. And if he died tonight, he'd spend eternity in hell. And so he's in a precarious position. He's in a terrible situation.
And here I am, the custodian of this Gospel, and I'm not going to tell him that. I'm going to just kind of meekly say, "God loves you. God loves you." And so he doesn't realize at all that he's going to be destroyed at any moment. And so I better tell him the whole Gospel. I better tell him, "Look, the Bible says that all men are sinners, and if we're not born again we're under the wrath of God. And hell is going to be our lot. And we're only one breath away from eternity. But wonderfully, wonderfully, there's another side to this story. We can know the love of Christ, if we'll only see our sins, if we'll only repent of our sins and cry out to God for mercy, and cast our lot with Him, and trust in Him as Savior and Lord, surrender our will to Him. He will be our Savior. He then will be the one who has taken our sins and has paid for them, so that we'll never have to endure hell for our sins.
Now we're beginning to get at the whole counsel of God, you see.
CALLER: I think then what I put under "Content of the Gospel" is I Corinthians 15, beginning with verse 3, where it says that Christ died according to the scriptures, He rose according to the scriptures. And then Peter's sermon in Acts 2, and then Paul's sermon in Acts to the people of Lystra and Athens, where he again presents the historical facts about Christ. But this would be the remedy. And the first part, the people being under wrath.
HC: Quote from Romans 3:10-20, or from Ephesians 2:1-3. And in fact, Ephesians 2 is tremendous because after declaring what our sad condition is, it indicates that by grace we have been saved. Or you might quote from II Corinthians 5:21: "For our sake He made Him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in Him we might become the righteousness of God." That shows the justice of God being worked out.
CALLER: We would have to give the predicament part of the Gospel then. God came with the Good News, declaring Christ.
HC: Without declaring the predicament, we have no Gospel. Now you read the Book of Jonah, because there you find a man who was a reluctant missionary. He brought the Gospel, and there was the greatest revival, there was the greatest outpouring of blessing that's recorded anywhere in the Bible, because the whole city of Nineveh repented. And from the language of the New Testament, we may assume that these people in the city of Nineveh became born again.
Now what was the content of Jonah's message? "Repent, because God's wrath is upon you, and in forty days He's going to destroy you." He didn't use the word love at all. He talked about repentance. The wrath of God, that is the chief content of the Gospel, incidentally. That is the chief content of the Gospel, that man is in trouble with God, that he's under the wrath of God. And once we understand that, once that has been imbedded in our sin-bound minds, then we're going to begin to ask questions: "Well, what do I do now? What do I do now?" Like the jailer of Philippi in Acts 16: "Sirs, what must I do to be saved?" He knew he was in trouble. He was ready to commit suicide.
CALLER: I had noted Paul's remedy: "Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved." But I hadn't related it back further to his statement. That's very good.
HC: Okay?
CALLER: Thank you very much.
HC: When you get your "A," send it to me.
CALLER: You really helped me clarify my thinking. On some papers you can find all the information right there, but this one I have to do a lot more of my own thinking.
HC: I was very glad to help you, because you are asking some very pertinent questions about the nature of salvation.
CALLER: Yes. Once I started, I realized how unclear things were in my mind, even though I've been taking this class in communicating the Christian faith. Still, on my own I had not thought through what the Gospel was. I think that's probably when you really learn it, not when you just take what other people say, but you have to work it through for yourself. So thank you very much.
HC: Thank you for calling. Good night.