Conviction 3: The knowledge of the Bible and of the story it tells is necessary to effective, Biblical preaching.
Later that day something even more unsettling happened. During afternoon rest period I was flipping through the magazines provided for us, when all at once I reached for the Bible that I kept on my nightstand as a memento of my mother. I had not read it since I’d been back in Holland. But that afternoon I suddenly started reading, and to my astonishment I understood it. All the passages that had seemed so puzzling when I struggled through them before now seemed like a fast-paced action yarn. (Brother Andrew, God’s Smuggler)
The Bible tells a gripping story, a story that we have called the Great Story, a story that has heroes, villains, poetry, mystery, and suspense. It is a story that is written by God, about Jesus. It begins in the garden, ends in heaven, and has the battle for the souls of humanity in between. And it is an epic tale.
As we said in the introduction, the preacher is the story teller. Sadly, many sermons today, even those who point to Jesus, do so without referencing the Great Story. This may be due to ignorance or laziness, and this laziness is actually disobedience. (“I know Jesus said the whole Old Testament testified to himself and I know we are called to preach the whole counsel of God, but to do that is too much work.”) To not preach the whole Bible and Jesus’ place within it is like reading in a mystery novel only the chapter wherein the detective discovers the identity of the felon. Such a reader ignores the context of the events and clues that lead the detective to their conclusions. So the preacher ignores the context of the events of the Great Story into which Jesus stepped. This is a tragedy and leads to an anemic faith in your congregation.
The competent preacher familiarizes himself with the Story and preaches out of that familiarity. This will cause not only their listeners to grow in their own understanding of God’s Word but also lead to the preachers’ own growth. The preacher must know and preach the Grand Story.
The Bible begins with the declaration that, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth1.” Everything that exists does so because God brought it into being. He is the creative genius behind flowers and galaxies, mountains and snowflakes, fish, trees, and humanity. Because He is the Creator, he is the Lord of all that is.
His lordship implies two things. First, it implies power (that is, he can rule). He has the ability to govern the universe, because he made it all. Second, it implies authority (he has the right to rule). He made everything and can do what he wants with it. The universe and everything in it belongs to him. God the Creator is Lord, with supreme power and authority.
That sounds threatening unless we recognize that God is good. He created mankind to be recipients of his love and to love him in return. Creation reveals a God who appreciates beauty and values order, but also values creativity and freedom. A God who invented pleasure and joy inspires awe and wonder and instills values like nurture in animals and in us. God does not just have the soft qualities of love, mercy, and goodness, but also hard qualities like justice, concern for right and wrong, and loving discipline.
God culminated his creative activity by creating man and woman. Adam and Eve were unique in all creation in that God formed man—Adam—and breathed into him the spirit of life. Something came from God and entered Adam and he became a living being. From Adam, God also formed Eve, so they are of the same substance, the same “stuff”. God said Adam and Eve were created in God’s own image. They were not little gods but had an affinity to God, unlike all the rest of creation. They exercised authority on his behalf over all that he had made.They were not only physical but also spiritual beings. They shared some of God’s attributes: reason, emotion, will, creativity, love of beauty, a sense of justice and rightness, and so on. They also had the ability to know God relationally and intimately, to love and enjoy him, and to receive and appreciate his love for them.
Love requires choice. Love coerced or instinctual is not love at all. Love must be freely given. So God provided Adam and Eve with an opportunity to choose to love Him. He gave them complete freedom in the Garden of Eden but set apart one tree and said, “You may surely eat of any tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die2.” Adam and Eve fell. They chose to mistrust God but trust the serpent, and so disobeyed God by eating the forbidden fruit. This mistrust and consequent disobedience is called sin.
When Adam and Eve first sinned, it had two effects. First, it fractured their relationship with God, separating them from him. A wall was established between them, a wall they had erected. Second, it put them in a position of guilt. They had committed an offense against the Lord of the universe and stood guilty.
Sin, by its nature, infects. What we see in the history of Adam and Eve and their descendants bears witness to the cancerous spread of sin. Once rooted it takes over, to the point where no person and no facet of life or human nature remains untainted. The greatest philanthropist may have issues with pride. The closest, loving relationships show streaks of anger or selfishness. A certain level of dishonesty, gossip, lust, or temper shows up in all of us more regularly than we care to admit.
We see this in the biblical story about the downward spiral of Adam and Eve’s descendants. By Noah’s time, humanity as a whole embraced sin and lived utterly in opposition to God. Although God judged mankind with a great flood and started afresh with Noah, sin, like cancer, has a way of coming back. Noah gets drunk, his son mocks him, and before long the whole cycle of sin begins again. Humanity is gripped by sin, willingly enslaved to it, guilty of it, and cut off from God because of it.
Centuries later, God creates a nation from descendants of a man, Abraham. This nation, Israel, becomes God’s own people. They become the means by which God effects a change in the world’s sinful condition. Through Moses, God gives his perfect Law; not just his laws or rules, but his Law, his defining of how things really are.
It’s like the law of gravity. If you jump off a building, you will not be punished by falling to the ground. If you jump, you will fall. That’s the law. So it is with God’s Law. Integrity, worship of God, honour, and care for other people are objectively right. Murder, envy, and ignoring God are objectively wrong. They are a violation of the real order of things.
God’s Law is not something outside himself that he created. God did not just decide that this is how he wants things to be. God’s Law is the expression of his person and character. One writer aptly said, “God is allergic to sin.”* It is not that he could tolerate sin if he wanted, but chooses to punish it instead. Not at all. Sin is repulsive to God’s very nature and, therefore, contrary to the very order of things as he created it. God abhors sin like nature abhors a vacuum.
To Israel God says via his Law: “This is what it looks like to be what I created you to be: worship only me. Do not make idols. Honour my name. Honour your parents. Set aside a Sabbath day, a day for rest and worship. Don’t lust, or steal, or kill, or lie, or covet.” Incidentally, Jesus said, “Even if you don’t act these things out, the very desire in your heart to do some of these things violates God’s perfection.”
Israel looks at these Ten Commandments and says enthusiastically, “We promise!”
But the rest of the Old Testament relates their systematic rebellion against that promise. Not just godless pagans live sinfully. Even when God steps in, establishes a relationship with a community he calls God’s chosen people, and outlines exactly how to rightly live, they cannot keep his Law.
Such is sin. It enslaves entirely. It makes people heap guilt upon themselves. It builds the dividing wall between us and God higher and thicker. And all people have sinned, some more than others. Some big sins, some smaller sins (but those are artificial categories). No matter at what point or how many times you break the stick, the stick is broken. Even a single sin means God’s character has been violated. “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God3,” the Bible reminds us. We have all turned away from God. Sin has become our default position. Even when something inside us desires to be good, we find we’re always facing some form of selfishness, anger, lust, envy, gossip, or pride. They are present in us no matter how much we wish otherwise. Therefore, we are guilty before a perfect God and separated from him relationally.
But there is good news.
God sent his Son to earth, Jesus, eternal and divine. We call that event the incarnation which means, in Jesus, deity took on flesh and became a real human being. He was tempted in every way like us but he alone, amongst all who ever lived, always chose God’s values over his own temptations. He lived, without sin, the life we are created to live but cannot.
Jesus died as a substitutionary sacrifice for us, giving his sinless life for sinful man. He gave his life of infinite worth as payment for the infinite debt of our sin. The prophet, Isaiah, says of Jesus: “He was wounded for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and by his stripes we are healed.”4 He took our guilt upon himself and bore the punishment we deserve. The Bible says, “The wages of sin is death.5” Jesus, sinless, was put to death. As he hung on the cross bearing our sin, God turned away and Jesus experienced the alienation from God that sin brings.
The Bible also says: “He made him who had no sin to be sin for us, that in him we might become the righteousness of God6.” “He was wounded for our transgressions7.” Jesus, Son of God, died for our sins.
On the third day Jesus was raised to life again. His resurrection is the confirmation and vindication of Jesus’ life and ministry and of his sacrificial death for our sins. The Bible says Jesus was declared to be the Son of God in power according to the Spirit of holiness by his resurrection from the dead8.
Jesus, during his life, spoke and acted as if he were divine. He raised the dead. He calmed storms. If people worshipped him, he accepted it. He claimed the ability and authority to forgive sin. He claimed to have existed before Abraham. He said he would one day come in glory to judge the whole earth, determining the eternal destiny of every person. He took the divine name, I AM, and applied it to himself.
If Jesus had been crucified and that had been the end of his story, it would have been impossible to know whether or not to take him seriously. But God raised Jesus from the dead; by so doing, God put his stamp of affirmation on Jesus, vindicating him. By his resurrection from the dead, we know that what Jesus said was right and his demonstrations of divine power were the real thing. By his resurrection from the dead, we know that Jesus is the Son of God. Therefore, we know that his death for our sins was sufficient to effect our forgiveness.
So Christians have rightly made much of the idea of justification. Biblically, justification is a legal term.** It means “to gain right standing as far as the Law is concerned.” The Bible describes sin as a transgression of God’s Law. It is not just breaking God’s rules, but violating his character and violating the order of things as they really are.
When we sin in any one of a thousand ways (gossip, petty pride, lust, murder, addiction, adultery), we transgress the law of God’s goodness and commit an offense against him. Our condition is one of objective guilt, just as breaking a criminal or civil law makes us objectively guilty in the sight of the law. Guilt requires punishment and/or restitution to restore our right standing and to justify us in the eyes of the law. It is necessary to pay the fine, do jail time, or be executed, depending on the nature of the offense and the law of the land.
The necessary punishment or restitution for offenses against God is death and separation from him. This is not because he is excessively severe, but because his perfection is infinite. Any sin, however small it seems to us, constitutes an infinite offense. Therefore, our guilt is infinite and the punishment and restitution necessary for our justification are also infinite. We owe God an infinite debt and our separation from him, merited by our sin, should rightly be total and eternal.
You see the problem. How can we justify ourselves? How can we possibly manoeuvre ourselves into a position of right standing? We don’t have the resources. We can’t do enough good deeds. We can’t be religious enough. Even our own death is not sufficient, unless it is somehow an eternal death.
That is why Jesus’ death is such infinitely good news for us. By his sinless life and as the divine Son of God, his death was sufficient to erase the infinite debt of our sins. His life of infinite worth, laid down on our behalf at his crucifixion, means that our eternal death is no longer required. He died in our place. Our sins are dealt with and now we can have right standing with God, not on the basis of what we have done, but on the basis of what Jesus has done for us. God, in sheer grace, not only forgives our sin but actually takes the moral perfection of Christ (what the Bible calls righteousness) and imputes it to us. He credits it to our account. Not that we are now righteous or perfect. We are not. We still sin. But God considers or reckons us righteous and deals with us on that basis.
Of course, if we reject or choose to ignore Jesus, then we are still on the hook for our own sins. Punishment and restitution are still required. God won’t just ignore our sin. He would not be good or just if he did. But he has provided a way for us to be made right with him, and that is through Jesus. All we do is repent of our sin, accept that gift and respond accordingly, or continue to rebel against God.
The Bible describes the day when the Lord Jesus is revealed from heaven with his mighty angels in flaming fire, inflicting vengeance on those who do not know God and on those who do not obey the gospel of Christ9. The gospel is not merely an invitation, but a command. The appropriate response to God’s mercy is what the Bible calls faith, believing that Jesus’ death was for our sins, and ordering your life under God’s lordship. We do not serve God in order to get right with him. Our justification is entirely a work of God’s grace. Forgiveness is not earned. We respond to him in gratitude. Living under his lordship is our response of love.
Justification by faith means we throw ourselves on God’s mercy by believing and gratefully receiving Jesus’ death for our sins. By virtue of that, and only that, we have right standing with God.
Perhaps an analogy will be helpful. Each of us has a certificate of debt. Our name is on top and our sins are written on it. On the bottom, on the line Total Debt Owing is the word, INFINITE. Method of payment: death and eternal separation from God. But for those who have, by faith, accepted Jesus’ death for themselves, PAID IN FULL has been stamped in bold, red capital letters across our certificate. What’s more, there is an added column with the heading, Credit, and in that column is written, “JESUS’ PERFECT RIGHTEOUSNESS.”
At the end of days, when Jesus delivers the kingdom to God the Father, after destroying every rule and every authority10, each person will stand before God’s throne and be called to account. We will each have a certificate of debt balance, either owing death and separation from God (leading to eternal separation from God) or account paid in full, leading to eternal life and intimacy with God.
Because of his resurrection from the dead, we know our faith in Jesus is well-grounded. By his resurrection, the credit on our account is guaranteed. By his resurrection, we know that his death is sufficient for our sins. Jesus was delivered over to death for our sins, and raised to life for our justification, says the Bible.
Many have not received Jesus as Saviour by faith. They have not accepted his death for their sins. They, therefore, bear the weight of their sins against God and are responsible to pay the infinite debt. God, in his justice, will require that of them. Yet in his mercy and love, he gave his Son for them. They must, however, respond to him, confessing their sins to be saved from sin’s penalty and restored to right standing with God.
Many have acknowledged Jesus but don’t realize that Jesus’ death is enough. They think they still have to fill up what is lacking by being religious or good. Their goodness does not, indeed cannot, make them right with God. It is only Jesus’ death and resurrection that justifies. Living right in a loving response to God’s grace is a joy, while trying to be good enough to maintain God’s goodwill becomes only a burden. They need to surrender the need to measure up and rest in the knowledge that, in Jesus, God sees them as good.
Many have put their faith in Jesus. They know their sins are forgiven. They have been saved by the grace of God, who loves them too much to let them go.
This is the Great Story of the Bible. Every Christian sermon must be tied to this and to Jesus who is its central figure. Unfortunately, many Talks, despite the best intentions of the speaker, fall short of this glorious message, either through laziness or ignorance. But if this truth is declared Sunday after Sunday our listeners will be encouraged and transformed. The Story has inherent power to change people because it is God’s Word. This Word is what we are called to preach.
*
I do not know who said this but I am greatly appreciative of this pithy and accurate expression.
* The Bible also uses non-legal terms as metaphors for the gospel: redemption (we were slaves but Jesus paid for our freedom); regeneration (we were dead but Jesus made us alive); family (we were estranged from God but in Jesus we have become children of God); reconciliation (we were separated from God but Jesus drew us close).