This is the final of a series of messages simply titled ‘The Gospel’. We have looked at the various pictures the Bible gives us, by which we can understand more fully the death of Jesus Christ for us. We need to do this because nothing matters more than the Gospel.
Yet the Scriptures themselves do not neatly package or summarize the Gospel. What the Scriptures do is give some themes that thread through the Bible.
And yet, even our understanding is incomplete, for the Gospel remains and will always remain somewhat mysterious, too big for us.
This is what we have considered for the last 4 weeks:
Sin is the breaking of God’s perfect Law, and the reality of our sinfulness has made us guilty in the sight of a Holy and just God. The appropriate consequence of guilt is punishment. But Jesus has borne our punishment, and on that basis God reckons us innocent. This is what is meant when the Bible speaks of ‘justification’. But the Gospel is more than that.
Sin also kills. The Bible said we were ‘dead in sin’. To exist out of the context of God is exactly that: mere existence, but not really living at all. But on the cross, God himself in the person of Jesus Christ experienced both physical death and that sense of rejection by God. The Bible says that he experienced it for us, and that when he was raised to life by the power of God, God included us in that resurrection. We have been ‘made alive’ in Christ, who has come to give life, and life to the full. Theologians call that ‘regeneration’. But the Gospel is more than that.
Sin also enslaves us. We are captive to it. But Jesus gave his life as a ransom and thus has secured our release. We are no longer enslaved to it. We are able now to choose righteousness, to pursue what is good, and to live in a manner that reflects God’s character and goodness. This the Bible calls ‘redemption’. But the Gospel is more than that.
Sin has made our hearts dirty, filthy and permanently stained. The Bible speaks of our being ‘washed in the blood of the Lamb’, the blood being a reference to Jesus’ death. We have been cleansed from our sin. The word ‘righteous’ has to do with purity, and Jesus’ perfect righteousness has been imputed to us, so that when God looks at us, he now sees the righteousness, the perfect purity of Christ, instead of our sin, and treats us accordingly.
Guilty to justified. Dead to alive. Enslaved to freedom. Filthy to clean. This is the Gospel.
But it is more than that, and so today we consider what framework of the Gospel is really most astonishing: the picture of family.
The Bible gives us two family relationships by which God relates to his people: the parent/child relationship, and the marriage relationship.
When Luke chapter 3 traces the genealogy of Jesus backwards, it starts with Jesus was the son (as was supposed) of Joseph, the son of Heli, the son of Matthat… and so on, until it ends: the son of Seth, the son of Adam, the son of God. Having created Adam and breathed life into him, Adam was, in a very real sense, God’s son. There was a relationship, a nearness, in which God was close to him (and to Eve) and would ‘walk’ in the garden of Eden (if not physically and visibly, certainly in a way that Adam and Eve could walk with him and talk with him).
At some point Adam and Eve, like rebellious children, chose to step outside the good authority of a Father who loved them and wanted the best for them. But notice the immediate effect on their relationship with God: the next time they heard God in the Garden, for the first time ever, they hid from him. Adam and Eve are hiding, hoping not to get caught but, pretty quickly, Adam and Eve had to confess: they had disobeyed the perfect Father, and irreparably damaged what had been a perfect relationship. They had become relationally estranged. There had opened before them a gulf and all their children and descendants were born on their side of the gulf.
Then judgment of God upon Adam and Eve was to have them leave the Garden of Eden, the place that had been home. As children now helplessly in the grip of sin, God effectively said to them, ‘You can’t live under my roof’, and sent them out.
As the human race became utterly rebellious, God judged mankind with the Great Flood, which gives an indication of just how flagrant and gross sinfulness had become. After the Flood, from one of the descendants of Noah, God chose one man through whom he would build a nation. This nation, in turn, would be a people through whom God would put into motion his dream of restoring the world to himself. This nation was Israel.
In the days of Abraham’s grandson Jacob, Jacob’s family was relocated to Egypt in order to survive a famine. They remained in Egypt and multiplied for several centuries, at one point becoming so numerous that Pharaoh considered them a threat and enslaved them brutally. When, at the appropriate time God would act to gain their freedom, he called Moses to be the agent of their deliverance. Moses was to go to Pharaoh and speak for God, demanding the Israelites’ release. But God also warned that Pharaoh would not bow to Moses’ demand. ‘When that happens,’ God said to Moses, ‘You shall say to Pharaoh, “Thus says the LORD, ‘Israel is my firstborn son, and I say to you: Let my son go, that he may serve me. If you refuse to let him go, behold I will kill your firstborn son.’”’
God essentially says to Pharaoh, ‘You mess with my family, you mess with me.’ God, in a series of plagues, held up the Egyptian gods to ridicule and led Israel out of Egypt in triumph. Centuries later, through the prophet Hosea, God would reflect back on this event, saying, ‘When Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt I called my son.’
Israel, however, proved to continue being a rebellious son. Their story is a pattern of God’s faithfulness to them, and their rebellion against him.
In Deuteronomy 32, God plays the role of both mother and father, and Moses says this of the rebellion of Israel:
‘Ascribe greatness to our God! The Rock, his work is perfect for all his ways are justice, a God of faithfulness and without iniquity, just and upright is he. They have dealt corruptly with him; they are no longer his children because they are blemished; they are a crooked and twisted generation.’
and
They sacrificed to demons that were no gods, to gods they had never known, to new gods that had cme recently, whom your fathers had never dreaded. You were unmindful of the Rock that bore you, and you forgot the God who gave you birth. The LORD saw it and spurned them, because of the provocation of his sons and daughters. And he said, ‘I will hide my face from them, I will see what their end will be, for they are a perverse generation, children in whom there is no faithfulness.
Through Jeremiah, God says, ‘I thought you would call me “My father” and not turn away from following me.’
God is the Father who loves and disciplines his children; his children are rebellious and belligerent children, never submitting to either God’s affection nor his authority. Even as God continues to demonstrate his Fatherly affection and authority, the children remain willfully distant, willfully unreconciled.
Such is the human condition: children estranged from their father, by their own choosing.
The Bible also uses the imagery, and that quite poignantly, of marriage: God is the spurned husband, Israel is the adulterous wife. When God speaks in this context, you can hear his heart breaking, and the unfaithfulness of the wife is absolute. In Jeremiah 3, after God says, ‘I thought you would call me father’, he immediately says, ‘Surely, as a treacherous wife leaves her husband, so you have been treacherous to me, O house of Israel,’ declares the LORD.
In Jeremiah and Ezekiel, there are extended passages that describe Israel’s unfaithfulness to her spouse. Here are some examples:
Ezekiel 23 describes Judah’s worship of foreign gods in these personal terms:
The word of the LORD came to me, ‘Son of man, there were two women, the daughters of one mother. They played the whore in Egypt; they played the whore in their youth; there their breasts were pressed and their virgin bosoms handled. Oholah was the name of the elder and Oholibah the name of her sister. They became mine, and they bore sons and daughters. As for their names, Oholah is Samaria, and Oholibah is Jerusalem. Oholah played the whore while she was mine, and she lusted after her lovers the Assyrians, warriors clothed in purple, governors and commanders, all of them desirable young men, horsemen riding on horses. She bestowed her whoring upon them, the choicest men of Assyria all of them, and she defiled herself with all the idols of everyone after whom she lusted. She did not give up her whoring that she had begun in Egypt; for in her youth men had lain with her and handled her virgin bosom and poured out their whoring lust upon her. Therefore I delivered her into the hands of her lovers, into the hands of the Assyrians, after whom she lusted. These uncovered her nakedness; they seized her sons and her daughters; and as for her, they killed her with the sword; and she became a byword among women, when judgment had been executed on her.
‘Her sister Oholibah saw this, and she became more corrupt than her sister in her lust and in her whoring, which was worse than that of her sister. She lusted after the Assyrians, governors and commanders, warriors clothed in full armor, horsemen riding on horses, all of them desirable young men. And I saw that she was defiled; they both took the same way. But she carried her whoring further. She saw men portrayed on the wall, the images of the Chaldeans portrayed in vermilion, wearing belts on their waists, with flowing turbans on their heads, all of them having the appearance of officers, a likeness of Babylonians whose native land was Chaldea. When she saw them, she lusted after them and sent messengers to them in Chaldea. And the Babylonians came to her into the bed of love, and they defiled her with their whoring lust. And after she was defiled by them, she turned from them in disgust. When she carried on her whoring so openly and flaunted her nakedness, I turned in disgust from her, as I had turned in disgust from her sister. Yet she increased her whoring, remembering the days of her youth, when she played the whore in the land of Egypt and lusted after her lovers there, whose members were like those of donkeys, and whose issue was like that of horses. Thus you longed for the lewdness of your youth, when the Egyptians handled your bosom and pressed your young breasts.’ [Ezekiel 23:1-21, ESV]
(Ezekiel 16 says something similar, using the same language.)
Now, if all that sounds like ‘too much information’, too lewd and graphic for church, think then of how God considers how full and complete was Israel and Judah’s unfaithfulness to him. For them to have turned away from God so utterly, becoming essentially idol-worshiping pagans was an offense almost beyond expression.
We have seen this in previous weeks: the infinite guilt of sin, dead in sin, helplessly enslaved to sin, rendered foul and reeking with sin. If these descriptions of the unfaithful spouse sound unnecessarily extreme, it is just a reminder to us again of the nature of sin.
Let us make no mistake: to elevate anything in our hearts above God is to be unfaithful. There was a time when that was our natural and unalterable condition. Unable to do anything but turn continually away from God. Our sin was no different, no less flagrant than that of Israel. The orientation of humanity is to whore after other gods.
That is what sin is. It is the stubborn estrangement of children from the Father, the brazen promiscuity of a wife against her husband. Both of these are so severely wilful that we act as enemies, hostile to God.
But it’s not the end of the story.
Yet the number of the children of Israel shall be like the sand of the sea, which cannot be measured or numbered. And in the place where it was said to them, ‘You are not my people,’ it will be said of them, ‘Children of the living God.’
and
‘And in that day,’ declares the LORD, ‘you will call me “My husband” and no longer call me “My Baal”.’
Estranged children who will once again be called ‘children of God’. A wife who prostitutes herself, will once again call God, ‘My husband’.
The first chapter of the Gospel of John says that But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to be called children of God.
Ephesians makes this statement: In love he predestined us for adoption through Jesus Christ, according to his will.
Paul is writing this to the citizens of a leading Roman city, and the Roman understanding of adoption was very different from ours. In the Roman setting, a man could adopt a son to be his heir. Most adoptions in our day are of orphans and infants. Not so in Rome. A Roman would often adopt an adult. When someone was adopted into a family, Roman law was such that the adopted one would have full status as a son. The family was bound, in matters of inheritance and all legal matters, to treat the adopted one as an equal.
But an adopted son was to some degree better off than a natural son. Once adopted, an adopted heir could not be disowned. Adoption was irrevocable. A natural son could be disowned. A father could say to his natural son, ‘Your choices and lifestyle are a disgrace to this family. From this point on, you are no longer my son. You have no part in this family, and no share in the inheritance of our estate.’
With an adopted son, he could not say that. The position of the adopted son in the family, entitled to share in the estate and the inheritance, was actually more secure than that of the natural son.
Among the ancient legal documents from this era there is a record of a father who disowned his son, only to later on forgive him and receive him back into the family. But later, the father again decided to disown the son and cast him off. Now here’s what’s interesting: the son claimed his father was not legally entitled to do this because after having been received back the first time he now has the status of an adopted son. He wanted to be treated as an adopted son because it gave him a more secure place in the family than his status as a natural son!
So when Paul says we are ‘adopted’ as God’s children, what he is implying is not that we are less than full children of God, but in a sense we are more than natural children. Not only do we have full status as God children, but it is an eternal, irrevocable, unshakably secure status.
And so John again says, See what kind of love the Father has given to us, that we should be called ‘children of God’. And so we are.
Now also in Revelation: The one who conquers will have this heritage, and I will be his father and he will be my son.
Look at the picture given to us at the end of history, near the end of the book of Revelation: it is a picture of a wedding banquet!
Let us rejoice and exult and give him the glory, for the marriage of the Lamb has come, and his Bride has made herself ready; it was granted her to clothe herself with fine line, bright and pure for the fine linen is the righteous deeds of the saints.
The bridal gown is worn by whom? – the saints!
On at least two occasions the gospels paint Jesus as ‘groom’ (Matthew 9 and John 3) and on two other occasions Jesus tells parables that describe the kingdom of God in wedding imagery (Matthew 22 and 25).
How does this happen? By what means does God make rebels his children and spiritual adulterers his spotless bride?
And you, who once were alienated and hostile in mind, doing evil deeds, he has now reconciled in his body of flesh by his death, in order to present you holy and blameless and above reproach before him, if indeed you continue in the faith.
And so it has been all these last weeks. When we speak of the Gospel, we always come back to a place (the cross), an event (the crucifixion), and a person (Jesus of Nazareth).
The New Testament repeatedly ties the love of God in Christ (a relational word) to the cross of Christ:
Romans: God demonstrates his love for us in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.
Galatians: The son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.
Ephesians: Christ loved us and gave himself up for us and Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her
1 John: This is how we know what love is, that he laid down his life for us and This is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his son to be a propitiation for our sins.
God is the Father who could not stop loving. He is the husband who could not stop longing. And he gave his Son, in love’ that God might restore us to himself. And the cross is how he did it.
What is God like as a husband? And what does it mean for us to be his reconciled beloved?
Ephesians 5 speaks of the relationship between Christ and his church as the model for the husband and wife relationship.
The husband is the head of the wife even as Christ is the head of the church, his body, and is himself its Savior. Now, as the church submits to Christ, so also wives also should submit to their husbands in everything.
Christ is the head of the Church, and the Church submits to Christ in everything. Christ is in authority over the church. He leads the church. He takes responsibility for the church. The Church lives under his roof, rather than the other way around.
But what shapes his leadership? Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself for us.
All of Christ’s leadership, whenever Christ exercises his authority, he does it out of so profound a love that he would (and did) lay down his life for the Church. He would literally do anything if it was good for the Church.
The Church’s response is very simple: we submit to Christ in everything. Everything. He says love one another, so we do. He says forgive one another, so we do. He says make disciples, so we do. He says follow him whatever the cost, so we do. We order our lives absolutely under his authority.
But we do it in the realization that in every way that he leads us, he does so for our good. Wives, what would it be to order your lives under the leadership of a husband whose every action and decision is motivated solely by his desire for your good? Such is Jesus. And our submission to him in all things is the submission that is in such awe at his love that we cannot help but also love and respond to him accordingly.
Do you believe that in everything in your life, God has acted, is acting and will act for your good? That whatever he has done or allowed, in whatever circumstance you find yourself in, do you believe it comes from a God who so deeply loves you that, in all things, he is working for your good? What is going on in your life right now? Do you trust him? Will you lovingly submit to him?
Some people have had terrible fathers, and therefore refuse to think of God as a father. But the problem is not that God is like their father (your father?) but because they were not like God. God is the real, the perfect father.
What is a father to be like? What do fathers do?
They provide. They love unconditionally. They discipline (but always in love, always concerned for the character of the children, never flying off the handle, and never excessively). They delight in their children and love them no matter what. They forgive. They notice their children and spend time with them so children feel safe with him.
God does all of these things.
You have probably heard parents say to their children, who were not coming when the parent said it was time to go, ‘Okay, we’re leaving now. Bye…’ in the hopes that their child would then come running, which often they do. But what that parent has just done (unintentionally, we hope!) is told the child that, unless the child obeys, the parent may leave them. Some people’s whole life is shaped by the fact that their father might have (or maybe actually did) walk away. God never threatens with abandonment. Never. Quite the opposite. He guarantees his presence with all of his children, all the time.
So the Church and we ourselves are secure with the constant presence of the God who really does delight in us, who always will provide what is needed, who disciplines but never in anger, and who forgives and forgets.
Hebrews 12 reminds us that if there is some form of hardship in our lives, that is evidence that we are children of God. We often think it is evidence of God’s absence, but it is just the opposite: God is exercising discipline. Not discipline as punishment, but discipline as an exercise in formation, just as parents discipline not for punishment, but to form the character and habits of their children so that when they are no longer children they will also no longer be childish.
The Gospel is that when we were enemies of God, hostile children who ran as far away as we could, maliciously unfaithful spouses, God has reconciled us to himself. He has brought us home. He had made a bed for us. He has made a meal for us. He has clung to us and whispered in strong tenderness, ‘I love you. I will never leave you nor forsake you. And you shall dwell in the house of the LORD forever.’
So…
God has justified us and, through Christ, considers us righteous.
God redeems us and, through Christ, has made us free.
God regenerates us and, through Christ, brought us from death to life.
God cleanses us and, through Christ, washes our sins away so we can stand before a holy God.
God reconciles us and, through Christ, enables us to become his children, his bride.
And that is the Gospel.
Amen.