Gospel or Nothing Part 1: The Gospel

Introduction: This series of posts is from a sermon series I preached last year that I continually find effective in my life and faith. It is a five part series about the Gospel. In life, we’re given a choice: we can have all that God offers through Christ in the Gospel, or we can try to find all of that in the world and end up with nothing. The choice facing everyone of us is this: Gospel or Nothing. I used five sermons to describe the Gospel and then point out four major, significant, life-changing ways the Gospel offers everything and the world offers nothing, four things we’re all searching for in life: hope, love, purpose, and joy. So let’s begin this journey together with the foundation of the Gospel.

Read Isaiah 53:3-12.

I’m gonna have us start off with something every student hates: a pop quiz. You don’t have to write it down if you don’t want to. I just want you to think of your answer.

One of the largest social media websites today is Twitter. It gives you only 140 characters per post. So here is your task: Tweet the Gospel. Answer this question in 140 characters or less: What is the Gospel? This is something we should be pretty quick at as Christians. Before you continue reading, give it a shot.

Need: We talk all about the Gospel, but we don’t know what it is. I would think most Christians would place the Gospel at a very high importance. We probably would all say we’re all about the Gospel. We find it in churches’ mission statements and value statements. We say we love the Gospel, preach the Gospel, teach the Gospel, live the Gospel, share the Gospel. But it’s a very dangerous thing if we don’t know what we’re talking about. The Gospel is at the center of Christianity. When we start defining the Gospel in our own terms, we’ve put man in the center of Christianity and not the Gospel. This causes all sorts of problems.

What is most commonly placed at the middle of Christianity is what author Christian Smith has titled, “Moral therapeutic deism.” Moral: This means God cares about right and wrong; Therapeutic: he wants us to be happy and is there when we need him; Deism: he kind of started the clock then sat back and only intervenes when we want him to. Matt Chandler’s description of this: “The idea behind moral, therapeutic deism is that we are able to earn favor with God and justify ourselves before God by virtue of our behavior. This mode of thinking is religious, even ‘Christian’ in its content, but it’s more about self-actualization and self-fulfillment, and it posits a God who does not so much intervene and redeem but basically hangs out behind the scenes, cheering on your you-ness and hoping you pick up the clues he’s left to become the best you you can be.” As you can see, this is very dangerous for Christians to believe, and it’s a result of not knowing what the truth and beauty of the Christian Gospel is.

I feel the need to say this before we move on: If you’re a Christian and you think you know the Gospel, you think you got a perfect score on our pop quiz, I beg you not to turn off your ears and brain because you think this is beneath you. We never move on from the Gospel. Never. It is one of the most important questions you can ever answer in this life. So here it is...

Question: What is the Gospel? This is an important question. Hopefully you put some thought into it when you took the quiz. It’s also a question I asked several members of my church in preparation for this sermon. Here are some of the answers I got: “The Bible; the life of Jesus; the Word of God; the first four books of the New Testament; Matthew Mark Luke and John; good news of the Bible, and stuff; forgiveness; truth.” These are all great things, but they are not the Gospel.

As we look at the Bible this morning, I hope that we find this truth to the answer:

Truth: The Gospel is the good news that Jesus Christ, Son of God, lived, died, and rose again for the forgiveness of sin. (read that again).

Let’s unpack this and find out just what the Gospel looks like.

First, we need to know what the Gospel is not.

Good advice, good rules, good teaching, good living. It’s not karma, or heaven, or Jesus’ miracles. It’s not behavior modification, becoming a better person, or even following Jesus’ example. It’s not conservatism, Christendom, transforming culture, or high morality. It’s not the church, the Bible, the first four books of the New Testament, or just the life of Christ.

To make any of those things the Gospel is to replace the true Gospel in the center of Christianity.

 
The Gospel is good news, coming from the Greek, “euangelion,” which means good announcement, good message, or good news, and is where we get our word evangelism. Where we see it most often used in Ancient Greek culture is in good news brought back from war of victory. For example, the newspaper headlines after victory in Europe in World War II on May 8th, 1945: "VE-DAY--IT'S ALL OVER." That announcement is euangelion. So when we talk about the best, most beautiful, most true and meaningful euangelion, we’ve now come to realize the Gospel. Picture the headline: “Victory! It is finished. The battle against sin and death has been won by Christ.” That is the Gospel.

Second, at the heart of the Gospel is the idea of penal substitutionary atonement.

When we look at our passage in Isaiah 53, we see the heart of the Gospel. It is the idea of penal substitutionary atonement. Another string of confusing words, but it’s rather simple. It means a penalty (penal) being paid by a substitute (substitutionary) in order to atone for wrongdoing (atonement). There’s been many attempts at examples and illustrations of this, but I don’t want to even get near them right now. I think the truth of Christ’s penal substitutionary atonement from Isaiah 53 is beautiful and clear enough for us.

Ten ways Christ accomplished atonement in death on that first Good Friday:
Listen to the beauty of substitutionary atonement in this...
1. He took up our infirmaries
2. Bore our suffering
3. Pierced for our transgressions
4. Crushed for our iniquities
5. Punishment upon him that brought us peace
6. By his wounds we are healed
7. Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all
8. Stricken for the transgression of my people
9. He will bear their iniquities
10. He bore the sin of many to make intercession

So taking this into consideration, the Gospel in short, in a tweet, might sound something like this…
“He took the punishment only we deserve so we can enjoy the blessings only He deserves.”
“He became sin so we could become righteousness.”
“Christ said it is finished when we couldn’t even start.”
“He drank the cup of wrath we deserve so we can bathe in the hope that he offers.”
“The Creator became creature to bring the creature to the Creator.”
“The world says do, Jesus says done.”
“He took the death we should have died so we can live the life we should have lived.”
“We don’t live so that we can be saved, we live because we have already been saved.”
“He bore the wrath that should be on us so we can enjoy the love that should only be for him.”
“He was wounded, we are healed.”
“Christ died, so we can live.”
That is the heart of the Gospel.

Third, Good Friday isn’t good nor the good news good until the resurrection of Easter Sunday. I believe this text from Isaiah 53 offers us special proof that the resurrection is true. Because everyone must come to one of two conclusions about the resurrection: it either didn’t happen and Christianity is all a big scam, or it did, and Christ is Lord and Savior. Because making Christ Lord and Savior is so often repulsive to sinners, the cover up began on day one and hasn’t stopped since. See, we can all agree that Jesus was crucified, even scholars and historians agree on this. But what really makes Jesus Savior and King is the resurrection. So they must try their best to cover it up. 

The popular theory is that Jesus simply fainted on the cross...

There was a question and answer forum in which one lady wrote, “Dear Sir, Our preacher said on Easter that Jesus just swooned on the cross and that the disciples nursed him back to health. What do you think? Sincerely, Bewildered.” In reply they wrote, “Dear Bewildered, beat your preacher with a cat-of-nine-tails with 39 heavy strokes, nail him to a cross, hang him in the sun for 6 hours, run a spear through his side, put him in an airless tomb for 36 hours and see what happens and get back to us. Sincerely, Charles.”

Islam takes it a step further and actually claims that Jesus did not die on the cross for sinners and rose again but that there was a replacement on the cross, he escaped death and later was taken to heaven. 

The Q'ran, sura 4:156-157 says:
. . . and for their [the Jews'] saying: "We slew the Messiah, Jesus son of Mary, the Messenger of God" – yet they did not slay him, neither crucified him, only a likeness of that was shown to them. Those regarding him; they have no knowledge of him, except the following of surmise; and they slew him not of a certainty – no indeed; God raised him up to Him; God is all-mighty, All-wise.”

Therefore Muslims in general believe that the central message of the New Testament and of Biblical Christianity is built on a mistake: Christ did not die, and Christ did not rise. Therefore the very heart of Christianity is false.

There are significant historical reasons why the Islamic reconstruction of the life of Jesus is not true. But here's the point in taking our text from Isaiah 53. This chapter was not written by Christians after Christ's coming, trying to distort or failing to understand what really happened on Good Friday and Easter. This chapter was written by a Jewish prophet 700 years before Christ came. And what he saw in the future was not a Messiah who escapes death and resurrection, but a Messiah who dies – and dies explicitly in the place of sinners – and then rises again to make intercession for his redeemed and forgiven and justified people for ever.

We see three prophecies of his resurrection in verse 10. In the Jewish sacrificial system, the guilt offering was killed. That’s what makes these prophecies so crazy. Even after he’s offered as a guilt offering...

I. “He will see his offspring”
That is, even after dying, somehow this suffering servant will see the offspring reborn through his death. Therefore he must live again to intercede and care and guide the redeemed.

II. “He will prolong his days”
Verses 3-9 make it pretty clear that his days are over, you can stop counting because this guy is crushed. However, verse 10 comes in with “he will prolong his days!” The days are still coming for this servant, even after death!

III. “The will of the Lord will prosper in his hand”
Even the most powerful, wealthy, happy, or good people in this world are still subject to, enslaved to death. But not so with this suffering servant. The grave could not hold him down, death could not keep him there, Jesus rose again! And therefore, he is the only king who we can say conquered all, even death!

The resurrection is true and wonderful. Isaiah knew it 700 years before it happened. The resurrection makes Good Friday, good. The resurrection makes the good news, good.

Conclusion: It has been my prayer for this morning that you would walk out of here with a very clear description of the Gospel. To know what the Gospel is is incredibly important, but also amazingly wonderful. After all, it is good news! The Gospel is the good news that Jesus Christ, Son of God, lived, died, and rose again for the forgiveness of sin. As we have seen from our text, the Gospel is the news that Jesus has taken our place in punishment. This is the only way justice and mercy could coincide. God is both “Just and the justifier” (Rom. 3:26).

If you have not placed your trust in the Gospel, what better day to do it! Realize for yourself today that Jesus Christ has died on the cross in your place, for your sins, and rose again to give you new life. You can begin that life today by calling out to God, confessing your need for him, repentance for your sins, and a desire to be reborn by the good news of the Gospel.

“Crown Him the Lord of life, who triumphed over the grave,
And rose victorious in the strife for those He came to save.
His glories now we sing, who died, and rose on high,
Who died eternal life to bring, and lives that death may die.”

Amen.