Across our nation and the world today people are gathering either virtually or in person to celebrate the greatest event that this world has ever known. They are gathering to celebrate the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Nothing in history compares to it. The single most essential event in human history. The confirmation of the accomplishment of the salvation plan of God. All according to the predetermined plan and foreknowledge of God established in eternity past, guided and predicted by the sovereignty of God throughout history, and proclaimed by His church ever since. It is the crown of the gospel and today across the world the faithful of God are proclaiming the good news. Good news that brings great joy, good news that glorifies God.
At the same time, throughout the world there are countless false gospels being preached, innumerable incomplete gospels being shared. Even as they gathered to celebrate the resurrection of Jesus Christ, the good news is being maligned. The word gospel is thrown around everywhere. It is claimed by so many people with so many different ideas of what it is. It is adjusted with words like “prosperity,” “liberation,” “social.” Even those who would seek to do it justice, men and women who are dedicated to Scripture and to the truth of God often fail to explain what it is.
What is the gospel? We have to be right about the gospel. If the gospel is what saves us, if knowing and understanding what the good news actually is brings us to a saving knowledge of God, then to be wrong about the gospel is to be wrong where it matters most in eternity. To be wrong about the gospel means that everything else in your theology is pointless. What does it matter if you can perfectly and clearly articulate the doctrine of the Trinity or interpret the book of Revelation if you are wrong about the gospel. To be wrong about the gospel means that you are unconverted, it means that you are unsaved, and that you are still in your sin. You cannot be in a right relationship with God and be wrong about the gospel. Getting the gospel right is essential to life now and to life in eternity.
So this morning, to get an understanding of what the gospel is, we are going to look at Paul’s introduction to the book of Romans. The book of Romans is Paul’s major explanation of what the gospel is. If you want to understand, if you want to flesh out the intricate details of the gospel then you have to study this book. It has been a game changer in the hearts and minds of the greatest preachers and theologians throughout history. And this morning we are going to look at his introduction, verses 1-6. The entire book of Romans is really just an explanation, it grows out of Paul’s introduction of himself and the gospel in these verses. Lets read.
“Paul, a bond-servant of Christ Jesus, called as an apostle, set apart for the Gospel of God, which He promised beforehand through His prophets in the holy Scriptures, concerning His Son, who was born a descendant of David according to the flesh, who was declared the Son of God with power by the resurrection from the dead, according to the Spirit of holiness, Jesus Christ our Lord, through whom we have received grace and apostleship to bring about the obedience of faith among all the Gentiles for His name’s sake, among whom you also are the called of Jesus Christ.”
The word “gospel” is a compound word in Greek from the words “good” and “message.” It is a good message, good news to be proclaimed to all who will hear it. It is the good news of salvation that has come from God in the person of Jesus Christ His Son, to people who are under the wrath of God and who need to be delivered from their coming eternal destruction. It is good news, it is not just good news it is the greatest news that anyone could ever hear.
Paul in verse one makes it clear that he is just the one delivering this message. An apostle is one who is sent, and emissary, an ambassador. He is been called by Christ Jesus to bring this message, this good news. Paul is not important, he is merely a slave obeying the commands of his master. The messenger is not important all that matters is the message that he brings.
What is far more important in verse one is the source of the gospel, the author of this good news. It is the gospel of God. The Gospel is from God, it is about God, He is the source. The author and the architect. It has come from outside this world. It was not designed by man, not even the greatest doctors and philosophers of history. It came from the infinite genius of God. God enacting and God speaking his gospel.
Who but God could have come up with the idea of God the Father sending his Son to redeem a fallen race that continues in rebellion? While we were dead in our transgression. That is our dilemma, the reason for God’s plan. We are born dead in our sin, and it only gets worse from there. In Chapter 3 Paul will make it clear that there is none that seeks after God, none who does what is right, that there is none who understand, all have turned aside and come useless, for all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. So how can unholy man become right with a holy God? It is only through the Gospel of God.
Who but God could imagine a plan of salvation that would include this divine Son being born into the world that is filled with the curse of sin? Born into a world governed by a perfect law that existed only to condemn the hearts and souls of those who tried to follow it. And then to actively obey that law perfectly, so as to fulfil the law on our behalf. To secure perfect righteousness for us.
And then to go to the cross, to absorb all of the sins of all of the people throughout history who would be called by God and look to the death of Jesus. So that He who knew no sin would become sin for us. Who but God could have thought up the substitutionary death of Christ on the cross? To then be taken down from that cross and buried in a tomb, to then raise Himself from the dead on the third day. Jesus said, “I have authority to lay my life down and to pick it back up again. This commandment I have received from the Father.” To then have this Divine Son lifted up, highly exulted, and having the name which is above every name bestowed upon Him, so that at the name of Jesus, every knee will bow of those who are in the heaven and on the earth and the under the earth, and that every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.
Notice something else here in verse 1, it is the gospel. The only good news. There is only one way to be saved. It is not A gospelas if it is one of many. It is the gospel. There are many roads that lead to hell, all are marked as heaven, but leading to destruction. Broad is the way and wide is the gate that leads to destruction. It is a highway with many lanes. But there is only one road that leads to life everlasting, and it is through the Lord Jesus Christ. In John 14:6 Jesus said, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father but through me.”. Peter said in Acts 4:12, “there is salvation in no one else; for there is no other name under heaven that has been given among men by which we must be saved.” Paul said in 1 Timothy 2, “For there is one God, and one mediator also between God and man, the man Christ Jesus, who gave Himself as a ransom for all.”
This gospel is not a new message, it was not a late addition to history. Look at verse 2, God promised this gospel “beforehand through His prophets in holy Scriptures.” Throughout the Old Testament, in simple language that the people were meant to understand, that the people of Jesus’ day were expected to understand, that we are expected to understand. The gospel was announced to Adam and Eve in the same breath as the curse against them for sin was first uttered. That the seed of the Woman would crush the head of the serpent. Then it was narrowed down through the seed of Abraham, then again through David. It was prophesied from the very beginning.
There are hundreds of prophecies concerning the coming messiah that would both be the herald of the gospel as well as the embodiment of it. Who would bring life, who would wipe away sickness and sadness; who would bring sight to the blind and hearing to the deaf, who would cleans the lepers and raise the dead up, and preach the gospel to the poor. We have seen in our study of the book of Matthew how Jesus actively fulfilled these prophecies. In His genealogy and in virgin birth in Chapter 1. In His birth in Bethlehem, and flight and return from Egypt in Chapter 2. In His being trumpeted by John the Baptist and His baptism in Chapter 3. In His temptation and in His preaching ministry in Chapter 4. In His embodiment and fulfillment of the Law in Chapters 5,6, and 7. And in chapters 8-9 in His healing ministry, in the demonstration of His authority over both the natural world and super-natural world, and most importantly with the demonstration of His authority of Death and Sin itself. We will see more as we continue through the book of Matthew.
All of these have barely scratched the surface of the OT prophecies that Jesus fulfilled. The statistical likelihood that anyone would fulfill these prophecies are astronomical to the point of sheer impossibility without the direct hand of an all sovereign God who is the master of time and the director of every movement of man, beast and speck of dust in creation.
In verse 3 we see the subject of the Gospel. “Concerning His Son, who was born of a descendant of David according to the flesh.” You see the Subject of the gospel, the focus of the good news that God the Father prepared in eternity passed and promised throughout the Old Testament was not an act, it was not an event, it was not promise of things to come, it is a person. The Gospel is about a person; and in verse 3 we see both the deity and the humanity of that person in whom we find the essence of the Good News.
“Concerning His Son.” There is no gospel without Jesus. You cannot have the good news without Jesus. Paul will later say in 1 Corinthians 2 that he was concerned with nothing except Jesus Christ and Him Crucified. And the first thing that Paul points to here is the divinity of Jesus; He is the Son of the Living God. In every way equal with God the Father. In Philippians 2 Paul tells us that He existed in the very form of God, equal with the Father in every way. Jesus is of the same essence with the Father and the Spirit. Col. 2:9 “for in Him all the fullness of deity dwells in bodily form.” He is God made flesh, John 1:1 “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God…and the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” He is the God in human form such that Isaiah could say 800 years before Jesus would be born that “His name will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Eternal Father, Prince of Peace.”
But in the same sentence Paul says that the Son of God was born as a “descendant of David according to the flesh.” God was Born. He entered the human race. Adding humanity to His divinity. Jesus had to become a man in the gospel of God.
Why? Why would God need to come down to us in order to save us? First off, because we could not go to Him. Jesus had to descend because we are completely incapable of ascending. Our righteousness must exceed that of the Scribes and the Pharisees, as Jesus said in the sermon on the Mount, we must be perfect as our Heavenly Father is perfect and there is simply no way that we can do that. In order to raise us up, Jesus first had to descend into our sin filled world. He had to obey for us where we had failed. He had to become a Son of Man so that we could become the sons and daughters of God.
Jesus also had to be a man because the wages of sin is death, and God cannot die. In Hebrews 2 we read, “Therefore he had to be made like His brother and in every respect, so that He might become a merciful and faithful high priest in the service of God, to make propitiation for the sins of the people.” Unless Christ was fully man, He could not have died to pay the penalty for man’s sin, He could not have been a substitute sacrifice for mankind. In order for Jesus to suffer the penalty of the law, the curse of the law which is death, He had to die, and God cannot die. So Jesus took upon himself, He added to His divinity a sinless humanity that was capable of fulfilling that requirement on our behalf.
It goes further than that. He had to be like us in every respect so that He could be that perfect mediator between God and man as Paul said in 1 Timothy, He had to be like us in every respect so that He could be a merciful and faithful high priest. A mediator stands between two parties that are at enmity with one another. A mediator must be able to approach both sides and be able to relate to both sides. Jesus had to be truly God in order to represent God to man; and He had to be fully man in order to represent man to God. The only person in history who could have stood in the middle is Jesus Christ. There was no prophet, no Angel, no righteous man, nothing and no one could stand and that gap but Jesus Christ; and that is the gospel. The gospel is that Jesus is the only mediator.
As He stood in between as our mediator, Jesus accomplished several things. The first as we read in Hebrews 2, was “to make propitiation for the sins of the people.” Paul says in Romans 3:25 that in Christ Jesus, God displayed publicly a propitiation in His blood. That is to say that Jesus served as a sacrifice that bears God’s wrath to the end and in doing so changes God’s wrath toward us into favor. Paul continues in Romans 3:25 “this was to demonstrate His righteousness, because in the forbearance of God He passed over the sins previously committed; for the demonstration of His righteousness at the present time so that He would be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus.”
Jesus absorbed the wrath of God in our place; “He made Him who knew no sin to be sin on our behalf, so that we might become the righteousness of God in Him.” God is just, He is angry with the wicked and His righteous and perfect wrath burns against all sin that is an affront to His holiness. God is “just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus.” God is both the one who looks to punish us for sin and the one who took the perfect wrath upon Himself in the person of Jesus. He satisfied that wrath completely. When Jesus said on the cross “it is finished,” He meant it. So that Paul can say in Romans 8, “Therefore there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.” When He took the cup of God’s wrath, Jesus absorbed all the righteous anger of God toward you and me and God’s justice has been fully placated and appeased.
The second thing that Jesus accomplishes as our mediator is reconciliation. We were in rebellion against God, and He was holy in His justified wrath against us, and there was a chasm in between. But as Jesus shed His blood upon the cross, He reconciled sinful man and holy God. He has brought us together.
The next is justification. Jesus is our representative as He stood in our place in His final act of obedience on the cross. Paul says in Romans 4 “He was delivered over because of our transgressions, and was raised because of our justification.” It is because He stands in our place that we are declared not guilty before God. God looks at us and sees not our sin and our rebellion but the perfect obedience of Jesus and declares us justified.
This is the essence of the gospel. Jesus standing as our mediator, as our propitiation, our reconciliation, our justification.
And how do we know that this is accomplished? Where is the proof of this mediation? In verse 4, “who was declared” remember, the gospel is about a person, “who was declared the Son of God with power by the resurrection from the dead.” That was God’s ultimate validation of the cross. In the resurrection is the proof that Christ ultimately was who He said that He was an accomplished what He said He would accomplish. The resurrection was God stamp of approval on the work of Christ on the cross for all the world to see.
We cannot under-emphasize the resurrection. We looked at first Peter 1:3 in our Bible study this last week, “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who according to His great mercy has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.” He caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Without the resurrection there is no rebirth, without the resurrection there is no living hope that is our imperishable and undefiled inheritance, our salvation. Without the resurrection, our faith is meaningless as Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15, “if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain, your faith also is in vain… If Christ has not been raised, your faith is worthless; you are still in your sins.”
That is the significance of this day, of Easter, of Resurrection Sunday. It is a celebration of all that we hold dear as believers in Christ Jesus. It is the culmination of the gospel message, the glorious crown upon His head. “Jesus was declared the Son of God with power by the resurrection from the dead according to the Spirit of holiness.” Without the resurrection the gospel is incomplete, it is unproven. Without the resurrection the gospel fails.
The gospel is about Jesus. The gospel is Jesus, a name which literally means “God saves.” He was God in human flesh who came to rescue His people from His own wrath, the consequences of their sin. We were saved from God, and the only one who can save from God is God. So, the gospel is that salvation is from God, by God, and to God. Only God could save us from Himself. His grace and justice together create the perfect picture of the gospel, a picture that is embodied in the person of Jesus Christ our Lord.
Paul concludes this introduction of the gospel with a statement about its strength. The gospel has the power to change and transform lives. The gospel does more than impart an inheritance in heaven. It gives power to live a new life. Through Jesus we have received grace to bring about the obedience of faith. The facts of the gospel are the person and works of Christ. The subjective element of the gospel is faith. The only way that the work of Christ is applied to the sinner is through their faith in Jesus Christ. “For by grace you have been saved through faith; and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God; not as a result of works, so that no one may boast.” The gift of grace is your faith, and it is protected by the power of God as we see in 1 Peter 1:5.
Faith is more than just an intellectual assent to the facts of the gospel; it is more than an emotional response. It involves the will, the choices of the individual, and begins at the moment of conversion. The first step on the narrow road is a step of obedient faith. Through Jesus we have received grace to bring about the obedience of faith; and the obedience of faith means the faith that produces obedience. All true saving faith will produce obedience to the will and the work of God. “For by grace you have been saved through faith… for we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand that we would walk in them.” We were saved by grace, through faith, for good works, for obedience to God. Obedience is the mark of true saving faith.
That is the effect of the gospel on the heart of someone who accepts it. That is the effect of Jesus Christ on the heart of someone who truly accepts Him. Obedient faith is the only true saving faith.
As we come to a close, I just want to ask you one more question. Are you sure that you know Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior, that you know the true gospel? “Many will say to (Him) on that day, ‘Lord, Lord’… And (He) will declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from me, you who practice lawlessness.” Have you come to repentance over your sins? Have you turned away from your own self-righteousness, your own self-reliance? Have you turned to the Lord Jesus Christ, throwing yourself upon His mercy? You may know that He is A Savior, but do you know Him as your Savior and your Lord, and does he know you as one of His children? Have you experienced the obedient faith that comes from the gospel taking hold in your heart? The only thing you have to lose is your sin and its consequences. Without Christ you are perishing, without Him you have no hope, without Christ you are still under the wrath of God, but in Christ you have salvation and eternal inheritance in heaven with God the Father.