A fourth indictment, an ignorance
of the gospel of Jesus Christ. I want to submit to you tonight
that this country is not gospel hardened. It is gospel ignorant
because most of its preachers are. And let me repeat this,
the malady in this country is not liberal politicians. the
root of socialism, Hollywood or anything else. It is the so-called
evangelical pastor of our day and preacher of our day and evangelist
of our day. That is where the malady is to
be found. We know the gospel. We have taken the glorious gospel
of our blessed God, and reduced it down to four spiritual laws
and five things God wants you to know, with a little superstitious
prayer at the end, and if someone repeats it after us with enough
sincerity, we pompously declare them to be born again. We've
traded regeneration for decisionism. First of all, I am amazed after
I talk about what I'm going to talk about for just a few minutes
here, how many godly believers of 30 and 40 years walking in
the faith come up to me with tears saying, Brother Paul, I
never heard this before in my life. And yet it is the historical
doctrine of redemption, of propitiation. You see, when you talk about
the gospel, my dear friend, let's set it up just clearly. The gospel
begins with the nature of God. And it goes from there to the
nature of man and the fallenness thereof. And it goes from there.
Those two great columns of the gospel come to set up for us
what should be called and known as, in every believer's mouth,
the great dilemma. And what is that dilemma? If
God is just, He cannot forgive you. The greatest problem in all of
Scripture is this. How can God be just and at the
same time the justifier of wicked men? When Scripture throughout
the Bible says, especially I'll draw from one text in Proverbs,
He who justifies the wicked, is an abomination to God. And
yet all our Christian songs boast about how God justifies That
is the greatest problem. That is the acropolis of the
Christian faith. So said Martin Lloyd-Jones and
Charles Spurgeon and anyone else who's read Romans 3. You see,
God set this before people. The great problem is if God is
truly just and all men are truly wicked, God, to be just, must
be a damn wicked man. But then God, for His own glory,
For the great love with which He loved us, sent forth His Son,
who walked on this earth as a perfect man. And then, according to the
plan, the eternal plan of God, He went to that tree. And on
that tree, He bore our sin. And He became, standing in the
law place of His people, bearing our guilt, He became a curse. Cursed is every man who does
not abide by all the things written in the book of the law so as
to perform them. Christ redeemed us from the curse, becoming a
curse in our place. So many people have this romantic,
powerless view of the Gospel, that the Christ is there hanging
on the tree, suffering under the wounds of the Roman Empire,
and the Father did not have the moral fortitude to bear the suffering
of His Son, so He turned away. No! He turned away because His
Son became sin! And so many, when he's in that
garden and he cries out, let this cup pass from me, people
speculate, well, what was in the cup? Oh, it's the Roman cross,
it's the whip, it's the nails, it's all this and all that. I
do not want to take away from the physical sufferings of Christ
on that. But the cup was the cup of God,
the Father's wrath. that had to be poured out on
the sun. Someone had to die, bearing the
guilt of God's people, forsaken of God by His justice, and crushed
under the wrath of God, for it pleased the Lord to crush him. I was in Germany a while back,
or in a Germanic seminary in Europe a while back, This book,
The Cross of Christ. Now, it wasn't John Stott's book.
It was another. I pulled it off and began to read it. And this
is what it said. The father looked down from heaven at the suffering
inflicted upon his son by the hands of men and counted that
as payment for our sin. It's heresy. Now, that physical
suffering, that nailing to the tree, that was all part of the
wrath of God. It had to be a bloody sacrifice.
I'll take nothing away from that. But my friend, if you stop there,
you don't have a gospel. And let me ask you, when the
gospel is preached today and when it is shared in personal
evangelism today, do you ever hear the things I have just said?
Almost never. It is never made clear that Christ
was able to redeem because He was crushed under the justice
of God. And having satisfied divine justice
with His death, God is now just and the justifier of the wicked. Gospel reductionism. We wonder why it has no power.
We wonder what happened. I'll tell you, when you leave
the gospel behind, And there is no longer any power in your
supposed gospel message. Then you've got to go to all
the little tricks of the trade that are so prominently used
today to convert men. And we all know most of them,
all of them do not. My dear friend, let me say this.
Several years ago, graduating from seminary, I had to make
a decision whether I was going to go for my PhD. God, in order
to save my spiritual life, sent me to the middle of the jungles
in Peru, as far away from the academic world as I could get.
And there, I began to realize something. As Spurgeon said,
greater men with greater minds than I have approached this doctrine
of the second coming, but to no avail. It is a great and mighty
doctrine. He said, I will set myself to
this. Seeking to comprehend something of Jesus Christ and him crucified. Let me tell you this. This is
what it makes me so angry. When men treat the glorious gospel
of Christ as though it was a first step into Christianity that only
takes about ten minutes of counseling, and after that you go on to greater
stuff! That shows you how pathetic we are in our knowledge of the
things of God. My friend, on the day of the second coming,
you will understand absolutely everything about the second coming.
But you will be an eternity of eternities in heaven and you
will not even begin to comprehend the glory of God in Calvary.
It's what everything is about. Young man, young preacher, listen
to me. Go after Him on that tree. What it means. You'll need nothing
to build strange fires in your oven. If you only catch a glimpse
of what he did on that tree. What he did on that tree. I love to say this, I've said
it a million times. Abraham takes Isaac up that mountain,
his son, his only son, whom he loved. Do you suppose the Holy
Spirit was trying to tell us about something future? And that son put up no struggle,
but laid down. And when that father gave his
will into the will of God, he brought that flint knife to pierce
his own son's heart. But his hand was stayed and it
was told the old man that God had provided a ram. So many Christians
think, oh, what a beautiful end to that story. It's not the end,
it's the intermission. Thousands of years later, God
the Father laid His hand upon the brow of His Son, His only
Son, whom He loved and took the flint knife out of the hand of
Abraham and slaughtered His only begotten Son under the full force
of wrath. Now do you know why that little
gospel you preach has no power? Because it is no gospel. Get
to the gospel! Spend your life on your knees!
Get away from men! Study the cross!