The Gospel in One Word - Part 4

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As we continue to look into the gospel and specifically the truth of propitiation, let me summarize the overall truth we have put together and showed thus far:

Our Creator has become our Redeemer.

The gospel is an announcement, among other things, declaring that our Creator God has sent Jesus Christ who was Himself fully God, to humbly become a man, to ultimately die in our place so that God can rightly offer sinners forgiveness and salvation from God's justified wrath due our sin and eternal judgement.

Thru faith in Christ, Christ's offering and its sufficiency shields us from the wrath and judgment of God due our sin, by Christ becoming our representative substitute, by dying in our place and paying our sin penalty, taking on God's wrath due our sin as seen in His death, a death and penalty that we deserved to pay. Christ gets our sin and its penalty, we get His righteousness and forgiveness. This is 2 Cor. 5:17-21.

By this justice has been done. Every sin that will ever be forgiven has been judged and punished in the work of Jesus Christ and His death. Thus, forgiveness can rightly be offered to sinners. God can be just, and the justifier of those who have faith in Christ. See Romans 3:26.

This is the heart of the gospel. Our problem is our sin, which alienates us towards our Creator, creating hostility, brings about God's justified wrath. The gospel announces that his same God to whom we were alienated offered His own payment for our sin at the cost of Jesus's life, fully God, fully man, second person of the Trinity, dying as a propitiation, full payment, satisfactory payment, for that sin and thus satisfying the wrath due our sin. Jesus died as our substitute. Thus God can now offer peace to sinners, and rightly so.

This is what the gospel solves. To be sure it speaks to and effects other issues - relationships with our self, others, creation etc., but it accomplishes this by first solving a deeper problem, that of our hostility between us and our Creator due our sin. This is what the gospel solves. Everything flows from this. Our fundamental problem which lies at the heart of these other problems is sin and hostility between us and God.

Rebellion, defiance, retreat, animosity, guilt - you name it - this is what the Bible calls sin and must be dealt with as they stand against our Creator, not simply social errors. This is what we need to be delivered from, and why Christ died to make a way for our sin to be rightly forgiven. Everything else we see in this world that needs to be fixed is ultimately rooted in our sin problem and the hostility that brings between us and God. Nothing else can be rightly solved until our sin and animosity between us and our Creator is first solved.

This is why we also see the idea of reconciliation in regards to a picture of the gospel. The gospel allows for sinners to be rightly and sufficiently reconciled to their Creator by first dealing with their sin and its penalty. Our sin must be dealt with and put away if fellowship between the Creator and His creation can be rightly restored.

It is against the threat of divine judgement due our sin that all of this shines brightest. See Romans 1-5; Galatians 3; Eph. 1-2; Hebrews 8-10; 1 John 1-3.

This puts not only the gospel in perspective, but the whole Biblical narrative in perspective. And we will look at this in the coming days. I think we have enough to ponder and meditate on for now. Everything makes sense and can be put in place when we see propitiation and the gospel rightly and fully.

I hope these help us to do just that, to the glory of God.