"...the
gospel which I preach..." (Gal. 2:2).
"Now I made known unto you, brethren, the gospel
which I preached unto you..." (1 Cor. 15:1).
"For I make known to you, brethren, as touching the
gospel which was preached by me, that it is not after
man" (Galatians 1:11).
"The
gospel which I preach". "The gospel which was
preached by me".
There
are in the New Testament four main designations for the
basic matter with which it deals, the vital truth with
which it is concerned, and those four designations are
The Gospel, The Way, The Faith, and The Testimony. That
which has now come to be known as 'Christianity' was then
expressed by one or other of those designations. Of these
four, the one used more than any other is the first - The
Gospel. That title for the inclusive message of the New
Testament occurs there at least one hundred times - that
is, in the noun form, 'the Gospel'. In the corresponding
verb form it occurs many more times, but unrecognised by
us, because it is translated by several different English
words. The verb form of this very same Greek word appears
in our translation as 'to declare', 'to preach', 'to
preach the gospel'. It would sound very awkward if you
were to give a literal translation to this verb form. It
would be just this - 'to gospel', 'to gospel people', 'to
gospel the kingdom', or, to take the meaning of the word,
'to good-news', 'to good-tidings', and so on. That sounds
very awkward in English, but in Greek that is exactly
what was said. When they preached they conceived
themselves as 'good-newsing' everything and everybody. To
preach the gospel was simply to announce good tidings.
It
is impressive that this word, this title, for the
Christian faith - 'the gospel' - abounds in twenty of the
twenty-seven books of the New Testament. The exceptions
are: the Gospel by John, where you will not find it, nor
will you find it in the three letters of John. You will
not find it in Peter's second letter, nor will you find
it in James or Jude. But these writers had their own
titles for the same thing. We mentioned amongst the four,
'The Testimony': that is John's peculiar title for the
Christian faith - often, with him, 'The Testimony of
Jesus'. With James and Jude it is 'The Faith'. But you
see how preponderating is this title of 'the good
news', 'The Gospel'.
The Range of the Term
'The Gospel'
So
we have to take account quite early of a most important
fact. It is that this term, the good news, covers the
entire range of the New Testament, and embraces the whole
of what the New Testament contains. It is not just those
certain truths which relate to the beginning of the
Christian life. The gospel is not confined to the truths
or doctrines connected with conversion and, in that
limited sense, salvation - the initial matter of becoming
a Christian. The gospel goes far beyond that. I repeat,
it embraces all that the New Testament contains. It is as
much the gospel in the profound letters to the Ephesians
and the Colossians as it is in the letter to the Romans -
perhaps no less profound a document, but often regarded
as being mainly connected with the beginnings of the
Christian life.
No,
this term, the 'good tidings', covers the whole ground of
the Christian life from beginning to end. It has a vast
and many-sided content, touching every aspect and every
phase of the Christian life, of man's relationship to God
and God's relationship to man. It is all included in the
good tidings. The unsaved need good news, but the saved
equally need good news, and they constantly need good
news. Christians constantly need some good news, and the
New Testament is just full of good news for Christians.
The servants of the Lord need good news. They need it as
their message, the substance of their message. They need
it for their encouragement and support. How much the
Lord's servants need good news to encourage them in the
work, and support in all the demand and cost of their
labours! The Church needs good news for its life, for its
growth, for its strength, for its testimony. And so the
gospel comes in at every point, touches every phase.
Now
as to our present method in the pages which follow. I
would ask you to follow me carefully, and to grasp what I
am trying to say by way of the foundation of this word.
We are going to pursue what I am going to call the
'resultant' method: that is, to elicit the conclusion of
the whole matter, rather than the particular aspect of
any one portion of the New Testament.
Let
me illustrate. Take, for instance, the letter to the
Romans, which we are going to consider in a moment. We
all know that that letter is the grand treatise on
justification by faith. But justification by faith is
shown to be something infinitely greater than most of us
have yet grasped or understood, and justification by
faith has a very wide connotation and relationship. All
that is contained in this letter to the Romans resolves
itself into just one glorious issue, and that is why it
begins with the statement that what it contains is 'the
gospel'. "Paul, a servant of Jesus Christ, called to
be an apostle, separated unto the gospel of God...
concerning his Son". Now all that follows is 'the
gospel' - but what a tremendous gospel is there! And we
have somehow to sum it all up in one conclusion. We have
to ask ourselves: 'After all, what does result from our
reading and our consideration of this wonderful letter?'
You see, justification is not the beginning of things,
neither is it the end of things, justification is the
meeting point of a vast beginning and a vast end. That
is, it is the point at which all the past eternity and
all the future eternity are focused. That is what this
letter reveals.
The God of Hope
Let
us now look at it a little more closely in that
particular light. What is the issue, what is the result?
That result is gathered up into one word only. It is a
great thing when you can get hold of a big document like
this and put it into one word. What is the word? Well,
you will find it if you turn to the end of the letter. It
is significant that it comes at the point where the
Apostle is summing up. He has written his letter, and he
is now about to close. Here it is.
"Now
the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in
believing, that ye may abound in hope" (Rom. 15:13).
If
your margin is a good one, it will give you references to
other occurrences of that word in this same letter. You
will find it as early as chapter 5, verse 4; you find it
again in chapter 8, verses 24 and 25; again in chapter
12, verse 12; and then in the fifteenth chapter - first
in verse 4, and finally here in our passage, verse 13.
"The God of hope". That is the word into which
the Apostle gathers the whole of this wonderful letter.
This, then, is the gospel of the God of hope; more
literally, the 'good news', or the 'good tidings', of the
God of hope. So that what is really in view in this
letter from start to finish is hope.
A Hopeless Situation
Now,
quite obviously, hope has no meaning and makes no sense
except in the light of the contrary - except as the
contrary exists. The Divine method in this letter,
therefore, in the first instance, is to set the good
tidings over against a hopeless situation, in order to
give clear relief to this great word - this ultimate
issue, this conclusion, this result. A very, very
hopeless situation is set forth. Look at the Divine
method in this. The situation is set forth in two
connections.
(a) In the Matter of
Heredity
Firstly,
it is exposed in regard to the race - the whole matter of
heredity. If we look at chapter 5, with which we are so
familiar, we see that there the whole race is traced back
to Adam - "as through one man..." (verse 12).
The whole race of mankind is traced right back to its
origin and fountain-head in the first Adam. What is made
clear in this chapter is this. There was a disobedient
act through unbelief, resulting in the disruption of
man's relationship with God. "Through the one man's
disobedience" (verse 19), Paul puts it - not only
here, but in his letter to the Corinthians (1 Cor.
15:21,22). And hence all men issuing from that man, Adam,
became involved in that one act of disobedience and in
its consequences - mainly the disruption of the
relationship between man and God.
But
that is not all. What immediately followed, as the effect
of that act, was that man became in his nature
disobedient and unbelieving. It was not just one isolated
act which he committed, not just one thing into which he
fell for a moment. Something went out of him, and
something else entered into him, and man became by nature
a disobedient and unbelieving creature. Not only did he
act in that way, but he became that;
and from that moment the very nature of
man is unbelieving, the nature of man is disobedience. It
is in his constitution, and all men have inherited that.
This
is something that cannot be adjusted, you see. When you
have become a certain kind of being, lacking a certain
factor, you cannot adjust. You cannot adjust to what is
not there. No man can believe unless it is given him of
God to believe. Faith is 'not of ourselves, it is the
gift of God' (Eph. 2:8). No man can be obedient to God
apart from a mighty act of God in him causing him to be
of an obedient nature or disposition. You cannot adjust
to something that is not there. So the situation is
pretty hopeless, is it not? Something has gone, and
something else which is the opposite of that has come in
and taken its place. That is the condition of the race
here. What a picture of hopeless despair for the whole
race! That is our heredity. We are in the grip of that.
You
will, of course, agree that in other realms, in other
departments of life, heredity is a pretty hopeless thing.
We often use the very hopelessness of it as a line of
argument by which to excuse ourselves. We say, 'It is how
I am made: it is no use you trying to get me to do this -
I am not made that way'. You are only arguing that you
have in your constitution something that makes the
situation quite impossible. And let me take this
opportunity of emphasizing that it is quite hopeless for
us to try to find in ourselves that which God requires.
We shall wear ourselves out, and in the end come to this
very position which God has laid down, stated and
established - it is hopeless! If you are struggling to be
a different kind of person from what you are by nature,
trying to get over what you have inherited - well, you
are doomed to despair: and yet how many Christians have
never learned that fundamental lesson! For the whole
race, heredity spells hopelessness. If this needs
focusing at all, we have only to consider the conflict
and battle that there is over believing God, having faith
in God. You know that it is a deep work of the Spirit, of
God in you that brings you, either initially or
progressively, to believe. It is the
"so-easily-besetting sin" - unbelief -
followed, of course, by inability to obey. We are
crippled at birth; we are born doomed in this matter by
our heredity.
(b) In the Matter of
Religious Tradition
Then
the Lord takes this thing into another realm. I hope you
recognise the meaning of the background, the dark
background, against which this word 'hope' is placed. The
Spirit of God through the Apostle takes it into the realm
of religious tradition, as exemplified by the Jews.
Everything now for them is traced back to Abraham and to
Moses. What a lot the Apostle has to say about Abraham
and his faith - "Abraham believed" - and then
about Moses, and the Law coming in. And here is something
of tremendous significance and importance that we must
note, for here we see the particular function that was in
view in God's sovereign choice of the Jewish nation. Have
you ever thought of it like this? There are many things
that could be said about the Jewish nation, their past,
present and future, but what comes out so definitely here
is their function in the sovereignty of God. It was, and
still is, their function, so far as testimony is
concerned, that is, the witness of their history. It was
to show just one thing. You can have a grand father - I
do not mean a grandfather! - and you may have the best
religious tradition; but nothing of that is carried over
in your heredity, that is, it does not pass into your
nature.
What
a father was Abraham! What a lot is made of "Abraham
our father"! What a magnificent specimen of faith
and obedience was Abraham! They were all of the stock of
Abraham; as a nation, they derived from Abraham. And what
a system was the Jewish system of religion, so far as
standard is concerned, a moral, ethical, religious
standard. There is nothing that can improve upon it in
the religions of the world. What a magnificent system of
religious precept was the Jewish religion, which came in
through Moses! - not only the ten commandments, but all
the other teaching that made up the Law, covering every
aspect of man's life. And they were the children of that:
yet what do you find here? You do not find the faith of
Abraham in them, and you do not find the reflection of
that great system in them, in their nature. These very
people, deriving from such a one as Abraham, and being
the inheritors of all those oracles of the Mosaic system,
in their natures are devoid of everything that is
represented by Abraham and Moses. These people are still
characterized by - what? unbelief, in spite of Abraham;
disobedience, in spite of Moses! What could be more
hopeless?
Some
people have the idea that, if they have a good father and
a good mother, that puts them in a very secure position,
but human nature does not bear witness to that. There may
be advantages in having had godly forebears - some
advantages; but it is no final guarantee that you are
going to escape all the difficulties and all the
conflicts and all the sufferings of getting your own
faith. The fact is that parents can be utter for God,
they can be the most godly, the most pious, and yet their
children can be the most renegade. A strange thing, is it
not? The disposition to faith and obedience is not in the
blood. Religious tradition of the best kind does not
change our nature. It may go back for generations - it
does not change our nature. We are still unbelieving and
disobedient in nature, however good our parents were. You
may have prayed from the beginning for a loved child,
from the time that it was the smallest babe; you may have
sought to live before it for God: and yet here is that
child self-willed, disobedient - everything else.
Hope in a Desperate
Situation
How
desperately hopeless this situation is! But that is the
way in which the Lord establishes a setting for this
tremendous thing that is called hope. And so we come to
the transcendent solution, and I use that word carefully
at this point, for here is something very great. This is
an immense mountain, this mountain of heredity: but there
is something that transcends the whole, gets above it
all; a solution which rises above the whole hopelessness
and despair of the natural situation; and that is what is
called 'the gospel'. Oh, that must be good news! Indeed
that is why it is called 'good news'! Good
news! What is it? There is hope in this
most desperate situation.
The Gospel in Eternity
Past
Now,
if we look at this letter again as a whole, we shall find
that the good news, or the good tidings, of the gospel is
not only in the Cross of the Lord Jesus - though that is
the focal point of it, as we shall see in a moment. The
good news, or the gospel, is found to be something very,
very much bigger even than the Cross of the Lord Jesus!
What is that? It is "the good tidings of God...
concerning his Son... Jesus Christ our Lord". The
Cross is only one fragment of the significance of Jesus
Christ Himself.
So
this letter, what does it do? It takes us right into the
eternity of the Son of God. This is wonderful, if you
grasp it. If this gospel does not save you, I do not know
what will. Here we are taken right back into the past
eternity of the Son. "Whom he foreknew, he also
foreordained to be conformed to the image of his
Son" (Rom. 8:29). He must have had His Son, the
Master-Pattern, there in view before ever man was
created, the eternal, the timeless, Pattern that the Son
was: before there was any need of redemption, atonement,
the Cross, the Son was the eternal Pattern of God for
man. And, mark you, it is so positive, so definite. It is
in that tense which means a definite, once-for-all act.
"Whom he foreknew, he also foreordained". It is
something which was done before time was. That is where
the gospel begins.
Yes,
we see the Son in His eternity as God's timeless Pattern;
and then we have the eternity or timelessness of the
redeeming sovereignty. The redeeming sovereignty is
included in that. 'He foreordained, He called, He
justified, He glorified'. Now these three remaining
things are not subsequent. They all belong to the same
time - which is not time at all; it is eternity. It does
not say that He foreknew and foreordained, and then in
course of time He called and He justified and He
glorified. You see what you are committed to if you take
that view. Most of us have been called and justified, but
we are not glorified yet. But it says 'He glorified', in
the 'once-for-all' (aorist) tense.
This
must mean, then, that when He took this matter in hand in
relation to His timeless Pattern, the Lord Jesus, He
finished it all in sovereign purpose and intention. It
was all rounded off then, so that the marred vessel is an
incident in time; a terrible incident, a terrible
tragedy, that the vessel was marred in the hand of the
Potter; but, for all that, an incident in time. God's
counsels transcend all that has come in in time. Dear
friend, when the Lord projected the whole plan of
redemption, it was not because something had happened
calling for an emergency movement to try to save the
situation on the spot. He had already anticipated the
whole thing, and had got everything in hand to meet the
contingency. The Lamb was "slain from the foundation
of the world" (Rev. 13:8). The Cross reaches back
over all time, right back over all sin, over the fall,
over the first Adam - right back to the eternal Son,
before times eternal. The Cross goes back there - to
"the Lamb slain from the foundation of the
world".
What
great hope is here! If that is true, if we can grasp
that, that is good news, is it not? We
make everything of the situation in ourselves which is so
hopeless; God makes everything
of His Son to meet our hopelessness. And God is not
experimenting because something has gone wrong - 'We must
find some kind of remedy for this, we must find something
with which we can experiment to see if we can meet this
emergency; man has gone sick, and we must look round for
a remedy.' No; God has already covered it from eternity,
met it from eternity, in His Son. It
is the gospel, the good news, of God "concerning
his Son". This may
raise a number of mental problems, but here is the
statement of this book. Hope, you see, is not destroyed
because Adam falls: hope reaches back beyond man's sin.
You
say, 'Then what about the Cross?' Well, the Incarnation
and the Cross are only effecting what was settled in
eternity - bringing out of eternity into time in a
practical way, making effectual for man in his
desperately needy condition, that great purpose,
intention, design of God concerning His Son. The Cross is
the means which lifts right up out of the trough, the
valley, of human sin and failure, on to the level of the
eternal counsels of God, and restores the even course of
that which ultimately is eternally unaffected by what has
happened in time. Tremendous good news, that, is it not?
The Cross becomes the occasion of faith by which all this
is transcended - of course it provides the ground for our
faith - and when faith acts in relation to the Cross,
what happens? We are brought into Christ: not brought
into the Jesus of three and a half years, or even of
thirty years, but brought into Christ as representing
God's timeless thought for man. Faith brings us into
that. That is the good news, "the good news
concerning his Son"; the gospel, the good news of
"the God of hope".
You
see, hope is founded upon God's eternal provision outside
of time: and that is a very safe rock upon which to
stand! Yes, founded upon the eternal rock of Christ's
Sonship, not upon an after-thought and an after-measure
to meet something that has happened unexpectedly. Hope is
grounded and anchored outside of time. The Apostle,
writing to the Hebrews, uses a picture, a metaphor.
"The hope... which we have as an anchor of the soul,
a hope both sure and stedfast and entering into that
which is within the veil" (Heb. 6:18,19); taking you
outside of time, outside of this life, anchoring you
there in eternity. How great is the Cross! How great is
the message of Romans 6! It takes us right back beyond
Moses, Abraham and Adam. It takes us right back past
Adam's sin and failure, and the whole race's hopeless
condition. The Cross takes us back before it all, and
there in the past eternity links us up with what God
intended. The Cross secures that. And with the other hand
the Cross reaches right on into eternity to come, and
says, "Whom he foreknew... them he also
glorified" (Rom. 8:29,30). The Cross secures the
coming eternal glory. How great is the Cross!
Hope,
then, is resting upon the immensity of the Cross. Hope
rests upon the fact that Christ, who passed this way,
becoming the last Adam, being made sin for us, bearing it
all, now raised by God, is seated at God's right hand,
and therefore that we, as "in Christ" have been
placed beyond any risk of another fall. I always think
that this is one of the most blessed factors in the
gospel - that Jesus in Heaven now, having been this way
and the way of His Cross, says that this Adam will never
fail. There will never be another fall. This heredity is
secure, is safe, because linked with Him. There is no
fear of our being involved in any more falls of that
kind, no fear at all. It is indeed a wonderful hope, this
gospel of the God of hope!
Do
you see how very vividly the dark picture of hopelessness
is drawn? I have only given you the outline, but you look
at the details - the terrible picture of the Gentiles and
the Jews drawn in the first chapters of this letter, and
the hopelessness of the situation for both. Yes, despair
indeed - and then over it all written, Hope! The good
news of hope stands over it all, in spite of it all,
because hope rests upon God having before all things
determined upon something which He will carry out, and
which He has demonstrated by the Cross of His Son, Jesus
Christ. You and I know, do we not, that when faith has
acted in relation to the Cross of the Lord Jesus,
something begins in us which reverses altogether the
natural course of things. Now faith is growing, faith is
developing; we are learning the way of faith, we are
being enabled to trust God more and more. Everything has
changed: obedience is now possible.
And
there is another life, another nature, another power, in
us, which has made for hope. A contradiction of the
Christian faith is a despairing Christian, a hopeless
Christian; one who is not marked by this great thing
which is pre-eminently characteristic of God - hope. He
is "the God of hope". The Lord make this true,
that we are filled with hope, "rejoicing in
hope". "Patient in tribulation" but
"rejoicing in hope" (Rom. 12:12).