What Is the Gospel?

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0:00:00 – (Matt Smethurst): If you’re ready to go deeper in theology, Southern Seminary’s PhD programs were built for you. With flexible formats from fully online to modular to in person. Southern makes serious doctoral level theological training accessible to the pastor called to bring the depth of God’s word to God’s people. Study with faculty committed to strengthening the church and bring that depth back to the people you, you lead.

0:00:26 – (Matt Smethurst): Visit sbts.edu PhD to learn more. We’re not merely offering good advice, we’re announcing good news. This breaking headline from heaven’s press room of what God has accomplished in Jesus Christ to reconcile rebels to himself. Welcome back, friends, to the Everyday Pastor, a podcast from the Gospel Coalition on the nuts and bolts of ministry. I’m Matt Smethurst.

0:01:01 – (Ligon Duncan): And I’m Lig Duncan.

0:01:02 – (Matt Smethurst): And we’re going to be thinking about the most important thing we could think about, and that is the gospel. We as a church here in Richmond have a list of 10 priorities as a church that, you know, just think vision, values. We’ve listed them on our website and the very first one is clear gospel. And, and we say that if this isn’t the most important thing about our church, then we’re wasting our time.

0:01:28 – (Matt Smethurst): Religion makes a really lame hobby. We want to not just understand the gospel, but to treasure it, to champion it, to celebrate it week in and week out. Now, the gospel has become a bit of a buzzword over the past 20 years. And before we lament that, let’s just celebrate it. In a sense, that gospel centrality became a thing and I think has done all kinds of good in churches to point where the gospel perhaps now sometimes is in danger of being assumed. You know, it’s been said that what is believed by one generation is assumed by the next generation, is denied by the third or lost by the third. And all the problems begin when you assume the most important thing.

0:02:17 – (Ligon Duncan): Right?

0:02:18 – (Matt Smethurst): So let’s think about what the gospel is and talk about it in a way that we would commend pastors to talk about it among their people. And then we’ll talk about what it means to truly be gospel driven.

0:02:29 – (Ligon Duncan): Yeah, we were talking even before we started this conversation about a friend who had said, I really think we need help in defining exactly what we mean by the gospel and then thinking about what it means to proclaim the gospel, not just to use the word gospel. And so I’m thinking of this conversation in both those categories. And I think one reason why you can find some confusion in evangelicalism on what the gospel is is because there’ve been A lot of people trying to correct what they see as an overly soteriological gospel in different directions.

0:03:09 – (Ligon Duncan): So our mutual friend Greg Gilbert wrote a little book called what Is the Gospel? And in the beginning of the book, he sort of lists a series of statements that he has heard made that purport to define what the gospel is. And I’m not gonna go through all of them, but I’d like to do three of them. Just to give you an idea, all people will posture this. Here’s one. The good news is God wants to show you his incredible favor.

0:03:39 – (Ligon Duncan): He wants to fill your life with new wine. But are you willing to get rid of your old wineskins? Will you start thinking bigger? Will you enlarge your vision and get rid of those old negative mindsets that hold you back? And the psychological kind of language there, the subjective and emotional. You can almost feel the sort of. That’s a little. It’s sort of health and wealth gospel light in the very formulation of that. And you can hear that in a lot of churches that think of themselves as self consciously evangelical.

0:04:20 – (Ligon Duncan): They’re therapeutic maybe in the way that they present the gospel. So there’s one example that he gives and then he gives this example. Here’s the gospel in a phrase. Because Christ died for us, those who trust in him may know that their guilt has been pardoned once and for all. What will we have to say before the bar of God’s judgment? Only one thing. Christ died in my place. That’s the gospel. And when I hear that definition, I think of Alistair Begg’s sermon, the man on the Middle Cross.

0:05:01 – (Ligon Duncan): Just a tremendous exposition of what has

0:05:05 – (Matt Smethurst): been made into an evangelistic booklet our

0:05:07 – (Ligon Duncan): congregation gave out at the Christmas services this year. Yeah, we gave it every visitor. We said, please take away a copy of the man on the Middle Cross

0:05:16 – (Matt Smethurst): that’s published by 10 of those. And I wasn’t planning to say this. They’re not asking me to say it. But if you’re not familiar with 10 of those, look up at their website. They’re a wonderful Christian publisher. You can get lots of great Christian books for great prices at 10of those.com.

0:05:35 – (Ligon Duncan): so if you’re a church, my church, churches in sort of the orbit of the Gospel Coalition, you’re more likely to hear a summarization like that. Now here’s a third one. And again, I’m not giving all of the ones that Greg offers, but I think it’s interesting he says this. Here’s another way I’ve heard it formulated the gospel itself refers to the proclamation that Jesus, the crucified and risen Messiah, is the one true and only Lord of the world.

0:06:10 – (Ligon Duncan): Now, there are a lot of true things in that, but you can hear some people sort of saying the gospel is about Jesus, kingship, or lordship. It’s not about soteriology. I think that that’s a false juxtaposition and it ends up being very, very unhelpful. But you do get this sort of the gospel is about kingship or it’s about lordship. It’s not about salvation from sin. And I think that’s confused a lot of folks in the evangelical world. You have people talk about a Soterian gospel and you hear boo when they say that, and then a King Jesus gospel, and that’s yay.

0:06:49 – (Ligon Duncan): That’s a good president. And so that’s confused, I think, a lot of people. What do we mean about the proclamation of the gospel? So, Matt, when you’re trying to help people think clearly and biblically and succinctly about the formulation of what the Bible calls the gospel, where are some of the places that you go? I’ve got a place that I’m wanting to think, but I want to know where are some of the places you go to help people think clearly and biblically about this?

0:07:17 – (Matt Smethurst): Well, first I’m going to read 1 Corinthians 15 in just a moment. But. But what strikes me about that first definition you read is I thought there’s some good advice there, but I didn’t hear any good news. And that’s the fundamental distinction between Christianity and every other philosophy, religion, and worldview on the market is we’re not merely offering good advice, we’re announcing good news. This breaking headline from heaven’s press room of what God has accomplished in Jesus Christ to reconcile rebels to himself.

0:07:56 – (Ligon Duncan): Amen.

0:07:57 – (Matt Smethurst): And in 1 Corinthians. Go ahead.

0:07:59 – (Ligon Duncan): No, yeah, I want you to go ahead.

0:08:00 – (Matt Smethurst): In 1 Corinthians 15, Paul writes verse 3, For I passed on to you as most important, what I also received. Now, this means that he’s drawing from earlier teaching that was circulating around. Some think it was an early creed or hymn. And here’s what it is. That Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures. And then the appearances. So just as the burial verified that he really died, so the appearances verified that he really rose.

0:08:38 – (Matt Smethurst): But notice it’s he died not just the historical fact, but also the significance. Paul says he died for our sins, and that’s the problem with the third gospel definition you gave, My response to that would be, amen. That’s news, but it’s not necessarily good news.

0:08:59 – (Ligon Duncan): It could be bad news. Yeah.

0:09:01 – (Matt Smethurst): The fact that the Lord Jesus Christ has been enthroned as king, overall, if

0:09:07 – (Ligon Duncan): I am a rebel against him, that is really bad news for me.

0:09:10 – (Matt Smethurst): For enemies of his kingdom. Yeah. So the gospel is the good news of how you can be made right with that God, how you can be adopted into his family, forgiven of your sins, given the hope of everlasting life.

0:09:23 – (Ligon Duncan): Amen. I’m glad I was open to 1 Corinthians 15 as well. Let me Amen. Charlie, you and point out two other things. When Paul says, for I received, he’s letting you know I didn’t make this up. I’m not the author of the gospel. The gospel was something that was given to me. I’m not.

0:09:39 – (Matt Smethurst): He says the same thing in Galatians

0:09:41 – (Ligon Duncan): 1, and he does the same thing in Romans 4 when he’s talking about justification. He just says, hey, by the way, I didn’t come up with justification by faith. Moses did. And he does it in the story of Abraham in Genesis 15. So Paul is always letting you know, contrary to our liberal friends from the 19th century in Germany, Paul did not invent Christianity. He received a message that came directly from Christ.

0:10:05 – (Ligon Duncan): He’s passing on what he’s heard. So he does this with justification. He does this in Galatians, he does this with the Gospel. So amen to what you say there. And then notice that he specifically puts it in a soteriological context. And you’ve already mentioned this, that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, and he was buried and he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures. So there he does something that Jesus does in Luke 24, which is, you can understand me unless you understand that I am the fulfillment of what the Old Testament teaches about the Messiah, that is that the Messiah has to be humiliated because of the sins of his people, and he has to be exalted in the resurrection for victory over sin and death and hell on their behalf. And there’s Paul just laying it out. So it’s something that’s objective. We haven’t contributed anything to it.

0:11:05 – (Ligon Duncan): We’re the beneficiaries of it. And that’s why it’s good news. And I know you know Tim Keller’s wonderful story that he tells about this when he tells the difference between good news and good advice. He says, it’s like a city is being attacked. And the king marches out of the city to defend the city. Now if he loses the battle, he might send a messenger back to the city with some good advice. And the good advice is head for the hills. The king has lost the battle, the enemies are coming.

0:11:39 – (Ligon Duncan): Run for your lives. That’s good advice. But he says the good news is when the king wins the battle, he sends a herald back to the city, not to tell them what to do, but that the battle has been won by the king. Good news. It’s an announcement, not of something that they’ve done or something that they should do, but it’s something that the king has done. And so that objective work of Christ that we say, yes, he is the king, but he is the king first of all, in fulfillment of the promises of God to, to David. So anybody that talks about a gospel of Jesus, kingship or lordship apart from the Davidic prophecies of the Old Testament, is just wresting that idea out of its biblical theological framework.

0:12:24 – (Ligon Duncan): And why do we need a king who is the son of David, who’s going to build the temple? Because over and over in the history, the kings failed. They failed, they failed. They failed. They failed. We finally need a king that does not fail, who perfectly represents what God intends for the rule over his people, obeys the law perfectly. And that’s what we have in the Savior, who dies in our place, even though he’s obeyed the law. So I know that you’ve sort of roughed out a four point outline that you often use in sharing the gospel.

0:13:03 – (Ligon Duncan): Give me a statement. If Craig were listing your statement in his list of things that he’s heard, given his definitions of the Gospel, how would you do it, Matt? And then sort of work it out in that four point outline?

0:13:18 – (Matt Smethurst): Yeah, it’d be along the lines of what I said earlier. The Gospel is the breaking news headline. The good news of what God has achieved in the person of Jesus Christ through his life, death, resurrection, in order to reconcile rebels like us to Himself.

0:13:35 – (Ligon Duncan): That’s good.

0:13:36 – (Matt Smethurst): And the way that I try to help my people think about that is in kind of four chapters. And I’ve written this out in chapter one of my book, before youe Share youe Faith. Because before we can talk about evangelism, we have to make sure we’re clear on the evangel, the good news. So chapter one is just simply titled Grasp the Gospel. And I talk about about it in terms of the ruler, the revolt, the rescue.

0:14:05 – (Matt Smethurst): Your response, and I love to not just monologue here, I’D love to kind of hear you think with me about each of these things. So, first of all, the ruler. This is obviously referring to God. And I think as pastors, we have to be aware of the fact that increasingly in a biblically illiterate, post Christian age, people have all kinds of misconceptions about who God is. Some might think of God as kind of just a Santa in the sky.

0:14:33 – (Matt Smethurst): Some might, because of painful life circumstances, think of him as a bit of an absentee father, kind of a deadbeat dad. Others might think of God as just kind of a drill sergeant. But what the Bible presents is that God is actually a community of persons, the Trinity, who have always existed in living, loving relationships forever. And it’s out of the overflow of their joy that they created the world. Not because there was something lacking within God, but because there was such a fountain of love that he wanted to overflow for our good. So I think we start there.

0:15:14 – (Matt Smethurst): I want to admit that some critiques of the so called, as you said, Soterian gospel, something I think they’re right about is we can sometimes speak as if the Bible starts in Genesis 3. We can start with sin, right when. No, actually the Bible starts with a good and holy God and human beings in a perfect relationship with him in Genesis 1 and 2. So that’s establishing who God is. What else would you add in terms terms of helping people understand who God is?

0:15:46 – (Ligon Duncan): I like that. I like that. And I tried to develop a teaching outline that would have a little mnemonic to it to help people remember some of these factors when they’re talking with folks about the Gospel. And the way I started with God our Maker, to try and include the things that you just emphasized, because God created a world that was intended for his glory, a theater for his glory, our enjoyment of him and Satan’s assault upon our first parents was designed to thwart that defeat, that, disrupt that.

0:16:23 – (Ligon Duncan): And what you see from the beginning in Genesis 3 is God saying, I’m not going to be defeated. My purposes are not going to be thwarted, and I’m going to engage in the redemptive work that is necessary to bring about the enjoyment of the peoples of the world in the glory and goodness of God. And so I do think it’s good to start with the creation and to understand, as you said, that the creation itself is an overflow of God’s goodness. God didn’t have to create.

0:16:53 – (Ligon Duncan): I think that’s one of the things, by the way, where a Christian doctrine of God is superior to A Muslim doctrine of God. Because a Muslim doctrine of God can’t explain the relationship between God and the creation, the Christian doctrine of God can. Because of the Trinity. God doesn’t need the creation in order to express his character, because he already lives in an eternal fellowship in which that character is expressed.

0:17:20 – (Matt Smethurst): Well, exactly. So if you’re talking to an unbeliever, a Muslim friend, or someone else, you can just say, don’t you want love to be at the heart of all things, the heart of reality? Don’t you realize that that’s only possible with a God who is Trinity? Because if God has not been in a set of living, loving relationships for all of eternity, that means that love is not intrinsic to who he is. He only started loving after he created the first person to love.

0:17:53 – (Matt Smethurst): So according to the Muslim worldview, power may be at the heart of all things, but not love. Right.

0:18:01 – (Ligon Duncan): So I do think that’s the right place to start. And it frames the discussion. And so, so I would start with God, our Maker. And then what I do in my outline is move to sin, our failure. And so that sin disrupted our fellowship with God. That sin was an act of rebellion against Him, a rejection of His Lordship, an expression of pride, of idolatry, of a lack of faith in Him, a breaking of his law. There are lots of ways that you can describe what that sin was towards Him. So we recognize this is not a petty little thing. People. Oh, Eve took a piece of fruit. Why is God so petty to be upset about a piece of fruit? Well, it’s about the rejection of the One who made you and gave you everything you are.

0:18:58 – (Ligon Duncan): The Old Testament says it’s a spiritual version of adultery. Here’s your husband. And that language is used for God and his people in Exodus 19, and it’s hinted at in Genesis 2. And you’ve not acknowledged that your husband has given you everything that you have. You’ve gone off with someone else who said, don’t trust your husband. Don’t listen to your husband. So it’s an act. The Old Testament will play it out as spiritual adultery.

0:19:31 – (Ligon Duncan): And so it’s a big deal. And to help people understand that that’s where we are. We’re all in that kind of. Paul will use really strong language. We’re dead in trespasses and sins. So the language that he’ll use of where we are is not of us doing, oh, we’ve broken some tiny little law that we failed to check Mark over there. And this petty God is mad at, no, no, this is Cosmic rebellion against a good and loving God who gave us everything that we have.

0:20:03 – (Ligon Duncan): And we’ve chosen to rebel against him and not to acknowledge him and to run off with someone. So I want to make that move from God our maker to sin our failure, because frankly, and I think this is something that Tim Keller was good at. He recognized that moderns can very easily scoff at the idea of sin, and he wanted to work hard to make them feel the reality of sin. And so he would talk about idolatry and disordered loves to just get at them and recognize you can’t get away from this by scoffing at some sort of what you think is a petty view.

0:20:46 – (Matt Smethurst): The pastor who goes deeper in theology doesn’t just become a better thinker, he becomes a better Shepherd. Southern Seminary’s PhD programs are forming pastor theologians, men who have wrestled seriously with the great tradition of Christian thought and who bring that depth back to the people they love and lead. What you gain in your study, your congregation receives in. Southern Seminary’s faculty are here to support you in your work to strengthen the church.

0:21:15 – (Matt Smethurst): Southern’s PhD program is built to fit alongside your ministry, offering flexible formats from fully online to modular to in person, so you can pursue the kind of rigorous theological training that will change how you pastor without stepping away from your church. If you’re ready to go deeper, Southern Seminary’s PhD program is where that begins. Visit sbts.edu PhD to learn more. Well, actually, in 1990, he preached a sermon called the Faces of Sin that has just been turned into a book, a posthumous book called what Is Wrong with the World?

0:21:56 – (Matt Smethurst): And it is tremendous in the way that it talks about sin as predator, sin as deception, sin as self righteousness, sin as leaven, using all kinds of biblical metaphors to get at what sin actually is and not what we are inclined to think it might be in a world that tends to sanitize that reality, not to mention our darkened hearts and consciences that want to suppress the truth of God in unrighteousness. But I love how you said ligament, you went from God our maker, to sin our failure.

0:22:32 – (Matt Smethurst): And you explained sin our failure in relation to the generosity of God. And this is where Sinclair Ferguson is so good in the whole Christ. The emphasis of Genesis 1 and 2, yes, is on God is creator, yes, is on God is holy. But it’s also God is generous, unbelievably generous, every tree in the garden. And yet, of course, Satan zooms in on that one and says, did God really say, you may not eat from

0:23:03 – (Ligon Duncan): Any tree in the garden.

0:23:05 – (Matt Smethurst): He’s getting Eve to question the generosity of God.

0:23:09 – (Ligon Duncan): That’s exactly.

0:23:09 – (Matt Smethurst): Isn’t he stingy? Isn’t he withholding something from you? Sinclair calls that the Edenic poison that courses through every sin. And so, yeah, fundamentally in Romans one talks about sin is failing to give thanks. Sin is a failure of ingratitude to the boundless generosity of our triune God. And then I also liked how you talked about sin as cosmic rebellion, cosmic treason. It’s not just a heavenly parking ticket.

0:23:40 – (Matt Smethurst): Sin is a heart level betrayal against the Lord of love. Like you said, we’ve cheated on our maker and we’ve built our life on lesser things. We’ve looked into the face of ultimate beauty and yawned. And part of. I think preaching is helping our people see and feel the horror of sin in a way they haven’t before with the Spirit’s help. But yeah, you talk about sin or failure. I kind of talk about it as the revolt, the next.

0:24:15 – (Ligon Duncan): So your first one is the ruler. Ruler, then revolt.

0:24:18 – (Matt Smethurst): Yeah, essentially the ruler. That’s just a summary of Genesis 1 and 2. The revolt is launched, the insurrection against heaven is launched in Genesis 3. And then that leads to the long, tragic saga that we see play out through, particularly the nation of Israel in the Old Testament. And I think that it’s important as we preach the Bible to help people realize that, yeah, it’s not just Genesis 3 and Romans 3, but there is a long story that is important to situate into which we must situate our gospel presentation in order for, you know, if you were to get a text message on the fourth of July saying, hey, I’ll meet you for fireworks at noon, you would assume it was a typo.

0:25:07 – (Matt Smethurst): We don’t go look for fireworks at noon because you can’t see them. You need the midnight, you need the dark backdrop in order for the glory of the fireworks to shine. And so we need to understand the gravity and the seriousness of sin in order to marvel at the fireworks of his grace. And Adam in the garden is functioning as a royal son of a priest king. And as it were, he drops and shatters the crown that God has put on him through his rebellion.

0:25:43 – (Matt Smethurst): And then in, in Israel, we see God, in a sense, crown the nation and he refers to Israel as his son. And yet Israel drops that mantle, drops that crown, and it shatters on the ground. And then in the individual kings of Israel, we see that crown literally placed on their head and they drop the crown. And then when the Lord Jesus comes, the one that The Father splits the skies and says, this at last is my Son, whom I love. With Him I am well pleased. And then he goes immediately into the wilderness, the very place for 40 days where Israel had failed for 40 years. And he succeeds where they failed.

0:26:26 – (Matt Smethurst): He takes that broken mantle, that royal crown, and he never drops it. And so where Adam failed, where Israel failed, where the kings failed, where you and I have failed, Jesus Christ came to succeed. Which leads essentially to chapter three. So what do you call that third chapter?

0:26:46 – (Ligon Duncan): I do. God our maker, Sin, our failure, Christ our Savior. So I want to focus on God has to do the thing we can’t do, what has to be done to fix what we’ve caused. We’re the problem, so we’re not the solution. So the solution has to be provided in someone else. And that’s the provision.

0:27:09 – (Matt Smethurst): And before you talk about the solution, the provision, let’s just underscore the penalty of sin. So we’ve established what sin is. Why is that such bad news?

0:27:20 – (Ligon Duncan): Well, sin is such bad news because, first of all, from our standpoint, sin is inextricably connected with misery on our side. And on God’s side, sin is inextricably connected to a denial of his glory. So it’s a denial of what we were created for. I think sometimes people will say Paul’s use of the Greek word hamartia mean missing the mark. We think sort of like there was an old show called Get Smart, and it was a spoof secret agent, and he was really bad, and he would shoot the gun and miss, and he’d say, missed it by that much. And so I think. I think we think of, oh, that’s sin. We’re just barely missing it. No, the language is, you missed the reason for which you were created.

0:28:21 – (Ligon Duncan): You missed the whole purpose of life, which was to glorify and enjoy him. And so sin isn’t just barely missing it, it’s missing your purpose in life, the whole reason for which you are created. And so that that robs God of glory that he ought to be given, and it condemns you to misery because there’s no way to pursue sin and actually get joy and love and peace and hope. It always comes with misery.

0:28:56 – (Ligon Duncan): And so that’s the predicament we find ourselves in, missing our whole purpose in this world and condemning ourselves to a life of unremitting misery. And it’s so interesting. We hate the misery, but we don’t hate the sin. And so what often God does is he helps us hate the misery, and then Start drawing the line back to the sin so that we can begin to hate the sin like we hate the misery. And that’s usually where it is. We’re usually not thinking of his glory first, we’re thinking of our misery first. But in his kindness, he’ll use our misery.

0:29:39 – (Matt Smethurst): That is so. I’ve never thought about it like that. It reminds me, though. I’m sorry, I’m jumping.

0:29:45 – (Ligon Duncan): No, no, that’s good.

0:29:46 – (Matt Smethurst): How the Puritans talked about sanctification, they would often say that it’s the mark of a mature Christian to be able to say it is better to suffer than to sin.

0:29:56 – (Ligon Duncan): Right.

0:29:57 – (Matt Smethurst): It is better to experience misery than to sin, which only someone whose heart has been made new by the Holy Spirit.

0:30:05 – (Ligon Duncan): Yeah, you don’t do that unless the Spirit has changed you. Yeah. Now, so how do you address that? So you move from the ruler to the revolt. How do you address the material of God’s rescue?

0:30:18 – (Matt Smethurst): Yeah, well, the only other thing I’ll say about the revolt, it’s also, I think, helpful to teach our people that sin is more relational than behavioral. We’ve already touched on that. That it’s fundamentally not what we do. It’s fundamentally who in Adam we are. As it’s been said, we aren’t sinners because we sin, we sin because we’re sinners. And it’s not just more relational than behavioral, it’s also more vertical than horizontal.

0:30:49 – (Matt Smethurst): So Psalm 51, David has violated Bathsheba. He’s had Uriah murdered.

0:30:56 – (Ligon Duncan): He’s.

0:30:57 – (Matt Smethurst): He’s let down the entire nation, and yet he has the audacity to come before the living God and say, against you, you only have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight. He’s not denying those other evils that he had committed, but he’s recognizing a fundamental fact that actually what the prodigal Son says in Luke 15, I have sinned against heaven and against you, but I’ve sinned against heaven first and foremost.

0:31:25 – (Matt Smethurst): And so I think we have to help our people understand that, yes, sin is an assault against the Lord of love, the result of which is eternal condemnation, death, hell. And God could have left us there and been infinitely good and been worshiped age upon age by billions of angels who would have continued crying, holy, holy, holy. But the most incredible news is what we see in Ephesians 2. But God, where there should have been a period, there was a conflict.

0:32:03 – (Matt Smethurst): But God. And so I talk about the ruler, the revolt, and then the rescue. We couldn’t make our way to God. So he comes down to us, he launches a rescue mission to seek and to save that which was lost. And he does it by living the life again that Adam had failed to live, that Israel had failed to live, and that you and I have failed to live by living a perfect life, the life we should have lived, dying the death we should have died on the cross, bearing and exhausting the justice of God in our place for our sin.

0:32:39 – (Matt Smethurst): And then counting to three. Three days later God the Father raises Christ from the dead, proving that all those audacious claims that he had made about Himself, that no right minded, good moral teacher would have ever said if that’s all he was. It’s like the Father on a scroll has all of those claims of Christ. And at the bottom on day three signs his name to the bottom Jesus cries, it is finished. And three days later the Father says, it is indeed.

0:33:09 – (Matt Smethurst): And His Son walks out of the tomb. How do you talk about that kind of third chapter of the Gospel, which is really the good news?

0:33:16 – (Ligon Duncan): Yes. Well, let me go back and just say some scripture passages that come to mind about what you’ve been talking about. One, of course, is John 3:16, which emphasizes the Father. We often think of John 3:16 as about the love of Christ. But listen to it. For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son. So this is the Father’s initiative in sending the Son to die and be buried and to tell to live, to die, to be buried and to be raised again so that we could have everlasting life. Or language like Romans 8:32, he who spared not his own Son, but delivered him up for us all. How shall he not with him freely give us all things?

0:34:01 – (Matt Smethurst): God did not send Christ in order to love us. He sent Christ in order to save us. Because he already loved us.

0:34:08 – (Ligon Duncan): Because he loved us absolutely. And the language of Paul in Romans, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for the ungodly. And so I think it’s good for us to have a little catena of passages handy to go to because Paul and other Gospel writers will give us little short snippets that we can use to illustrate this. Now, why is the movement of the Resurrection so important?

0:34:44 – (Matt Smethurst): Because sometimes in our Gospel presentations we can leave Jesus hanging on the cross.

0:34:49 – (Ligon Duncan): And I can remember a friend of mine with long experience of preaching in the black church saying that I was preaching a sermon one time, get him down from that cross. And somebody from the congregation shouted out, get him down from that cross. And because the resurrection is so important to our proclamation. It’s the victory, right? It’s not just the demonstration of the victory. It is the victory it was demanded by justice that he be raised again from the dead. You know, my resurrection is a pure act of mercy and of grace. I do not deserve any of it.

0:35:30 – (Ligon Duncan): When I’m raised from the dead on the last day, I will not have done anything to deserve it. His resurrection is the demand of justice. He’s the only person in the world who did not deserve to die. And he died in perfection. And justice demands his resurrection, and it is the victory. And because we are in him, if we are going to be raised, we are going to be raised in Him. And so. So all the things leading up to it are for naught without that resurrection.

0:36:09 – (Matt Smethurst): I love how you just said, in Him. In Him. So just to underscore this, the logic only makes sense if you understand the doctrine of union with Christ. So Romans 4, 25, he was delivered up for our sins and raised for our justification. And if you think about that, you may think, wait, why couldn’t Paul just say, he was delivered over for our sins and for our justification? What does the resurrection have to do with our justification?

0:36:37 – (Matt Smethurst): Well, it’s the fact that when Jesus was raised from the dead, that was his justification, that was his vindication. And through union with the justified one, the ultimate justified one, we are counted justified. And so that’s why sometimes when I talk about he lived the life we should have lived, died the death we should have died and rose again so that anyone who trusts in him can have the confidence that one day they’ll rise right along with him with a resurrected body fit for a resurrected earth.

0:37:12 – (Ligon Duncan): Amen. Yeah, so that’s got to be a part. You started out with that quotation where Paul says, says, this is the Gospel which I preach to you, that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures, that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures. And that’s following the pattern of Luke 24, where Jesus says to the two disciples on the road to Emmaus, let me show you from the Old Testament, let me show me from your Bibles, that the Messiah had to be humiliated and had to be exhausted. He had to suffer and he had to be raised again.

0:37:50 – (Ligon Duncan): And he does the same thing later that day, end of Luke 24, with these disciples in the upper room. And Peter then repeats that in his preaching in Acts 2. And Paul’s repeating it right there in 1 Corinthians 15. So that’s got to be a part of our proclamation. Without the death of Christ on the cross, there’s no hope for us. Without his burial, there’s no hope for us. But without the resurrection, there is no justification for us.

0:38:20 – (Ligon Duncan): And Chuck Hill, who taught at RTS Orlando for many years, amazing New Testament and early Christian scholar, early on, during the New Perspective controversy, just made this very simple lexical observation. He said, having read thousands of texts from pre 200 years before Christ and 200 years after Christ, and looking at how the language of the dikaio words is used, it seems to me that for a Jewish person that when you mentioned the word justification, the immediate thing that they would go to in their minds is how would a man stand before God in the final judgment?

0:39:06 – (Ligon Duncan): Would he be declared guilty or not guilty? Would he be declared righteous or not righteous? He was raised for our justification so that we can know how we will stand before God on the last day in him. And so that is at the heart of the good news.

0:39:25 – (Matt Smethurst): Yeah. And I think there can be an allergy today to what can feel like a mere transactional gospel. And I understand that we don’t want to present the gospel in a formulaic way. It is the gospel story. It is this sweeping, glorious narrative from Genesis to Revelation. And yet the question of the Philippian jailer. I mean, Martin Luther did not make up the question, what must I do to be saved? That is the fundamental predicament facing every human being, and that was understood in the pages of the New Testament.

0:40:01 – (Matt Smethurst): And though the gospel, in a sense, is more than justification and more than just, you know, there’s all kinds of beautiful dimensions to it, it’s not less than answering the question, what must I do to be saved? To be reconciled to God?

0:40:15 – (Ligon Duncan): And you see that question repeatedly on the lips of both pious Jews and Gentiles in the New Testament. So the rich young ruler is asking almost exactly the same question that the Philippian jailer is asking. And so pay attention to the questions that they’re asking. And so I think you’re exactly right about that. And by the way, we’re not denying the crucial reality that God is saving us into a family, into a body. He’s making us a temple.

0:40:51 – (Ligon Duncan): We are the body of Christ. We’re not saved to go off and be lone ranger somewhere. We’re saved into a family. The church in no way want to downplay the social dimension of what God is doing in creating this new body, this new family, this new society. But what Christ is doing must be done for us, if we are going to be in that family.

0:41:24 – (Matt Smethurst): Yeah. I would say as modern Westerners, we do have to be careful that we’re not bringing an individualistic lens to the Scriptures. Having said that, it’s not necessarily individualism to ask the question, what must an individual do to be saved? Before we move on to how one responds to the good news, let’s linger a little more at Calvary. I know we’ve talked about the resurrection. Let’s just rewind a little bit. And here’s why.

0:41:55 – (Matt Smethurst): Spurgeon said, let us dwell where the cries of Calvary can be heard. If pastors listening to this are going to make it in their own hearts, souls in their ministries, if they’re going to help their people toward heaven, they and those around them have to dwell near to the cross. So let’s think just a little more about what happened on the cross. Last year, a popular author, John Mark Comer, in an Instagram story, referenced a book on Leviticus, and he said it was the final nail in the coffin, again against psa, penal substitutionary atonement.

0:42:34 – (Matt Smethurst): And you and I would both agree there’s a lot going on on the cross. A lot was being achieved by the God man. But help us understand what we mean by penal substitution and why that’s actually what makes sense of all the other glorious realities the cross accomplished.

0:42:54 – (Ligon Duncan): Yeah. And long before John Mark Comer made his criticisms, there have been lots of people with popular criticisms of the doctrine of penal substitutionary atonement. And I heard them when I was a seminary student, and when I heard people say, oh, the evangelical teaching on the cross is cosmic child abuse, all those sorts of things. But the New Testament just blows up all of those objections with the way that it talks about what Jesus has done. For one thing.

0:43:29 – (Ligon Duncan): Thing, Jesus is never presented as a victim. Jesus will say things to his disciples like, no man takes my life from me. I lay it down of my own accord. And then Jesus says in relation to the Father’s will, I love to do the Father’s will. It is my food to do the will of him who sent me. So Jesus is not.

0:43:56 – (Matt Smethurst): And on the cross, cross, he had 72,000 angels staring over the precipice of heaven, who at a whisper would have swooped in to save him. Right.

0:44:07 – (Ligon Duncan): I’ve often said, I wonder whether the prayer, father, forgive them, for they know not what they do, saved the entire world from obliteration. At that point, I just have one, you know, it’s not that, you know, he’s protecting us While he’s suffering on the cross from the justice that we deserve. And so the picture in the New Testament of the cross is not of the Savior on the cross trying to get God to love his people.

0:44:41 – (Ligon Duncan): He’s on the cross because of the Father’s love for his people and because he loves to do the Father’s will, and because he, for the joy set

0:44:53 – (Matt Smethurst): before him, he’s there.

0:44:55 – (Ligon Duncan): He despises the shame. He loves us. He loves us, loves the Father’s will. But there is divine justice that must be done against this rebellion against God. And he says, I’ll take that man’s place. I’ll stand in that woman’s place. He received in his body on the tree the due penalty of our sin.

0:45:21 – (Matt Smethurst): 1 Peter 2:24.

0:45:23 – (Ligon Duncan): Meditate on that in Galatians 3, 13, 15. It’s all over the place. And in doing so, I love the way John Murray says this in redemption accomplish applied in his work on the cross. Our sins are not canceled, they are liquidated. You know, it’s not that God says, okay, oh, I’m just going to forget about those sins. No, the debt is liquidated. It is paid in full. Which is one reason why the accuser on the last day will be powerless against us.

0:46:04 – (Ligon Duncan): When he says, but Matt Smethurst was a sinner. And Christ will open the book and says, I see no sins.

0:46:14 – (Matt Smethurst): It reminds me of the words of the old hymn, well, may the accuser roar. Of sins that I have done, I know them all and thousands more. Jehovah knoweth none. So whether it’s the sin you committed last night or 40 years ago, if you’re in Christ, the sins you cannot forget, God does not remember.

0:46:36 – (Ligon Duncan): And that obedience, that negative obedience in which he bears the penalty on the tree is the culmination of a lifelong of positive obedience. And it is that. That’s the famous telegram from J. Gressom Machen to John Murray right before he dies. Thank God for the active obedience of Christ. No hope without it. So it’s not only that Christ has borne that penalty, as you just said, he lived a life that we could not live, and he died a death that we deserve to die.

0:47:10 – (Matt Smethurst): And we need both sides of that,

0:47:11 – (Ligon Duncan): and we need both of that. And that’s what he’s done on the cross. So. So, yeah, well said. We need to linger at the cross and look at it.

0:47:20 – (Matt Smethurst): Yeah, it was fitting, he said, to fulfill all righteousness. One illustration that I sometimes use is the NBA has 82 games in a season. And this is an Illustration I’ll use with college students, young people, to help them understand the glory of 2 Corinthians 5:21. God made him who knew no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God, what theologians have called the sweet exchange, right? He takes our sin, we get his righteousness.

0:47:55 – (Matt Smethurst): And I’ll say that in order to have a perfect season in the NBA, what does your record have to be? Well, it has to be 82 0. What if someone says, well, my team’s undefeated, we’ve had a perfect season, we’re zero. Zero. Well, okay, yeah, you haven’t had any losses, but you also haven’t won every game. And of course, the illustration is that losses are like our sins, wins are like acts of righteousness.

0:48:25 – (Matt Smethurst): And it’s not enough just to have done nothing to offend God, we also have to have done everything to please Him. So in the garden, Adam and Eve, as it were, had a moral record of zero. And when they rebelled against God, they plunged all of us into sin. We’re sinners by nature and by choice. And we inherit a moral record before the Lord of love of O and 82. If on the cross all that was happening. You talked about canceling sins. If all that was happening was Jesus was canceling our sins, paying our debts, what would our moral record become?

0:49:04 – (Matt Smethurst): We would just be zero. But that’s not all that’s happening. He’s also giving us his perfect record of righteousness so that through faith in him we go, as it were, from being 0 and 82 to 82 and 0, as if we have lived his perfect life. We could say so much more lig about the ruler, the revolt, the rescue. I like your language of God the maker, sin, our failure, Christ our Savior. But a danger is that sometimes I think in our preaching we can sound those notes, who God is, who we are, what Jesus has done, and then kind of leave it at that.

0:49:41 – (Matt Smethurst): But how does an individual respond to that news?

0:49:45 – (Ligon Duncan): And my next step in my little outline, is faith our answer. And so it’s not that faith is something that we do as the solution. It’s the answer to God’s solution. And I don’t say that to exclude repentance. Obviously, I’m trying to outline. I’ll talk about what repentance means. In a sense, it’s a flip side of the faith because it’s an owning of your need for the forgiveness of sins. But faith, what I love about it is it points away from ourselves to Christ. I Can’t fix this.

0:50:20 – (Ligon Duncan): I’m not the solution. Christ is the solution. I’m looking away from myself and I’m looking to Him. I’m trusting in Him. So it gives me an opportunity to explain what the Bible means by faith, what it means to trust in God, to talk about the things that you need to believe, but especially the personal trust that you need to place in him as your Savior.

0:50:44 – (Matt Smethurst): Yeah, Luther once said, what good is it to you that God is God if he is not God to you? So at the end of the day, no one can live off the borrowed faith of someone else. Not your parents, not your youth leaders, not your pastors. When you stand before God, the question is, where is your trust? Where is your hope? I think sometimes in that more transactional way of talking about the Gospel, we can make it seem like becoming a Christian is like passing through a pay toll on the highway.

0:51:23 – (Matt Smethurst): That’s an impersonal transaction. You give them the money, they raise the bar. You do your part, they do yours. Becoming a Christian is not like that. It’s a lot more like getting married. It’s a lot more about essentially throwing yourself onto the Lord Jesus Christ into His open arms and trusting that he’s going to catch you and never let go. And first Peter 3:18 says, For Christ died once for all the righteous, for the unrighteous.

0:51:55 – (Matt Smethurst): And then he doesn’t say to bring you to heaven, though that’s true. He says something even more glorious. He did it all to bring you to God. This is where John Piper has been so helpful with his book. God is the Gospel. The ultimate good news that we hold out to people is not just that you get your sins forgiven. It’s not just that you get a new body. It’s that you get God. You were made to know and enjoy and delight in God. And that’s what he offers himself to us in the gospel.

0:52:25 – (Ligon Duncan): And that’s a message that echoes all the way back into the Old Testament. The covenant with Abraham. I will be your God, you will be my people. It’s a heart of the vision of what God. God is doing. As you say, it’s not just transactional. It’s deeply relational and personal. And to be brought to God, to be brought into fellowship with God. Adam and Eve enjoyed fellowship with God by their sin. That fellowship was disrupted in the gospel. We’re being called back into that communion with God.

0:52:57 – (Ligon Duncan): And faith is the way that it’s the alone instrument whereby we receive all those benefits that have been purchased for us through the person and work of Jesus Christ. And so I want to emphasize, as you just said, that it’s not enough to know that story. You must respond to that in faith. You must respond to that in trust.

0:53:23 – (Matt Smethurst): And you’re not just referring to a kind of one time physical act or decision. Right. It’s not that you’re necessarily saying, well, I prayed a prayer, I signed a card, I walked an aisle, I got wet, I threw a pine cone into a fire at a summer camp. No, I’ve turned away from my sin and I’ve plunged myself into the gracious heart of Jesus Christ. And then, of course, the good news of the gospel endures into eternity as we will have resurrected bodies on a resurrected earth and we’ll be able to enjoy God unhindered forever.

0:54:03 – (Ligon Duncan): I think what you said a few seconds ago about this is more like a marriage is exactly right, because that’s the major illustration from Genesis 2 to the last chapter of Revelation about the relationship between God and his people. It’s a marriage. And, and so in trust, that doesn’t end after the marriage vows.

0:54:26 – (Matt Smethurst): Absolutely.

0:54:26 – (Ligon Duncan): I mean, hopefully that grows in a good relationship. And it gets tested in different ways over time. You know, a wife learns that she can count on her husband when things aren’t going well. He learns that he can count on her when things aren’t going well with him. And one of the most profound things in a relationship is when you look at another person and you think, you know, when what? You stuck with me.

0:54:50 – (Ligon Duncan): When a lot of people would have just tapped out, they would have said, that’s it, I’m done, and you stuck with me. Well, trust is something that is a part of a healthy relationship. And that’s how it is. It starts with trust. And by God’s grace, faith grows over the course of the Christian life.

0:55:06 – (Matt Smethurst): Yeah. Especially to the degree we come to understand the Father’s heart. So it’s, you know, JI Packer has a wonderful chapter in Knowing God on adoption. That’s a doctrine we haven’t touched on. We don’t have the time to explore deeply. But let’s just suffice to say it’s not just that we’re right with God the judge, we are also adopted by God the Father. The criminal trial has become an adoption ceremony. He’s not just declared us righteous in his courtroom, as it were, he said, oh, yeah, and one more thing.

0:55:41 – (Matt Smethurst): You’re coming home with me.

0:55:42 – (Ligon Duncan): Me?

0:55:42 – (Matt Smethurst): You’re coming to my living room and I’m giving you a bedroom. And I have a seat at the dining room table for you night after night. And even now, he beckons us to come afresh. So even pastors listening to this, who know this gospel, believe this gospel, preach this gospel, may have grown overly familiar with the gospel. Maybe it’s long since ceased to stagger them. So I pray that one effect of this conversation would just be that we would be freshly astounded by what God has done for us in Christ.

0:56:15 – (Ligon Duncan): Amen.

0:56:16 – (Matt Smethurst): Thanks for joining us for this episode of the Everyday Pastor. We hope it’s been encouraging to you. We hope that your church would be centered on the good news of Jesus Christ. Please share this with others so that we can continue helping pastors and Everyday Christians find fresh joy in the work of ministry.