God's Grand Old Gospel

Announcer: Have you ever wondered what the word gospel really means? It occurs several times in the first few verses of the book of Romans. In fact, it’s the theme of the book. Yet many people don’t understand what it really means. Welcome to the Bible Study Hour, a radio and internet ministry of the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals, featuring the Bible teaching of Dr. James Boice, teaching you to think and act biblically. Today, we continue our new series in the book of Romans, part one, an introduction by looking at the meaning of the word gospel and applying it to our lives. Most of us know that the word gospel means good news, but for many of us our understanding stops with the definition. So just how good is this news? We’re going to learn about that today and gain a greater appreciation of what God has given us in the gospel. Let’s turn now to Romans chapter one and begin.
Dr. James Boice: Several weeks ago we began a verse-by-verse study of what is by general consent the most important book in the New Testament, and therefore also no doubt the most important book in the Bible, and certainly the most influential book in the entire history of the church. I’m referring to Romans, of course, this great letter of the apostle Paul to the church at Rome in which more than in any other book he unfolds the fullness of the Christian gospel, explaining what it means that God sent Jesus Christ His Son from heaven for the redemption of the world. Paul does that in a very full way in Romans, dealing with the need of humanity that led God to send His Son to die for us, the work of Christ in His death on the cross and all of the results of that in our lives individually, for what this teaches about history and for the impact of the lives of such redeemed people upon society at large.
Guest (Male): Now we began with a study of the book itself and then a study of the apostle Paul using the terms by which he introduces himself in the very first verse of the letter. We come today to the phrase "the gospel of God." Linguistically, this is the most important idea in this introductory section of the letter. This word gospel, the most important word, occurs six times in verses 1 through 17. And it’s important because it’s the letter’s theme. Paul is writing this letter to explain the gospel, to make it more widely known. You’ll notice that it occurs in verse one where Paul identifies himself as one called and set apart for the proclamation of this gospel. You find it again in verse two where he begins to unfold a little bit what the nature of the gospel is. It is, he says, a gospel which God promised beforehand through His prophets in the Holy Scriptures regarding His Son.
Guest (Male): In verse nine he firms that up, actually joining the reference to Jesus Christ to the gospel itself. He says he has made it his goal with his whole heart to preach the gospel of His Son. And then the very end of this section he tells why he’s so eager to do that, mentioning the gospel three times. "This is why I’m so eager to preach the gospel also to you who are at Rome," he says. "I’m not ashamed of the gospel because it’s the power of God for the salvation of everyone who believes, first for the Jew and then for the Gentile. For in the gospel, a righteousness of God is revealed, a righteousness that is by faith from first to last."
Guest (Male): Now most of us know that this word gospel means good news. But I’m sure that Martin Lloyd-Jones is right when he says in his commentary that for many Christians at least, the understanding of that word stops with the definition. We know that it means good news, but we don’t really appreciate how good the good news is. The place to begin in any real attempt to understand the goodness of the gospel is in recognizing that Christianity excepted, the religions of the world are not at all good news. Matter of fact, the opposite is the case. The religions of the world are bad news. They impose a burden upon people.
Guest (Male): I think that the easiest way to demonstrate that, if you’re able to do it, is merely to look into the hard, grim faces of those who are the religious leaders of the world apart from Christianity. Look into the priest, the monks, the mullahs, the gurus, and the holy men that are found across the face of the earth wherever human beings are found and therefore wherever religion is found. These men have grim faces, hard faces. They’re sad people. And the reason is that the religion they embrace is a burdensome religion. Most religions are an attempt to find God or peace or Nirvana, whatever particular term is given to that goal. And in every case, the way that is done is by human effort. The effort is described in different ways. Sometimes it’s a religion of good works, sometimes it’s a religion of a certain path to God, sometimes it’s a religion of meditation. Whatever it may be, but what ties all these things together is that the effort is man’s. It’s man reaching out in order that he might find and discover God.
Guest (Male): If that were a possible task, the religion would be good news. But the difficulty lies in the fact that the task is impossible. God is holy and we are separated from God because of His holiness and our sin. Our sin keeps us from Him. Therefore, no matter how hard we try, no matter what we do, we never can by ourselves unaided on the basis of our own good works find God. And so He’s always distant from us and our sin is always a barrier. And moreover, our sin is a burden, it’s something that we are unable to escape from.
Guest (Male): And so instead of being good news, the tasks that are set before us by the world’s religions actually become oppressive. They’re something in which the requirements become increasingly intense but do not bring us to the goal. The apostle Paul himself found that. He had grown up in a kind of formalistic Judaism in which, according to what he was taught, the way to God was by the keeping of the law. And so he set out to do it. As far as he was concerned, he was blameless where the keeping of the law was involved. And yet, as he was the first to confess, he did not find God, he did not discover peace through those efforts. Instead, as he will say later on in Romans, he found that what he wanted to do he couldn’t do, and the things he knew he shouldn’t do he ended up doing. And he was, as he says toward the end of that seventh chapter of the book, a very wretched man.
Guest (Male): Now in our day, there are a number of people who have tried to escape that by doing away with religion. And they have created, if I can put it this way, a no-religion religion. They’ve said religion is a burden. We’ve discovered that to be true, and therefore the way to find peace, even if not to find God, is by doing away with this. Any enlightened society should do away with religion. Religion is a tool by which some people oppress others. And so religion has been banished, and God who stands behind religion has been banished. And the people who take this view say, "Well, now at last we have found what the human race really has been seeking. We find peace or liberation." And on the surface, that seems to be true. If there is no God, then we are not accountable to this God. And if we’re not accountable to this God, we’re free to do anything we please. We make our own standards. You determine what’s right for you, I determine what’s right for me. You determine what you want to do, I determine what I want to do. And the future just opens up as a series of joyous possibilities.
Guest (Male): Ah yes, but when you stop to think about it, it doesn’t work that way. Because if there is no God and therefore if there is no being to whom we are accountable, if there’s no creator to whom we must give an answer for what we’ve done with the life He has given, then what we do with the life He has given in the final analysis doesn’t matter. And if what we do with our lives doesn’t matter, then we don’t matter. And we find ourselves, as many in our day are recognizing, just accidental occurrences in the midst of a universe without meaning. We are bubbles on the cosmic deep, and when we burst, the world is not the poorer by our loss and we are soon forgotten. That particular approach, the religion of no religion, is not good news either because it ends in despair.
Guest (Male): And right here Christianity comes in and says we have a gospel. And our gospel really is good news and that is for two reasons. First of all, because there is a God. It’s His gospel after all. And the fact that there is a God means that there is one who has made us to whom we are responsible and before whom we shall give an account. And though as sinners that puts us in fear and makes us tremble, God has an answer to that. It nevertheless gives us meaning, because what we do day by day, the decisions we make, the people we affect, really has meaning. That is a very, very important thing. We count. And then secondly, Christianity says we have a gospel, good news, because not only is there a God but this God by His very nature is the kind of God who has loved us and has reached out to find us and save us in Jesus Christ. We were unable to find Him even if we thought we were trying to find Him. We actually were separated from Him by our sin, but He has reached out to find us.
Guest (Male): And so He has sent His Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, to die in our place, to remove that burden of our sin, to give us a new possibility of relationship to Him as sons and daughters with all of the privileges that come from belonging to that divine family. And so now we who have found that in Jesus Christ, not only proclaim it joyfully to the world, we rejoice among ourselves. We sing praises to God for what He has done.
Guest (Male): It’s worth thinking about that, isn’t it? Let me just make that point about singing praises. I wonder if you have ever thought how characteristic it is of Christianity that we sing joyful songs. I don’t mean to say by that that the other world religions don’t sing, they do. But when they sing, it is often more in the nature of a chant and the singing itself is conceived of as a religious exercise. It’s a way you get yourself into a holy frame of mind or suppress the flesh or gain merit with God. Singing in Christianity is not like that. We sing not because we think that singing will get us close to God, but because God has made Himself close to us. And so we sing joyfully and praise for what God has done. I notice that the hymnbooks, if you just open them and go through them, are filled with songs of praise. The very first hymn in our hymnbook and in most other hymnbooks, too, is that great hymn "All People That on Earth Do Dwell." Sing to the Lord with cheerful voice. His praises sing, His praise forth tell. Come ye before Him and rejoice.
Guest (Male): If that is true, then we need to ask whether this first point that Paul makes, the point that the gospel is good news, has really had an impact upon us. Is the gospel really good news for you? If it’s not really good news, if as you think about these things you don’t find your heart rejoicing, you need to stop and ask whether you’re really born again. Or perhaps you need to ask if you’re close to God or far from Him. Sometimes we are so far from Him because of our sin that that which should be good news for us actually begins to fade away.
Guest (Male): Now the second thing that Paul says about this gospel is that it was promised beforehand through His prophets. That is, it was previously announced. That’s important, too. Because although it is true that when the gospel of God’s work in Jesus Christ to save men and women was first announced, it burst upon our darkened world like a new thing, it nevertheless was no novelty. It was new in the sense that the accomplishment of the salvation had just happened. Jesus had achieved that historically not many years before the apostle Paul began to preach. But it was no novelty. It was not new for the reason that God had already announced it from the very beginning of His dealings with the human race. We see this in all of the surviving examples of the apostolic preaching.
Dr. James Boice: Let me give you some examples. If we turn back to the 13th chapter of the book of Acts where we have the first recorded sermon of the apostle Paul after his conversion, you find that it is filled with Scripture from beginning to end. Paul is preaching here. He has Jews and Gentiles in his congregation and in order to make his points concerning Jesus Christ, he quotes prophecy. First of all, he quotes Psalm 2:7 to prove Christ’s deity. "You are my Son, today I have become your Father." Then he talks about the resurrection, showing that that was prophesied in the Old Testament, quoting Isaiah 55:3. "I will give you the holy and sure blessings promised to David" and Psalm 16:10, "You will not let your holy one see decay."
Guest (Male): As he gets toward the end of his message, anticipating unbelief on the part of some, he points out that even the unbelief was prophesied in the Old Testament. He quotes from Habakkuk the first chapter, verse five. He says as Habakkuk quotes God, "I am going to do something in your days that you would never believe even if someone told you." And then to bring it right home to them, he refers to Isaiah 49:6 as a prophecy even of his own ministry because he said, quoting that verse, "I have made you," God speaking, "you, a light for the Gentiles that you may bring salvation to the ends of the earth." You see in this first great sermon of the apostle Paul’s, the first surviving example of his preaching, all of the points are made on the basis of quotations from the Old Testament. If you turn several pages further on in the book of Acts, you come to the next of Paul’s sermons which he preached at Thessalonica in chapter 17. Here it says, verse two, not giving the words of the sermon but the substance. "As his custom was, Paul went into the synagogue and there on three Sabbath days he reasoned with them from the Scriptures." That means from the Old Testament, explaining and proving that Jesus had to suffer these things and rise from the dead.
Guest (Male): We find the same thing in Romans in the fourth chapter after Paul has just articulated the nature of the gospel in chapter three. He answers the question that would be in the minds of many of his readers. That is, whether what he is speaking about is something new or novel. Oh no, says Paul. This is the way people were saved from the very beginning. And so he goes back to texts that concern the patriarch Abraham and King David to show that they were saved by looking forward to the Messiah to Jesus Christ and by having faith in Him in exactly the same way as we look back.
Guest (Male): Go back in the book of Acts a bit further. You go to the eighth chapter and there we have an example of the missionary activity of Philip, one of the early deacons. Philip was used by God to explain the gospel to an Ethiopian nobleman. He was what the Jews called a God-fearer. That’s to say he was a Gentile but he believed in the God of Israel and he’d been up to Jerusalem to worship. He had bought a scroll while he was there. On the way home in his chariot he was reading it. And God sent Philip to preach the gospel to him. Philip approached the chariot and asked him what he read. What he was reading was from the 53rd chapter of Isaiah. "He was led like a sheep to the slaughter and as a lamb before its shearers is silent, so He did not open His mouth. In His humiliation He was deprived of justice. Who can speak of His descendants? For His life was taken from the earth." The Ethiopian didn’t understand who that was written about. "Was the author writing about himself?" he said. "Or is he writing about someone else?"
Guest (Male): And Philip had the opportunity of explaining that to him. He said he was writing about Jesus Christ, a man who came and lived and died and rose again not many years ago. In the very early chapters of Acts, we have examples of the preaching of Peter. Peter preached the first real Christian sermon on the day of Pentecost. And what is most characteristic of that sermon is the number of Old Testament Scripture verses that Peter used as the basis of his message. There are three main passages. First of all, Joel 2, verses 28 through 32, the prophecy of the pouring out of the Holy Spirit on Pentecost. That was his chief text because this was Pentecost. It’s when that prophecy was fulfilled.
Guest (Male): Second, Psalm 16, verses 8 through 11. This was the passage from which the apostle Paul quoted in his sermon recorded in Acts 13. And then finally, Psalm 110:1. "The Lord said to my Lord, sit at my right hand until I make your enemies a footstool for your feet." That is the verse of the Old Testament most quoted in the New Testament. It’s referred to again and again. When you add up all those verses, you find that the apostle Peter quoted 11 verses from the Old Testament and, as we have it in Acts, his own exposition of those verses only occupies 12 verses. And two of those are an introduction and two of them are a conclusion. So what he quoted from the Old Testament and what he explained is almost evenly divided. Peter was saying in effect, if you want to understand what this gospel is, you have to go back to the Old Testament where God prophesied beforehand through His prophets what would take place.
Guest (Male): You go again to the fourth chapter of Acts to the next of Peter’s sermons and you find that this sermon is based upon Psalm 118:22. "The stone you builders rejected has become the capstone." Referred to Jesus Christ, a foundation stone of God’s building of true religion rejected by the Jewish leaders. But he said, God has made this rejected Christ the capstone, the cornerstone of the whole edifice. This was a verse that Peter obviously liked because he picks up and uses it again in his second letter where he embellishes it also by two similar quotations from the prophet Isaiah. Christ is made the rock upon which the church of God is being built.
Guest (Male): Well, that’s important, you see. It means that from the very beginning of God’s dealings with the human race, recorded way back there in the book of Genesis, the whole way through the Old Testament period up to the very last of the Old Testament books, the books of Malachi, you have prophecies of the coming of Jesus Christ. In the beginning in the third chapter of Genesis, it has to do with the one who’s going to destroy the works of Satan. At the very end of Malachi, there’s an anticipation of the coming of Elijah who is going to be Christ’s forerunner. From beginning to end throughout in explicit prophecies and in the Old Testament themes, all of this is looking forward to the coming of Jesus. And now you see, says Paul, this good news is proclaimed, the news that what God promised beforehand through His prophets has come to pass.
Guest (Male): There’s a third thing we need to see about this gospel. Not only as I pointed out that it’s good news, not only that it is good news that was prophesied before it happened, but thirdly that it was prophesied in the Holy Scriptures. This tells us where the good news may be found and also the nature of those documents in which it’s disclosed. It’s interesting, isn’t it, that Paul puts in that phrase? He could merely have said the gospel he promised beforehand through his prophets, and that would’ve been perfectly true. We know that in the history of Israel there were periods of great prophetic activity when men of God went about telling what God had to say to the people and looking forward to the redeemer who should come. That would’ve been a perfectly valid and useful statement.
Guest (Male): But Paul is writing in a later day. He’s looking back to that prophetic witness and he’s saying it’s not merely significant that God spoke in the past through prophets, but that God caused these prophets to write down their prophecies. And what he says in this verse is Holy Scriptures, that is Holy Writings. So his point is that if you want to find out what the gospel is and if you want to see these prophecies, you have a place to go to look. You don’t just deal on the memory of something that happened in the past. You don’t say, "Well, it seems to me my father said that his father said to him and before that his father said to him that in the days of so-and-so there was a prophet who said so-and-so and I think that’s what it’s about." It wasn't a case of that at all. God caused these prophets to write down what He had given them, and those books are here for us to read and study and to make our own possession. So that’s where you find the gospel. Then secondly, not only by using this phrase does he tell us where we can find it, he says something about the nature of the books in which it’s found. Not merely that these prophecies are written down, but the books in which they’re written are holy books, Holy Writings. I’m sure you know that that word holy means separated unto God, that is selective and used by God for His own purposes. It’s what makes these books, these writings, unlike all other human writings.
Guest (Male): On one side, of course, they are human writings. When God gave the message, He gave it through men who were inspired by the Holy Spirit. It’s what Peter himself, one of the human authors of the New Testament, says when he writes about it in his letters. "Men spoke," Peter says, "but they spoke not merely as men. God’s Holy Spirit came upon them so that what they produced as men, as human writers, was nevertheless at the same time also the very word of God." So when we read these writings, when we turn to this book, we don’t turn to it just as we would to another human book, but we turn to it as that book in which God Himself, the great divine author, has explained the gospel and in which He speaks to our own hearts.
Guest (Male): If we really believe that, then it should draw us to the word of God in faithful, diligent, prayerful, and obedient study if we really believe the Bible to be God’s book. Well, the final point about this gospel, the point with which Paul really begins, is that it’s the gospel of God. You see it means that it’s His gospel. God is the author of this good news. God is the one who accomplished it through the work of His Son, the Lord Jesus Christ. God is the one who called apostles to proclaim it and who today raises up believers to witness about this good news to others. God is the one who blesses it to the conversion of men and women.
Guest (Male): I wonder if you have noticed that in these opening verses of Romans each person of the Godhead is brought in. And each person of the Godhead relates to the gospel in one way or another. God the Father is here because it’s His gospel. He announced it and promised it beforehand through His prophets in the Holy Scriptures. The Lord Jesus Christ is here because it’s the gospel of His Son, which is mentioned in verse three. And the Holy Spirit is here because it is through the Spirit of holiness, that is the Holy Spirit, that Jesus was declared with power to be the Son of God by His resurrection from the dead. And it’s through the power of that same Holy Spirit that the Lord Jesus Christ is preached as the Son of God and the savior today.
Guest (Male): You see, if God is that concerned with His gospel, this good news, that He would design it, accomplish it, and proclaim it, shouldn't we expect God to bless it? God does bless it everywhere it is apprehended, believed, and made known. Let me give you one story that illustrates what can happen. In the year 1816, a Scotsman by the name of Robert Haldane went to Switzerland. He was a godly layman who together with his brother, James Alexander Haldane, had been much used of the Lord in Scotland. He went to Geneva and there on one occasion as he was sitting on a park bench in a garden in the open air, he overheard some young men who were nearby talking. He listened for a while and he soon understood two things. First of all, that they were theological students. And secondly, that they were very ignorant of the gospel. They just did not understand what Christianity was all about. So he began to talk to them and he saw them on a few later occasions and as a result of that, eventually he invited them to his rooms for a Bible study. And there in this Bible study he began to explain the epistle of Romans to them, an explanation which eventually found its way into print and is today, in my judgment, one of the great commentaries on this book.
Guest (Male): It’s interesting what happened as a result of that Bible study. God honored it and by the work of His Holy Spirit, He began to convert these young men one by one. And they in turn became great leaders in the French church. As a result of the conversion of these men, something of a revival began in Switzerland. It spread to France and even to Holland. It was called at one point Haldane’s revival, and it all went back to the exposition of the epistle of Paul to the Romans in that rented room in Geneva in the 1800s.
Dr. James Boice: Why should it be any different for us today? If this were merely our gospel, our good news, it would accomplish nothing, it would be wishful thinking. But it’s not our gospel, it’s the gospel of God, that grand old gospel which God Himself announced beforehand through His prophets in the Holy Scriptures and which He has accomplished in Jesus Christ for us and our salvation. Let us pray. Our Father, we ask for your blessing upon our study in this hour, our study of the gospel. We ask you to take the message of the gospel and bring it home to many hearts because it pleases you to do that. It is for this that all of these great events of history involving the coming of the Lord Jesus Christ have been accomplished. Our Father, bless this gospel in our time. Bless us as we hear it and learn about it and believe it and appropriate it in our lives. And bless it as we proclaim it to our needy world. We pray in the name of Christ, our Lord. Amen.
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