Welcome to The Truth Pulpit with Don Green, founding pastor of Truth Community Church in Cincinnati, Ohio.
Hello again, I'm Bill Wright. It is our joy to continue our commitment to teaching God's people God's Word. Today Don is continuing with the second part of a message we started last time.
So let's get right to it. Open your Bible as we join Don now in The Truth Pulpit. Now secondly, the gospel and the resurrection. Paul, having explained the gospel and the church in the first two verses, now goes on to explain the role of the resurrection and the centrality of the resurrection to the gospel of Jesus Christ. Verse 3, and these are verses of highest importance to all of Christianity, as shown by Paul's own words. He says in verse 3, For I delivered to you as of first importance. This is a primary matter here.
This is not a secondary matter of baptism or eschatology. This is central to everything. He says I delivered to you. When I preached, I gave this instruction to you. It's of the highest importance.
It's what I also received. And then he says this. Notice the word that.
That. He highlights four central features of the gospel with his use of the word that, as I will show you as we go through here. I delivered to you what I also received. Number one, that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures. Number two, that he was buried. Number three, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures. And number four, that he appeared to Cephas and to many other witnesses. Four features of the gospel. Number one, Christ died for our sins. Christ was buried. Christ was raised on the third day. Christ appeared to many witnesses.
Now, beloved, here's the starting point of what you really need to see and what I hope will be clarifying for some of you who have been under works-based teaching at formative parts of your life in the past. The true gospel is not what man does for God in order to be saved. The true gospel is what Christ has done in order to save men and what Christ has done in actual time and space and historical fact. The gospel, at its core, at its fundamental essence, is a declaration of what God has done for sinners, not what God commands sinners to do for themselves.
You must understand that distinction. The gospel tells you what God has done, what Christ has done, not what you can do or are to do in its fundamental essence. It's about what Christ has done.
The good news, the glad tidings of the gospel, is what God has done in order to reconcile sinners just like you to himself. And we'll consider the resurrection more next week. I just want you to see these four aspects that Paul lays out.
Let's look at them again so that we don't miss it. Paul had said, I remind you of the gospel that I preached. I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received.
And then what does he do? He goes and he lays out historical realities with one theological interpretation. I delivered to you that Christ died for our sins. Secondly, I delivered to you that he was buried. I delivered to you that he was raised on the third day. Fourthly and finally, I delivered to you that he appeared to Cephas. You are not a part of the gospel message, as Paul has laid it out here.
It is Christ-centered. It's what Christ has done. He died. He was buried. He was raised the third day.
He appeared to many witnesses. And so we must start from that fundamental core of historical reality if we have any hope of understanding the gospel at all. And then in the preaching of the gospel, you're called to repent and believe.
We'll get to that later this month. But you need to see the centrality of the historicity of the facts of the gospel as your starting point. God has done something to save you. He has sent his own son, and that son has done something. He has died. He has been buried.
He was raised. He has appeared to many witnesses. This is fundamental, undeniable historical reality. And if you missed my series that I've preached twice in recent years, is Christianity true?
Those messages will go into greater depth about the historical facts and their utter undeniably. For all of the arrogance of men and atheists and unbelieving scientists who try to exclude spiritual truth from the assessment of what is actually real, the historical record is definitive about the truth of the historical facts of Christianity. And Paul bases the gospel on historical fact with one addition, and that brings us to our third point this morning, which is the gospel and the atonement. The gospel and the atonement.
And I'm going to explain the word atonement in just a moment. But what the gospel does is it tells us that Christ died, but it's not just the historical facts that he gives us. Notice this additional phrase that you find at the end of verse 3 and the end of verse 4, that all of these things happened in accordance with the Scriptures. Christ died in accordance with the Scripture. He was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures. In other words, what the message of salvation, what the teaching of the Bible is, is that over the course of some 1,500 years prior to the birth of Christ, God was in the progress and in the process of revealing aspects of his truth and prophecies that pointed to the coming of Christ, so that when Christ died, it was in complete conformity with what the prophets had been foretelling would happen in the preceding 1,500 years. Going all the way back to Genesis 3.15, when God told the serpent that the son of the woman would bruise his head.
And many things follow after that. And so God gave a prophetic foundation, and the gospel rests upon that. And we are to see and to understand that. So let me just address ever so briefly atonement and the Old Testament as we consider what Paul means by the fact that this happened in accordance with the Scriptures. In Psalm 16, verse 10, we read, You will not abandon my soul to shield, or let Your Holy One see corruption. There was an indication of the coming resurrection that the Holy One of God, the Messiah, would not undergo the corruption of death. In Psalm 22, verse 16, and following, we read this.
A prophetic statement from Christ. For dogs encompass me. A company of evildoers encircles me. Listen to this, beloved. They have pierced my hands and feet.
I can count all my bones. They stare and gloat over me. They divide my garments among them, and for my clothing they cast lots. In the days of David, a thousand years before the coming of Christ, before crucifixion was introduced into the world by the Persians, some several centuries later, you see an accurate description of the crucifixion of Christ being laid out, that this Holy One of God would have His hands pierced, His feet pierced, and men would cast lots for His garments. Then, in Isaiah 53, if you want to turn there, you can. Isaiah 53. In verse 4, we read this. Isaiah 53, verse 4. Remember, Paul said that Christ died for our sins.
The prophet Isaiah, seven centuries before Christ, looked to that event and described it in advance. He said, surely He has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows, yet we esteemed Him stricken. This is verse 4, Isaiah 53, verse 4. We esteemed Him stricken, smitten by God and afflicted, but He was wounded for our transgressions.
He was crushed for our iniquities. Upon Him, upon that one man, that one Messiah, upon Him was the chastisement that brought us peace. And with His stripes we are healed. Notice the individual in Isaiah is bearing the sins of many. There is one and there is many that is taking place in what he says, and in verse 6, again the plural and the singular, all we like sheep have gone astray. We have turned, every one, to His own way, and the Lord has laid on Him the iniquity of us all. And then in verse 12, we read that He poured out His soul to death and was numbered with the transgressors, yet He bore the sin of many and makes intercession for the transgressors.
Now, beloved, we can all take a deep breath right now, kind of catch up and restore our focus here. Let me just say that back in May of 2023, I preached two messages, a life, Jesus, a life predicted and Jesus, a death predicted, where I go into much greater detail about the prophetic foundation of Christ in His life and in His death, looking at, I don't remember, 12, 15 different aspects of it. So what I'm giving you here this morning, my point is this, I'm just giving you a very brief, inadequate summary to help you see that the death of Christ for our sins was in accordance with the Scriptures. God prepared the way over the process of revelation from Moses until the silent period, 400 years before the time of Christ from Moses through the prophets, God was laying a foundation so that the Messiah could be clearly recognized and understood in the mission that He came to fulfill. You know, and you could even include the whole system of animal sacrifices, making atonement for sin as being a foreshadowing of the coming sacrifice of Christ.
Those animals died as a substitute for the one who offered it. And what the Old Testament pattern leads us to understand is that Christ died as a substitute for those who would receive Him. He bore the penalty of all of that judgment when He hung on the cross. For His people, for everyone who would ever believe in Him, He suffered on their behalf as their representative in a way that is in perfect conformity with what the Old Testament taught us to expect. So there's the atonement in the Old Testament.
There is this reality of substitution that is taking place. So, just to kind of reset things here and to gather my own strength for what yet remains. We've seen the gospel in the church. Paul says, you exist, church at Corinth, because of the gospel that I preach to you. We saw, secondly, that the resurrection is central to the gospel. And now, thirdly, we come to this point of the gospel and the atonement.
Why am I making such a matter about atonement here? Well, go back to 1 Corinthians 15 with me. 1 Corinthians 15.
Because tucked into this description of the history of things is what you could say is the theological explanation for it all. I kind of passed over it in order to make the historical point, but now look at it here in verse 3. I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received, that Christ died for our sins. The purpose of the death of Christ was for our sins. And that brings us to a second subpoint of point number 3, the gospel and the atonement. Subpoint A, atonement in the Old Testament. We just see that the Old Testament anticipated this gospel, this sacrifice of the Messiah. And now we come to the gospel and the atonement and the fact that Christ died as an atonement for sin. That's the second subpoint here, atonement for sin. And what the gospel tells us is this, is that after the Old Testament pattern, Jesus Christ died as a substitute for his people.
And I want to say this in a whole lot of different ways to help you understand. The gospel is not a message about what you can do in order to atone and make up for your own sins. Beloved, you can't make up for your own sins. If we represented your life and your sins by the simple thing of an egg, a raw egg holding it in your hands, your life, your righteousness and all of it has just been, that egg has been splattered on concrete and there's no putting it back together.
No one would even try to put a fractured egg, to put Humpty Dumpty back together again. And in like manner, in the spiritual point that I'm making, you cannot restore your own righteousness so that you are fit for God. You must have someone act for you on your behalf or you will be eternally lost. And so when we say that Christ died for sinners, he laid down his life as a substitute for his people.
He stood in their place. Beloved, if you are a Christian, Christ took responsibility for you and suffered the price, the penalty of your sins. He suffered them in order to deliver you from the judgment that you could not satisfy on your own. Now earlier this morning I thought of an illustration. I haven't really thought this through. If someone here or one of my friends hears this and says this is a terrible example and here's why, I'll be happy to listen to you.
I really will. But I think that this communicates and makes sense in a way that makes it simple and to grab the principle around it. Picture a young boy, an active, energetic boy who by accident or even maliciously takes a baseball, hits a baseball, and shatters the window of the neighbor's house. And he feels the guilt and he has real guilt, real responsibility for his actions. Yet he immediately knows there's nothing I can do to fix this. I do not have, the little boy says, I do not have the personal ability to repair what I have broken. I do not have the funds to pay for someone else to repair it. I am totally helpless here before a rightfully angry neighbor. Assume that the neighbor is kind of like me, you know, get off my grass. What do you mean you broke my window?
But what happens is that his father in love goes and intercedes for the boy before the neighbor and says, yes, my son did that. I take responsibility for it. Here's the money that is necessary to pay for all the damage that he has done.
If it costs more, let me know. But I take the responsibility for it. I incur the loss. You are made whole. What's required is made whole because I have interceded for my son.
We can all understand that. The father in love for his son, in mercy upon his son, intervenes with the aggrieved party and makes amends, pays what's necessary in order that there is no longer judgment or anger against the son but everything is restored to harmony. I think that's a decent thing that helps us understand what Christ was doing. The justice of God, the righteousness of God has been broken and has been shattered by the injustice and unrighteousness and sin of men. And you as a sinner have no means of making amends for what you have done, what Christ has done.
Scripture says, and he did it in love, he did it voluntarily because he loved sinners. We'll see a host of scriptures about this in a moment. Christ has intervened and said, I'll take the responsibility. I'll pay the eternal price that these sins deserved. Because of my love for sinners, Christ says, I will undertake on their behalf. I will act as their representative.
I will go before the aggrieved party as the mediator. I will go forth and satisfy everything so that he is fully restored, so that the sinner is fully restored to fellowship with God. Well, beloved, keep that in mind in the scriptures that I'm going to rather race through here now. What scripture says about all men, women, boys and girls is that they are dead in sin and separated from God as a result. Isaiah 59 verse 2 says, your iniquities have made a separation between you and your God, and your sins have hidden his face from you so that he does not hear. In John 9 31 we read, we know that God does not listen to sinners.
And so here you are, beloved, in keeping it in the whole context of what we've been talking about. Matthew 7 judgment, guilt for sin, separation from God. There you are, dead and separated and without hope. And God does not hear you when you pray. God, you are not a member of the family of God. You are separated from him. You are estranged from him. You are outside of him and under his wrath, and there's nothing you can do about it.
You can't fix it. Indeed, not only have you broken the window of God's judgment, the seeing eye of God sees you standing there with the ball bat in your hands and the guilty look on your face and the fear that says, I can't fix this. And so you have a problem of separation from God that you can't fix. And so what the gospel comes and tells guilty lost sinners is this, is that Jesus Christ made an atonement for sin. We can define atonement as one writer did like this.
And this is kind of a technical term, but we need to just take a moment for it. The atonement is that aspect of the work of Christ and particularly his death that secures the restoration of fellowship between sinners and God. The atonement addresses the problem of separation, and Christ did a work that was necessary so that this vast gulf could be bridged, the separation could be removed, and you could be reconciled to a holy God despite your sin.
Atonement stated differently, more simply, atonement means Christ made a sacrifice on behalf of his people. He died for our sins. You see, beloved, it's not enough to know and to believe the bare historical fact that Christ died. It's not even enough for you to believe that Christ died for sinners. What you must do, what the gospel declares, is that Christ died for our sins.
Christ died for the sins of those who receive Christ and believe in him. Stated differently, stated another way, Christ acted as a representative on your behalf. If you want another illustration, we use the father going on behalf of his guilty son. In realms that I used to know, you know, an attorney goes into a court on behalf of his client and intercedes and mediates between the judge and his client for the things that are at stake there.
There is a mediator, there is someone else acting on your behalf as your representative. So Christ acted as your representative. He stood in your place on the cross.
He was your substitute. All of your sins were counted against him, and he paid the price for you. This is what we mean by atonement, and atonement is central to the gospel. Now listen to some scriptures here. Just let these wash over your mind. If you want the list of these texts, you can reach out to me or to Catherine, and we'll be happy to provide this to you.
For the sake of time, let me just read them. Romans 5-8, Christ died for us. Romans 8, verse 32, God did not spare his own son, but gave him up for us all. 2 Corinthians 5-21, for our sake he made Christ to be sin who knew no sin so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. Galatians 1-4, he gave himself for our sins. Galatians 3-13, Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us. Ephesians 5-2, Christ loved us and gave himself up for us. Titus 2-4, he gave himself up for us to redeem us from all lawlessness. There's 10, I don't know, 10, 12 verses there.
How many more could I have added to go along with that? The blood of Jesus cleanses us from all sin, 1 John 1-7. Beloved, it's all over scripture despite the false teaching that would diminish or ignore or remove the substitutionary aspect of the death of Christ. Listen, let me put it another way, and I'm almost done here.
Although I feel like I could go and should go another two hours, I won't inflict that upon you. Beloved, Christ acted on your behalf. Christ loved you. And when we say this, Christ was doing a spiritual work, paying a real penalty from God on your behalf. That is different from saying that Christ just died as a beautiful example of self-sacrifice for us to follow.
That's completely different from that. That's different from saying that Christ was just, you know, that he was winning his enemies by being kind to them and just in these vague sentimental terms that deny by their silence, if not their rejection, the substitutionary penal aspect of the atonement. Christ was paying a penalty on your behalf in order for you to be saved. He acted as your representative.
He substituted himself out. He took the guilt that was not his upon himself in order that you might be forgiven. His blood for your guilt and his righteousness communicated to you by faith alone.
And so, beloved, I belabored the point here because it's so important. God poured out the punishment for sin on Christ. It was a real human death followed by a real burial, followed by a real resurrection.
One last way for me to state it here. Jesus Christ died in order to satisfy and to extinguish the just wrath of God against you for your sins. And he did that at the price of his own life blood.
The Bible says, without the shedding of blood, there is no forgiveness of sin. And so, there's so much going on when we go back in our mind's eye and picture Christ on the cross. We see his physical suffering, but we realize that it was only an outward expression of the very real spiritual suffering that he was going through on our behalf. We look upon the cross of Christ and we see our only hope of heaven.
We see the narrow way made manifest before us. We see the love of a savior for someone who had been so vile and in opposition to him and rejecting him and sinning against him like you and me. And how great, oh Spirit of God, help us in this moment. How great the love of God for sinners like you that Christ would do that gladly and voluntarily.
Number one. How great the price that Christ paid, the agony. You know, we don't often talk about this, maybe not often enough anyway. If you're like most people, you think about Christ and you think, well, you know, he was on the cross there suffering, you know, his three hours of darkness. You know, three hours, that's not a, that's, you know, what's so big about that? Well, beloved, understand that what Christ did for you as he was hanging on that cross is that it wasn't simply three hours of suffering.
That's a totally superficial wrong way to look at it. Christ, on your behalf, if you are a Christian, Christ bore the equivalent, the exact equivalent of the eternal punishment that all of your sins deserved. That was all compressed and condensed into that period of suffering that he had on the cross. Your agonized moans and groans and cries of dereliction and lostness in hell, which would have been yours, and all of that pain and suffering endlessly throughout endless ages, all of that compressed and laid on Christ, and he felt the full weight, the full brunt of that, and drank the cup to the dregs in order to pay it on your behalf.
And then multiply that eternal punishment of yours by the millions who will also join us in heaven, whom he also died for. Millions, tens of millions, hundreds of millions. I don't know the number.
It's not revealed to us. But say it's, just for a round number, say it's a billion sinners that were saved, actually, by the death of Christ. I'm just making up a number. Don't hang up on the arithmetic of this.
And follow the greater point. Christ endured a billion hells for each one of those people for whom he died. That's how great the atonement is.
That's how great the love is. When Paul says Christ died for our sins, it means in the fullness of the teaching of Scripture that there was eternal suffering that he underwent on our behalf, because only eternal suffering would satisfy the eternal wrath of God for a violation of his eternal law. And it's that sacrifice that is held forth before you to come to Christ, trust in his atonement, forsake your works, forsake your sins, come humbly before him and embrace him by faith, and all of that benefit of what he has done can be applied to your soul, and you can be saved today before you walk out of this building. God will forgive all of your sins and give you new life, and he calls you in light of this gospel that we have heard today to turn to Christ so that you might be saved.
Listen to what C. H. Spurgeon said, and with this I'm closing. Spurgeon said, If you believe on the Lord Jesus, he will wash you from all your sins, give you a new heart, and henceforth your life shall be holy, your conduct shall be consistent, he shall keep you to the end, and you shall most assuredly be saved. God bless this testimony to any such as are living in sin, that they may be reclaimed from it for Christ's sake.
Amen. Let's pray together. Father, may you grant us greater understanding of the gospel. May you open eyes to see, ears to hear, and hearts to believe. Help each one understand that there is no hope apart from Christ, that judgment is assured if any man, woman, or child, God forbid, would turn away from the message of the gospel. And yet, Father, to your people, the fullness of the atonement, the complete satisfaction that Christ made on our behalf, bring by your Spirit to our hearts the great certainty, the assurance, the confident hope and expectation that we can look at judgment with no cause for fear. We can look at death with no cause for fear, because Christ has conquered death through the cross, through the resurrection, and he will certainly bring us to his home in his time. In Jesus' name we pray.
Amen. Well, my friends, before we go at the end of today's podcast, I wanted to let you know that I'm very excited to announce the upcoming release of my latest book. It's an evangelistic book titled An Easy Guide to Missing Heaven, and I think you're going to want to get a copy for yourself and also to have copies to give to others. It's a short book, it's about the size of my hand, and with very short, brief chapters that make it easy for people to read.
You know, I'm not a great evangelist on a one-to-one basis, and I understand that sometimes it's hard to get a conversation started with someone you know, a friend, or even more with a person that you love within your family or the circle of your household. Well, this is a perfect book if you are like me. You can give this book easily to anyone.
They can read it in an hour, and that will set the stage for further conversations down the road. Again, the book is titled An Easy Guide to Missing Heaven, and you can find it at our website, thetruthpulpit.com. Just look for the link books on our website, thetruthpulpit.com. That's Don Green, founding pastor of Truth Community Church in Cincinnati, Ohio. Thank you so much for listening to The Truth Pulpit. Join us next time for more as we continue teaching God's people God's word.
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