The gospel tells us, firstly, about God: that he is our Creator, through whose goodness and greatness we exist, in whose hands and by whose constant care every human person lives and breathes each moment.1The pattern here followed is guided by J. I. Packer, Collected Shorter Writings (Paternoster Press, 1998), 2:229-30, 250-51; idem, Evangelism and the Sovereignty of God, 66-81.
And here’s the first thing to notice about him. The Creator is a communicator.
‘Not till the Creator’s claim is seen can we ever grasp the sinfulness of sin.’
Speech Goes All the Way Down
Communication is essential to God. The gospel is itself a communication, a revelation in words — indeed the fundamental revelation issued by God himself. His speaking is instrumental in all his ways and works, and speech is essential to his very being: ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God’ (John 1:1).
The Bible begins with God bringing the world into existence by speaking. ‘In the beginning’ (Gen 1:1), God created ‘the beginning’ with a series of words. And it proceeds with God talking to people — clearly, directly, understandably — then causing much of it to be written down and distributed in the Scriptures, through which he carries on speaking today.
Those Scriptures publish the only Divinely authorised version of the gospel. It was ‘promised beforehand through his prophets in the holy Scriptures’ (Rom 1:2), passed on ‘in accordance with the Scriptures’ (1 Cor 15:1-11), and put into writing in the New Testament.
What He Tells Us
In the Bible, God tells us many things. He made the world to be our home. He greatly values us, and unconditionally loves us. He made us in his image to live in harmony with him and everything else he made — to enjoy him, serve him, worship him forever, living in conscious, obedient, personal, loving relationship with him and with other creatures.
Because God is our Maker, his claim on us is absolute. With perfect goodness, he owns us. We belong to him and owe everything to him.
Which means we’re not here by accident. Human beings have been put here by God for good reasons, and his goals should always determine ours. He made us, firstly, for himself and, secondly, for each other.
Anything less simply cannot work. Without that purpose as foundation, our lives are empty, unfulfilled, lacking meaning, in terrible danger. God made us to draw us to himself, and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in him.2Augustine, The Confessions, 1.1; trans. Maria Boulding (New City Press, 1997), 39.
God rightly rules over all he has made — and bound up in that rule is his role as Judge and Saviour. ‘Not till the Creator’s claim is seen can we ever grasp the sinfulness of sin.’3Packer, Collected Shorter Writings, 2:229.
In the gospel God addresses sinful human beings, speaks out loud in human words, calls to them, graciously commands and invites. Through the words of the Bible, through teachers and preachers, God communicates — revealing and offering himself in a way that declares, argues, persuades, commands, and instates us into an everlasting personal relationship with him.
What’s Actually Wrong
The gospel tells us, secondly, about sin and its effects. This is the condition the gospel addresses.
Sin originally began not with people but in the mind and will of the devil. Yet it entered the human world through the temptation and disobedience of the first human couple.
Sin itself combines unbelief, mistrust, failure, revolt, lawlessness. Its essence is rebellion against God. Its result is the insane, senseless ruin of relationships — with the Creator, with each other, and of our wider environment.
Each of us remains accountable to God. But we are now by nature corrupt, rebellious, guilty, indebted, under his just judgment — and ‘nothing we can do for ourselves can put us right.’4Packer, Collected Shorter Writings, 2:250.
Alienated from God, we are hostile, helpless, enslaved, bound to confusion, pain, suffering, death and Divine judgment. Our guilt before God requires condemnation, and condemnation demands punishment. And because sin is essentially satanic, outside of Christ human beings lie subject to Satan, trapped within the realm of evil.
Sin is very sinful, and the evil flowing from it very evil. God’s mercy restrains its worst excesses — yet everyone is implicated, and everything is spoiled.
Why God Is Angry, and Why That’s Right
God’s holiness, love and righteousness respond to sin and evil in relentless wrath and judgment — past, present and future.
Note where that anger comes from. God’s hatred of sin arises from his love, because whatever harms or hurts what God loves is not to be tolerated. The perfect goodness of God means he must hate and reject evil, regarding real wrong with real loathing, judging it justly, reasonably, fairly.
The alternative would be indifference.
At the climax of history, God’s final judgment — based on complete knowledge — will be delivered without partiality. ‘The basis for the judgment is relationship with God and obedience to the gospel.’5Chapman, Know and Tell the Gospel, 64. An individual’s future destiny is determined according to our relation to Jesus Christ; and that relation is determined by our acceptance or rejection of the gospel.
Evil will be overthrown, sin undone, wrong punished. Justice will prevail, and by forgiveness, restoration and re-creation, the kingdom of God will proceed for the perfect eternal good of all.
Judgment Dignifies You
It is worth emphasising that God’s judgment stresses our accountability and worth. ‘The truth of divine judgment on human wrong is necessary in a moral universe, upholding the goodness of God, respecting the dignity of humanity.’6T. Bradshaw, ‘Judgment of God,’ in New Dictionary of Theology: Historical and Systematic, eds. Martin Davie et al (IVP, 2016), 478. In judgment God publicly affirms ‘those values on which the common life of society depends.’7Oliver M. T. O’Donovan, ‘Punishment,’ in New Dictionary of Theology (2016), 717.
Knowing exactly how and when to act for the best, God’s judgment gives rulings that put matters permanently right. As in the rescue of Israel from Egypt, he judges sin to remove both the blindness it brings and its tyrannical rule, restoring us to relationship with him (Exo 12:29-32; 14:1-4). That judgment falls both now and decisively at the ‘day on which he will judge the world’ (Acts 17:31).8These concluding sentences are drawn from ‘Great Truths: Sin and Death,’ 4.1 https://www.greattruthsglobal.com/sin-and-death/.
Two Possible Verdicts
Integral to the gospel, then, is the declaration of God’s final judgment upon sin — either of forgiveness or of condemnation.9Joel R. Beeke and Paul M. Smalley, Reformed Systematic Theology, Volume 3: Spirit and Salvation (Crossway, 2021), chapter 12, 292-97.
God’s judgment delivers two types of verdict. Either it announces forgiveness, which opens paradise, the everlasting kingdom of heaven, to believers. Or it delivers condemnation, which shuts the kingdom of heaven against unbelievers, away from the presence of God who is the source of all that is good (2 Thess 1:9) — consigning them to everlasting conscious torment, which Jesus described as ‘the hell of fire’ (Matt 5:22).10‘How is the kingdom of heaven opened and shut by the preaching of the holy gospel? In this way: that, according to the command of Christ, it is proclaimed and openly witnessed to believers, one and all, that as often as they accept with true faith the promise of the gospel, all their sins are really forgiven them of God for the sake of Christ’s merits; and on the contrary, to all unbelievers and hypocrites, that the wrath of God and eternal condemnation abide on them so long as they are not converted: according to which witness of the gospel will be the judgment of God, both in this life and in that which is to come’ (Heidelberg Catechism, Question 84; Schaff, The Creeds of Christendom, 3:337).
‘Not till we begin to grasp these things can we ever appreciate the dimensions of the declaration that Jesus Christ saves us from sin.’11Packer, Collected Shorter Writings, 2:229.
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- 1The pattern here followed is guided by J. I. Packer, Collected Shorter Writings (Paternoster Press, 1998), 2:229-30, 250-51; idem, Evangelism and the Sovereignty of God, 66-81. ↩︎
- 2Augustine, The Confessions, 1.1; trans. Maria Boulding (New City Press, 1997), 39. ↩︎
- 3Packer, Collected Shorter Writings, 2:229. ↩︎
- 4Packer, Collected Shorter Writings, 2:250. ↩︎
- 5Chapman, Know and Tell the Gospel, 64. ↩︎
- 6T. Bradshaw, ‘Judgment of God,’ in New Dictionary of Theology: Historical and Systematic, eds. Martin Davie et al (IVP, 2016), 478. ↩︎
- 7Oliver M. T. O’Donovan, ‘Punishment,’ in New Dictionary of Theology (2016), 717. ↩︎
- 8These concluding sentences are drawn from ‘Great Truths: Sin and Death,’ 4.1 https://www.greattruthsglobal.com/sin-and-death/. ↩︎
- 9Joel R. Beeke and Paul M. Smalley, Reformed Systematic Theology, Volume 3: Spirit and Salvation (Crossway, 2021), chapter 12, 292-97. ↩︎
- 10‘How is the kingdom of heaven opened and shut by the preaching of the holy gospel? In this way: that, according to the command of Christ, it is proclaimed and openly witnessed to believers, one and all, that as often as they accept with true faith the promise of the gospel, all their sins are really forgiven them of God for the sake of Christ’s merits; and on the contrary, to all unbelievers and hypocrites, that the wrath of God and eternal condemnation abide on them so long as they are not converted: according to which witness of the gospel will be the judgment of God, both in this life and in that which is to come’ (Heidelberg Catechism, Question 84; Schaff, The Creeds of Christendom, 3:337). ↩︎
- 11Packer, Collected Shorter Writings, 2:229. ↩︎