The Forgotten Gospel

The Biblical Gospel Forgotten: An excerpt from a Book I’m writing.

Plainly when men make such bizarre and repugnant assertions as considered just above, they have abandoned the entire spiritual framework of the scriptures as for the state of man, and the duty of the church. They imagine that they’ll win the lost over to the gospel “with wisdom of words” just as Paul said not to. (ICor.1:17, ICor.2:4) We get in big discussions as for whether evidentialism or presuppositionalism is that God ordained, or at least theologically indicated, method of addressing the lost men around us, as though the foolishness of preaching the cross were not explicitly “chosen” of God to “save them that believe”, not with wisdom of words lest the cross of Christ be made of none effect. Because of Him are ye in Christ Jesus, who of God is made unto us wisdom. The church proclaims. The regenerate are made to hear by a divine hand, and not by any human craft whatever, that our faith should not rest in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God. But we seem to have lost our faith in this singular power, and while Paul “reasoned” with Agrippa and the Areopagites, yet he didn’t establish a school for training of ministers in Greek mythology, or Pagan philosophies, so that they could reach them with the gospel. Nor did he don a toga and take up the mandolin as the sly means of winning their attention or regard. The church is a divine institution, with a divinely ordained message and method. The debasing of its sacred proclamation can never be replaced with our idiotic evangelical fads, as we gad about to win the world with the latest rock out show in the stead of the sacred example of a people who have truly seen and embraced the gospel, and who are therefore genuine and visionary in the gladness, worship, hope, love  —in the actual worship of Jesus Christ for the infinitely great things He’s done for us, and for His own proper greatness as the creator of the universe, and Saviour of those who hope in Him. Anything that attempts to supplant this one single mission of the church is godless unbelief, and spiritual blindness, as I Corinthians chapter one makes perfectly clear.

Such novelties evidence our adoption of an ecclesiastical fluidity that counts itself at liberty to employ whatever novel practice might be vainly esteemed to “reach” the world. Just think what the apostles might have accomplished if they only had access to lasers and smoke machines, seems to be the drift. And Just as a self-willed method of biblical interpretation has cast a novel and idolatrous image of God, with its unavoidable new-fangled system of ethics, it has, as well, created a new gospel, and a new process of evangelism accordingly.  This wholly other gospel, (which is not another, but there be some that pervert the gospel of Christ, Gal.1:7), is evidenced by its meager expectations of any degree of repentance or separation from evil. Being characterized by a view of law that is purely theoretical, one minute exposing every extension of sinful thought word and deed to judgment, and the next warranting nearly any abomination, so be that modernity gives it a name not known to the first century. The same divine law whose penetrating divinity of vision cannot suffer the least imagination of sin, is the same one that gives you “your favorite sodomite program”. (Note: Earlier in the book a minister was quoted as affirming that all Christians he knew watched TV “sitcoms” full of sodomites)

But not only this. This other “gospel” also overtly seeks to remedy a wholly other problem. The problem of human unhappiness and discontent. This hipster “gospel” and its parallel paradigm of evangelism are minutely tailored to the degenerate tastes of the times. Not only does it pamper the flesh with only the most publicly scandalous sins reprimanded, but it makes its appeal not to man’s desperate need for mercy, as a condemned criminal in the sight of a righteous Judge, but appeals to his need for “relevance”, for “personal fulfillment” and his “need” to have all his personal feelings and desires answered by a more efficient providence. In short, the least thought of sin merits eternal hell, but we can all have “our favorite sodomite program”: and the gospel that deals with sin, condemnation, substitution, satisfaction, justification, and reconciliation lies hardly mentioned, if not unmentioned, while God the divine Santa Clause is preached unto all assurance of pampered and flattered humanity.

Could we have forgotten the gospel? Go ask your average Christian what the gospel is, and likely the majority can’t tell you. They will recite vague expressions that they don’t really understand, and can’t really explain beyond having a nondescript idea that God forgives sin if you will but “ask Him into your heart”, and please disregard the glaring fact that the bible never once says any such thing. Go listen to a sermon on the radio, and what do you hear? God has a wonderful plan for your life! Come to Jesus, He can make you happy! He can give you relevance! He can make you satisfied! He can give you a family, a job, a feeling of purpose, a life! God wants to be your own personal fairy god-mother if you will only let him into your heart! Ask your average Christian, and they think that someone having difficulty in life is ripe for the gospel, because now they’ll realize Jesus can come fix their frustrations, with no thought of the real problem of sin, judgment, the helplessness of unregeneracy, and the deliverance of the Cross.

This is the consummation of the mindset that we have to win the world by trying to make the gospel attractive and palatable to fallen men who are fundamentally at odds with God and all restraint, and therefore with the basic unpalatable truths of the gospel. The apostle John speaks of such as would proclaim such a worldly “gospel” in the following terms: “They are of the world, therefore speak they of the world, and the world heareth them.” (Jn.4:5) All they have in mind is that God can come and help you with —fill-in-the-blank. He’s become your personal Genie —your personal fairy god-mother. They may at times parrot the phrase that “Jesus died for your sins”, but its typically only the necessary passage on the way to getting all you want out of life, without men ever having any clear biblical picture of the moral framework of the gospel, with thus no conception of what is meant by the act of divine substitution or of satisfaction.

How foreign would be the words of Jonathan Edwards’ “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” compared to today’s “God has a wonderful plan for your life” gospel? And the evangelistic appeal is to proclaim to the world the good news that God cares about you so much, and is just waiting to wave his all-powerful wand and give you all thing things your carnal blinded heart pines after. There is a joke about country music that goes like this: What do you get when you play a country music song backwards? Ans. You get your wife back, your house back, your job back, your dog back, etc. And this pretty much summarizes the false gospel of the age. This gospel basically gives you the same thing as you get by playing a country song backwards; gives you all the things that Satan promised to Jesus if He’d bow down and worship him. Behold their god! But no —behold your own. (Is.40:1)

You will hear this modern imposter gospel as though it were somewhere found in the bible, or hear any number of the other vast multitude of iterations of this pathetic idolatry presented as the Christian message, but here is what you will not hear. What you will not hear is that gospel that has changed men through countless ages, that has filled them with joy in suffering, and which has so reconciled them to God, and afforded them such a vision of God that they were lifted up in victory over the fooleries of the world, or if otherwise, only temporarily overcome, and without becoming the apologists for remaining so, or of attempting to make a virtue out of remaining so. 

You may hear that “God has a wonderful plan for your life”, but what you will not hear is that you are a fallen man, and as such are consummately idolatrous, universally sinful, an offense to a righteous God, in hopeless arrears to justice, and entirely unable to fix yourself or recommend yourself to His favor, but deserve only condemnation and punishment, which is exactly what a righteous God has promised to give you, and which is the necessary first step to ever understanding what it means that “Jesus died for your sins”, or what believing on Him even means.  

You will not hear that because of this universal sinfulness and inability to do any good whatever, God has published threats of judgment upon you for your immoral and depraved spiritual condition, not just depraved acts, but depraved condition, and that such judgments are entirely appropriate and merited in light of your genuine character, and that these judgments are true, inescapable, and on their way. Even that eternal damnation in hell-fire to every son of Adam is proclaimed generally, and to you personally.

You will not hear that into this utterly and otherwise inescapably hopeless human catastrophe, entered the eternal God Himself into human history; The divine Person of Jesus Christ, the Second Persons of the Trinity, becoming incarnate in humanity, True Man and True God, inserted into time from eternity, to live a life of perfect sinlessness and self-denial, a life of perfect love toward His people, a life of perfect teaching and example, and a life of reproof to all the evils of the world, but only to be despised by His own kin, and to be ignored and betrayed by the vacillating multitude who exist between persecuting Pharisees and those saints who received Him, until the mass of humanity arose to nail the living God, the personification of all divine goodness and love, to a cross of wood until His last breath expired, as it would soon prove, into the hearts of His Redeemed to give them LIFE.

You will not hear that as His disciples looked on in confusion, and thinking that all was lost, that this appearance of evil triumphing was rather destined to be eternally employed by Almighty Wisdom to bring about God’s greatest victory of all universal history to the honor of His Name, in using the ultimate evil to bring forth the ultimate good by thus securing the salvation of His chosen, and to the cursing of all hell, and for which He would be loved, adored, and worshiped for eternity, and glorified by all saints and angels.

You will not hear that in this moment God the Father lay upon His Only Begotten Son the full burden, demerit, and liability of His people’s guilt, requiring the entire weight of their debt to justice to be imputed to His impeccable and sinless person.

You will not hear that in this central event of all human history God thus Redeemed His people by ordering their justice to be required at the hands of His Only Begotten Son as our divine substitute Who there stood in our place of judgment on our behalf, and did in fact receive the full weight of His people’s burden of sin, and debt to divine justice, until He expired a vicarious sacrifice under the curses due to His elect.

You will not hear that here, as His Spirit left His body, leaving his dead corpse hanging a curse between the earth He came to Redeem, and the Heaven to which He reconciled them, Satisfaction to Justice was fully and finally attained to be forever after proclaimed to the sinful world of sinful men as the One Way of Redemption.  

You will not hear that the justice sent forth against the sin of God’s people had exacted its measure of wrath from the divine substitute, Who was thus made the sacrificial Lamb of God to come as man for man, and Who had in very deed accomplished the full expiation of sin, in anticipation of which John the Baptist proclaimed, “BEHOLD THE LAMB OF GOD that TAKETH AWAY the sin of the world!”

You will not hear that there, in this divine transaction Jesus Christ brought full satisfaction to justice on His people’s behalf, forever silencing all claims of the law, and leaving the wrath due unto them expiated, and as it were as a bow who’s arrow was already shot, and the retribution against them entirely and irrevocably accomplished, freeing the saints to eternal reconciliation, peace, freedom, and glory, forever filling them with worship, gratefulness, and love to God, and rejoicing in each other’s mercy and ineffable kindness bestowed.  

And that is what you will not hear. This is what we hear:  “God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life”. Oh wow! I can get a “plan for my life! What is escaping eternal judgment by a sinless substitute compared to that! So “ask Jesus into your heart” (as if that were anywhere in the bible) and “get God in your life” by saying this prayer: “God I’m a sinner, but I want you in my life, so I can be happy and have the things I want, Amen”. Now I can escape the Billy Grahamism of “eternal separation from God”, or escape the “freely chosen identity apart from God on a trajectory into infinity” proposed by Dim Keller.

While doubtless some who are so egregiously guided may, by God’s help, conceive some basic idea of redemption, and find a confidence in a living powerful Saviour and hope in Him for mercy, yet so few who are so led have any clear apprehension of their judgment, or of the nature of Who Christ is or of Why He is a Saviour or upon what magnificent grounds He has power and authority to save, or from what! Oh you blind guides that dare preach such rubbish and drivel! Do you not have bibles! Oh please step down and bring no more condemnation upon yourself for so perverting the gospel of Christ, nor ruin upon the church for your ignorance and heedless presumption, neither entering yourself, but hindering those who would enter!  

But that true gospel is what finds men truly believing with understanding upon the divine Person of Christ as Clothed with Salvation, making all things new for His Redeemed and bringing that peculiar rejoicing in their reconciliation to God, being filled with the Holy Spirit, and mourning for their sinfulness, earnestly seeking greater repentance, and truly knowing the worship of He who thus delivered them from hell, and into the glorious liberty of the children of God, all things having been made new. This is the gospel that sets men in the way, and leaves them victors over the avalanche of hellish machinations which seek to jostle them from the road of peace and spiritual plenty in this life, or when so jostled, then forever followed by goodness and mercy where by an almighty and kindly providence their peace is removed until they are brought back into the way, that goodness and mercy thus inalienably following them, restoring them, and keeping them until their happy end. 

 This is the gospel that makes men genuinely repulsed by the wickedness of the age, such that no one has to tell them what to be offended by because they are in heart at enmity to that which brought their own ruin and that which was the very cause of the sufferings of their Redeemer. They possess an enmity to evil that is sincere, not for sale, and which doesn’t have to be explained to them, because it is genuine, lives within them, and fills them with self-loathing when they become deceived by it, but never become the apologist for it, thinking to attain peace by warranting it, rather than by the peace of Christ’s Cross when they fail, and joy by being divinely shepherded back into the Way.

Such as blindly adopt a moral theory as a mere notion glibly waltz into all manner of theatrics, music, literature or company, which all belch their filthy ribald, mock the sacred, and seek to render every evil palatable and normative, have none of these things. God’s Redeemed have HIM, have eyes, have heart, have a straightened spirit that, despite all the corruption that remains in them, has not left them reconciled to any such thing but who rather from the heart utter eternal enmity and war to all that contradicts the sacred, dishonors the holy, and rejoices in iniquity, because truly all things are made new. (IICor.5:17)

The glory of seeing your sins forgiven you, and being so deeply touched with the inalienable finality of your reconciliation to the true God, of His goodness and mercy following you, and the “everlasting arms” below you, the cross and glory before you, these do not agree well with the viewing of people rejoicing in wickedness, mocking God, and straining every nerve to pervert the world, and entice to evil, such as any average TV viewer nightly beholds without remonstrance from his seared conscience. Being hardened and blinded by sin and chastised of God (if even His) for their provocations, he has nothing left in him that he has not cast away that might have responded to conscience.  

Perhaps one may say, I recall such visitations, and how precious and quickening to joy, worship and general spiritual gladness they were. But should not that recollection be seen as a call to return, and bring you to mourn that which has made it to fade from your spiritual vision?

1. It was my sentence, was my pain
My wrath, My sorrow, and My stain
That fell upon the only spotless One . 
Beneath its damning endless weight
A hopeless debt in blood was paid,
To capture there the hope that blindness shunned.

2. He could have justly let us bear
The load condign in our despair,
But bled a flood until each debt was cleared;
When from the throne the flood released
Of reigning grace that published peace
So loud it overwhelmed His people’s fear.

3. ‘Oh why forsaken here, accursed?”
He cried where our just place reversed
Before the great assize that summoned me.
Where vengeance bathed its awful sword
There conscience felt the pardon poured
That hid me in the arms of Calvary.

4. Oh Saints prepare to shout your NO!
To all the powers that pull you low,
And gaze upon the font your lashes drew.
For He embraced your cross that day,
In blood full satisfaction paid,
And drank the cup of wrath reserved for you.

5. Oh sanctifying vision stay,
Preserve me in this peaceful way;
Subdue each lawless thought and reign supreme!
When I the Saviour’s pathway trace,
See Jesus where He took my place,
A subject of the reign of grace redeemed.

A poem I penned in 2025.