The Gospel of Jesus Christ (s.n.e. Reformation Conference) — Paul Washer

God’s Compassion, Grace, and Justice

Let's open up our Bibles to the book of Exodus. The book of Exodus, chapter 34. And please stand as I read this text. Exodus 34, verse 5. The Lord descended in the cloud and stood there with him as he called upon the name of the Lord.

Then the Lord passed by in front of him and proclaimed, The Lord, the Lord God, compassionate and gracious, low to anger and abounding in loving kindness and truth, who keeps loving kindness for thousands, who forgives iniquity, transgression, and sin, yet will by no means leave the guilty unpunished, visiting the iniquity of fathers on the children and on the grandchildren to the third and fourth generations.

Moses made haste to bow low toward the earth and worship. Let's pray. Father, I come before You in the name of Your Son. Lord, it is my greatest desire that Your Son be glorified through the preaching of the Gospel, and that, Lord, Your people be edified through understanding, through comprehending the Gospel, and that through the Gospel they would be motivated to greater devotion and greater godliness.

Father, it is my desire that if there's someone here tonight who does not know You, that the Gospel would do its work in their heart, that they would be regenerated by the Holy Spirit, that they would come to repent and believe unto salvation.

And Lord, to have the greatest assurance of that salvation. Father, everything I desire for this night is absolutely impossible for the flesh. Lord, nothing is impossible for You. And so it is only with that confidence, it is only with that confidence that we preach.

The Gospel Reduced to Spiritual Clichés

In Jesus' name, amen. Tonight I want to talk to you about the Gospel of Jesus Christ. We live in an age and we live in a place, we live in a culture. We live in an evangelicalism that has taken the Gospel of Jesus Christ and reduced it down to a few tiny spiritual laws or principles.

We have taken the glorious Gospel of our blessed God and reduced it down to something far less than an intellectual creed. We've made it into a cliché. There are countless individuals throughout the West, throughout the United States of America and Canada and now in many parts of the world that have been infected by our teaching.

There are countless individuals who believe themselves born again and they are not because of the type of Gospel that we preach in this land and that we have exported to other lands. Many people today say that the West is hardened to the Gospel.

What you need to understand is the West is not so much hardened to the Gospel any more than any nation has ever been hardened to the Gospel. The problem here in the West is not Gospel hardness, but Gospel ignorance.

Most people in the West are ignorant of what the Gospel truly is. Most people sitting in the pew are ignorant with regard to what the Gospel truly is. And the reason for that is most of the men standing behind the pulpit are ignorant of what the Gospel truly, truly is.

Tonight we're going to take a look at the Gospel of Jesus Christ. And you may be wondering now, why did I choose to begin in the book of Exodus? Well, there's a very important reason because there is something found here and then in another text to which I'm going to take you before I go to our main text that explains the reason for the Gospel.

Why do we need the Gospel of Jesus Christ? Well, let's look at our text. To give you a little bit of background on this, you understand that Moses has been used of God as a servant to bring his people out of Egypt.

You also realize that Moses is asking God for something. He wants to see God's glory. He wants to draw closer to the flame. He wants to know this great God and so in verse 5, God answers his prayer. The Lord descended in the cloud and stood there with him as he called upon the name of the Lord.

Now, I want you to understand that what the Bible says is true. No man has seen God. And any time you see a prophet or the lawgiver like Moses seeming to indicate that he has seen something of God, you need to understand it is but a glimpse.

It is not even the fringe of His glory. The power, the holiness, the very beauty of God is so great that if you could catch only a small, the tiniest glimpse of His glory and of His beauty and of His power and of His holiness, it would drive you mad in an instant.

That is why in order to dwell in heaven, the believer is going to have to be supernaturally changed, transformed, lest the very beauty of God kill you. We are not talking about someone like us, just bigger.

We are talking about someone wholly other than us in a completely distinct category. That is the reason why when Moses said, who are you? God said, I am that I am, or I am who I am. You see, if someone were to come to me from another country, or let's be a little bit more dramatic.

Let's say that there were some space creatures out there and one of them were to land in a field by my house and come to me being the first human they had seen and they would say to me, who are you? I could say easily, I am like her.

And I am like him. And I am like these. As a matter of fact, if you want to know all about me, there's over 6 billion of us on this planet. But when someone asks God, who are you? There's no one to which He can compare Himself.

He says, I am who I am. There's no metaphor. There's no comparison. There's nothing that can be used to describe God except God. That is why R .C. Sproul asked the question, which creature is more like God?

The archangel in heaven? Or the worm crawling on the ground? Which one is more like God? The answer is, neither. At this very moment, because I'm standing on a platform, I am closer to the sun, S-U-N, than everyone in this room.

But it would be absolutely absurd for me to boast of being closer to the sun. Because the distance is so great that the small amount of distance between you and I makes me into nothing great. You see, you cannot understand the Gospel unless you have a right view of God.

Because people need to understand this. When I ask them, I ask them, why is the Gospel necessary? And they say it's because of who we are. And I say, absolutely not. It's because of who He is. The Gospel is necessary because of the character of God.

The Gospel begins with God. If God was like us, we wouldn't need a Gospel. If God was fallen like us, we wouldn't need to be saved from our fallenness. If God was like us, a fallen being like us, there would be no need for redemption because sinners get along quite well whether they're a creature or Creator.

And the reason why we need a Gospel, the reason why we need a Savior is because God is not like us. We are fallen. We are morally corrupt. We are radically depraved. We are sinners. Now, when I say that we are sinners, that doesn't bother you very much because that type of language is used all the time, isn't it?

Let me put it this way. We are evil. And the problem is, God is not. So he goes on and he says in v. 6, "...then the Lord passed by in front of him and proclaimed...". Now, this is God's self-revelation.

This is God's self-proclamation. God is now telling us who He is. And if you ever want to know something about God, I recommend you go to God as the source. Don't take secondary sources on this. Especially in this day and age in the West and in the state of evangelicalism, don't walk around asking a bunch of evangelical pastors what God is like because they're liable to mislead you.

You should go directly to the source. The Bible, which is both a New and an Old Testament. Go to the whole thing. Discover who God truly is. And he says this, "...then the Lord passed by in front of him and proclaimed, The Lord, the Lord God, compassionate and gracious...".

What a wonderful thing to know. "...slow to anger and abounding in loving kindness.". This is absolutely wonderful. Do you have any idea what it would be like if God were evil? Do you have any idea the terror of our reality if God was like us?

We have the political maxim that absolute power corrupts absolutely. And that all of us are subject to the greatest corruption depending on the amount of authority we are given. The Caesars and the tyrants and the dictators have proved that.

They kill millions of their own. What would it be like if the Creator of the universe was like you? It would be absolutely terrifying. But He's not. He's compassionate and gracious. Slow to anger. Abounding in loving kindness and truth.

Verse 7, "...who keeps loving kindness for thousands...". It's not a wavering loving kindness. It's a covenantal loving kindness. He makes a promise and He keeps it. "...who keeps loving kindness for thousands, who forgives iniquity, transgression, and sin.".

That's a wonderful thing to know. That means that there's hope for us regardless of how holy and how righteous this God truly is. There's hope for us because He Himself tells us that He forgives iniquity, transgression, and sin.

But now comes the problem. In verse 7, it says, "...who keeps loving kindness for thousands, who forgives iniquity, transgression, and sin, yet He will by no means leave the guilty unpunished.". Now we have a problem.

Everything that I have just read about God now seems to be annulled. There are a great deal of theological and philosophical contradictions now that we must deal with. He says He forgives iniquity and sins and transgressions.

All those terms are heaped together in a Hebrew style to let you know He forgives all types, manners, and kinds of sins. But if He does that, how does He also say that He will by no means leave the guilty unpunished?

So does that mean that He's going to give the guilty the full measure of punishment due them and then pronounce forgiveness over them? Will He send the world to hell, but at the same time declare forgiveness to a world that's been lost to its own iniquity?

I mean, how do you put these two things together? How can God be a forgiving God and yet punishes absolutely every sin with perfect justice? That's the great problem of the Bible and that's what the Gospel is all about.

God’s Goodness and the Problem of Human Guilt

And if you don't understand that, you don't understand the Gospel. Now, let me put it in another way before we go to another text. I was preaching a few years ago in Europe and I was asked to speak at this university and it by no means was Christian.

And the students were kind of loaded for bear, as we might say. They were waiting to hear this social dinosaur, this evangelical, this Reformed preacher who was going to come to talk to them about a holy God.

I mean, it was laughable. The place was filled with everyone who believed nothing of what I was going to teach. And so I was back in the back and I was saying, Lord, I don't mind going out there. I don't mind their mockeries.

I don't mind their questions and their objections and their arguments. But Lord, I don't want to go out there just to be a martyr. I want Your Gospel to progress. I want something good to come of this.

And I was praying, Lord, what do I do? And as I walked out on the platform, it just dawned on me what I should do. And I looked at them and I said, you know something of who I am. You know something of what I believe.

You know I believe that the Bible is the inerrant, infallible Word of God, that it is totally trustworthy in every word. Now, just to set things off at a right pace, since you know that I talk a great deal about the wrath of God and judgment and the sin of man, I want to share with you up front what is the most terrifying truth in all the Bible.

Now, I warn you, those of you who are faint of heart, you may want to leave now through an exit. Because I am going to share with you something that is absolutely terrifying to the thinking man. And so they were all ears.

And I said, are you ready? Are you ready? Brace yourself. This is the most terrifying truth of all the Scripture. And I leaned in and I said this, God is good. And when I said that, every one of the student bodies, some of the professors, you could just tell they went, well, that wasn't so bad.

And I said, no, you're not hearing me. God is good. And finally, a student said out loud, and what's the problem with that? And my answer was, you're not good. Now, what does a good God do with people like you?

Full of iniquity. Full of self-love. Full of murder. Full of hatred. Those who will break every good moral law apart from the restraining grace of God. If God is good, what does He do with you? Now, think about that.

Everyone wants to go to heaven. Really? And what will that heaven become like very quickly? It's unbelievable, people's views of heaven. Like, they have these utopian views that heaven is a place where you go and everybody gets along.

Well, then, some things are going to have to seriously change. Why don't we get along here? Because of our own private lusts and desires and greed and selfishness. So we're all going to go to heaven and be the same.

Heaven will quickly turn into Dante's Inferno. Another thing that's very, very common about our culture today, everyone wants to go to heaven. They just don't want God to be there. When they get there, I mean, take this for a moment.

Really think about what's being said here. God is good. Now, He's not just mostly good. He's not good in a grandpa sort of way. He is the Lord of glory. He's the King of righteousness. Every one of His decrees and judgments are perfect.

In His pristine holiness and righteousness, cannot tolerate a single moral failure. Because we can see, can't we, what a single moral failure can do to an entire universe. My dear friend, all the evil in the world isn't product of society.

It doesn't somehow jump over the head of the individual. The blame does not land upon the world by itself. People say, no, children are born in such a way. Men are basically good, but society corrupts them.

Do you not understand? Society is not alien. It's a product of our own hearts. So there's really two problems whenever you deal with the idea of heaven, reconciliation with God. And these two problems are this.

If God is good, can He simply look over all the iniquity of our hearts, of our thoughts, of our words, of our actions, and like a foolish old grandfather, sweep them under the rug and invite us in? Then the other problem is this.

If He did invite us in, is it not true that heaven would soon turn into hell? For what is going to restrain our evil? I mean, we did this with this world. What would we do with the next one? And if we are raised to some heightened existence so that we no longer suffer from the pains of death and we live forever, exponentially our evil would grow.

Do you see these problems? See, the greatest problem in the world is God is good. Let me explain it this way. Criminals, drug cartels, mafias, corrupt corporations, do they fear evil judges? No, they don't.

They can buy off evil judges. Evil judges are just like they are. They like evil judges. They go to dinner with evil judges. But all such immoral people and immoral organizations they fear good men. They fear righteous authority.

And rightly so. Because the right authority will stand against them. Let me give you another example that I use quite often. And it's this. Let's say that you were to dismiss from here tonight and you were to go to your home and find out that the family that you left there had been slaughtered by an assassin.

Brutally murdered by an assassin. And as you walk through the door, that assassin is standing over your last child wringing the life out of its body. And in a fit of rage, you fly across the room, you grab the assassin with blood on his hands, you throw him to the floor, and you tie him up.

And your rage is stilled and justice takes over. Instead of killing him and getting revenge, you call the police. And the police come and take him to the jail. You live in a small town and so everyone in the city knows about it.

And so the time of the court, the time of the trial comes and this man who slaughtered your entire family, who was caught blood-handed, red-handed, doing the deed, stands before the judge. And the judge looks down at him and says, I am a gracious judge, abounding in loving kindness and slow to anger, who forgives iniquities, transgressions, and sins.

Therefore, I pronounce you not guilty. You're free to go. What would be your response? Would you say justice had been done? Would the people in your town applaud the compassion of the judge? Isn't it our greatest complaint that our country's falling apart because our judges are corrupt?

Because they don't do the righteousness they're commanded to do? Isn't it true that if someone did that, if there was a judge that type of judge on the bench that you would be writing all the politicians, even the president, you'd be going to the newspapers, you'd be going to the news media saying there's a judge on the bench far more corrupt than the criminals he sets free?

You would be crying out, is it not the job of a judge to do justice? Do you see how hypocritical we are? If it is the job of a judge in a minor province to do justice, is it not the responsibility of the judge of the universe to also carry out justice?

And the problem is, though, my friend, if he carries out justice on you or me, there is no hope. You say, now, wait a minute, Brother Paul. I'm not that bad. In your eyes, that's possibly true. And in the eyes of a society that no longer understands even the most basic politic of moral law, that may be true.

But in the eyes of a holy God, it is not true. My dear friend, do you realize right now, if I could take out your heart, if I could take every thought you've ever thought from the moment you first were conscious of being alive, I could take every thought you've ever thought, every deed you've ever done in secret, and somehow I could take it all and put it on a DVD and I could show that film here tonight, you would run out of this room and you would never show your face again to the people here.

Because you have thought things, even tonight, even while I was preaching, you have thought things so vile that you could not share them with your closest friend. Now, you know that we are just like you.

You know if that kind of malady exists in your heart, it also exists in mine and in everyone else's. And yet, you're still ashamed that your sin be exposed even before like sinners like us. So what will it be like one day when your life is exposed before a perfectly righteous God?

Justification, Propitiation, and the Righteousness of God

Will you stand on that day? I tell you, you will not. Now, let's go on to another passage. Let's go to Romans 3, speaking of Jesus Christ in verse 25, whom God displayed publicly as a propitiation in His blood through faith.

This was to demonstrate His righteousness because in the forbearance of God, He passed over the sins previously committed. For the demonstration, I say, of His righteousness at the present time so that He would be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus.

The passage that I have just read, many theologians down through history have said it's the most important passage in the entire Bible. They call it the Acropolis of the Christian faith. The fortified city.

The central city of the Christian faith. In it, we find the reason for the cross. And yet, how many pastors today even expound this text with any importance whatsoever? Or feel the need to even define the terms that are being used here?

Now, I want you to look back at that text and you're going to find a phrase that's very important. That God might be both just and the justifier. There's the key to understanding the Gospel. You miss this.

You cannot understand the Gospel. Here's the problem. If God is just, He cannot forgive you. That's the problem. If God is just, He cannot forgive you. Any more than that judge can set that assassin free who murdered your entire home.

There's a passage in Proverbs, kind of obscure, but it is a great illustration of this. It's in Proverbs 17 .15. And this is what it basically says. Anyone, particularly referring to any authority in Israel, any judge, anyone who justifies the wicked is an abomination to God.

Now, if you're a Christian, what is the one thing that you most sing about? That you were a sinner and God justified you? Do you see the problem? The Christian faith and Christians boast in the fact that though we were sinners, God justified us.

He declared us to be right with Him. But the problem is, the Bible says, any authority that justifies wicked men is an abomination to God. So how can God justify wicked men without becoming an abomination?

How can God be just and yet pardon the wicked? Do you see the problem? Many of you have never heard this in your life. And yet, you've been in church for so many years. What are all these teachers teaching nowadays?

The things that some of you are saying right now, well, man, I've never heard that before. This was the common speech among Christians 150 years ago. So let's settle it right here. Here's the great problem.

God is good. God is righteous. God is the judge of all the earth and He will do right. You have broken every law God has ever given. From birth, you went astray. Radically depraved, morally corrupt, evil.

Do you have to teach a child to lie? No. No one has ever had to teach a child to lie. Do you have to teach a child to be self-centered and selfish? No. From where do wars spring up? The heart of a child that grows into an adult.

And unless that adult is restrained by the grace of Almighty God, he will make Hitler look like a choir boy. You take a child. Put him in a room. I challenge you. A little child. Put him in a room. Give him all the toys his heart could desire.

Just spread them out around him. And let him play until you can determine the toys that he really loves and the toys that he wants nothing to do with. He wants nothing to do with those toys. Mark those toys that he does not want to play with.

You put that toy in his hand. He throws it away. He doesn't want it. Then, take another child and bring that child in the same room. And then hand that toy that the other child has thrown away and put that toy in the hands of that other child.

And what's going to happen? World War III. But don't you see? That's why the old preachers would use language like this. Monsters of iniquity. I'm not saying this to try to hurt you, but realize I've got Scripture on my side.

And realize this, for those of you who are secular and believe the Bible is just an old book of crudely formed ideas, realize I've got every newspaper in the world on my side. I've got every history book in the world on my side.

And if I could pry through that outer casing of your heart and reveal what is inside there, I would have the testimony of your own wicked thoughts to defend me. Everything I'm saying about us is true.

Now the question is, how does God forgive us and still be just? How can God pardon our iniquities and still be a righteous God? Let's look at another passage just for a second before we go on to the answer.

Look in Romans 4. Here we have another problem. Look what David says. Now this is David who committed adultery with Bathsheba, who had her husband basically killed. Look at verse 7. Blessed are those whose lawless deeds have been forgiven and whose sins have been covered.

Now even though it's not mentioned here, do you realize who's covering these sins? It's God. God is covering these sins. God is forgiving these lawless deeds. Verse 8, blessed is the man whose sin the Lord will not take into account.

To be honest with you, if that text was left by itself, it would say a lot of terrible things about God. What do you think about a judge who covers evil deeds? Pretends they didn't happen. Looks the other way.

Is that the kind of God you want ruling the universe? But David says that's the kind of God he had. If you just look at that verse by itself, that doesn't look like a very holy God. That doesn't look like a very righteous Creator and Judge.

So how can we have the part of the Scriptures testifying to the fact that God is righteous and He will punish every sin? And then over here, blessed is the man whose sins are covered by God. That it is an abomination to justify the wicked.

And then in another part of the Bible, the wicked rejoice because they've been justified by God. This is the context of the Gospel. This is the divine dilemma. And how is the problem solved? How can we bring these two things together and prove that there is unity within the Person of God Himself, that there is unity within the Scriptures?

I mean, what brings this all together? The Gospel of Jesus Christ. And there's one word. Let's look at it. It's in Romans 3, verse 25, whom God displayed publicly as a propitiation. Now, what is a propitiation?

It's a sacrifice. What does that sacrifice do? It satisfies the demands of justice. And in satisfying the demands of justice, appeases the wrath of God. And makes it possible for a righteous God to forgive the iniquities of men.

In His righteousness, in His justice, God condemns the world. God sends the law. And the law aggravates the matter, even on purpose. It displays our sin in living color. It shows us that we are condemned.

Those of you who would seek to save yourselves by keeping the law, all of creation testifies against you. That's an impossibility. You have broken the law at every point. The law just makes you that much more guilty.

And in His righteousness, God condemns the world. And in His grace, He designs a plan of salvation. And what is that plan? God becomes man. God becomes a man. The Son of God incarnate. And He walks on this earth as a man.

He is fully God. He is fully man. The two natures are not confused or mixed. One is not diminished for the sake of the other. He is truly God and He is truly man. But He walks on this earth as a man. And then as a man, as your brother, He lives an absolutely perfect life.

He is the only one of whom God could say, this is My beloved Son in whom I am well pleased. Behold, He doeth all things well. And then according to the foreknowledge, the sovereign plan of God, He is lifted up by the hands of us and nailed to a cross.

Now herein lies the problem. How does a man dying on a tree save us from our sin? How does a man dying on a tree pay for our sin? Let me put it in a more crude vernacular. How does the fact that the Romans beat up Jesus pay for our sins?

Because you see, here is the problem. When I hear most preachers preaching about the cross of Calvary, what they talk about is the cat of nine tails with which Christ was beaten. They tell me about the crown of thorns.

They talk about the mockeries of men, how He was beaten, how He was slapped, how He was a bloody picture of a man going to a tree. They tell me how He was cast down upon the beam. They tell me how He was nailed to a tree and lifted up.

They tell you that every Easter. But the question still remains. Okay, the Romans crucified Jesus. How does that pay for our sins? Listen to me. If you are saved here this evening, it is not merely because Jesus was beaten up by the Romans.

It's not merely because they nailed Him to a tree. If you are saved here this evening, it is because when Christ was on that tree, your sins were imputed to Him. They were placed upon Him. The guilt for every wicked thing you've done was heaped upon His head.

And then Almighty God crushed His only begotten Son under the full force of His holy hatred against your evil. Have you never read Isaiah 53? And it pleased the Lord Yahweh there in Hebrew. It pleased the Lord to crush Him, to grind Him to powder.

You see, what you need to understand is this. By breaking the law of God, you made yourself an enemy. I sometimes ask people. They say, Brother Paul, I've been saved. I say, saved from what? They say, saved from sin.

I say, sin wasn't after you. If you've been saved, do you know what you've been saved from? You've been saved from God. As a matter of fact, I like to put it this way. You have been saved from God, for God, and by God.

You see, He is righteous. You and I, because of our law-breaking, are evil. Every one of us. You go down into some shady part of the city and find the prostitute and find the drug addict and find the worst of the worst and pick them up, look them square in the face.

They're just a mirror of what you are.

Apart from the grace of God, they are a mirror of you. You think Hitler is an anomaly? The only reason why you do not surpass Hitler in your evil is because God has restrained your evil by His common grace.

Hitler's not an anomaly. He's one of us. And God in His justice and in His righteous anger turned against the whole lot of us. You say, well, I just don't believe. God is love and I just don't think God gets angry.

You don't think. What you think really doesn't matter. What the Bible says is what matters. And let me show you again your hypocrisy. Let's say you pick up a newspaper tomorrow and you find out that a man kidnapped a little girl 15 years ago and has held her in his basement for 15 years and done nothing but torture her every day of her life.

You tell me you can pick up that paper and read it and be neutral about it? If you're neutral about it, you're immoral. You're just as immoral as the man who did that. Can you hear about the Holocaust and say, well, you know, it's not that big a deal?

Can you hear about slavery in America and not burn? Well, then you're immoral. You and I even reserve the right of righteous indignation when we hear about evil. We, even though we're fallen, even though we're sinful, when we hear about crimes that even go beyond our imagination, do we not burn within us?

Anger. We can't stand what's being done. How much more a holy God when He looks square at every sin and every wicked intention of your heart. But on the cross of Calvary, the sins of God's people, the guilt for that was heaped upon the Son.

And God crushed His only begotten Son under the full force of His righteous indignation against our sin. And before Christ died, He cried out, it is finished, which means He paid for it in full. Your crimes have been paid for by the very One who condemned you.

And now God can be just and the justifier of the wicked because He Himself paid for their crime. Do you see that? Now, let's look at this with a bit more depth. I want us to go to 2 Corinthians 5 .21.

He made Him who knew no sin to be sin on our behalf so that we might become the righteousness of God in Him. 2 Corinthians 5 .21. He, that is God, made Him, that is the Christ, who knew no sin to be sin on our behalf so that we might become the righteousness of God in Him.

Now, let's look at this for a moment. He knew no sin. He wasn't acquainted with sin. He was perfect. Although He came into this world and took upon Himself the flesh, the body like our body. So many people think that when Jesus came to the earth, He came in this super, almost Superman type of body.

No, He didn't. He came in the likeness of sinful flesh. He Himself was absolutely incorruptible and pure, but He took upon Himself a body that suffered all the effects of our sin. That's why He was tired and thirsty and weak.

The thing that really captures me here is that He knew no sin. Not just that He didn't do any sin, He knew no sin. He wasn't acquainted with it. Someone asked me one time, what is the greatest sin? And I said, well, I suppose the greatest sin would be breaking the greatest commandment.

The greatest commandment is love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength. That's why the idea of sinless perfection for the believer is absolutely preposterous because if you say that you have loved the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength, you've also blasphemed.

Here's what I want you to see. There has never been one moment in your life, not one fraction of one moment in your life or mine, that we have loved the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength.