Notice what Revelation 14:6, the beginning of the three angels’ messages, begins with: the “eternal” or “everlasting” gospel. If we fail to understand the depth of the gospel, we will miss the entire point of the three angels’ messages. We can never fully understand the issues in God’s judgment-hour message or the fall of Babylon or the mark of the beast if we fail to understand the gospel.
Read 1 Corinthians 15:1-4, Romans 3:24-26, and Romans 5:6-8. How is the “everlasting gospel” presented in these texts? What great hope is presented here for us?
Image © Lars Justinen from GoodSalt.com
The gospel is the incredibly good news of Christ’s death for our sins, His glorious resurrection, and His ever-present love and concern for us. By faith in His shed blood and His resurrection power, we are delivered from both sin’s penalty and power. Christ absorbed the apostle Paul’s thoughts and was at the center of his teaching and preaching. The crucified Christ redeemed him from the condemnation and guilt of his past. The resurrected Christ gave him power for the present, and the returning Christ gave him hope for the future.
Notice four points in these passages in Romans:
1. We are justified freely by grace.
2. Grace is a declaration of God’s righteousness.
3. Grace justifies those who by faith accept Jesus.
4. God’s love was demonstrated for us while we were yet sinners.
Christ’s grace is unmerited, undeserved, and unearned. Jesus died the agonizing, painful death that lost sinners will die. He experienced the fullness of the Father’s wrath, or judgment, against sin. He was rejected so that we could be accepted. He died the death that was ours, so we could live the life that was His.
Any wonder, then, that salvation must be by faith, and without the deeds of the law? What could we possibly add, what could our works, even the best-intentioned, Holy Spirit-filled works, add to what Christ had done for us at the cross?
And this plan, the plan of salvation, had been put in place even before the beginning of time (2 Timothy 1:9, Titus 1:2, Ephesians 1:4), which helps explain why it is called “the everlasting” gospel. Before the world was created, God knew what would happen, and so He instituted the plan of salvation to meet the crisis when it, eventually, would come.
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