Ask an average congregation of Christians gathered on a Sunday morning, “What is the Gospel?” and you will be amazed by the array of answers.

“Well,” says one, “the Gospel is God’s commitment to the poor and oppressed of the earth. The good news is that God wants to bring liberation to those in bondage to social injustice.” Yes, that is definitely good news and God is committed to bringing liberation to the captive poor. But that is not the Gospel.

“OK,” says another, “I’ve always believed that the Gospel is to love the Lord your God will all your heart, soul, mind, and will, and to love your neighbor as yourself.” Well, that’s a critically important commandment in Scripture and we are certainly responsible for loving God and neighbor, but that’s not the Gospel.

I’ve heard some suggest that the Gospel is the power God provides to help us move beyond self-contempt into a healthy sense of self-esteem. Whatever else one may say about that, it certainly is not what the NT has in view when it speaks of the Gospel.

Then again, I hear often today that the Gospel is God’s purpose to restore creation to its pristine condition, as it was in Eden before the Fall of Adam. The Gospel, so they say, is the good news that God will eventually bring justice to bear in the earth and eliminate all environmental pollution caused by sin and subdue every enemy of the kingdom. Well, yes, God will one day do all that in the new heavens and the new earth. But I still don’t think that’s what the NT means by the Gospel.

Perhaps we could say that all these things I’ve mentioned, or at least most of them, are the consequences of the Gospel. But they are not the content or core of the Gospel. They are the effects of the Gospel, but not its essence.

So, what, then, is the Gospel? No better or briefer answer is given to us than the one we find in 1 Peter 3:18.

The Gospel, in brief, is the gracious and redemptive work that God has accomplished through his Son Jesus Christ in his life, death, and resurrection, whereby the sin and guilt that alienated us from God and made us subject to his wrath and judgment has been overcome. That is the good news we proclaim. That is what Peter describes ever so briefly here in 3:18.

Notice five things Peter says about the death of Jesus that sets him apart from every other death of every other person.

(1) When Jesus suffered, he suffered “for sins”.

The words “for sins” = literally, “concerning” sins, with regard to sins, which is to say, because of sins and as a substitutionary sacrifice bearing the penalty that our sins merited or deserved. Cf. 1 Peter 2:24.

Christ died because of my “sins” in the capacity of one who took the penalty for them upon himself. If it was because of my sins and your sins that he suffered and died, then this must be what has separated all of us from God. The greatest threat to my soul, then, is not Satan, or big government, or low self-esteem. The greatest threat is my own sin. My greatest need, therefore, is for someone to address this problem and by doing so to bridge the chasm between me and God. Isaiah 59:2, "Your iniquities have made a separation between you and your God."

It is only because Jesus has died for my sins that I don’t have to.

(2) When Jesus suffered for sins, he suffered only “once” and for all time.

This single word that Peter uses here, translated “once,” points to the finality of Christ’s death and therefore the sufficiency of his death. There as nothing defective in his death. He left nothing undone. The sacrifice he made for you and me was altogether perfect. There is no need for it to be repeated.

Listen carefully to what the author of the book of Hebrews said concerning this. Listen to how often he speaks of it and how emphatically he makes the point:

“For it was indeed fitting that we should have such a high priest, holy, innocent, unstained, separated from sinners, and exalted above the heavens. He has no need, like those high priests, to offer sacrifices daily, first for his own sins and then for those of the people, since he did this once for all when he offered up himself” (7:26-27).

“But when Christ appeared as a high priest of the good things that have come, . . . he entered once for all into the holy places, not by means of the blood of goats and calves but by means of his own blood, thus securing an eternal redemption” (9:11-12).

“Nor was it to offer himself repeatedly, as the high priest enters the holy places every year with blood not his own, for then he would have had to suffer repeatedly since the foundation of the world. But as it is, he has appeared once for all at the end of the ages to put away sin by the sacrifice of himself. And just as it is appointed for man to die once, and after that comes judgment, so Christ, having been offered once to bear the sins of many, will appear a second time, not to deal with sin but to save those who are eagerly waiting for him” (9:25-28).

“And every priest stands daily at his service, offering repeatedly the same sacrifices, which can never take away sins. But when Christ had offered for all time a single sacrifice for sins, he sat down at the right hand of God, waiting from that time until his enemies should be made a footstool for his feet. For by a single offering he has perfected for all time those who are being sanctified” (10:11-14).

Apply to our understanding and celebration of the Eucharist, the Lord’s Table.

If he offered this sacrifice of himself only once, then nothing you or I do could ever do would put him back on the cross to do it all over again. That one offering of himself to suffer our death was enough. Enough! Enough! Once for all time! Never again! Once! Enough!

(3) When Jesus suffered for sins, it was as a righteous person dying in the place of unrighteous people.

Although he suffered for sins, they were not his own! He is the only person who has lived and died who didn’t suffer for his own sins.

The death of Jesus will mean nothing to you, will make no sense to you, unless you affirm both halves of this statement. You must know that you are “unrighteous” and that he is not. If you hold yourself in high regard, and think of yourself only as a victim of the unrighteousness of others and not a guilty sinner in your own right, you will find no need for the death of Jesus.

This is generally the situation with the world at large. They envision themselves as filled with shame, but not guilt. They do not see themselves as “unrighteous” because they do not see themselves in relation to the one true God who is infinitely righteous. In order for this statement to be meaningful, you must see yourself as Isaiah did in Isaiah 6.

As I’ve often said, the most difficult thing in getting people saved is in first getting them lost!

And you must see Jesus as righteous, as undeserving of death, as perfect and pure.

But wait a minute! We have to address a massive issue that virtually stares at us from within this passage. When Peter says that the “righteous” person has died in the place of “unrighteous” people, does that not strike you as a colossal miscarriage of justice?

Our legal system is based on the timeless principle that “righteous” people should not be punished for crimes or sins they have not committed. Equally essential to our system of justice is that “unrighteous” or guilty people should indeed be made to suffer for their crimes and sins. So how is it that we as Christians rejoice and celebrate in the idea of a sinless and righteous man suffering and dying and enduring the penalty that should have been inflicted on unrighteous men and women? Does this not seem like a miscarriage of justice, a massive mistake in which the rule of law has been utterly abandoned?

Several things need to be said in response.

First, it would have been a miscarriage of justice only if the penalty of the law had been ignored altogether. For God to have given us his eternal moral law and to have made it clear that violation of that law requires punishment, only then to simply set aside the penalty and ignore what the law demands would truly be a violation and miscarriage of justice. But that is not what happened. The penalty of the law was indeed fully inflicted. It is just that it was inflicted on Jesus Christ, our substitute, rather than upon us.

See Psalm 103:10. The reason he does not deal with us according to our transgressions and repay us according to our iniquities isn’t because he has ignored the demands of his law or simply waved the wand of mercy and made it all disappear. It is because he dealt with Jesus Christ, his Son and our substitute, according to our transgressions and repaid him what our iniquities deserved.

Second, this would have been a miscarriage of justice were it not for the fact that Jesus died as our substitute voluntarily. He willingly and joyfully offered up himself in our place. He was not forced or coerced or compelled against his will. READ John 10:14-18.

Third, the way this all happened is through what theologians call imputation. The guilt that was ours was imputed or reckoned to Jesus, or accounted as his, in the sense that when he hung on the cross he was treated and punished as if he were in fact the one who committed our sins and was thus deserving of our punishment. But remember, he embraced this voluntarily. His love for us was so deep and profound that he happily took up our burden.

The other side of imputation is that just as our guilt was imputed to Christ and he was punished accordingly, his righteousness was imputed to us and we are blessed and rewarded accordingly! Just as Jesus was reckoned as guilty, we are reckoned as righteous. Our sins were imputed to him. His righteousness was imputed to us!

This is what the Protestant Reformer Martin Luther called “The Great Exchange!” Praise God from whom all blessings flow!

(4) When Jesus suffered for sins it was in the place of sinners: it was “for” them, as a substitute.

You hear me speak often of the sacrifice of Christ as substitutionary. Sometimes people use the word “vicarious” to emphasize that Jesus stepped into history and did for us what we could not do for ourselves. This is the heart of substitutionary atonement. Jesus didn’t simply love us from a distance. He didn’t merely speak of his mercy or his grace. That would have been of not benefit to us. What we needed first and foremost and above all else was the sinless Son of God to become one of us, a human being, and as the God-man to live a life for us that we could not live, in complete and perfect obedience to the law of God, and to die a death that we should have died to satisfy the wrath of God that we alone deserved.

This is what Peter means when he speaks of Jesus suffering “for” us, in our place, enduring what we deserved, dying our death.

If Jesus did not die as your substitute, filling your place, standing in your stead, taking upon himself the obligation and debt that you owed God, then you must face the wrath of God, for yourself, on your own, all alone. Do you not see, then, that if there is no substitution there is no salvation? Do you not see, then, how eternally important that little word “for” is?

It is vitally important to remember that all of the many theories or models of the atonement are true. Yes, the death of Jesus exerts a “moral influence” on us insofar as it inspires us to live godly lives; to see God’s love for us in the death of Christ influences us to forsake our sinful ways and to pursue holiness of life.

The death of Jesus also provides an “example” for how we are to respond to unjustified suffering (cf. 1 Peter 2:21ff.).

Yes, God is the supreme “moral governor” of the created realm whose commitment to the interests of public law and order was vindicated and displayed in the death of Jesus (cf. Romans 3:25-26).

Yes, the death of Jesus conquered evil and was designed to undo the works of Satan (cf. 1 John 3:8) and liberate those held captive by him.

Yes, the death of Jesus was designed to restore in mankind the imago Dei (image of God) so horribly defaced (but not destroyed) by the fall into sin.

Yes, we see in the death of Jesus his voluntary submission to weakness and identification with the outcast and marginalized of society.

But all of these things are true only because his death was preeminently a dying in the place of sinners, enduring in himself (body and soul) and thereby propitiating (1 John 2:1-2; Romans 3:25) the wrath of a righteous God.

Satan was defeated and the imago Dei restored and the effects of Adam’s fall were reversed and God’s righteous rule was vindicated and an inspirational example of love and self-sacrifice was provided BECAUSE Jesus, as an expression of the incomparable love of God for sinners (Romans 5:8), voluntarily suffered the penal consequences of the law of God, the just for the unjust, dying our death, bearing “our sins in his body on the tree” (1 Peter 2:24). So long as the penal substitutionary sacrifice of Jesus is retained as foundational and fundamental to what happened on Calvary, we should joyfully celebrate and give thanks for all else that it accomplished.

(5) When Jesus died, he did it to bring sinners to God.

Assumption: we are far from God. Distant. Alienated. Separated. Far removed. Unqualified to be near him. Ignorant of him. Blind to his beauty. Deaf to his voice. Insensitive to his splendor. Indifferent to his glory.

Our greatest need isn’t that you tell me I’m ok and I’ll tell you you’re ok. Our greatest need is to get to God.

He didn’t die so you could feel better about yourself. He didn’t die so you experience a deep and abiding sense of emotional well-being. He didn’t die so you could escape the psychological torment of self-contempt.

This may at first sound strange to you, but Jesus didn’t die so you could experience redemption and deliverance from the power of sin. He didn’t die so you could be forgiven of the guilt of your sins. He didn’t die so you could be declared righteous before a holy God. He didn’t die so you could be adopted into God’s family.

Oh yes, make no mistake. It is because of his death for sinners that you can experience redemption and forgiveness and justification and adoption. But he made possible these experiences through his death so that he might bring you and me to God! Getting to God is what it’s all about. Everything else is subordinate to that one primary and all-consuming end.

Here is how John Piper put it in his excellent little book, “Fifty Reasons Jesus Came to Die.”

But what is the ultimate good in the good news? It all ends in one thing: God himself. All the words of the gospel lead to him, or they are not gospel. For example, salvation is not good news if it only saves from hell and not for God. Forgiveness is not good news if it only gives relief from guilt and doesn’t open the way to God. Justification is not good news if it only makes us legally acceptable to God but doesn’t bring fellowship with God. Redemption is not good news if it only liberates us from bondage but doesn’t bring us to God. Adoption is not good news if it only puts us in the Father’s family but not in his arms.

This is crucial. Many people seem to embrace the good news without embracing God. There is no sure evidence that we have a new heart just because we want to escape hell. That’s a perfectly natural desire, not a supernatural one. It doesn’t take a new heart to want the psychological relief of forgiveness, or the removal of God’s wrath, or the inheritance of God’s world. All these things are understandable without any spiritual change. You don’t need to be born again to want these things. The devils want them. It is not wrong to want them. Indeed it is folly not to. But the evidence that we have been changed is that we want these things because they bring us to the enjoyment of God. This is the greatest thing Christ died for. “Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God” (1 Peter 3:18).

Why is this the essence of the good news? Because we were made to experience full and lasting happiness from seeing and savoring the glory of God. If our best joy comes from something less, we are idolaters and God is dishonored. He created us in such a way that his glory is displayed through our joy in it. The gospel of Christ is the good news that at the cost of his Son’s life, God has done everything necessary to enthrall us with what will make us eternally and ever-increasingly happy, namely, himself. Long before Christ came, God revealed himself as the source of full and lasting pleasure. “You make known to me the path of life; in your presence there is fullness of joy; at your right hand are pleasures forevermore” (Psalm 16:11). Then he sent Christ to suffer “that he might bring us to God.” This means he sent Christ to bring us to the deepest, longest joy a human can have. Hear then the invitation: Turn from “the fleeting pleasures of sin” (Hebrews 11:25) and come to “pleasures forevermore.” Come to Christ.

John Piper, chapter 22, The Passion of Jesus Christ (also titled, 50 Reasons Jesus Came to Die)

“Oh, I get it Sam. Jesus died for us just like Gandhi died.” No! You don’t get it. Gandhi’s death isn’t anything like the death of Jesus. Gandhi died at the hands of a single assassin. Gandhi died as a political figure, a social revolutionary, but his death has no eternal effect on you or me. I watched the Academy Award winning film, Gandhi, starring Ben Kingsley in the title role. I was deeply moved by the sacrifices he made. I was stirred by his passion for the poor of the earth. I was convicted when I witnessed his incredible desire to see the many people of India reconciled.

But Gandhi didn’t die, the righteous for the unrighteous, in order to bring us to God. His death contributed absolutely nothing to bringing you into relationship with God. His death did nothing to wipe clean your sins. His death did nothing to satisfy and propitiate the wrath of God against you.

And neither will your death!

“O.K., Sam, I think I’m getting it. But perhaps Jesus died for us just like John F. Kennedy did.” No! You’re still not getting it. Kennedy died at the hands of a crazed man named Lee Harvey Oswald, who knows for what reason. Kennedy’s death shocked a nation, indeed the whole world. The whole world was moved to tears. The whole world mourned and wept. But the assassination of John F. Kennedy did nothing to bring me or you and anyone else to God. There was nothing in Kennedy’s death that obtained for anyone the redemption from sin.

“O.K. O.K. Don’t give up on me yet, Sam. I’m tracking with you. I’m tracking with Peter. Could it be that the death of Jesus should be compared, not to Gandhi or Kennedy but with Martin Luther King, Jr.?” No! No! You’re not tracking with me or with Peter.

Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his life to promote racial justice. He died in the cause of racial reconciliation. Whatever else you may think of King, none can deny that he accomplished more than anyone else in our history to bring to light the horrors of racial prejudice. In his life and in his death he achieved some monumental things when it comes to civil rights in America.

But his death at the hands of a hate-filled racist did nothing to reconcile us to our Creator. It was utterly incapable of satisfying the claims of divine justice against an entire globe of fallen and sinful people.

Let’s be clear about a couple of things. Whatever else you may think of Gandhi or John Kennedy or Martin Luther King, Jr. or any other great figure in human history whose death was notable and tragic and even history making, none of them were “righteous” as Jesus was righteous. No matter how much was achieved socially and politically and racially by their deaths, when it comes to their personal relationship with God someone else would have to die for them, someone who was truly and completely righteous in a way and to a degree that they never were.

All of you have seen death, in one way or another. Whether the death of an aged grandparent or a new-born child or a life-long friend or a famous politician. A few weeks ago we here in the U.S. witnessed the deaths of several famous people. All in the same week we read about the deaths of Ed McMahon, Farrah Fawcett, Billy Mays, and finally Michael Jackson. But none of them suffered and died as a sacrifice for the sins of others. None of them died as the righteous for the unrighteous. None of their deaths brought anyone, not even themselves, to God.

No one’s death in all of history has ever been in the same class or of the same quality or occurred for the same cause or achieved the same ends as did the death of Jesus.

That doesn’t mean that everyone who witnessed the death of Jesus of Nazareth knew that his death was different. They didn’t.

Describe perspective of majority of Jewish people who were drawn to him as a miracle worker but never embraced him as Lord and Savior.

Describe perspective of Roman political leaders such as Pontius Pilate. Jesus was a nuisance, a threat to the stability of the land. His death was no different from the deaths of dozens of others he had ordered, except for the fact that the Jewish crowds took an unusual interest in it.

Describe perspective of religious leaders who were personally threatened by him and thus saw his death as a relief from the pressure he put on them and the criticism he directed toward them.

Describe perspective of the soldiers who scourged him and drove nails into his hands and feet. As far as they were concerned, Jesus was just another political zealot who was causing problems in the land and needed to be eliminated and made an example so that others would not follow in his steps.

But most of all, consider the perspective of the two thieves crucified on either side of him. For one, Jesus was just another thief. The only thing that Jesus’ death meant to him was that he now didn’t have to die alone. At least another man was suffering in the same way he was. But for the other, the death of Jesus was altogether unique. The other thief, the one who by God’s grace came to saving knowledge of Jesus as he hung on his own cross, recognized that this was a death unlike any other death in the history of mankind.

Conclusion:

This is the gospel of Christianity. This is the good news. Nothing makes sense apart from this truth. The Christian faith will never mean anything to you or be of any benefit, now or in eternity, unless and until you see the truth of 1 Peter 3:18 and embrace it in your heart and soul and mind and will as your only hope for eternal life.