Power of the Gospel

July 11, 2021 Background Scripture: Romans 1 Lesson Passage: Romans 1:8 – 17 Every person born into this world of man and woman is born in sin. It has been like that since the day Cain and Abel were born. Adam sinned before any human had been conceived and born. (Adam and Eve were not born but rather created by God.) Since Adam was a sinner, all his offspring that are conceived naturally through a man and a woman are conceived in sin. Sin is both the opposite of holiness and opposed to it. Put another way, not only is sin unholy, but sin causes the sinner to actively fight against the things of God. Therefore, God has judged sin and condemned sin and the sinner to eternal damnation. This damnation is described as separated from the presence of God forever and an existence of perpetual agony and pain. It is not God’s desire that any person should be condemned to such a fate. God offers mankind a way to be delivered from such a condemnation and to spend eternity in His divine presence. Since God is all powerful, why doesn’t He pronounce this as the outcome and abolish sin in the process? That would be a violation of the very premise by which God created man in the beginning. In the beginning, God said let Us make man in Our image and after Our likeness. One of the necessary characteristics of being in the “image and likeness” of God is that man must be a free moral agent. A free moral agent has the privilege and power to make personal decisions. Therefore, a free moral agent must have choices—hence the reason why the tree of the knowledge of good and evil was placed in the Garden of Eden as a bad choice. Adam, as a free moral agent, was told about the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and warned of the consequences of eating its fruit. When Adam freely chose to eat from that tree, it was in opposition to God’s revealed will for him. That’s how sin came into this world, and now it infects all of us. Despite the presence of sin in us, we, like Adam, still retain some of the “image and likeness” of God in us. We are born in sin, and we are born as free moral agents—we have the power of personal choice. God is not going to violate mankind’s free moral agency. Instead, God uses our freedom of personal choice to give us a way to be delivered from sin. God uses a substitute to bear the penalty of sin in our stead. When God provided skins to cover Adam and Eve after sin entered the world, the life of the animal that provided its skin was the substitute for their sin. Yes, that animal paid for their sin with its own life. It was Adam and Eve’s personal decision to accept those skins from God. Here is the gospel: “God sent Jesus into the world to become the substitute for our sin. Jesus had to be born without sin. Therefore, he could not be born of man and woman. As a man, Jesus had to willingly accept being the sin substitute and bear the penalty of sin. Jesus became sin when he hung on Calvary’s cross. The penalty of sin was paid when Jesus died on Calvary’s cross. God demonstrated His approval by raising Jesus from the dead on the third day. Any person who freely accepts Jesus’ death as being in their stead, is immediately brought into right standing with God. All their sin is exchanged for Jesus’ death. Jesus became what we were, sin, so that we could become what he is, in right standing with God.” That is the simplicity of the gospel message. It demonstrates the power of God to save sinners eternally and judge their sin through a substitute. Robert C. Hudson June 12, 2021