The Gospel According To PaulSýnishorn

The Essential Elements of the Message

The gospel of Jesus Christ is a message of divine accomplishment. It is an announcement that Christ has already triumphed over sin and death on behalf of hopeless sinners who lay hold of His redemption by faith alone. This is grace-based religion. The focus is on what God has already done for sinners.

But to appreciate how such a message is good news, a person must know himself to be a wretched sinner, incapable of making an adequate atonement and therefore powerless to earn any righteous merit of his own—much less obtain redemption for himself. The sinner must feel the weight of his guilt and know that God is a righteous Judge who will not sanction sin. Indeed, he or she must be prepared to confess that perfect justice demands the condemnation of guilty souls.

That means a clear message about the reality of sin and the hopeless state of fallen humanity is a necessary starting point for the gospel’s good news. That’s why the gospel according to Paul begins with a guilty verdict that applies to all humanity. “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God." People apart from Christ are “condemned already." Any person “who does not believe the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God abides on him." Or, as Paul says in the preamble to his brilliant gospel summary in Ephesians, unredeemed people are “dead in trespasses and sins,” walking “according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, the spirit who now works in the sons of disobedience,” conducting themselves in the lusts of their flesh, “fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind.”

But here’s the good news: true believers are united with Christ “through faith," and therefore they too are “in Christ." God accepts them and blesses them on that basis. That is how He “justifies the ungodly. He credits them with a righteousness that is not their own—an alien righteousness, reckoned to their account.

Paul prominently features this truth in his own testimony. His heart’s desire, he said, was to “be found in [Christ], not having my own righteousness, which is from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ, the righteousness which is from God by faith."