Gospel Deeps: Reveling in the Excellencies of Jesus

by Jared C. Wilson, Matt Chandler Narrated by David Cochran Heath

Overview

While pastoring for the past fifteen years, Jared Wilson has become known in contemporary evangelicalism for his passionate, gospel-centered writing and teaching. Following Wilson's well-received publication of Gospel Wakefulness, he writes Gospel Deeps as a "next step" to establishing the need for astonishment, which begins by looking at the astonishing things God has done in and through Christ. Wilson holds up the gospel like a diamond and examines it facet by facet, demonstrating the riches of its implications. This book serves as a valuable contribution to the emerging canon of gospel-centered literature, in the spirit of John Piper's Pleasures of God and Tim Keller's emphasis on a "robust gospel" and continues in the glory-reveling legacy left by Jonathan Edwards, John Owen, and the like. The distinctiveness of Gospel Deeps is found in Wilson's winsome and frequently ecstatic writing voice, as well as his unique approach to showcasing the gospel's beauty.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940170170357
Publisher:	EChristian, Inc.
Publication date:	09/30/2012
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

THE GOSPEL DEEPS

"The things of the gospel are depths." — Thomas Goodwin

On the face of it, the good news of Jesus Christ is simply one thing. It is the news — not advice, instruction, or practical steps — that God saves sinners through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Depending on who we might be sharing this news with, we might want to expand a few of those details, mentioning for instance that all men and women are sinners from birth, that Jesus was God himself incarnate in human flesh, that Jesus was (and is) the Messiah, that his death was a substitutionary sacrifice, or that the resurrection was a literal resurrection of a glorified body from a real death. Or we may want to add details in order to put the gospel announcement into the context of the biblical storyline. But the basic facts are there in that first statement — God saves sinners through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ — which expresses the simple gospel in a clear and concise way.

This simple gospel is power enough to save the most hardened sinner (which is every sinner). Salvation power is conveyed through the gospel message, and received to accomplish a sinner's justification purely by a person's faith, and Jesus tells us that just a mustard seed–sized bit of faith can move mountains (Matt. 17:20). Because of this, then, we know that it is not the size or strength of the faith that saves, but the truth of the faith, and because of that, we know it is not our power that rouses our dead heart to trust Jesus, but the Spirit's power working through the gospel that is being believed. This gospel, Paul says, is the power of salvation for all who believe (Rom. 1:16).

In 1 Corinthians 15:3–4, Paul expresses the simple gospel message this way:

For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures.

Paul goes on to relay more historical detail, telling us that Jesus appeared to Peter and the other disciples, then to a crowd of five hundred, then to the apostles, and so on. But the sum of the gospel message Paul is delivering as "of first importance" is contained in verses 3 and 4: Jesus died for our sins, he was buried, and he rose again on the third day. This is the historic news that is the good news.

Simple, isn't it? But 1 Corinthians 15 is anything but simple. As we progress through it, we see that the effects of the gospel are far-reaching and creation-transforming. That the gospel would empower the all-time forgiveness of a person's sins is enormous in itself, but there's more. The rest begins with Paul's crediting the grace of the gospel for doing his good works (v. 10). Then, Paul says, the resurrection of the glorified Jesus activates the future resurrection of all believers (vv. 21–23). Then, because the gospel of Jesus's life, death, and resurrection essentially declares that he is the Messiah, the gospel's power includes the subjection and destruction of all other powers and authorities (v. 24). Finally, not even death escapes the power of the gospel, because by conquering death and the grave, Jesus kills death and the grave (v. 26).

Clearly the gospel is both simple and complex, elementary and advanced. But all of the advanced stuff won't fit on an end zone sign at the Super Bowl, so John 3:16 works just as well.

I have heard it said that the gospel is shallow enough that it is safe for a toddler to swim in, yet deep enough to drown an elephant. We might also think of it this way: We teach our little ones how to read by first teaching them their ABCs. From there, they may move on to the basic principles of phonics. ABCs and phonics are scaled for little children to grasp the English language. But some people get advanced degrees in linguistics. Same category, different levels. The gospel is like that. The ABCs of the gospel work very well for people at all levels of their faith, including wise old pastors and brilliant theologians, but it's possible to explore the ABCs into their inherent complexity.

Although a small child can learn the basics of the English language, many people will nevertheless tell you that English is not the easiest of languages to learn. In the same way, even the simple gospel can be seen less simply. Suppose we use the template "God saves sinners through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ." We could go point by point through that simple statement and find depth along the way. God saves sinners through Jesus's life? How so? Suddenly we are talking about Christ's active obedience, the tension of the incarnation, the reality of temptation and the reality of sinlessness, and the like. How does God save sinners through Jesus's death? There is a wealth of truth there, and now we are on the verge of discussing the various theories of the atonement. And since the resurrection changes everything, we are ready to talk about everything when we get to it! What sort of salvation does Jesus's resurrection enact for sinners?

What we are glimpsing now is how a wardrobe can contain a world.

When Jesus came, we got all of him. Not a bit of him was held back from us. John 1:16 says that what we get in the gospel is delivered from Jesus's fullness.

The great practical help of this truth is that no matter the day, the circumstance, the sin, or the trouble, there is a grace in the gospel demonstrating God's love for us and empowering us to glorify him. From his fullness, John 1:16 tells us, we receive grace upon grace. In the gospel there is grace for every need, because it comes through an all-sufficient Savior who is the God of steadfast love.

THE DEEP, DEEP LOVE OF GOD

We are in love with God's love. Even non-Christians admire this crucial tenet of the Christian faith, and hardly an atheist exists who does not know both that Jesus commanded us to love our neighbors (Matt. 22:39) and our enemies (Matt. 5:44) and that God is in fact love (1 John 4:8). The weddings of thousands of unbelievers every year will include the so-called "love chapter," 1 Corinthians 13. Love, we know, is the greatest of the things that remain.

Of course, the love of God is a fantastic place to start in doing gospel theology, which is why one of the first ways we teach the gospel to unbelievers or those immature in the faith is through a simple exposition of John 3:16: "For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life." But in all of this admiration, by believers and unbelievers both, it's possible we have loaded into the biblical concept of love our preconceptions and presuppositions. It's possible that in all this celebration of God's love, we actually distort the full biblical picture of the love of God.

How great is the love of God? Very, very great. The Scriptures tell us that God's love is steadfast, enduring, unceasing, separation-defying, everlasting to everlasting, and manifested in the inscrutable incarnation. We are told that God's love controls us (2 Cor. 5:14), roots and grounds us (Eph. 3:17), and surpasses knowledge (Eph. 3:19). This is not the kind of love that can be easily captured in religious sentimentalism or humanistic altruism or even romantic emotionalism. This is a specific, personal love that accomplishes things — like saving sinners (Rom. 5:8), disciplining them (Heb. 12:6), and directing their paths (Ps. 25:10) — not a vague, ethereal, "love" that "makes the world go 'round." When the Beatles sing "All you need is love," everyone sings along in agreement, but not everyone knows that while God is love, love is not God.

In fact, one of the chief ways we distort the biblical picture of God's love is when we presuppose, as many Christians do, that love demands freedom. Where we get this notion, I do not know, but it is not in the Bible. In fact, we find in the Bible quite the opposite: the love of God violates human freedoms constantly and consistently. If there's one thing any biblical figure can count on, besides that God loves him, it is that he is not in control of his own destiny. The biblical picture of God's love is bigger, stranger, and more complex than our misguided attempts to assist the gospel by anthropomorphizing God's love. "What the Bible says about the love of God is more complex and nuanced than what is allowed by mere sloganeering," D. A. Carson reminds us.

Some end up sloganeering under the guise of finally doing justice to God's love. The fashionable new waves of postmortem free will, universalism, and inclusivism allege that their views of the love of God are more reflective of the enormity depicted in the Scriptures. Instead, by carrying in philosophical presuppositions about what love must entail in order to be real love, and by seeking to commend the gospel by making this love appear as acceptable to as many people as possible, they take what is multidimensional and squash it out, in effect flattening the idea of God's love like pizza dough in a pan in order to make it look bigger.

But the bigness and depth of God's love aren't captured in flatness. They are captured in something more complex, fuller.

What every believer in every age is challenged to do is resist the innate compulsion to flatten out the expansive love of God. Does love demand freedom?

Does love demand giving the loved what he or she wants? The new inclusivists insist yes, and while their desire to maintain the biblical teachings on hell are admirable, we do not find much in the Scriptures to support the idea that, à la Lewis, the doors there are locked from the inside. The sentimental tail wags the theological dog when we say that love demands freedom, and that therefore when God consigns the unrepentant to judgment he says, "Thy will be done" to them. In one sense, he is saying this, of course, but in the most crucial sense, he is not. In that most crucial sense, when God consigns the ultimately unrepentant to eternal conscious torment, he is saying, "My will be done."

What we are asked to believe is that God doing whatever he wants with whomever he wants is a simplistic, fatalistic view of love, and that God letting us do whatever we want is a more compelling vision of his love.

No. If my daughter is unaware of the Mack truck bearing down on her, or if she is aware that putting her finger in a light socket will electrocute her but she wants to do it anyway, do I love her if I am able to intervene but defer to her freedom? Or am I a loving father to tackle her out of the truck's way, to slap her hand away from the socket?

"Ah," but some will say, "God lets children get hit by Mack trucks and electrocuted by light sockets every day." Yes, he does. And so already we are faced with what to do with this information as it relates to "God is love."

Since God loves everyone, perhaps "God is love" means he will some day tackle everyone, including the unrepentant and spiritually dead haters of God, out of the way of eternal death. Because the only other alternative, on this train of thought, is to believe that God does not in fact love everyone.

Or maybe the reality is a love more multifaceted than we can understand with finite, fallen minds. Maybe the reality is that the God of the Bible is as transcendent as he is immanent, that his ways are inscrutable, that his love is glorious and astonishing precisely because it is too wonderful for us. Maybe the heights and breadths of God's love do not refer merely to its size but also to its complexity.

In Trevor Francis's great hymn "O the Deep, Deep Love of Jesus," we sing:

O the deep, deep love of Jesus, vast, unmeasured, boundless, free! Rolling as a mighty ocean in its fullness over me! Underneath me, all around me, is the current of Thy love Leading onward, leading homeward to Thy glorious rest above!

In Walter Matheson's hymn "O Love That Will Not Let Me Go," we sing of the "ocean depths" of God's love. Francis and Matheson give us a more fitting symbol for the biblical picture of God's love. It is deep like the ocean, and not just in fathoms and leagues, but in diversity and complexity. There are clear shallows to play in and opaque depths of mystery. There are hidden places in the ocean, places we will never see, places too deep for us to go. There are things about the ocean depths small children can understand, things marine biologists still haven't figured out, and things nobody will ever discover to even have the opportunity to scrutinize. As Augustine is thought to have said, "I have seen the depths, but I cannot find the bottom."

And then, since we are alleged people of the Book, we know that the unfathomable ocean of God's love does not exist in a vacuum, hermetically sealed off from all the other "things" God is and God does. He does not say "Jacob have I loved, Esau have I also loved." And while "hated" in that instance (Mal. 1:2–3; Rom. 9:13) may not mirror the sort of hatred we are most familiar with today, this point is itself a good reminder that neither does "love" in that instance take its cue from our conception of it. The Bible shows us our God, who is love, saying and doing all sorts of things most of our more sensitive souls would not consider loving at all. We must remember, then, that God's oceanic love occupies space in the perfect balance of the infinite universe of all his attributes. He is love, yes, but he is also just and jealous. Richard Lovelace concurs, writing in his classic work Dynamics of Spiritual Life: God's mercy, patience and love must be fully preached in the church. But

they are not credible unless they are presented in tension with God's infinite power, complete and sovereign control of the universe, holiness, and righteousness. And where God's righteousness is clearly presented, compassionate warnings of his holy anger against sin must be given, and warnings also of the certainty of divine judgment in endless alienation from God which will be unimaginably worse than the literal descriptions of hell. It is no wonder that the world and the church are not awakened when our leadership is either singing a lullaby concerning these matters or presenting them in a caricature which is so grotesque that it is unbelievable.

The tension between God's holy righteousness and his compassionate mercy cannot be legitimately resolved by remolding his character into an image of pure benevolence as the church did in the nineteenth century.

It is a sad irony, then, that the ever-fashionable impulse to do justice to the depths of God's love amounts to a very dramatic exercise in one-dimensionalism. God's love is polyhedronal stuff. Woe to the flatteners of what is hyperspatial, multidimensional, intra-Trinitarian, and eternal in ways awesomer than "one year after another."

We can feel the weight of this complicated awesomeness in Paul's prayer in Ephesians 3:14–19:

For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named, that according to the riches of his glory he may grant you to be strengthened with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith — that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.

We may know a love that is beyond our knowing. (We are given the amount we need in the cross of Christ, itself a comprehensible prelude to incomprehensible "subsequent glories.") But we will need the strength of Spiritual4 power in our insidest insides to scratch the surface of this comprehension. We won't even come close with our clichés and sentimentality.

God's love is much deeper than that. It is more fascinating than that. The angels certainly find it so:

Concerning this salvation, the prophets who prophesied about the grace that was to be yours searched and inquired carefully, inquiring what person or time the Spirit of Christ in them was indicating when he predicted the sufferings of Christ and the subsequent glories. It was revealed to them that they were serving not themselves but you, in the things that have now been announced to you through those who preached the good news to you by the Holy Spirit sent from heaven, things into which angels long to look. (1 Pet. 1:10–12)

I love Peter's phrase "subsequent glories" in this passage. The atoning work of Christ unleashes a beautiful torrent of goodness, like a Pandora's Box of blessings. In 2 Peter 1:4, he tells us that through knowledge of Christ's glory and excellence, we have received "precious and very great promises," plural.

The gospel's content — Jesus's sinless life, sacrificial death, and bodily resurrection — is deep and multifaceted, but so are the implications and accomplishments of the content. Through the historical work of the gospel, future blessings pour out and stream in abundance. Paul reflects this when he speaks of the gospel this way: "In the whole world it is bearing fruit and increasing" (Col. 1:5–6). As the whole tree is in the acorn, then, so blossoming glories are in the gospel of "Christ crucified."

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "Gospel Deeps"
by .
Copyright © 2012 Jared C. Wilson.
Excerpted by permission of Good News Publishers.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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