If you were to remove a spoke or two from a bicycle wheel, you’d still be able to ride with it. The more you removed, of course, the weaker the wheel would become. Try to remove the hub from the wheel, however, and your bicycle would collapse immediately. It would not stand. Today’s Epistle text gives us the hub of the Christian faith - the Gospel in a nutshell, the teaching upon which the Church stands or falls. From it radiate outward all the other teachings of the Bible. Get some of those teachings wrong and the structure weakens. Get the Gospel wrong and the structure collapses.
In Romans 3:23-25, the Apostle Paul sets forth that Gospel clearly and plainly as both the heart of his letter and the heart of Christianity. First, he reveals our problem, the reason for the Gospel - our sin. “All have sinned and fall short of [or lack] the glory of God.” Most people don’t want to hear this message. It’s for somebody else, but not for them. Even Christians get tired of hearing it. “We already know that!” they say. “What we need to hear is the Gospel.” Hearing that you are a sinner is about as much fun as hearing that you have a terminal disease. But, in fact, sin is terminal. It leads not only to physical death, but eternal death, eternal separation from God. Sadly, though, some think they only have a touch of the disease, while others deny that they’re infected at all. Paul here, however, informs us that we have all sinned and fall short of the glory of God. To fall short of the glory of God is to lack that original image of God in which He created us. In God’s image we were like God. We were perfectly righteous, holy, and blameless. We perfectly feared, loved, and trusted in God above all things. But when we disobeyed Him in the Garden, we lost that image. From that time on, humanity was conceived and born in sin. And that’s why we sin today. It’s not that our sins make us sinners; it’s because we’re sinners that we sin. And though we might not act out our sinfulness the same way that others do, we are all just as infected, just as dead in our trespasses and sins as anyone else. As James writes, “Whoever keeps the whole Law but fails in one point has become guilty of all.”
Without understanding the problem of sin there’s no Gospel. You can’t hear the Gospel without hearing that you’re a sinner first, because the Gospel is the answer to this problem. If you don’t think you have this problem, then you won’t want to hear the solution. The Gospel is the message that God declares you righteous and forgives you your sins for Christ’s sake. There are many messages today that people call the Gospel, but they’re really no Gospel at all. Some understand the Gospel as something that promotes social change and justice, including welfare and equality on earth. Some understand it as a genre of music (which may or may not, incidentally, give you the true Gospel). Still others confuse it with the Law and proclaim that you can get to heaven, if only you live a good, moral life, following Jesus’ example. But Paul makes it clear here that the Gospel is not about what you do for God, but what He does for you in Jesus. It’s not about any sort of status change in this world, but a status change before God. And it’s given to you as a gift.
Paul writes, “All are justified by God’s grace as a gift through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus.” Though Paul is very clear here, some of the words he uses are very technical. When my car mechanic tells me what’s wrong with my vehicle, he knows exactly what he’s talking about, but he must explain it to me in terms that I can understand. The first technical word Paul uses here is “justified.” To be justified is to be declared righteous. To be righteous is to be sin-free, to be restored to God’s image and glory, just as if you had never disobeyed God’s commandments. You can’t do this for yourself. You can’t declare yourself righteous; God does. But He doesn’t do this on the basis of your good works; He does it by His grace as a gift. God’s grace is His undeserved favor towards you. On account of His undeserved favor, God declares you righteous as a gift - freely, apart from your works. But this gift does come at a cost, and that cost is the redemption that Jesus has worked for you.
“Redemption” is a term that carries with it the idea of a payment or ransom. On account of our disobedience against God’s commandments, we all owe God a debt - the debt of righteousness. We owe Him our perfect obedience to His Law. But since we have failed to give Him this, we owe Him our death for having broken His Law. Since we could not pay this debt ourselves, God sent His Son, Jesus Christ, to pay this debt for us. With His perfect obedience to God’s commandments and His death on the cross, Jesus has paid in full what you owed God. Jesus is your ransom before God. Ransom also carries the idea of being freed from slavery. Not only did Jesus pay your debt to God, but He also ransomed you from your slavery under the devil. Because of our sin, we come into this world captive to the devil, to whom we justly belong and from whom we cannot free ourselves. But in his letter to the Colossian church Paul writes that God “has delivered us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of His beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.” And so, on the basis of Christ’s redeeming work, God freely and graciously justifies all who have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, transferring them from the kingdom of Satan to the kingdom of Jesus.
Next Paul shows us how this redemption was achieved by Christ. He writes that God put Jesus forward as a “propitiation by His blood.” “Propitiation” is another technical term, and it is literally a reference to the lid of the ark of the covenant in the O.T. If you ever saw Raiders of the Lost Ark you saw a copy of this ark, and you would have noticed that on the lid there were two cherubim of gold, one on each end, both facing each other, whose wings overshadowed the lid. This lid was called the mercy seat, and it covered the two stone tablets of the Law that were kept in the ark. God gave the promise that He would meet Moses there from between these two cherubim and above the mercy seat to speak with him about all the commandments he was to give the people of Israel. One of those commandments was that once a year, the high priest was to bring the blood of a bull and a goat into the temple and sprinkle that blood on top of the mercy seat to atone for the peoples’ sins. By saying that God has now put Jesus forward as a propitiation by His blood, Paul is telling us that Christ’s blood covers our infractions against God’s Law. For the sake of that blood shed on the cross once for all, God forgives your sins. And unlike those animal sacrifices that had to be offered over and over again, Jesus’ sacrifice was the perfect sacrifice. It was perfect, because He Himself is perfect God and perfect Man. And so His blood can cleanse you from all sin, because His blood is the blood of God. Jesus is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. For His sake God has mercy on you and no longer counts your sins against you.
And this mercy is universal. The Gospel is good news for the whole world, not just for Christians. As Paul writes in his second letter to the Corinthian church, “God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself, not counting their trespasses against them...” And the Apostle John writes that Jesus is the “propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world.” The Gospel message is not, “Your sins may have been taken care of by Jesus,” or “Jesus might be your Savior if...” But Jesus is your Savior and He has taken care of all of your sins. For His sake God justifies you, declares you righteous as a gift.
But because this redemption is a gift, it can be rejected. Just as Christmas presents may remain under the tree unopened, so the greatest gift that God gives to the world remains unopened by most. This is why Paul writes that it is received by faith. Faith is trust in God’s promises, and for this reason it is the only way God’s gift of salvation can be received. It can’t be received by works, otherwise it becomes a wage, something due or owed to us. Faith itself, then, can’t be a work we do to get God’s gift. Just as those presents under the tree with your name on them are yours regardless of whether you want them or not, so the gift of God has your name on it, whether you believe it or not. Put the other way around, in your Baptism God has put His Name on you, showing that you belong to Him. You are Christ’s gift to the Father. But here again the gift of Baptism can be ignored and rejected, just like the message of the Gospel. And that’s exactly what we all once did with the Lord’s gift. Later on in this letter to the Roman Christians Paul writes that it was while we were still sinners and enemies of God that God reconciled us to Himself through the death of His Son. How is it, then, that we were able to come to faith in His promise and receive His gift of salvation? “For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast.” Faith itself is a gift to you from God. It is given as the Holy Spirit works through the Gospel message itself to change your stubborn will and your rebellious heart, so that you might receive the gift of salvation that God freely gives you in Jesus.
This is the hub of the Christian faith, that we sinners are justified/declared righteous by God’s grace as a free gift through faith in His promise of redemption in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as the propitiation/the atoning sacrifice for our sins. Take this hub away, and Christianity itself collapses. Remove or distort any element of this hub, and the Gospel no longer remains the Gospel. If it is proclaimed that we are not sinners (or even not very big sinners), we don’t need Jesus. If it is proclaimed that we are justified by our own good works, we don’t need Jesus. If it is proclaimed that there are other atoning sacrifices, other gods, or other ways of salvation, we don’t need Jesus. And if it is proclaimed that Christians no longer need to continue to hear the good news about what God has done for us in Jesus, then they no longer need to come to church. If this Gospel is no longer being proclaimed in a church, then that church has ceased to be church. The Apostle Paul writes, “We preach Christ and Him crucified.” Christianity is not about you; it’s about Jesus and what He’s done for you. A church faithful to the Gospel will continue to proclaim Jesus to you.
On this Reformation Day, then, let us listen again to these words upon which the Church stands or falls, that we might never forget them, but hold fast to them, and never let anyone take them from us or tell us that we don’t need to hear them anymore. Until the day we die we will never have heard them enough. May God’s Church on earth continue to proclaim them in their truth and purity, so that your consciences might always find peace in the message that Jesus has redeemed you from your slavery under sin, death, and the devil, that He has atoned for your sins with His blood, and that for His sake God declares you righteous, holy, and blameless in His sight. Amen.