A Sermon by Peter Masters: Apparently my drive to work has become the setting for all sorts of unexpected theological adventures. One day last week the featured message on SermonAudio was Peter Masters preaching The Glorious Gospel Defined. The title alone caught my attention. There is something wonderfully overwhelming about the very expression “the glorious Gospel” – as though the words themselves are already directing us away from everything small in ourselves and toward Christ.
What especially caught me was not Peter Masters himself – I had never even heard of him – but the direction of what I was hearing. Again and again the emphasis seemed to move away from man and toward Christ. And when he came to the righteousness of God, and said in effect that our righteousness is not something found in us but in Christ Himself, I found myself leaping for joy. I actually pulled over on the side of the road and shared it with three different individuals.
Sadly, that is often the way I operate. Something strikes me deeply, I get excited about it, and before I have had time to examine every implication, I am already sharing it with somebody else. Well, naturally, once I had shared it, somebody raised a question. Then another question followed. And before long I was searching for a transcript of a sermon by a man I had never heard of twenty-four hours earlier. One of my friends eventually sent me the entire transcript, and although I have no desire to dissect every sentence of the message, I did want to go back and look carefully at the portion that had so deeply encouraged me.
Here it is: “The righteousness of God in verse 17. Romans 1:17. Is the gift, the free gift of righteousness credited freely to our moral account if we trust in Christ. Even more, the righteousness of God in verse 17 is a person. It is Christ, the second person of the Godhead. The righteousness of God is Christ. He personally will come down like rain upon the mown grass. Righteousness will descend from heaven. Those are the prophecies. Christ will come and live a perfect life, and suffer and die to atone for the sins of all who trust in him. He is our righteousness.”
Reading it now, I certainly see things that I would not say in precisely that way. “If we trust in Christ” sounds conditional to my ears, and the closing expression – Christ dying “to atone for the sins of all who trust in him” – puts the order differently than I would. I would rather say that those for whom Christ died are brought to trust Him. The order matters. Faith is not what determines whom Christ redeemed, nor is it what causes His redeeming work to become effective for a particular sinner. Christ died for His people, and those for whom He died are brought to faith. And “the second person of the Godhead,” while perfectly familiar theological language, is not language I normally adopt.
But here is what interests me. None of that changes what made me pull the car over. What overwhelmed me was the direction of the whole passage. Christ is our righteousness. Christ came. Christ lived the perfect life. Christ suffered. Christ died. Christ is the whole ground of our acceptance before God. I was not being directed inward to search for something in myself that might commend me to God. I was being directed outward to Christ.
Perhaps that is what I want to hold onto here. Careful reading may require us to qualify certain expressions, but careful reading should not make us incapable of rejoicing when Christ is plainly being set before us as everything. And in this passage, that is exactly what I heard: “He is our righteousness.” Jeremiah 23:6. MPJ