The word “gospel” is mentioned frequently today within the church, yet sometimes we use this word without grasping its full meaning. In this sermon, R.C. Sproul presents a clear, biblical definition of the gospel. He shows us how the Apostle Paul yearned for his Jewish listeners to understand this good news and believe in the risen Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.

Let us continue our study of the book of Acts as we turn our attention to Acts 13. I am going to start earlier, since I did not get all the way to verse 33 last time. So, I will read Acts 13:26–39:

“Men and brethren, sons of the family of Abraham, and those among you who fear God, to you the word of this salvation has been sent. For those who dwell in Jerusalem, and their rulers, because they did not know Him, nor even the voices of the Prophets which are read every Sabbath, have fulfilled them in condemning Him. And though they found no cause for death in Him, they asked Pilate that He should be put to death. Now when they had fulfilled all that was written concerning Him, they took Him down from the tree and laid Him in a tomb. But God raised Him from the dead. He was seen for many days by those who came up with Him from Galilee to Jerusalem, who are His witnesses to the people. And we declare to you glad tidings—that promise which was made to the fathers. God has fulfilled this for us their children, in that He has raised up Jesus. As it is also written in the second Psalm:

‘You are My Son,
Today I have begotten You.’

And that He raised Him from the dead, no more to return to corruption, He has spoken thus:

‘I will give you the sure mercies of David.’

Therefore He also says in another Psalm:

‘You will not allow Your Holy One to see corruption.’

“For David, after he had served his own generation by the will of God, fell asleep, was buried with his fathers, and saw corruption; but He whom God raised up saw no corruption. Therefore let it be known to you, brethren, that through this Man is preached to you the forgiveness of sins; and by Him everyone who believes is justified from all things from which you could not be justified by the law of Moses.

He who has ears to hear the Word of God, let him hear it.

Father, grant us ears to hear, to really hear the essence of the gospel that is set forth in this first recorded sermon of the Apostle Paul. By Your Holy Spirit, take these words and pierce our own souls, that we may be renewed by the power of the gospel. For we ask it in Jesus’ name. Amen.

Your Messiah Has Come

I do not know what it was like in your house growing up, but in my family, we were taught to give a certain measure of respect and friendliness to the close friends and associates of our parents, although they were not blood relatives. For example, my father had a corporate bankruptcy firm in Pittsburgh. He had a whole stable of attorneys who worked for the firm, and most of them were Jewish in their faith.

My dad would often bring home some of his attorneys who were close to him, and we would have meals together. They treated us with great love and affection, and we responded by calling these men “uncles” and their wives “aunts.” I remember my uncle, Ben Feldstein, who was one of these attorneys, and how well he treated us.

The same was true in Vesta’s family because her father was in the garment industry. He spent a week of every month in New York City dealing with the owners of various garment manufacturing companies, every one of whom was Jewish. So, Vesta grew up with Uncle Herman and Uncle Sam.

After Vesta and I were married, Uncle Herman would go out of his way to take us out for dinner or send us steaks; he was so gracious. Uncle Sam and Aunt Gert, as a wedding gift, sent Vesta and me to Bermuda for our honeymoon. Those were nice uncles and aunts to have. They did more things for us than my real uncles and aunts were able to do.

But I will never forget Uncle Sam’s wife, Aunt Gert, who lived in Brooklyn. She was the prototype for Rosalind Russell’s Auntie Mame, if you remember that. She was really a pistol. One day, we were talking, and she said, “R.C., you and your Christianity—if it just wouldn’t have been for Jesus, we would agree on everything.” I said, “It’s a brilliant insight, Aunt Gert, but the fact is Jesus did come, and we don’t agree at all about who He was, do we?”

Recently, we went back to visit New York, and we stayed at a lovely hotel. While we were at the hotel, there was a celebration of the most sacred holy day of the Jewish people: Yom Kippur, or the Day of Atonement. This past week, I saw more Hasidic Jews than I have seen since I was in Jerusalem.

As I watched the procession of Hasidic Jews coming into the hotel, going to their celebration, I wanted to get up on a table and call out to them, not in anger. but I felt a sense of lead in my stomach. I wanted to say to them, “Don’t you understand that your Messiah has come?”

There is no need to celebrate the Day of Atonement unless you celebrate the supreme atonement that was offered once and for all by the Son of God, so perfect in its sufficiency and completion that it made any further ritualistic repetitions of that atonement irrelevant. But I was burdened by watching the results of my Jewish friends who were caught up in unbelief. I got a taste of the feelings that burdened the Apostle Paul when he came to Pisidian Antioch, as recorded in Scripture in this text.

The Son of God Condemned

In Romans 9, Paul takes a sacred vow before God. His love for his kinsmen according to the flesh, Israel, was so deep and so great that he was willing, if possible, to exchange his own salvation so that they might be saved.

Jesus commanded the church to go to the Jew first and then to the gentile. Remember our Lord weeping over Jerusalem, and how He came to His own, but His own received Him not. That is one of the great tragedies of human history.

That is part of the message that Paul gives here in Pisidian Antioch when he says to the people: “Men and brethren, sons of the family of Abraham, and those among you who fear God, to you the word of this salvation has been sent. For those who dwell in Jerusalem, and their rulers, because they did not know Him, nor even the voices of the Prophets which are read every Sabbath, have fulfilled them in condemning Him.”

Do you hear what Paul is saying? In essence, “Your friends in Jerusalem, the people who never miss coming into the temple on the Sabbath, who love the study of the Torah, who search the Scriptures week after week, fulfilled the very Scriptures they were reading by condemning the Son of God.” Paul continues:

And though they found no cause for death in Him, they asked Pilate that He should be put to death. Now when they had fulfilled all that was written concerning Him, they took Him down from the tree and laid Him in a tomb. But God raised Him from the dead. He was seen for many days by those who came up with Him from Galilee to Jerusalem, who are His witnesses to the people. And we declare to you glad tidings—that promise which was made to the fathers. God has fulfilled this for us their children, in that He has raised up Jesus. As it is also written in the second Psalm . . .

Back One Thousand Years

I have said before that when Paul comes into the synagogue, his approach is to reach back into the pages of the Old Testament, back to the promises God made to Abraham and to the exodus led by Moses. Then he brings his listeners to a pivotal point in Jewish history—the reign of David. Paul explains how God promised certain things to David, specifically that his kingdom would last forever and that one of his descendants would sit on the throne from everlasting to everlasting.

David was the great warrior-king of Israel, and he was also the poet laureate of the nation, who composed the majority of the Psalms. Paul gets their attention. He says: “Look at David. Listen to David. Pay attention to the Psalms, because those things that David said by the Holy Ghost have now come to pass.”

Do you remember what significant thing happened in the year AD 1004? Does that date ring a bell with you? Me neither. I do not remember anything of any significance that happened in the year 1004. I do know that it was more than fifty years before the Battle of Hastings, which was fought in 1066, and something happened at that time that is of great personal significance to me. After the Battle of Hastings, the king of Scotland hired one of the mercenaries, brought him back to Scotland, and put him with the clan at Loch Lomond. That man sired a whole family of Scottish Presbyterian ministers for generations to come, and I am of that line. We go back to 1066, but I do not know what happened in my family before that.

The year 1066 is before Thomas Aquinas. It is before Lorenzo de Medici and the Renaissance in Florence, Italy. It is before the pilgrims set sail for the New World. It is before the Protestant Reformation. It is before every significant thing that we study in the history of Western civilization. It was a time when Western Europe was slowly beginning to crawl out of what we sometimes call the “Dark Ages.” The only significance of the date 1004 to me today is that it was over one thousand years ago.

That is what Paul is doing here. What if I said to you this morning, “I want you to pay attention to what someone said in 1004 because what that person predicted would happen just took place recently”? That is what Paul does. He takes them back one thousand years to the writings of David, and he quotes some of those writings.

A Shout of Resurrection

Paul says, “Look, it is written in the second Psalm.” This is the Psalm that portrays a world in hostility against God. Marshalling all the forces of the earth, the kings of the earth set themselves against the Lord and against His Messiah, saying, “Let us cast their bonds asunder. Let us be liberated from the domination of God.”

David says, in essence: “He who sits in the heavens looks down at this and laughs. The Lord holds them in derision.” Then David warns the people that God has placed His Messiah in front of them, saying: “This is My Son, today I have begotten Him. Kiss the Son, lest He be angry, and you perish in the way.” Paul says to his Jewish friends: “Did you hear that? You didn’t kiss the Son; you killed the Son. But God declared Him as His only begotten.”

This is fascinating because Paul does not go back to the days of Jesus’ baptism, where the heavens opened and the voice came from heaven, saying, “This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased” (Matt. 3:17). Neither does he go to the mountain where, again, the voice comes from heaven and God says: “This is My beloved Son. Hear Him!” (Luke 9:35).

Even when God spoke audibly from heaven, it was nothing compared to the shout that took place in Jerusalem when He raised Jesus from the dead. Paul is saying in effect that when God raised Jesus from the dead, that was the fulfillment of His statement in the Psalms, where God said, “Today—this day, the day of resurrection—You are My begotten One.”

Free of Corruption

Paul goes on to say:

And that He raised Him from the dead, no more to return to corruption, He has spoken thus:

“I will give you the sure mercies of David.”

Therefore He also says in another Psalm:

“You will not allow Your Holy One to see corruption.”

In the Bible, both in the Old Testament and the New Testament, we have narrative records of people being raised from the dead. But every one of those people subsequently died and was buried, and their bodies decomposed in the ground.

Just yesterday, Vesta had me watching one of her favorite television channels, the Archaeology Channel. We were watching a program about the excavation of an ancient Egyptian pyramid, in which an Egyptologist gave close-ups of the remains of an ancient Egyptian who lived one thousand years before King Tut.

We saw vivid pictures of the skeleton in the crypt, while the expert was calling attention to aspects of the skeleton, saying, “This person was so many years old, and he died from this, and he had recovered from that.” He gave all these facts that only a skilled medical examiner could deduce from the skeletal remains. Then he said, “I guess, in a sense, he’s had a kind of immortality.” I looked at that, and I said: “I see a skeleton. I don’t see a whole lot of immortality here.” But I also thought, as I looked at the remains of this ancient Egyptian, that his body underwent the same changes that everyone’s body goes through.

The gospel of John records the death of Lazarus, who had been dead for a few days. The Bible, particularly in the old King James Version, tells us that when Jesus came to the gravesite, it was said of Lazarus, “He stinketh.” I guess the Elizabethan form of the statement makes it kinder than simply saying, “He stinks.”

That is what happens to all of us. When we die, the tissue of the body begins to decay, and we rot in the grave—until that day of resurrection, when we will receive a new body that is imperishable and incorruptible.

Paul is saying that in fulfillment of the prophecy of David, when Jesus was raised from the dead, unlike anyone else who was ever raised, there was no return to death. In fact, in the time that Jesus spent in the tomb, from the end of His life on Calvary’s hill, there was not the slightest bit of decomposition in His body. His flesh was as secure and solid on the day of resurrection as it was on the day they buried Him.

Do you know why that is? Do you know why it is that our bodies rot in the grave? Why does the Bible use the term “corruption” for that decomposition when speaking of physical decay? It is because the physical decay of our body is inseparably related to the moral decay of our souls. That is why the body of Jesus did not decay physically, because there was no corruption in Him that would justify the corruption of His flesh. God said, “I will not permit Him to see corruption.”

Justified by Faith Alone

Paul is saying, in essence: “This Jesus, God has raised from the dead. We saw Him, He appeared to all these people, and we are declaring Him to you today. We are declaring to you the gospel, that with this triumph over death comes the forgiveness of sins, the forgiveness of your corruption for everyone who puts their trust in Him.”

Paul, as he always does in the proclamation of the gospel, teaches with it the doctrine of justification by faith alone. Essentially, “If you put your trust in this One whom God has raised, all of your sins are forgiven that cannot be forgiven through the law of Moses.” As he says in verse 39, “Everyone who believes is justified from all things from which you could not be justified by the law of Moses.”

I recently received a letter from a Roman Catholic attorney who was very complimentary. He said he listens to our radio program every day and profits from it. He said the one thing that frustrates him is that I keep insisting on the doctrine of justification by faith alone. He wrote to me: “You’re so close to the Roman Catholic Church. Why can’t you make the final plunge? Why don’t you do this? You know better. You know the Bible doesn’t teach that and you’re just being dishonest by telling people about justification by faith alone.” I did not have the heart to write back and say: “If I’m wrong on this, I’m going to sleep in tomorrow morning. I’m not going to join Rome, because Rome gives me no hope whatsoever.”

My only hope is in the righteousness of someone else. I cleave to that, because this is the heart and soul of the Christian faith, and because the Bible says, “By the works of the law no flesh shall be justified” (Gal. 2:16).

You just cannot make it that way. The only way that we can make it is through the only begotten Son of God, whose perfect life and perfect death are vindicated by the divine resurrection and the promise of forgiveness for all of our sins. That is why we are here today; that is why we come to the table, lest we ever forget what Jesus said: “Do this in remembrance of Me. As often as you come together and drink of the cup and eat of the bread, you show forth My death until I come.”

This transcript has been lightly edited for readability.