THE GLAD TIDINGS OF GOD
D. Robertson
Acts 4: 12; Hebrews 10: 14–17; 1 Corinthians 8: 5, 6 (to “the Father”)
The glad tidings involves the speaking of faith, and it also involves the speaking of God for, as the scripture says, it is “God’s glad tidings”, Romans 1: 1. These glad tidings have their source in God Himself, and that distinguishes them from all the other speakings in this world.
The world is full of speaking, men speaking relative to one cause or another, but there is one speaking that stands out supremely and that is, “God’s glad tidings”. We cannot afford to neglect listening to what is coming from God Himself. One man, you remember, was conscious of having a word from God. He said, “I have a word from God unto thee”, Judges 3: 20. What a word it was, a word of judgment. Thank God we are not preaching judgment, we are preaching the glad tidings and it is unto you. It is “God’s glad tidings ... concerning his Son ... Jesus Christ our Lord”, Romans 1: 1–4. God has no other man to speak to you about.
Of course He may have to speak to you about yourself. In God’s grace He might have to tell you that you are a sinner, but if He is telling you that He has a reason. His reason is that you might be brought to know salvation. That is what God has in His thoughts for sinners. Men have a very different thought about God than that; as the scripture says, they think God is harsh (Luke 19: 21). God is not like that. He tells us in the Scriptures, My thoughts towards you are thoughts of peace and not of evil (Jeremiah 29: 11). There is no evil thought in God’s heart towards any creature in this world. God’s thoughts are thoughts of peace. God’s desire is that all men should be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth (1 Timothy 2: 4). How wonderful God is! He is the source of blessing, of grace, of love and of goodness. One could write—
‘Great God of wonders! all Thy ways
Are wondrous, matchless, and divine’. (Hymn 262)
Those of us who have come to know Him as a Saviour God can say, Amen, to that. He has wrought wonders in the lives of persons in this very room.
The greatest miracle that can happen today is the conversion of a sinner. Why is that? Because the sinner is dead in his sins. That is a moral state of death. Only God could meet that state. He is the great God of wonders. He is speaking to you the sinner about the Saviour, and He says, “And salvation is in none other”. There is only one Saviour and that is the Lord Jesus Christ. Men, even religious men in this country, are divided in their thoughts about that now. They are speaking about comparative or alternative religions and making way for influences from sources that do not regard the Lord Jesus Christ as the only Saviour. That is not faith’s language. There is only one Saviour, and if you refuse Him there is no other. That is the language of faith.
I say in simplicity on God’s behalf to you, there is only one Saviour, Jesus. I hope He is your Saviour. Thank God He is mine. He is so because God has operated in my heart through grace and drawn me to know Him. No one comes to Him who does not feel their need. Jesus is a willing Saviour, and a needy sinner will find a willing Saviour. It says, “him that comes to me I will not at all cast out”, John 6: 37. If you read the gospels you will find there were persons who came to Jesus at all times. We read of one man who came to Jesus by night.
There was never anyone turned away, “him that comes to me I will not at all cast out”. It is simple language that the youngest can understand. I am appealing to every one here, and I would ask you if Jesus is your Saviour. Have you put your faith in Him? You say, Well where can I get faith? God is willing to give you faith. It is the gift of God. I cannot give you it, the person that loves you most in this world cannot give you it, but God can give you the gift of faith so that you might put your trust in the Lord Jesus Christ.
How very simple the message is, “salvation is in none other, for neither is there another name under heaven which is given among men by which we must be saved”. Think of that little word ‘must’ coming in there. God would compel you in divine grace that you must be saved.
There is nothing you need more, if you are a sinner, than salvation; that is what the sinner needs, you must be saved. Thank God there is a Saviour for sinners, the Lord Jesus Christ. O, that all here might be amongst those who have put their trust in Him.
There are two great features of the glad tidings. One is the Person of Christ and the other is the work of Christ. It says, “thou shalt call his name Jesus, for he shall save his people from their sins” (Matthew 1: 21); that is the Person of Christ. The work of Christ is the other great feature of the glad tidings. That is what I want to speak about in Hebrews 10. It speaks about the one Offering, “For by one offering he has perfected in perpetuity the sanctified”. That opens up a wonderful truth, the grandeur of the work of Christ. The Saviour has accomplished the work of redemption. He has accomplished that great work that God might have a basis upon which He can bless the sinner. There would be no salvation, no blessing for the sinner, apart from the Lord Jesus suffering on the cross. No other work could effect atonement, no other work could accomplish salvation for the sinner. Mr. Coates says so beautifully in his hymn—
‘If sinners ever were to know
The depths of love divine,
All Calv’ry’s weakness and its woe,
Blest Saviour, must be Thine’. (Hymn 431)
Think of what it meant for the Lord Jesus, that this salvation might be so readily available to you. God could not pass sin by, He could not pass the sinner by. Divine justice had to be satisfied and the claims of God’s throne answered.
What could meet it? The one offering of Jesus! We often quote the words, and we need to be very conscious of a sense of reverence as we quote them for they are the words of the Lord Jesus as He suffered on the cross at Calvary, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”, Matthew 27: 46. O what words these are, the words of the Lord Jesus, the words of the Saviour, the words of the One who was accomplishing this one Offering, the only Offering that could satisfy God with respect to the question of sin and sins. There was no other one, no other person, no other offering that could meet the claims of a righteous God. What underlay it was that life of perfection, in which He qualified, one speaks reverently, to be the Sin Offering meet for God. If there had been one flaw in that life, one omission, He would have been disqualified, but it was a perfect Offering. He was holy, He was sinless, He was completely free from any charge of guilt of any kind, no offence could be laid against Jesus.
He was not only perfect in the sight of men, although His perfection was witnessed to publicly, but He was perfect in the sight of God; it was that blessed Person, that holy, spotless One who made that one Offering on the cross at Calvary. O what a Saviour He is!
It says, “For by one offering he has perfected in perpetuity the sanctified”. Scripture speaks of “the sanctified”, that is, those who have been cleansed and have been secured for the glory of God, through the efficacy of this great work of Christ. The Lord Jesus Christ had to go this way if blessing was to be ours. This blessed Person could call worlds into being, that is who Christ really is, and yet He stooped to take the sinner’s place.
‘Came to the world His hands had made,
And stooped to take the sinner’s place’. (Hymn 407)
Think of such a Person, the One who is over all God blessed for ever, and yet coming into manhood to die, to suffer in your stead and mine, to accomplish this one Offering that a perfect salvation might be offered to us. Some people preach that you can be saved today and lost tomorrow. It is a denial of the glory of the work of Christ. God has accepted that work in all its perfection, and what God offers on the basis of this one Offering is eternal salvation. It is a wonderful thing to have faith in Christ and in His finished work. The work never needs to be repeated, it stands in its perfection. The only basis for settled peace of soul is the finished work of the Lord Jesus Christ, “For by one offering he has perfected in perpetuity the sanctified”.
Then it says, “the Holy. Spirit also bears us witness of it”. The Lord Jesus accomplished the work, He died, He shed His precious blood, He went into the grave and destroyed the power of death. He rose from it, a victorious Saviour, and He has set Himself down at the right hand of the greatness on high. The Holy Spirit has come down and He is bearing witness to this completed work. Think of a divine Person active in convicting men of the glory of this work that stands in its value for time and for eternity. That is the work that our salvation depends upon, it is eternal. It is like the Saviour Himself. Friend, this is solid ground, not sinking sand.
This is not something like the miry clay that the psalmist speaks of when he says, “And he brought me up ... out of the miry clay, and set my feet upon a rock”, Psalm 40: 2. Those of us who know Christ are standing on that rock, and the Holy Spirit, a divine Person, is here to testify of it. It is so important. You might have said, Could God not have sent an angel as He did in the Old Testament? It was too important for that. It requires the presence of a divine Person to bear witness of it. The Holy Spirit has borne faithful witness throughout the whole dispensation and will continue to do so until the dispensation ends. What a testimony the witness of the Holy Spirit is.
It speaks of the new covenant here, that is another blessed thing. Another family will come into the light of it in another day, but you and I can come into the spirit of the new covenant now. What does it mean? It means that whereas before, in the old dispensation, God righteously required from man what man could never give, in this time God has come out in His love in the supply of grace towards him. That is the spirit of the new covenant. It is the outflowing of the heart of God that has been made known in the Person and in the death of Jesus. The Holy Spirit would bear witness to it that we might be drawn into the joy of it, and that our hearts might be full of the love of God, as the word says, “the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Spirit which has been given to us”, Romans 5: 5. Think of what can happen in a heart that was once full of malice and bitterness towards God, as for example in a man like Saul of Tarsus, or in any one of us, for all our hearts naturally are dark and estranged from God. Think of conversion taking place by the power of God’s grace coming into our lives and changing us, so that instead of our hearts being filled with these bitter feelings towards God they become full of the love of God.
So that is why I read in 1 Corinthians. It says, “to us there is one God, the Father”. That is a very important word, “to us”, referring to believers. I trust we all belong to that “us”. There was teaching that affirmed that God is the Father of every man. That is not the truth. God is the Creator of every man but He is the Father of those who receive Christ. It is the privilege of each one who believes on His name. Not only are his sins forgiven, not only does he receive the gift of the Holy Spirit, but he has God as his Father. Dear young believer, you have God as your Father. How well off you are. What blessings God has bestowed upon you.
God has operated in our lives through divine grace, giving us a knowledge of the Saviour, filling our hearts with the assurance of the glory and the stability of that glorious atoning work, giving us the Spirit to indwell our hearts and filling our hearts with the knowledge that He Himself is our Father. You can pray to God as your own Father. What a privilege!
Paul in the fulness of his soul could say, “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenlies in Christ”, Ephesians 1: 3. You might have thought it would have been enough to say, ‘With many spiritual blessings in the heavenlies in Christ’, but scripture does not say that, it says, “with every spiritual blessing in the heavenlies”, meaning that God has not withheld any blessing He has in mind. From the beginning Satan sowed the seed of doubt in man’s mind when he said, Hath God said? (Genesis 3: 1). In other words, he said, God has kept something back from you. God has come out in Christ, His own Son, and He has proved that He has held nothing back in the way of blessing for men. He has brought us into every blessing, “every spiritual blessing in the heavenlies in Christ”; not just material blessings, but spiritual blessings. You say, What does that mean? I will tell you what these spiritual blessings are, they are blessings that not even death can rob you of, that is spiritual blessings. Some of us here are getting older. We may be called to die. Even young persons may have to die. But one thing, spiritual blessings will not be affected by the power of death. They are eternal blessings. They are “in the heavenlies in Christ”. He is there in heaven and the blessings are all centred in that blessed Man. What a Person He is! What a God we are speaking of, “the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ”.
O that we might all be enriched in the knowledge of God as Father; as we are enriched in it we will become more responsive. The finished work of Christ has many aspects. In John’s gospel He says, “I have completed the work which thou gavest me that I should do it”. There was no other who could do it. I think the finished work in John’s gospel includes that the Lord would leave a circle of men here on earth who had the capacity to respond to God. It had in mind that men should not merely have relief from their sins and from the pressure of death, but also that they would have power by the Spirit to respond to the blessed Source of all good. What a thing it is to know God as our Father and to be able to respond to Him in the language of scripture, and in the language that the Holy Spirit would help us to employ. Think of the believer crying, “Abba, Father” (Romans 8: 15), a term of wonderful intimacy.
There is only one Saviour, there is only one work, and thank God too there is one Spirit given to the believer to indwell his heart, to fill him with a sense of peace and joy. The word says,
“Now the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing”, Romans 15: 13. That would be the result of the Spirit indwelling the heart. Then not only that, but we can say with others, “to us there is one God the Father”. May God bless the word.
Preaching at Edinburgh (Loanhead)
19 June 1994