This episode, pulled from Pastor Joe McIntyre’s Resurrection Faith sermon series, highlights the differences in the Gospel message we often hear today versus what was preached and demonstrated by the first Christians in the Book of Acts.

• How and why did this original Gospel message get distorted?
• How can we restore this original, glorious vision for what it means to be saved and follow Christ’s example?
• How should we think about Christians who evangelize through broadcasting the 10 commandments through a megaphone, condemning people as sinners who are destined for hell?

Listen to the episode here.

Additional Resources

Resurrection Faith – Full Series Audio

Mentioned in this Episode

Christus Victor by Gustaf Aulen 

Full Transcript

Well, let’s get started tonight. We’ll pray and ask the Lord to help us. And we’ll invite him. Lord, we thank you that you live in us. And Father, you’re forming your son in us. And so we’re looking to you, to illuminate us to bring us revelation in light and understanding, so that we can be conformed to the image of your son. Father, you’ve begun a good work in us. We’re believing you to complete it. You’re bigger than all our weaknesses. You’re bigger than all our frailties. And you’re greater in us than he that’s in the world. So we ask you to live big in us tonight, and help me to bring forth the Word of God with clarity. And we ask your anointing upon it, and we ask you to anoint the ears of each one here tonight to hear what the Spirit would say to the church. Not so much what I would say, but what the Spirit would say. Father, unfold your divine purpose for us, reveal things to us. In Jesus name, Amen.

Well, we’re, we’re off on a new series tonight. A number of years ago, I taught parts of this series. I had another glorious obsession. And my obsession was with the resurrection of Christ. And I realized there’s things that we all know, in a way, but we don’t grasp the full significance of them, until we began to have the spirit open it up to us. And then we start to realize that, you know, it’s one of those things where, you know, you catch some light on something and then every place you open the Bible to you see the same thing, it’s just there and there, and there, and there. Well, the resurrection is like that.

In the history of the Atonement, studying the sacrifice of Christ and His death for us, in the early church, for the first thousand years, the emphasis was on the resurrection, and the deliverance of mankind from the thralldom of Satan. That was the major emphasis for the first thousand years of teaching. What happened, as we came into later history was the supernatural worldview that earlier cultures had, was lost to Western civilization, and Christendom suffered from that in two regards. One, that many theologians stopped believing in the devil and demons and the reality of spiritual warfare. And because of the influence of Calvinism, many people believe that God was doing everything that was happening. Everything that happened was God. God is sovereign. If you got sick, it was because God in his sovereignty wanted you sick. If your relatives died prematurely, it was because God in his sovereignty wanted them to die. Everything was the sovereignty of God.

Well, if you’ve got no devil, and God responsible for everything, that’s going to create a kind of theology. I don’t think it creates a healthy theology. The one thing that Calvinist apologists can never do is answer the problem of evil. Because if you believe God is responsible for everything directly, then God is responsible for all evil, and how can you say he’s a good God and a loving God? And the answer is really, you can’t. There has to be another way of looking at the world. And actually, the biblical worldview has the reality of spiritual conflict underlying all that goes on in it. And without that view, then we’re left with God doing everything.

In my early days of Christian living, God was sovereign. So everything that happened was him. So who needs to resist the devil? It’s all God anyway. You see? But any doctrine that leads you to disregard scriptures cannot be a correct doctrine. So if God is sovereign, so everything’s from him, then I don’t need to resist the devil yet the Bible tells me to resist the devil. So that idea that God is controlling everything and everything is filtered…the phrase that was taught to me when I was a young Christian is everything is filtered through the loving hands of your father. So if you have a car wreck today that was filtered through his filter, and if you just work out the implications of that, the devil is just on God’s leash. He can’t do anything unless God lets him. And of course, people draw that from the book of Job, because in the book of Job, there was a certain spiritual dynamic in play that we don’t realize, when we read the book of Job.

The fact of the matter is, do you ever asked yourself the question “Why could Satan come boldly into the presence of God, and accuse Satan to God, and malign Job to God?” Well, the reason he could do that was because he knew that he would not be judged, because if he was judged, all those who are under his authority would be judged with him. So he could come into the presence of God. We know that from Revelation 12, that he was the accuser of the brethren. And in Zechariah, he accuses the high priest, and we see him gradually unveiled in the Old Covenant, Job being the primary example. But you see, man really was delegated authority from God. When Satan tempted Jesus, he shows him the kingdoms of the earth in a moment of time, and he says, “all of the these kingdoms and their glory, I will give you, for they have been delivered to me.” Well, if Satan really didn’t have those, then it wasn’t even a real temptation to Jesus. But we know the temptation was sufficient enough that God had to send angelic help to Jesus to strengthen Him.

And so, we find that Jesus three times refers to Satan, as the ruler of this world. But you see, that was before the cross. Because at the cross, all of Satan’s works, and his right to condemn us and our old life in Adam, were all judged and crucified. But when God raised Jesus from the dead, (Colossians, we’ll look at in a minute here), the father, it says, stripped off from him, the rulers and authorities and made a public show of them, triumphing over them in Christ. And I’m getting ahead of myself here, but the point I’m trying to make is that because our theologians lost any real faith in the devil and demonic forces and the actual spiritual conflict that exists in the world, they created a theology that has no devil in it. That was not the worldview or the reality to which the gospel came with power in the first century. And all of the cultures tried to appease demonic forces. They may have been more or less involved in the rituals, but all of them felt that something was controlling life. And there was a sense of futility.

If you read the history of the Greeks or any of the Roman early Roman Empire, there was a couple of things you’ll note; one was that the class distinctions were very dramatic, and that poor people and and common laborers were considered nobodies. They had no status in the culture whatsoever. And this permeated all the other cultures of the day, until the church came along, and said, All men are equally valuable in the sight of God. This was a radical upheaval in Roman culture, and it eventually overthrew Roman culture, and before Constantine declared Christianity the religion of of the Roman Empire, a number of the Roman leaders and other leaders were starting to try to imitate the Christians in honoring some of the poor people and helping the poor and doing things that they had never done before. That was not part of their worldview. It was only after the church came that these things begin to happen.

I want to just go to my notes right now and kind of work through this a little bit. It’s clear that the early church preached that Christ died for our sins. Paul outlines this in First Corinthians 15, which we can take a look at here. I can read it to you. In First Corinthians 15, Paul says, “Moreover, brethren, I declare unto you the gospel which I preached to you, which also you received, in which you stand, by which also ye are saved, if you hold fast the words which I preached you, unless you believed in vain. For I delivered to you first of all, that which I also received, that Christ died for our sins, according to the scriptures, that He was buried, and that he rose again the third day, according to the Scriptures.”

And so here we see stated, the simple truth of the gospel, Christ died for our sins, and that He was buried and that he rose again the third day. Now, in our day, the gospel has been preached in a slightly different way, the same basic message, but the emphasis has greatly shifted. We preach, Christ died for your sins, receive Him as your personal Savior, and go to heaven when you die. That’s the Gospel according to modern, popular preaching. The problem with that is, although it’s certainly true and gloriously true that Christ has died for our sins, the emphasis of the New Testament is not on the fact that Christ died for our sins. It is a fact of the New Testament, but not the central fact. The central fact of the New Covenant teaching is the resurrection of Christ from the dead.

In fact, I did a survey today I’ve done it before, but I wanted to do it again, I was thinking of having us walk through it. But we’re going to take a shorter version than I wrote out, but you can’t find the phrase in the whole book of Acts, 28 chapters, “Christ died for your sins.” It was never preached. Now, it was taught that forgiveness was available, but it was taught in the light of the resurrection. There’s a book that came out in the 1930s by a gentleman named Gustaf Aulen, called Christus Victor. And he challenged the popular Protestant view of the Atonement, saying that that view wasn’t known for the first thousand years of church history. And he said, the view that was taught was the victory of Christ over evil principalities and powers, which resulted in new life coming into mankind, and the forgiveness of sins came with the new life. But the emphasis was not so much on forgiveness of sins, but on the fact that because Christ rose from the dead, defeated Satan and delivered us from Satan’s authority.

He could bestow a new life on us, and that new life delivered us from all of the past and provided a way to walk in ongoing forgiveness of sins. And, that was the message that was lost in the dark ages. And this author was suggesting that the church has taught a gospel that wasn’t the full New Testament gospel, because what we’ve said is “Yes, Christ has died for your sins, and he’s now your Savior. And yes, God raised Him from the dead to prove that he was the son of God.” But you see, in that kind of preaching, we’re not really saying man was in bondage to a fallen angel and in spiritual darkness in spiritual death, therefore, when Christ rose from the dead, he became the firstborn of a new race of beings who came forth out of the grave with him, and had been resurrected to walk in new life because that resurrection proves that Satan is defeated. And then they went around in the early, early centuries of the church, demonstrating the defeat of Satan by casting out demons, healing the sick and bringing people out of all kinds of bondages by the demonstration of the resurrection power of Christ.

When I was a young believer, and I don’t know what anyone else’s experience was, but I read all the devotional books that were recommended to me because I wanted to get my life straightened out. I’d been gloriously saved from drugs and alcohol and an immoral lifestyle. And I wanted to live right. But I had all kinds of temptations and problems. And I was really desperate to get right to stay right with God. And so I said, “Well,” you know, “what can I read? Because I like to read.” So they gave me all the devotional books. Well, the thing they told me was that I needed to die out. And I needed to be conformed to the death of Christ. And I needed to kill the old man and I needed to put to death the flesh. Well, you know, all I could conclude from that was, I would really be spiritual if I could just die. And, you know, it was a horrible project, trying to put yourself to death. I mean, you’d got you know, you’ve only got one hand and you got a hammer on this and you try to nail down that hand, you nail down your feet, but then you can’t get that last hand nailed down, so you can’t crucify yourself. So it was just a horrible situation.

But, you know, the Bible does say we are to be conformed to the image or to conform to his death, Paul prayed that he might be conformed to the death of Christ. But we have to put that in the larger context of all of what Paul said, about our identification with Christ in His death, burial and resurrection. And that conformity to the death of Christ was a willingness to face the satanic persecution and warfare that came against him because he was a messenger of Christ. And he was wanting… he had such an amazing mindset about this. He said, “We bear about in our bodies, the dying of Christ.” You see, he’s talking about partaking of the forces that put Christ to death, them coming against him. He said, “In order that the life of Jesus might be manifest in our mortal bodies.” So he said, “Our light affliction which is but for a moment is working for us a far more eternal weight of glory, while we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are unseen.”

So any Bible truth, which is emphasized out of balance with its corresponding truth, can produce a wrong perspective. We’ve heard that Christ died for our sins so that we could have forgiveness and go to heaven when we die. The early church proclaimed that Christ rose from the dead, therefore Satan’s power has been broken, and we are free from the bondage of his tyranny. We are no longer captives of death and have entered into a new kind of life. And because we have this new life, we are no longer in bondage to sin and guilt.

It’s really a an amazingly profound and positive message that in the resurrection of Christ, in fact, I hope to not get off too far off the theme here, but most theologians debate, many things, probably everything. But one of the things they discuss, I shouldn’t say debate so much as discussed, is the fact that that the the Old Testament saints were waiting for the arrival, the apocalyptic arrival of the kingdom of God in a Messianic kingdom. This was going to be a total upheaval of the world that resulted, in their thinking, of Israel being exalted at the head of nations, Messiah ruling on his throne in Jerusalem, and all nations being subdued to the newly enthrone Messiah.

Now what happened was God began the apocalyptic overthrow of all things by raising up Jesus and sitting him on his throne, but the overthrow of all nations was not instantaneous, but rather it began with the enthroning of Christ, and is being worked out in history through the body of Christ as we move toward the goal of God’s fullness of His purpose in the cycling of all nations and having the gospel spread throughout the world. And it will culminate in the second coming of Christ, wrapping up this inauguration of the new age that began and is being worked out in us, because Paul writes, in Galatians 1:4, he says, that Christ as has delivered us from this present evil age, according to the will of God.

So we are in this age, but we’re not of this age. We are tasting and participating in the age to come, which has begun in us. It’s not fully formed in us and it won’t be fully consummated in us until we get a new body. But the new age, the kingdom, age has begun. The kingdom of God is within us. The kingdom of God is not meat and drink, outward observation, but righteousness, peace and joy in the Holy Spirit.

So the kingdom came in an unexpected way. They thought it would be a total overturn of the world, setting up Messiah as king and ruler of nations. But we understand now that it’s in two phases, that the intervention has taken place in the resurrection of Christ, but that resurrection has actually begun in us in our inner man. But it will not be fulfilled in us until we get a new body. Because in one place, Paul says that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God. And yet in other places, he talks about our participation in the kingdom of God presently, and John speaks very much about the present reality, of eternal life and of the kingdom now.

So this is the thing I’ve been referring to, nowhere in the book of Acts did the disciples preach Christ died for your sins. Let’s look a little bit, let’s do a little survey of Acts here. This isn’t exhaustive. I didn’t cover, I didn’t write out all the verses. I wrote them out personally, but I didn’t put them in our notes. But in Acts, chapter one, verse 22, starting with verse 21, he says, “Therefore,”… this is when they’re wanting to choose a replacement for Judas. And it says, “Therefore, of these men who have accompanied us, all the time that the Lord Jesus went in and out among us, beginning from the baptism of John, to that day, when he was taken up from us, one of these must become a witness with us of the resurrection.”

Now, here’s the the thing that is really shocking if you’ve never heard it, and that is that they weren’t preaching Christ died for your sins. They didn’t know he died for their sins. They knew forgiveness was available, they knew Christ rose from the dead, but you can’t find in the book of Acts, where they understood that Christ was our substitute and took our place in judgment. You see, as Kenyon put it, they were walking in all the realities that were later revealed to Paul, but they had no theology for it. They just had it in experience. They were forgiven. They knew their sins were blotted out. They knew they were forgiven, don’t misunderstand me. But what I’m saying is, they didn’t have a theology of Christ’s death for their sins, they were giving witness to the resurrection. And God was confirming the witness of the resurrection with the demonstration of kingdom power.

Now, as I share this with you tonight, I’m trusting that you’re understanding that the church today needs to get back to preaching that which God confirms with power. You see, I’ve been talking with some folks who have a particular style of evangelism where they go out and take the Ten Commandments and and beat the sinner over the head with them to try to get them convicted and then lead them to Christ. Well, because some of these people have an evangelistic anointing, they get some people saved. But that doesn’t mean the message is the right message. You see, because again, I was talking with one of these guys that is interacting with one of these fellows who teaches this and I said, “Well, ask him to show you that In the Book of Acts, where they took the law and told them you’re you’re disobeying the Ten Commandments. You’re going to hell. Now you need to receive Christ as your Savior.” And this is the methodology they’re using.

Well, thank God for everybody that gets saved. But I suggested I said, “Well, what if you were moving in the Holy Spirit, and God revealed to you what the pains in their body was or what the problems they’re dealing with were, and you spoke by the Spirit and told them that? And they said, ‘Well, how did you know that?’ You said, ‘Well, God showed it to me, because he loves you, and he wants to help you. Would you like to receive Him as your Savior and confess Him as your Lord? You can have a whole new life in him and he’ll heal your body.'” And if you could demonstrate that with power, I think you’d be more effective an evangelist than trying to club people into the kingdom by telling them what an awful sinner they are. Now, they do have to come to the realization that they’re a sinner to get saved. But if they see Christ in His goodness, mercy and kindness, their selfishness will be exposed, and they’ll know they’re a sinner.

You see, I’m certainly not suggesting that the unbeliever doesn’t need to realize they’re a sinner. I’m just saying, “What’s the method by which we bring them to that knowledge?” If we preach Christ, they’ll know it or if we preach sin, they’ll know it. Which one is the New Testament model. Now, in the case of well, I’m getting ahead of myself, because I’m so excited.

So anyway, in choosing the disciple, to replace Judas, what they wanted, what they were looking for was somebody who could be a witness with them, to the resurrection of Jesus. All right, now look in Acts chapter 2, verse 22. “Men of Israel hear these words, Jesus of Nazareth, a man attested by God to you by miracles, wonders, and signs, which God did through Him in your midst, as you yourselves also know, Him, being delivered by the determined counsel and foreknowledge of God, you have taken by lawless hands, and have crucified and put to death.” Now, they’re certainly saying he died, but they just don’t say anything about him dying for our sins, do they? So he said, “So they have taken him by lawless hands have crucified and put to death, whom God raised up having loose the pains of death, because it was not possible that he should be held by it.”

Now, I want you to notice that what Peter’s emphasizing here is Jesuss defeat of death. You see, it’s overcoming death, that he’s preaching in Jesus. And then in verse 30, he says, talking about David, he says, “Therefore, being a prophet, and knowing that God had sworn with an oath, that of the fruit of his body, according to the flesh, he would raise up the Christ to sit on his throne. He foreseeing this spoke concerning the resurrection of Christ, that his soul was not left in Hades, nor did His flesh see corruption. This Jesus God has raised up of which we are all witnesses, therefore, being exalted to the right hand of God, and having received from the Father the promise of the Holy Spirit, He poured out this which you now see and hear.”

So he’s preaching the resurrection and the enthroning of Christ. And I’m convinced that we are coming into a time when the church is going to preach the gospel that the early church preached with power and demonstration of the Spirit.

Because you see, the resurrection of Christ is the defeat of death. The defeat of death is the overthrow of Satan and all his works. The law of sin and death is the whole dominion of death, and all of the results of the fall. And in what the good news that was preached in the early church was God raised Jesus from the dead, and yes, they preached you can be forgiven of your sins, but you don’t have to live under the thralldom of Satan. This was the good news. You don’t have to be oppressed. You don’t have to be hopeless. You don’t have to be despairing. You see, how many people, you know how many young people today, teenagers commit suicide?

You don’t commit suicide, unless you’re hopeless. You see, the gospel is exceedingly relevant. But first of all, the church has to come alive to the good news. So that we boldly share the good news. So that God confirms His good news in the lives of those we minister to.