For many years, I didn't truly see the finished work of Christ as the gospel. I certainly said I saw it that way but, in reality, I saw the work of the cross more as a potential gospel. My view was that if people would ask God to forgive their sin, He would. If a person would pray to get right with God, He would answer that prayer. If somebody would come to God in faith, the great gulf of sin that separated her from God would be bridged.
It all depended on the person - his faith - her decision. I don't see the gospel of Jesus Christ that way anymore. The gospel isn't a sales pitch in which we tell people that if they'll do this, then God will do that. The gospel is an announcement of good news. When Jesus said, "It is finished," He really meant it.
We have been justified and reconciled to God by the finished work of Christ, not by a decision that we may or may not make. The good news of the gospel isn't that God won't count our trespasses against us if we come to Him. The gospel is the news that He doesn't count our sin against us because He has come to us! As the One who came to take away the sins of the world, He has dealt with the matter of sin once for all.
Does that mean that everybody is automatically a Christian? No, not at all. A Christian is a follower of Jesus Christ; one who trusts Him and is depending on nothing or nobody else as the source of his right standing with God. I have often said that salvation is the subjective experience of an objective reality.
God has done what He has done, whether we believe it or not. We have been reconciled to Him but it is in the believing that we begin to experience the personal benefit of what He has done. Our sin has already been forgiven, but that objective reality has no personal value to us until we believe it. The Father has accepted us. That's real. It's when accept Him that we see the beauty of His acceptance and are transformed. We love Him because He first loved us.
The Emancipation Proclamation was signed by President Abraham Lincoln on January 1, 1863, setting all slaves in the United States free. That was an objective reality. However, that didn’t mean they all experientially benefited from it. Shelby Foote, in his three-volume work on the Civil War recorded the response of one slave that revealed the mindset of many. This slave said, “I don’t know nothin’ ‘bout Abraham Lincoln, ‘cept he set us free. And I don’t know nothing ‘bout that neither.”
That man's experience mirrors that of many people today. Jesus Christ has dealt with the sin of mankind. Jesus Christ has set us free from sin's tyranny over us. That's an objective fact, but that doesn't mean everybody is living out of that reality.
One theologian was asked, "When were you saved?" "Well, I suppose it was 2000 years ago," he answered. What did he mean? He meant that the objective reality of salvation took place at the cross. Trusting Christ now doesn't bring something into existence. Instead, trusting Him now is simply a response predicated on the fact that we, at last, see what He has already accomplished for us and we now believe it! We begin to live in the reality that was brought into existence at the cross. We begin to enjoy today the subjective experience of an objective reality that was settled long ago.
Remember that faith doesn't make anything happen. Faith is the evidence of things not seen. Those things are there already. They're just not seen. Through faith, the invisible reality that already exists becomes our visible experience. Through faith, the objective become subjective.
There's nothing left for God to do for mankind. He has already done it all. To proclaim the gospel is to tell people that it really is finished. To experience salvation firsthand is to believe it and live from the reality of His work on our behalf.
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