The Foundation of the Gospel; 1 Cor. 15:1, 2

The question we have addressed: What is the gospel? This is so important to understand. The starting point for understanding the Christian life is to understand the gospel, not merely understanding it enough to believe it for salvation, for justification for phase one salvation. They realise that their faith is in Christ alone as the only object of their faith, that they are saved only because of what Jesus did, that anything else is superfluous and nothing else matters, and they are saved. At that instant God imputes to them the perfect righteousness of Jesus Christ. That means God’s perfect righteousness is credited to their account. It is as if you had a negative balance of ten-million dollars in your account which is analogous to sin, all of our righteousnesses are as filthy rags and no matter how good you are you the bottom line is you have a ten-million dollar deficit in your moral bank account. And you can never make that up, there aren’t enough good deeds in the world to ever get you even to the point of having a positive balance. Yet the riches of Jesus Christ’s righteousness are put in that account the instant you put faith alone in Christ alone. It is not because you have never sinned, it has nothing to do with that.

The gospel can be presented as simply as “believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and you will be saved,” Acts 16:31, or it can be much more profound, depending on the person you are talking with, depending on the circumstances, depending on how much garbage is in their soul, depending on how long it has been since they have had any kind of understanding of biblical truth. Some people have been prepared. But then there are unprepared people who have to be approached in a slightly different manner.

What Paul is beginning to get to in the first two verses in chapter fifteen is that there are real implications to the gospel and the starting point is that we learn grace. The irreducible minimum in salvation is that we recognize that we are lost, under condemnation in some sense, and the only way out is Jesus Christ. But in our post-salvation spiritual life as we are growing and advancing in the spiritual life we have to understand what grace is. Grace is the foundation for understanding concepts of His forgiveness, love, the on-going relationship of God with a believer who is in carnality, and if we don’t understand grace which comes from understanding the gospel and what Christ did on the cross then we are never going to be able to understand these other concepts in the Christian life. So Paul again and again and again goes back to the essence of the gospel and what is included in the gospel in order to unpack these various emphases on grace. So he says, “Now I make known to you, brethren, the gospel which I preached to you, which also you received.”

Now we have to understand two phrases which at first glance seem to suggest something different from what they teach: “which also you received, in which also you stand.” When we see “which also you received” we tend to take that as the fact of their acceptance of the gospel. They accepted the gospel, they trusted Christ and they were saved; “in which also you stand”: well we stand in the grace of God, we stand positionally in Christ. So our first glance interpretation of those two phrases has to do with personal salvation and positional truth. Well, if that is how we understand it we are wrong. That is not how this is being used.

We have to go back and have a look at what happened in Acts 18 which records what happened when Paul first took the gospel to Corinth.

Acts 18:1 ^NASB “After these things he left Athens and went to Corinth. [2] And he found a Jew named Aquila, a native of Pontus, having recently come from Italy with his wife Priscilla, because Claudius had commanded all the Jews to leave Rome. He came to them.” So what we learn about Aquila and Priscilla is that they are Jews who were born in the diaspora, they are from Pontus, that they travelled around a bit and were living in Rome when Claudius delivered an anti-Semitic decree demanding that all Jews leave Rome. [3] “and because he was of the same trade, he stayed with them and they were working, for by trade they were tent-makers. [4] And he was reasoning in the synagogue every Sabbath and trying to persuade Jews and Greeks.” Paul was following the principle of to the Jew first and also to the Greeks. The word “reasoning” is the word from which we get our English word “dialogue,” so it is not a monologue, which is what we are used to in preaching and teaching in a local church, and which was standard afterwards in the early church, but this is in a different context. This is the Greek word dialegomai [dialegomai], a deponent verb, treated as an active verb. The imperfect tense is progressive and indicates ongoing action in past time. So this isn’t something that happened on one Sabbath, this is something that is pictured happening on Sabbath after Sabbath after Sabbath over a period of time. So this was a progressive thing that was going on for a while. The basic meaning of the verb is to converse, to discuss, to argue, to inform or instruct in a way that may also include an exchange of views or questions and answers. This gives Paul an opportunity to present the case for Christ and for those there to say, Well what do you mean, the Messiah has come? How do you know He is the Messiah? Then he could go through the evidence from the Old Testament and so there would be a dialogue. He was not simply making an announcement and then walking out the door but he was answering their questions, there was dialogue, a give and take. He reasoned, giving the evidence from the Old Testament that Jesus of Nazareth was indeed the promised Messiah who died on the cross as a substitute for our sins. As a result of that he persuaded both Jews and Greeks. The Greeks here are not the pagan Greeks outside of the synagogue, these are Gentiles, Greek proselytes who had been attending the synagogue and who had some Old Testament background.

Acts 18:5 ^NASB “But when Silas and Timothy came down from Macedonia, Paul {began} devoting himself completely to the word, solemnly testifying to the Jews that Jesus was the Christ.” There is where we get the content. What is the focus of his reasoning in the synagogue? That Jesus is the Messiah. [6] “But when they resisted and blasphemed, he shook out his garments and said to them, ‘Your blood {be} on your own heads! I am clean. From now on I will go to the Gentiles’. [7] Then he left there and went to the house of a man named Titius Justus, a worshiper of God, whose house was next to the synagogue. [8] Crispus, the leader of the synagogue, believed in the Lord with all his household, and many of the Corinthians when they heard were believing and being baptized.” This gives us the response. Crispus “believed,” aorist active indicative of the verb pisteuo [pisteuw] which means to trust, to rely on, to believe. The concept of belief is the idea that you are trusting in a proposition. Faith is always directed toward a proposition. The faith-rest drill is doing what? Basic definition: mixing your faith with the promises of God. What are the promises of God? They are propositions in Scripture. Everything in our relationship with God is mediated through written documentation. We aren’t saved because we have a relationship with Jesus. Judas had a relationship with Jesus and he wasn’t saved. Everything that we have in our relationship to God is ultimately grounded in a written, legal document. What does that mean? They are propositions. Because we have that guarantee we can have a relationship with Jesus Christ but it comes after the propositional understanding and it is based on that.

So what we see here is that this is how they received the gospel. It is not talking about personal reception in terms of faith alone in Christ alone, it is talking about the fact that historically “I made known to you the gospel, which you (plural) received.” As a group what they heard, what they accepted when Paul was there in Corinth was what they accepted. It was the truth, the orthodox gospel. They received that. They had an orthodox statement that they had accepted as a body and there is a danger of them losing the implication of that. There is a group in the New Testament that did lose the implication of the gospel, did lose the gospel, and departed from what they had received, and that is the Galatians where we see almost identical terminology in Galatians 1:11 ^NASB “For I would have you know, brethren, that the gospel which was preached by me is not according to man.” But we pick up the context in verse 6: “I am amazed that you are so quickly deserting [metatithemi/ metatiqhmi] Him who called you by the grace of Christ, for a different [e(teroj] gospel.” They are turning away, deserting, running out on God by deserting the gospel. [7] “which is {really} not another [allos/ alloj, another of the same kind]; only there are some who are disturbing you and want to distort the gospel of Christ. [8] But even if we, or an angel from heaven, should preach to you a gospel contrary to what we have preached to you, he is to be accursed! [9] As we have said before, so I say again now, if any man is preaching to you a gospel contrary to what you received, he is to be accursed!” The word “received” there is paralambano [paralambanw], the same verb we have for reception in 1 Corinthians 15:1, and it is not talking about individual belief, it is talking about the group or the corporate acceptance of the orthodox gospel. [11] “For I would have you know [gnwrizw], brethren, that the gospel [e)uaggelion] which was preached [e)uaggelizw] by me is not according to man.” So here we see that in a parallel passage we find out that this concept of receiving the gospel that Paul talks about in 1 Corinthians 15:1 is not talking about individual reception but he is talking about the fact that we as a body of believers accepted the orthodox truth at one point.

Then he goes on to say, “in which also you stand.” That isn‘t talking about positional truth but is where we start seeing the real impact here; it is not positional, it is experiential. It is like “stand firm in the gospel.” There are various mandates in the New Testament, e.g. 1 Peter 5:12 ^NASB “…I have written to you briefly, exhorting and testifying that this is the true grace of God. Stand firm in it!” When it is an imperative it means that we need to apply the principle.