Friday, October 23, 2009

Your Problem and the Answer to Your Problem

And it is because of this that I keep preaching. It is because I believe that all who die in their sins not only go to judgment but go to hell that I keep proclaiming the message. If I believed that when we all die, that is just the end of it, that our bodies just dissolve and become part of the earth and that is all, then there would be no need of a gospel. But “it is appointed unto men”—all men—“once to die, but after this the judgment” (Hebrews 9:27). Death is not the end. We go on, and we go on for all eternity. The judgment is announced; judgment is pronounced.
But, thank God, man is fallen, condemned, miserable, and helpless, but God intervenes! God comes into the wreckage. God visits man and calls him by name and addresses him. God, even at the moment of rebellion, tells man that he has a way to rescue him and to redeem him: “It [the seed of the woman] shall bruise thy [the serpent’s] head” (Genesis 3:15). The serpent, the archenemy, the power with which we cannot deal, the god of this world who is too strong for us, can only be mastered by one, and he has come—the seed of the woman, Jesus of Nazareth, the Son of God. “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that who- soever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life” (John 3:16). Christ, the Son of God, came into this world, took on our human nature, entered into our very situation, and smote our enemy. He conquered the foe and can set us free. He received judg- ment for us. He bore our sins and their punishment in his own body on a cruel cross. God dealt with him there and pardons us, and our enemy is conquered. So the way to paradise is open, and it is open for you.
Your misery, all your problems, all your needs, arise from the fact of sin. They arise because you are in this terrible position face-to-face with God. That is the cause of all ill. And there is but one solution to the problem, the solution that God himself has provided in the person of his only begotten Son. “. . . that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” And that life begins here and now—a knowledge of God, assurance that you are right with God, that God will bless you and smile upon you and give you what you need, that he will strengthen you and enable you to overcome your enemies, that he will take you through death and announce in the judgment that you are already pardoned and forgiven, that he will say to you, “Well done, thou good and faithful servant . . . inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world” (Matthew 25:21, 34).
My dear friend, that is your problem, and that is the answer to your problem. Believe it. Accept it here and now. Go to that great God, almighty beyond conception and understanding, who existed from eternity and who made all out of nothing. Cast yourself before him. Acknowledge your ignorant, arrogant sinning against him, and thank him for his eternal love in sending his only Son to rescue you and to redeem you by dying for you on Calvary’s hill, and ask him to give you life anew. And he will. I say that on the authority of his only Son who stated, “Him that cometh to me I will in no wise cast out” (John 6:37). He cast out man in sin and rebellion. Go back to him in repentance, and he will not cast you out. He will receive you and bless you.
Martyn Lloyd-Jones In The Gospel in Genesis

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