The great question that must govern any Easter series is not merely whether a sermon mentions the cross, wrath, substitution, forgiveness, or grace. The deeper question is this: does the sermon bring the hearer consciously beneath the reality that humanity in Adam stands spiritually dead before a holy God and therefore must be born again?
That is the controlling issue because Good Friday in Scripture is not simply the story of endangered sinners receiving rescue. It is the story of God vindicating His own holiness against the imputed sin of Adamic rebellion through the judgment-bearing obedience of His eternal Son, thereby laying the foundation for a new humanity in Christ.
This Good Friday sermon, “Thank You for the Cross,” utilises Rom 5:6-11 as the controlling text and contains many doctrinal strengths. The preacher, Rev. Phil Mercer, openly speaks of judgment, wrath, hell, substitution, guilt, and divine justice. Humanity is described as “powerless,” “ungodly,” and “sinners,” while Christ is repeatedly proclaimed as the substitute who “took our place in judgment.” In an age where many Easter sermons collapse into therapeutic reassurance or sentimental spirituality, these categories should not be dismissed lightly.
Yet despite these strong doctrinal formulations, the sermon never fully establishes humanity as dead in Adam.
Consequently, the necessity of the new birth never emerges organically from the sermon’s anthropology. The hearer is consistently presented as guilty, troubled, powerless, alienated, and in need of rescue. But the hearer is rarely brought consciously into the reality that fallen humanity itself lies under covenantal condemnation, corruption, and death. That absence becomes the interpretive key to nearly every weakness in the sermon.
The opening WWII holocaust concentration camp illustration immediately establishes the emotional architecture of the message. The hearer instinctively identifies with the prisoner awaiting rescue through another’s sacrifice. That framework is emotionally compelling, but it fundamentally prepares the congregation to think in terms of rescue rather than redemption. The prisoner is endangered and helpless, but not morally ruined in Adam. He is a victim awaiting deliverance, not a covenant-breaker standing beneath divine holiness. From the outset, therefore, the emotional centre of the sermon becomes human rescue rather than God’s vindication of His own righteousness.
This framing quietly shapes everything that follows. Good Friday becomes primarily about Jesus rescuing sinners from danger rather than the Triune God publicly vindicating His holiness against Adamic rebellion. The cross is repeatedly interpreted through its benefits to us: forgiveness, peace, acceptance, reconciliation, assurance, and eternal inheritance. These are glorious truths, but the Godward dimension of the atonement remains comparatively muted. Paul’s burden in Romans is not merely that sinners be rescued, but that God demonstrate His righteousness and remain just while justifying the ungodly. In this sermon, however, divine justice often functions more as the mechanism enabling our forgiveness than as the blazing public vindication of God’s own holy name.
This explains why the sermon feels strangely pastorally safe despite its strong doctrinal content. The preacher repeatedly approaches abyssal realities but rarely allows their full existential weight to settle upon the hearer. Wrath is introduced, but quickly softened into reassurance. Judgment is affirmed, but not deeply inhabited. God-forsakenness is mentioned briefly, then rapidly surrounded by the language of acceptance and love. Even the sermon’s deepest anthropological moment, the extended Piper quotation describing sin as failing to treasure God above all things, is not allowed to fully land experientially before the sermon moves quickly toward solution and comfort.
That moment is especially revealing because it briefly exposes a far deeper human problem than behavioural wrongdoing. Once sin is defined as not loving God, not treasuring His holiness, not delighting in His presence, and not fearing His wrath, the issue clearly exceeds misconduct. At that point the heart itself must become new. Yet the sermon repeatedly retreats from ontological categories back into moral and existential language. Humanity is said to be unable to “turn our lives around” or “pull ourselves together.” But this is not Paul’s language of death in Adam. It is still the language of broken people needing repair rather than dead people needing resurrection.
This becomes clearer in the sermon’s repeated descriptions of sin as “mutiny,” “rejection,” and “misconduct.” Such language certainly establishes guilt and rebellion, but it subtly frames sin primarily as voluntary human behaviour rather than inherited Adamic corruption. A mutineer may need pardon. A person guilty of misconduct may require forgiveness. But Paul’s Romans theology presents humanity as far more radically ruined. The sinner is not merely someone who has rebelled. The sinner belongs to a humanity under condemnation, death, and corruption in Adam. That humanity does not simply need rescue. It requires new creation.
This is precisely why the absence of Adam/Christ federalism is so significant. Romans 5 is not fundamentally about guilty individuals receiving help. It is about two covenant heads and two humanities. In Adam there is condemnation, death, corruption, and alienation. In Christ there is justification, righteousness, life, and resurrection. The sermon approaches these themes repeatedly but never fully enters them. Christ “lived the life we failed to live” and His righteousness is spoken of as being “transferred” to believers, yet the covenantal logic grounding that transfer remains largely unexplored. Without Adamic federalism, salvation naturally contracts into personal rescue and forgiveness rather than transfer into a new humanity united to Christ.
The necessity of the new birth therefore weakens throughout the sermon. There is almost no experiential language of becoming estranged from sin itself, mourning over corruption, hating unrighteousness, or becoming lovers of holiness. Salvation is overwhelmingly presented as relief from guilt and judgment rather than deliverance from Adamic existence itself. The hearer is invited to receive forgiveness, but not deeply confronted with the personal necessity of dying and rising with Christ. Paul’s later Romans language of crucifixion with Christ, death to sin, and slavery to righteousness remains almost entirely absent. The self remains substantially intact. It is troubled, guilty, and unable to save itself, but not radically crucified in Adam.
This also shapes the sermon’s treatment of repentance and faith. Because humanity is not deeply portrayed as spiritually dead, repentance and belief begin functioning subtly as the decisive human response that activates salvation. The preacher strongly emphasises grace and inability, yet structurally the hearer is left with the impression that salvation finally hinges upon whether one chooses to repent and believe. In a fuller Pauline framework, repentance and faith arise from resurrection life and sovereign union with Christ rather than functioning as the ultimate differentiator between the saved and the lost.
Even the sermon’s Christology contributes to this flattening. Christ’s humanity, obedience, and suffering are emphasised strongly, but His eternal divine identity remains comparatively muted. The sermon repeatedly magnifies what Jesus did more than who Jesus eternally is. The incarnation itself is treated largely as the prelude to the cross rather than the astonishing humiliation of the eternal Son descending from heavenly glory into Adamic ruin. As a result, the cross risks sounding less like the Triune God vindicating divine holiness through the incarnate Son and more like a perfect man performing a rescue mission for troubled sinners.
The treatment of wrath suffers similarly. The preacher says Christ “bore the shocking impact of God’s wrath,” yet wrath is described more as force or punishment than as the holy judicial opposition of the Father toward sin borne by the beloved Son. The profoundly Trinitarian and covenantal dimensions of Good Friday remain comparatively thin. The hearer is told that wrath happened, but not deeply brought into the terrifying reality that the eternal Son entered God-forsakenness beneath divine judgment for Adamic humanity.
Remarkably too, blood language is almost entirely absent from the sermon. The cross is framed predominantly through forensic and rescue categories: debt paid, punishment borne, justice satisfied. Yet Scripture’s sacrificial, priestly, covenantal, and cleansing categories remain largely unexplored. Blood in Scripture does not merely address guilt. It addresses defilement, uncleanness, exclusion from God’s presence, and the need for purification. Without these themes, the cross can become strangely manageable and transactional.
None of this means the sermon is liberal, shallow, or doctrinally unsound. In many respects it stands above much contemporary evangelical Easter preaching precisely because it still retains categories modern preaching frequently abandons. But the sermon repeatedly moderates the deepest implications of those doctrines. The hearer is brought near terrifying realities, but not left beneath them long enough to feel the full weight of being dead in Adam before a holy God.
Perhaps the clearest example of this structural problem appears when the sermon describes humanity’s sinful condition as “a chronic heart problem” that is “a life-threatening condition.” At first glance, the language sounds serious and weighty. Yet beneath the surface, the metaphor quietly replaces Paul’s doctrine of death in Adam with an entirely different anthropology. A “life-threatening condition” still assumes the patient is alive. The sufferer may be weak, endangered, deteriorating, and unable to heal themselves, but they nevertheless remain fundamentally living persons requiring rescue and recovery. Paul’s theology is far more radical. Humanity in Adam is not spiritually endangered. Humanity in Adam is spiritually dead. “Death spread to all men because all sinned.” The old humanity does not recover. It does not slowly heal. It does not merely need assistance, reassurance, or rescue. It stands condemned beneath divine judgment and therefore requires resurrection life through union with Christ. This is why the sermon ultimately struggles to generate the necessity of the new birth. Structurally, it repeatedly preserves the hearer within categories of sickness, danger, brokenness, and inability rather than death, crucifixion, and new creation. The result is a sermon where forgiveness becomes necessary, rescue becomes urgent, and reassurance becomes comforting, but the absolute necessity of being born again never fully emerges. The hearer is consistently treated as a troubled sinner needing salvation from danger rather than as a dead child of Adam requiring an entirely new humanity in Christ.
And that is finally the sermon’s deepest weakness within the framework of this Easter series. Scripture presents Good Friday not first as a man-centred rescue operation for troubled sinners, but as the God-centred vindication of divine holiness through the judgment-bearing obedience of the eternal Son. Human salvation flows from that reality. The cross exposes not merely that we have behaved badly, but that humanity in Adam stands condemned, corrupted, and spiritually dead before God. Therefore the sinner requires not merely forgiveness, reassurance, or rescue, but resurrection life itself.
This sermon strongly explains why sinners need pardon.
It never fully explains why humanity in Adam must be born again
