What is the Gospel

My dad, who oddly enough is in my Sunday school class, asked me a very important and pertinent question yesterday. “What is the gospel?”

As I have meditated on the question, I understand why he asked it and how important it is that we understand exactly what the gospel is. If I am to say that all of Christian life is contingent on the gospel, which is the power of God, I had better make a clear explanation of what the gospel is.

Those who spend time around me know that I speak often of God’s love as being unconditional, and that it is the unconditional love of God that gives us the latitude to break free from this world’s system and live for God. Perhaps I should make an effort to tell it exactly as it really is; God loves us without placing any conditions on us. To say simply that God’s love is unconditional is inaccurate.

This world and its law, including the law of God, absolutely demand payment for everything. There can be nothing which is completely unconditional, because law always places conditions on everything. No one gets out of this world alive. The language of law is always “If… then.” The wages of sin is death, as Paul says. “If you sin, you shall die.” Somebody has to die, as that is the condition of the law. Were God to love us completely unconditionally it would be a major violation of His own character. That would mean that we get of scott free, which cannot happen because God’s own justice must be answered or God Himself is unjust.

As Paul has said, the wages of sin is death. Someone must pay those wages in order for justice to be satisfied. So God did something incredible in sending his son, him who knew no sin, so that he might become sin for us. He paid the wages of sin himself because in our sinful condition, we couldn’t. He met the conditions of the law in a way that the world suspects is very sneaky indeed! This is one of the reasons that the cross is such an offense; it is patently unfair to our humanity (original sin) because it does not satisfy the personal accountability that self-righteousness demands. And yet, dogonnit, it is clearly perfectly legal! God outwitted the system of the world by giving himself as the wages for sin. Well played, God! Law never saw that one coming.

So God’s love in not truly unconditional, but God himself met the conditions that had to be met so He can love us freely (even as sinners). And because He has done this – paid our debt to the law - He has a legal right to love us without placing any further conditions on us. In order to be just, he cannot place further conditions on us, because to do so would be to declare Christ’s work as incomplete, which would be unjust. Justice, once served, can never be served again – especially when that justice requires the death of the unjust. So because Christ the just became unjust and died in our place, our debt is paid.

Now that alone is exceedingly good news. Oh happy condition – free from law and sin and death! This is freedom from self – from trying to pay the wages ourselves. This is death of slavish bondage to our self-seeking desire for recompense to and from God and others. But the good news of the gospel does not stop there, for if it did it would leave a mighty and frightening vacuum in our lives. If God were to remove the restraining influence of law from our lives without replacing it with something, leaving us to the nature we inherited from Adam, we would be in a worse state than before!

To be complete, the gospel must include the resurrection of Christ as well. For one thing, it is proof of his divinity. But more importantly, it tells us that if we died with Christ, we shall also live with him. And this living is in the same manner as his, resurrected from the dead never to die again, a beloved son in whom God is well pleased, always seeking to do the will of the Father because being set free we can do the will of the Father. The law was put in place to restrain the influence of self-will, our rebellious and desire-bound Adamic nature. But the law was weakened by that nature so that it became an occasion to sin, a challenge to the rebellion within us. If and when we die to that influence, God gives us His own Spirit so that we may live in a new way which is alien to the world. “For through the law I died to the law, so that I might live to God… in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in me, because I walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit.” (Galatians 2:19 and Romans 8:4, ESV translation altered)

I suppose that is a bit of a long winded answer. And I honestly believe that an eternity will not be long enough to understand all the mystery that is bound up in this exceedingly good news. It is the very center point of history – the point at which holy God contacts sinful man and expresses perfect love. All that went before and all that comes after makes little difference because it all radiates like spokes from the hub of Calvary (Luther’s analogy, not mine). But if faith starts there and seeks outward from there, all of the rest of the picture falls into place. Only in light of the cross does creation, law, the prophets and prophetic visions of things to come make sense. Only in light of the cross does life make any sense at all!

God Bless