What's So Good About the Gospel?

I just heard from a high ranking source in NUIG Christian Union that next weeks meeting will be a discussion based on the question "What is the Gospel?" This excites me very much.

I've lost count of the amount of times I've heard this question asked over the last few months, and every time I reflect on it I'm never fully happy with what my own answer is.

There are a few snappy little sentences that sum up the Gospel quite nicely - "God with us", or "Christ in you, the hope of glory". These I like, but to a lot people they don't mean very much. They might sound very nice (and I think they do), but what's the meat of them?

I'm reminded of that scene in the cartoon version of The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe when Beaver mentions Aslan's name, and all the kids suddenly display beaming smiles of hope, despite not really having a clue who Aslan actually is.

The same thing can happen with these short little Gospel summaries. You can be left with a smile on your face upon hearing them, but then ten seconds later you're scratching your head wondering what it's all about.

I'm not going to attempt an exhaustive Gospel message in this blog, but I will quickly look at Romans 1:16-17, which reveals what the Gospel is and why it is so powerful.

First off, the what:

"For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes..." - Rom. 1:16

In other words, the Gospel is the power of God for salvation. To understand our need for salvation, we need read nothing more than Romans 1:18-32, or even take a long, hard look at ourselves. To understand the means of salvation, we need look no further than the life (and death…and then life again) of Jesus Christ.

The Gospel is good news because it addresses mans most fundamental problem – sin. When we realize our sinfulness in all its totality, only then can we see our need for salvation.

The reason Paul is so enthusiastic about the Gospel, the reason why he's willing to go to prison over it, and even die because of it, is because it is a message of salvation. It is a message that will save people, even from the very sting of death itself, because it deals effectively with the fact we have a holy God, and we are an unholy people who deserve wrath. Doesn’t such a message sound like something worth dying for?

We may then wonder how such salvation is possible. Is the Gospel basically God throwing us a rope to grab onto, and if so, then what's the point? Escapism?

Paul says why the Gospel is the power of God in the next verse, as he writes,

"...it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes...For in it the righteousness of God is revealed..."

That little word "of'" is ambiguous to say the least, but in this context we can take "righteousness of God" to mean two things, which makes the ambiguity necessary. First, it means that the righteousness that God Himself possesses is revealed. In the Gospel, we see God for who He really is. After all, as Jesus said, "if you have seen Me you have seen the Father". God made Himself known to humanity by being "with us" in Jesus, and to behold Him is to behold the very essence and character of God. In fact it is to behold God Himself.

Secondly, the “righteousness of God” refers to the righteousness that comes from God; the righteousness that is imparted to us by God Himself, which is also His own righteousness. This, above all else, is why the Gospel is good news. God hasn't just thrown us a rope. He has actually come down to our world in order to restore us and redeem us.

As Dr Arden Autry says, “Salvation isn’t about God taking us out of creation. It’s about God coming down to creation and restoring it”. These are simple words, but how often do we miss the whole point, and make Christianity sound like some belief system that takes you to a different plane of thought completely unrelated to the world around us. We damage ourselves and damage others by turning Christian salvation into an escape hatch, instead of living it out and relating the utter truth of it.

And the truth of it is that this holy and just God is also a God who desires restoration, and He accomplishes this in us by imparting His very life into all who believe in Jesus Christ. This is what Paul is talking about when he writes about the “mystery” that was hidden for ages. He reveals that mystery, which is “Christ in you, the hope of glory”. That is, our hope of being restored to being men and women who perfectly reflect the character of God. We do not become God, but we become His image bearers, as we were originally intended to be. This only comes to fruition when we die of course, but here on earth we are being transformed from one degree of glory to another, until that day when we see Him and become like Him in pure perfection.

A holy God pronounces unholy people righteous by faith, and they can now live at peace with God and in fellowship with one another, with Jesus Christ as their Lord and Saviour.

Doesn’t that sound like good news? I think so anyway.

There’s a lot more to be said about the Gospel of course, and certainly at lot more that could be unpacked from these verses, but here's a little taster anyway.