What is the Gospel?
Every year the evangelical churches here in Galway rent a stall in the Christmas market that fills the square in the centre of the city from mid-November to mid-December. We use the opportunity to share the gospel with passers-by—to explain why the Son of God left heaven and came into the world as a human being. As part of our preparation we have been going over the fundamentals of the message we are hoping to share, to make sure that everyone is clear on what the gospel is.
Surely that shouldn’t be necessary in evangelical (‘gospel’) churches?! If someone asked you to explain the Christian message in just a few minutes, would you know what to say? There are all kinds of good things that we could say, but what are the essentials that must be communicated?
There is a fair bit of confusion on this point, even among evangelicals today. One of the reasons for that is that in recent years the word ‘gospel’ has been stretched to refer to all kinds of things. About twenty years ago, D.A. Carson started asking students at seminary what the gospel is. He was surprised and troubled by the wide range of answers he received. Here are some of the things those theological students said:
‘Believe in the Lord Jesus and you will be saved.’
‘Love the Lord your God and love your neighbour as yourself.’
Do social justice: ‘make poverty history,’ ‘end abortion now,’ ‘save the planet!’
When we look at the Bible however, we discover that the gospel is news—good news about what God has done and is doing in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. The message of the gospel may lead to a whole host of things that must be done by those who embrace it, but the outworking of the gospel is not the same thing as the gospel.
So what are the key elements of this good news? When we survey the apostles’ preaching or writing about the gospel in the New Testament, we discover that there are four components that are fundamental to the good news, either explicitly or implicitly. We can sum them up in four words: God, man, Christ, response. I don’t want to suggest that the gospel can be reduced to a soundbite—these four headings summarize depths that to all eternity we will never plumb—things into which angels long to look. But these four words give accurate and convenient headings to these vast subjects.
One of the clearest places where these four elements of the gospel are set out is in Romans 1-4. In 1.16, Paul tells his readers that the gospel is the power of God for the salvation of everyone who believes. This is the theme of the rest of the letter, as Paul unpacks the gospel message step by step (chapters 1-4), and then explains some of the major implications of believing the gospel in the rest of the book. As we think about the components of the gospel message, I want to use the analogy of a picture.
I. God
This truth is like the frame in which the picture is set. God created the universe and everything and everyone in it. That means we are accountable to him. More than that, the God who created us is holy and righteous, so his standards are perfect—he cannot turn a blind eye to evil. Paul makes this clear in Romans 1.20—man is not his own master because God created world: For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse. We owe him honour and glory and obedience because he made us and owns us.
II. Man
This second element is like the mount behind the picture. The colour of the mount is chosen to set off the picture to the best advantage. In the case of the gospel, the mount is the darkest shade of black there is (Vantablack, if you’re interested—a super-black coating that absorbs up to 99.96% of visible light).
Human beings sinned against God. They committed cosmic treason by rebelling against God’s righteous rule. As Paul puts it in Romans 1.23, they exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images. What arrogance and wickedness! To behave as though anything is more glorious than Almighty God! Nor is it just certain especially bad people who do this—Paul spreads the net wider and wider in chapters 2 and 3 to include decent, moral people and religious people like the Jews until he comes to the conclusion in Romans 3.10-12: None is righteous, no, not one; no one understands; no one seeks for God. All have turned aside; together they have become worthless; no one does good, not even one.
This is the ‘bad news’ which makes the good news intelligible—the idea of a saviour is meaningless unless there is something from which you need to be saved! If someone burst into your house shouting, ‘I’m here to save you’ and proceeded to give you CPR or perform an emergency tracheotomy, you would be unlikely to thank him. Instead you’d have him arrested for assault! If you were having a heart attack or choking to death on a piece of steak you would feel very differently about his actions, but if there’s nothing wrong with you then you don’t need saved!
III. Christ
This part of the gospel is the beautiful picture itself—the most import component. An empty frame or mount isn’t much good without a picture. At the very heart of the gospel is what God has done and continues to do in Christ. God is gracious and merciful and so out of his love—just because it pleased him to do it—he decided to rescue human beings from the wrath they deserved for their rebellion against him. His solution—the only solution—was to send his Son to stand in our place: to live the life of perfect obedience to God that we can’t live and then to die the cursed death of the cross that we deserve. Paul sets this out in Romans 3.21-25: But now the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the law, although the Law and the Prophets bear witness to it—the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe. For there is no distinction: for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith.
IV. Response
A picture isn’t just painted for its own sake. It’s meant to be viewed and admired and possessed and enjoyed. So too this good news about Jesus Christ is not something that is for information only: it demands a response. Those who hear it are meant to do something—we are to believe that it is true and embrace it for ourselves. If we respond in the right way (repentance and faith), we will be saved from God’s judgment. Any other response we mean we are lost. Salvation comes through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe.
This then is the gospel. Many implications flow from this:
1. The most important one is to ask yourself, right now, if you have responded to the gospel in the right way—in repentance and faith? You have just read (perhaps for the thousandth time) the glorious good news about Jesus Christ. Millions upon millions in the world haven’t, but you have no excuse. You can’t say you didn’t hear or that it was too complicated to understand. There is much more to be said about the gospel, but you have read enough in this simple blog piece to be able to become a Christian.
2. It is so important not to confuse the message of gospel with the outworking of gospel, or we will mislead people about what it means to believe gospel. We don’t ever want to give people the impression that the gospel is about having a strong family or not getting drunk or doing drugs, or reading the Bible and attending church. All those things are valid consequences of believing gospel, but they are not themselves the gospel.
3. Our great goal in evangelism must always be to communicate this message of what God has done in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ to save human beings from the wrath to come. If we fail to get this across, we haven’t proclaimed the gospel. We may well have done other good things—we may have prepared the ground for proclaiming gospel, but we mustn’t think we have actually shared the gospel. Doing mercy ministry is not proclaiming the gospel. Doing apologetics and debating moral issues and the existence of God with atheists is not proclaiming the gospel. I am not saying these things don’t have an important place, or that they don’t include presentations of the gospel, but they are not evangelism as such. Often they are a kind of pre-evangelism: opening the way for the good news of Jesus to be set forth.
4. Following from this, we must safeguard the first place of the gospel in our thinking. Many other things are important, but they are not of first importance. Is the gospel what we are passionate about above all else? So many Christians and churches seem to be passionate about things that are not of first importance—issues like abortion, poverty, the environment, family breakdown, homosexuality, transgenderism, politics. It’s not that we shouldn’t be concerned about all these things, but the way we address them is from a gospel-centred position. All human ills are symptoms of a much deeper and more fundamental problem and the gospel addresses that. As J.I. Packer put it, ‘The gospel does bring us solutions to these problems, but it does so by first solving… the deepest of all human problems, the problem of man’s relation with his Maker…’
This helps us to keep secondary issues in their proper place and perspective as we engage with unbelievers. We don’t need to spend a lot of time talking about homosexuality with non-Christians. Of course homosexuality is an abomination, but the Bible also calls it an abomination to sow discord among brothers (Prov 6.19). Fraudulent measures are an abomination to God (Prov 11.1). God is not a man’s enemy because he is a homosexual—his wrath is upon him because he has rejected God as his God. That is true for the religious, moral, straight man as much as his polyamorous, homosexual, transgender neighbour. Every man and woman’s great need is to hear the gospel of salvation through Jesus Christ.
Now I would remind you, brothers, of the gospel I preached to you, which you received, in which you stand, and by which you are being saved, if you hold fast to the word I preached to you—unless you believed in vain. For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures. (1Cor 15.1-5)
