The Good News

We use language like, “I gave him the gospel”. What does that mean? It means, “I gave him the good news. Gospel is Greek for good news. In this case the good news. The Gospel is the good news of good news. It is not the ten o’clock news. It is actually good news. We are therefore left with two questions to answer. 1) What is the good news? 2) What makes this news so good? If we do not ask these questions separately, we run a great risk of saying something is the Gospel that is not, or that something is a part of the Gospel that is not. There is a difference between what the Gospel is and what the Gospel contains. There is a difference between a jug of water and the water. The jug is the jug without the water. It may seem to you that I am splitting hairs. Perhaps, I will grant this. But I do not mind splitting hairs over something that the Apostle Paul claims in not so many words to be the purpose of our lives. So what is the Gospel?
In 1 Corinthians 15 the Gospel is defined for us as the good news that Christ died for our sins, was buried, and rose again. That’s the jug. That’s it. That’s the Gospel.
It’s in the “why is that good news?” that things get tricky. To answer these questions, over the years we have come up with all sorts of little phrases to describe the teachings that answer that question. We talk about “justification by faith”, “total depravity”, and the penal/subsitutionary atonement. I would say that the conclusions we come to on these ideas are considerably important, and can affect the preaching of the Gospel. But “justification by faith” is not the gospel, anymore that the water contained in the jug is the jug. For that matter, God is not the Gospel. The Bible is not the Gospel. You are not the Gospel. Social equality is not the Gospel. The Gospel is the Gospel.
So why is the good news so good? It is because we are all individually hopeless sinners who have no way of saving ourselves, or earning a lenient relationship with a God who requires nothing less than holiness, blamelessness, and moral perfection. The good news is good because God acted. He did what only He can do. He provided the atonement necessary to cover our sin. He was the blameless, Holy, morally perfect sacrifice. In Christ we are not hopeless, but utterly hopeful, perfectly hopeful. We have an assured hope that in Christ, we are saved from our sin, and its penalty, death. By death I mean, separation from God eternally.
The good news is good because, Jesus was buried just like the rest of us will be. He lived a human life, and died a human death. Because He lived a human life, He is able to understand our pain and suffering. We can go to a God with assurance that He knows our pain.
The good news is good because Jesus came back to life. As the second Adam, second representative of humanity, He effectively defeated eternal death. Because He lives, so can we.
The one caveat is this. The good news only becomes effective upon our accepting it on faith. Faith is simply belief. There are some objective things that we must accept in order to believe the good news. We must believe that Jesus’ death was penal in nature, and that he died in our place. We must believe that He rose physically from the dead. We must believe that He is God, otherwise, how is He a perfect sacrifice? We must believe that He is also human, otherwise, how could we know Him, and how could he actually die, and really be a sacrifice? There are all these things that are not the good news, but are absolutely essential parts of the good news.
The more subjective things that we are required to believe in order to accept the gospel are the most difficult. We must accept that we need a Savior. This is humbling. That our good works are not good enough, and our bad works are so bad as to require God Himself becoming a man to die a gruesome death by crucifixion is really humbling. And when you think about it this way, the goodness of the good news increases and decreases as you realize more or less how much you need a savior. The more you understand the size of the gap that was created between you and God by your own sin, the better the news is that that gap has been filled by Christ. This is the part where many people stumble. And is it not conceivable that many brilliant arguments have been built up against the Gospel, on the basis of the offence of the cross, the unwillingness to admit that one really needs a savior? When we share the good news with people, we need to get straight to the heart of the matter, which is that Jesus died for them.
What has all of my hairsplitting accomplished? I would not deny the importance of explaining to people the gravity of their situation, the penalty of their sin, and their justification by faith. Does it really matter that these things are not the gospel themselves? It matters as it pertains to the order in which we present the Gospel. In my life I have found the suggested order to be effective in getting people to see the truth of the Gospel on their own without getting bogged down trying to figure out why this stranger is coming up to them and the first things he tells them is that they’re hell bound. Usually we present the Gospel as bad news, good news, in that order. What if we just told people the Gospel and helped them see to see the implications and why it was good news. They would see their sin in light of the cross, and therefore be able to see their sin how God sees it. Whenever people are led to get something on their own, they are more apt to understand it and own it. Is that not what we’re going for in our sharing of the Gospel?
Sharing the Gospel with people, particularly strangers, is very awkward and uncomfortable for all of us. Of course this does not remove the mandate to share the good news. I am now saving a lot of comments for another day and time, but what I have found, at least for myself, is that I spend so much time trying to find the most convincing arguments, the most comfortable way to approach someone one, the most clever ideas, is that I never actually share the good news with people. At Steamtown’s First Friday Outreach in June, I wrote the words, “There Is Good News” on the Wyoming Avenue sidewalk. And people stopped, and asked me, “What is this Good News?” It’s never been easier to share the Gospel than when I decided to share the Gospel, and then let it go from there. From the death, to the burial, to the Resurrection, to “all have sinned and fall short”, to justification by faith, to eternal security, and the Incarnation all mixed in.

Doubt

In our day and age, philosophically speaking, doubt is synonymous with temperance and/or moderation, and can therefore be viewed as a virtue. But for those who experience doubt in a personal way, it can be painful. Is there a time when rashness in decision making is advised? Ironically, God has left the decision of our salvation, in some sense, up to us. In other words, we can hear the offer of salvation through Jesus and reject it. The time we have in which to make the decision is indeterminate. "It is appointed unto man once to die, and after this the judgment" says the writer of Hebrews". None of us knows the appointed day of our death, and subsequently judgment. So at what point does the questioning become the rejection? Certainly one cannot question and accept at the same time? Still, the decision to accept Christ is not a true decision to accept Christ if it is on the basis of merely escaping the judgment. The decision must be genuine. A person must actually believe that Christ's death and resurrection is his only hope of escaping judgment. No one wants to be judged, but faith (accepting Christ in this case)doesn't just hope that a few words will count. You can't say, "I'll say this prayer and hope it works". No. True faith truly believes. Hence what makes doubt painful. You cannot believe without truly believing, and you cannot know that you believe without believing.
But is there good reason to doubt the Bible's account of things, how one knows God, receives salvation, finds meaning and purpose in life? I think there's good reason to believe. You ought to ask me (Pastor Matt) if you're curious. I am trying to shorten these posts.