The Gospel

The word “gospel” means “good news.”  But, what is the good news and what does it mean to you? Is there some bad news?

We have a God that is so holy and pure that he cannot be near even the slightest evil. When Adam and Eve sinned in the Garden of Eden, they committed a crime of colossal proportions. Because Adam was a representative for all humanity, his treason has consequences for all humanity. His evil has resulted in a curse on all of creation. Even though God has created all people and he loves them as his creation, the part of humans that is evil is repulsive to him.

Though God has given us everything, we have not loved him or obeyed him. This is sin—the treasuring of anything above the one who is infinitely worthy. Because God is infinitely worthy, for his creation to love anything more is a direct offense against him. Because God is also completely just, this offence is a crime that cannot go unpunished. The punishment is hell and eternal suffering and it is justly deserved. But because of God’s great mercy, this is not the end of the story.

God is not an angry or mean God. What he is, however, is a God of total justice. Right is right and wrong is wrong. To make an exception would be to contradict his own character; he must be consistent with himself. But God is also a God of love, and he himself provides a solution.

And this is the Good News: the one who is a solution to the problem of our evil is Jesus Christ. Christ, who is God, became a servant for you. He leaves his place in heaven to become a person with a body. He is totally human and can feel pain and suffering, and he is also totally God. This means he is infinitely valuable and divine and glorious.

And though in your sin you have offended him, he loves you, he delights in you, he knows every special thing about you. He is the perfectly obedient Son and the agreement he makes with God the father is this: God will save up all of the anger he has towards every human being that has ever lived and sinned and he will lay all of that punishment on Christ instead.

For the ones that Christ has been given he hangs on the cross and is crucified. He goes through hell, experiencing the infinite wrath of God so that you do not have to. And because Christ then rose from the dead and the tomb was left empty, we know that the work was accomplished. It is finished.

We don’t have to wonder if what he did was enough to save us. He has gone to be with the Father and from his place in heaven he is watching you and praying for you and in a way he is representing you before God the Father. We call him an advocate, our helper, our closest brother, our help in time of need. He lived on earth and he went through all of the challenges we go through and he can sympathize and identify with our struggles because he knows that life is hard and we all need a lot of help. And then when we die, we will rise as he did and we will have new bodies and we will live eternally in heaven. We will no longer have sin or dirtiness or our pain or our tears; we will live in glory.

But until that day he has sent us the Holy Spirit to cause our hearts to trust in Christ and to be reborn. The Holy Spirit brings understanding to the believer through God’s word and conforms the sinful individual to be more like Christ. When you have trusted fully in Christ, God agrees that when he looks at you, he will not see all that you have done and all that you are, but rather he will see the beauty and obedience of his own Son who has suffered your sentence on the cross. This is called justification and it puts the one who trusts in Christ into perfect harmony with God.

What do you have to do? You have to have faith. What is faith? Faith is believing that Jesus has saved you because he suffered the wrath and anger that you deserved. Only Jesus is glorious enough to pay that price. Make no mistake: Jesus did not change the Father’s mind. The Father is not the angry one and Jesus the loving one. God the Father gave Jesus to be the solution to a horrific situation and Jesus was wholly obedient. He is the perfect and the only solution.

That is good news—the best possible news. Life is short, but eternity is forever. And it is eternity that Jesus is saving you for. Our prayer for you is that you would know the truth about yourself and the truth about the Good News of Christ and that the Holy Spirit would awaken your heart to love and trust in him as your righteousness.

“Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. Through him we have also obtained access by faith into this grace in which we stand and we rejoice in the hope of the glory of God.”        -Romans 5:1-2