What is the Gospel?

"What on Earth?!”
What on earth is the Gospel? If you have spent any time in an evangelical church, the Gospel is something that your pastor tells you to share with others. For others, the Gospel might be a genre of music. A few others might even use the word "Gospel" to mean "undisputed fact" ("Ain't that the Gospel truth!"). Such a variety of usage might leave one confused. So, what exactly then is the Gospel--specifically in its original Scruptural sense? Why is it the most important and soul-lifting news that one could ever hear? This essay is written to answer these questions. In what follows, I hope to give a sufficiently comprehensive definition of what the Gospel is and then describe the response that it demands from us.

Defining the Gospel
Very simply, the Gospel is the good news that God has come to save believers from their sins through Jesus Christ. While keeping this basic message in view, I want to expand it in order to provide the more comprehensive definition which follows:
“The Gospel is the good news promised in the Old Testament Scriptures that the Lord God has come to save those who believe in Jesus Christ from their sins, their punishment, and their enemies, apart from their obedience to God’s law; and to bring them into a covenantal relationship with him through the obedient life, death, resurrection, and heavenly enthronement of Jesus, their priest-king.”
I would like to spend the remainder of this section unpacking this definition for us.
1. “The Gospel is the good news…” The New Testament word for Gospel is euaggelion (pronounced euangelion), meaning “good news.” So, if anything, the Gospel is good and happy news and not bad and depressing news. The Gospel is news that is intended to make us sing; give us reason to lift up our heads with happiness, and shout for joy.
2. “…promised in the Old Testament Scriptures…” Secondly, we note that the Gospel is the fulfillment of the Old Testament Scriptures. This is an assumption that the earliest preachers of the Gospel, who where mostly Jewish, held (Lk.24:45-48; Rom.1:2; 1 Cor.15:3, 4). This in turn implies that the Old Testament Scriptures—their laws, histories, songs, wise sayings, and prophecies—all anticipate the arrival of the Gospel. One can say that the Gospel is the realization of the God-centered and God-ruled society and reality that the Old Testament Scriptures called for. We will soon see why this so.
3. “…that the Lord God…” The third thing about the Gospel is that it involves the Lord God. The Lord is the holy Creator-King of the earth. Though high and exalted, God is not detached from the affairs of humanity. Far from it. His presence and kingship cover every facet of human life. Far from being the tribal deity of the Israelites, the Lord owns the earth and its peoples. He oversees and overrules human decision and destiny. He is the sovereign who knows no rival. His love, wisdom, and power are on a class of their own. It is from within his divine wisdom that the Gospel is born and issues forth. The Lord is the giver of the Gospel.
4. “…has come to save…” Fourthly, we see that God comes in a certain way and with a certain disposition: He does not come to destroy but to save, that is, to bring out of a certain predicament.
5. “…those who believe in Jesus Christ…” Who then has God come to save? Scripture is clear he saves those who believe in the good news. He saves those who receive this good news and trust in it. “Repent and believe in the gospel,” cries John the Baptist (Mk.1:15). To be even more precise, the Lord saves those who believe in Jesus Christ for their salvation (Jn.3:16). This implies, of course, that the salvation of God does not come to all. In the end, there will be some who will be excluded from the sphere of God’s salvation.
6. “…from their sins, their punishment, and their enemies…” Sixthly, God has come to save his people from three most disturbing problems.
The first thing God rescues believers from is their sin. This presupposes that sin is indeed the real issue for the human race. Sin is more than human imperfection. No. Sin is the moral corruption and evil decay within the human heart that overflows and defiles our world. Sin is the root of humanity’s problems. Without sin, there would be no evil desire, conflict, sorrow, and suffering. And so by saving us from sin, God removes from us the cause of all our problems. In light of this, the liberation of the Gospel cannot be understood as freedom to live outside God’s reign. That is an absurdity. The Gospel does not give license to sin. Instead, the Gospel is the means by which God assimilates us into that holy society and reality that the Old Testament Scriptures anticipated. However, if sin is a central problem, then so too is God’s wrath. Sin cannot exist without God’s wrath close behind. If sin is a malignant and dark force that seeks to attack God himself, then God will retaliate in kind. Sin will not be allowed to live and the sinner must be destroyed—that creation might eventually be purged of all evil.
In spite of this, sinners need not despair. Thankfully, anger is not the only sentiment that God has toward them. Out of his own compassion and grace, God does not approach sinners with death as the only option. Instead, he comes with patient love and redeeming grace. He comes to give sinners what they do not deserve, namely, freedom from his judgment.
But the promised salvation from sin is not confined to the individual’s personal sin. We should also note that God’s promised salvation is also meant for the sinned-against, those who are victims of the sins of others. Put differently, the Gospel overcomes the enemies of those who believe. While this is not meant to encourage passivity and personal irresponsibility in those who are hurt by the sins of others, this is surely intended to comfort them. The Gospel is at the same time God’s word for the wounded and God’s judgment against the enemies of his people. I have in mind here primarily Satan and his demonic agents (Eph.6:12). However, since Satan himself is the one who works in the human “sons of obedience” (Eph.2:2), defeating him also means defeating the human enemies of the Lord’s people. The coming of God to save spells the end of Satan’s power (Lk.10:18; 11:20) and the destruction of his agents, whether spiritual or human (Rev.19:20, 21).
7. “…apart from their obedience to God’s law;…” The salvation comes “apart from their obedience to God’s law.” This is the conviction of the Apostle Paul as evident in Romans 3:20-25. “Apart from their obedience to God’s law” means that salvation is entirely unearned. It comes outside the sphere of our observance of the moral requirements of God. While we deserve to be condemned and released to our enemies, God shows us grace: He saves us even though we do not deserve it. We bring him our failures and immorality and he gives us glory and a seat in his holy palace.
8. “…and to bring them into a covenantal relationship with him…” What then is the goal of saving believers from their sins and his punishment? What does the Lord hope to achieve? As hinted under the previous point, God seeks to bring believers into a covenantal relationship with him. By this is meant that God brings his saved people into a relationship with him that is protected by promises. One such promise is in John 10:28: “I give them eternal life, and they will never perish, and no one will snatch them out of my hand” (cf. Jn.5:39). Yet another promise is located in Jeremiah 31:33-34: “But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declares the LORD: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts. And I will be their God, and they shall be my people. And no longer shall each one teach his neighbor and each his brother, saying, ‘Know the LORD,’ for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, declares the LORD. For I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more.”
From these passages, we see that the promises of God toward his people include (1) the writing of his holy law in the core of their beings (so protecting them from sin); (2) the adoption of them as his people; (3) the revealing of himself to them in great clarity and comprehensiveness; (4) the forgiveness of their sins, and (5) the preservation of his people under his ownership. What then is the nature of this covenantal relationship? More specifically, what is the relationship of God’s people to God? Scripture uses many pictures to describe it. The relationship is that of a subject to a king; a servant to a master; a friend to a friend; a son to a father, and a bride to a husband. While each of these pictures is true, each by itself cannot exhaust the entire truth. What sits at the heart of all these pictures is that the relationship is mutual and beneficial: We offer ourselves to the Lord entirely for his glory and the Lord offers himself to us completely for our good.
9. “…through the obedient life, death, resurrection, ascension, and heavenly enthronement of Jesus, their priest-king.” Granted that the Lord has come to save sinners, we are still left with one question: How will he accomplish this salvation? The answer is quite simple: By means of the life, death, resurrection, ascension, and heavenly enthronement of Jesus Christ. Apart from and outside of Jesus, God is a foreboding threat to sinners; he is a consuming fire; the master of heaven’s armies. But through Jesus, sinners see the smile of God and are swept up into the embrace of God. Who then is Jesus? He is God’s Man; the Lord’s Servant; the new representative of the human race who represents God’s people before God and whose actions will count before God as the acts of his people. In sum, Jesus is the Lord’s Man-In-Our-Place. Another way to understand this is to say that Jesus is the priest-king of his people. In the old Israelite theocracy of the Old Testament, the priest and king are both representatives of the people before God. Jesus assumes both of these offices into himself. Conceived by the Spirit of God in the womb of a virgin, and perfectly obedient and unblemished by sin through his life on earth, Jesus was the only true covenant-keeping human and the ultimate priest-king. As such, Jesus is the only one qualified to save his people. He does this in several ways which we have seen see delineated in the definition above. One thing to note before proceeding is that these ways form an entire unified, inseparable complex of events. Our salvation will not be complete if but one part was left out.
Firstly, Jesus saves us by means of his obedient life. Romans 5:19 has this to say: “For as by the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners, so by the one man’s obedience the many will be made righteous.” Standing behind these words is clearly the figure of Adam, the first man whose sin made all of humanity sinners. Jesus however is the one man whose obedience will make us all righteous. We do not become righteous on our own power—Jesus makes us righteous by his obedience. Jesus is the Second Adam, the New Man who will bring forth a new humanity.
Secondly, Jesus saves us by means of his death. Since God could not simply ignore and “forgive” sin, sin had somehow to be punished. As priest-king, Jesus became the sin-bearer and the supreme scapegoat for humanity. There is of course, an entire conceptual background to this act of substitutionary death. Under the Old Testament, God instituted the sacrificial system as a means to deal with the sins of his people. Back then, unblemished animals such as goats and lambs were allowed to take the punishment that would otherwise have to be carried by the sinner. Jesus essentially absorbs this system into himself. He becomes the final One who will carry away the sins of God’s people once and for all (Heb.9:26-28; 10:10, 12; cf. 1 Jn.4:10). We may not too often think of it this way but the sin-bearer, Jesus became unrighteous, he became sin (2 Cor.5:21; Gal.3:13): He became the liar, the thief, the drunkard, the terrorist, the rapist, the adulterer, the murderer, the blasphemer. He clothed himself with our sins. So it was that on the cross, the holy and innocent Jesus, God’s unblemished Servant, carried the sin, shame, disgrace, and guilt of God’s people, and above all, the punishment that we deserved. At the cross, the Lord, the all-consuming fire, waged holy war on his own Son, consumed him, and destroyed the sin that he carried. “Yet it was the will of the LORD to crush him; he has put him to grief,” says the prophet Isaiah (Isa.53:10).
Thirdly, Jesus saves us by means of his resurrection. In 1 Corinthians 15:17, Paul makes a startling statement: “And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins.” In Paul’s mind, the resurrection of Christ is the evidence that we are free from our sins. But how does Christ save us by means of his resurrection? In order to answer this, we need to keep in mind the representational office that Christ holds. By rising from the grave not only for himself but for us as well, Christ became the first of many to taste the new creation and pass into the new age of God’s kingdom. As our representative, Christ rose as the firstfruits of many more to come. Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15:20, “But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who fallen asleep.” Christ’s resurrection is the guarantee of the future resurrection. So in the end, both the death and resurrection of Christ together are the heart of the Gospel. They are the cardinal points of the euangelion. While all the elements of the one complex of saving work are essential, the death and resurrection of Jesus are the heart of the entire complex. They are the decisive elements “of first importance” (cf. 1 Cor.15:3); they are the goal and accomplishment of Christ’s mission. Fourthly, Jesus saves us by means of his ascension. Glorious as it may be, the resurrection is not the end but the beginning. It is the beginning of a new heavens and a new earth; it is the genesis of a new order. Following the resurrection, Christ—still acting as our representative—passes into a new mode of existence, a Spirit-energized life. He rises from the grave and then from the earth, retracing the steps of his descent (Acts 1:9). Yet, he does not reverse his incarnation. He does not reject his human nature. Rather, he takes it up with him. He was born as a human and now ascends as a human. In his ascension, Christ removes us from the gravitational pull of the world and its petty concerns and he pulls us upward and onward until we reach the place of his original dwelling—and our new home.
Fifthly, Jesus saves us by means of his heavenly enthronement in heaven as divine king and the anticipated successor to King David’s throne (Lk.1:32). Upon entering the sphere of glory, Jesus takes his place at the right hand of God. This was what the earliest Christians preached. Take Peter for example: “Let all the house of Israel therefore know for certain that God has made him both Lord and Christ, this Jesus whom you crucified!” (Acts 2:36). And again, “God exalted him at his right hand as Leader and Savior, to give repentance to Israel and forgiveness of sins” (Acts 5:31; cf. Acts 7:55, 56). It is interesting however that Paul says that we have been raised “with Christ” (Col.3:1). And even if we might still be physically on earth, we are “hidden with Christ in God” (Col.3:3). In God’s eyes, our pre-Christian identities are gone, destroyed at the cross with Jesus Christ. In God’s eyes, we are dead and risen in Jesus Christ (Rom.6:10-11). The enthroned Christ is not enthroned alone—his enthronement anchors us to heaven with him. Ephesians 2:6 declares that God has “raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus.” If Jesus is secure in heaven, so are we.
Still, one thing remains to be said concerning the identity of Jesus Christ. While we have focused mainly on Jesus’ role as God’s Man, this role does not exhaust his identity. And herein lies the greatest surprise: Jesus is also God. He is the Word of God the Father (Jn.1:1); the Son of God (Jn.1:34), and the only-begotten God who came from the Father’s side (Jn.1:18). Hebrews 1:3 states that “He is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature, and he upholds the universe by the word of his power” (Heb.1:3). As such, Jesus is nothing less than the everlasting projection of God himself. He is the Father’s duplication. Though subordinate in role, Jesus is eternal God with the Father. Thus, Jesus did not simply represent God on earth or function as God on earth. The reason he could do all this was precisely because he was himself God on earth. In Jesus, God has given us more than a mediator. He has given himself to us for our deepest needs.

Responding to the Gospel
Having seen what the Gospel is and bearing in mind that the Gospel will benefit those who believe in it, we need to look now at what this belief comprises. In sum, belief is expressed by the twin actions of repentance and faith. The two actions are distinct but are held together in one unified response.
Repentance refers to turning away from sin. In Acts 2:38, the Apostle Peter says, “Repent and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.” Also in Acts 3:19, “Repent therefore, and turn again, that your sins may be blotted out.” Given the necessity of repentance, one thing still needs to be made clear: While true repentance means that our break with sin should be decisive, it is not expected that the Christian will not have momentary relapses into sin. If this were not so, all the exhortations to godly living that we find in the epistles will not make sense. Yet, even when Christians do sin, the Gospel still applies: “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (1 Jn.1:9).
This leads us to consider the role of faith. By itself, repentance is nothing. Turning from sin must result in turning toward something else—the Lord Jesus Christ. Thus, we can say that repentance must lead to faith or belief in Jesus Christ alone for salvation. Peter says, “To him all the prophets bear witness that everyone who believes in him receives forgiveness of sins through his name” (Acts 10:43). And also, “‘Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved, you and your household’” (Acts 16:31). At this point, it is important to remind ourselves of the Apostle Paul’s differentiation between faith and works. Faith, though arising out of obedience to God’s commands (Rom.16:26), is not the same as works. Consider Romans 3:20-25: “For by works of the law no human being will be justified in his sight, since through the law comes knowledge of sin. 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.”
Consider also his words in Galatians 2:16: “We know that a person is not justified by works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ.”
We are justified by faith in Jesus Christ. We are declared innocent by faith in Jesus Christ. Faith in Jesus Christ is the act that makes us God’s people. And as such, it is the gateway into all the other benefits that come with our salvation—including even our personal sanctity. Without the Gospel, there will be no hope for personal holiness. This implies that the Gospel, though received freely apart from any merit of our own, will not result in ungodliness. The work of God possesses all the transformative power to turn wicked and disgraced sinners into the holy ones who will ever live in the dazzling brilliance of God’s presence.

Conclusion
Why then is the Gospel the most important news that we can ever hear? It is so because it promises an end to sin and judgment for those who believe. Hopefully, we have by now caught a glimpse of the unparalleled wonder of the Gospel. It is the work of God himself for our salvation, accomplished by Jesus Christ, and received by us in faith apart from our (imperfect) obedience to divine law. The Gospel is certainly underserved. It issues from God’s own grace and from the abundance of his own resources. We do nothing to receive it except turn from sin and rely entirely on Jesus Christ to save us. In believing the Gospel, we leave our pasts behind and enter a future of glory—a future that is protected by God himself and secured in the exalted Jesus Christ. Such a future is now available to us. Let us hasten to claim it.