Gospel 201: A Review of the Basics
In Christ, the Gospel is the very ground we walk on. To leave it behind is to leave the faith behind altogether. Christians are people who, by God’s grace and not by any merit of their own, have been clothed in Christ’s righteousness and welcomed into God’s family. If we don’t return to the Gospel again and again, we will fall into worldly thinking.
Many Christians who sit in a church on a Sunday morning can say that they have already found the answer to the question What Is the Gospel? They have understood the saving grace of God in the cross of Christ, have taken hold of Christ by faith, and now find themselves in Christ, clothed in His righteousness, adopted as children of the Father, and walking in the Spirit’s power. In other words, at a particular moment in time, they were born again.
Yet while the Gospel may be the beginning of the Christian life, it is not simply an initiation. No, it is a fundamental principle to which we return again and again, not because we must be saved again but because our standing with God and our hope of redemption, once established, remains forever founded on that work of Jesus for us.
So, even for those who have been saved and experience assurance of their place in God’s family, a ministry of reminder is necessary. We need to remember the essential truths of our faith. And we may do so by considering the Gospel’s source, its substance, its scope, and its ongoing significance.
The Source of the Gospel
Throughout Scripture, the Gospel is described specifically to be “the gospel of God” (e.g., Mark 1:14; Rom. 1:1; 1 Thess. 2:2; 1 Peter 4:17). In other words, the good news of Jesus is not a manmade contrivance, but it is a divine revelation. It begins with God Himself.
In Galatians 1:11, Paul writes, “I would have you know, brothers, that the gospel that was preached by me is not man’s gospel”—or, as J. B. Phillips paraphrases it, “no human invention.” The Gospel ministry of Paul and his fellow apostles was not a matter of calling people to listen to what they had to say. It emerged from their responsibility to proclaim the message God had entrusted to them.
When we proclaim the Gospel, we’re proclaiming God’s message on His behalf. We’re saying to humanity that the God who made them in His image has presented, in His Son, the only means whereby they may find salvation and meaning.
And this Gospel is not a contingency plan. It’s not as if God had one bad go with Adam, and then another with the law, and now He’s trying it another way with Jesus. God didn’t send His Son to fix His own mistake. No, the Gospel has been His eternal purpose since before the world’s creation (Eph. 3:11). Long before Jesus was born in the stable in Bethlehem, God was unfolding His eternal purpose. Peter tells us that the prophets and even the angels knew that something was coming, but they didn’t yet know it in its fullness; they longed to see it because they knew that it had its origin in God’s heart (1 Peter 1:10–12).
Temptations will confront us to leave the Gospel story behind for one reason or another, for this or that strategy, for an exciting new idea. But the Gospel is not a human story that we can take up or put down as we please. Indeed, we proclaim Jesus because “there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved” (Acts 4:12). And so we must hold firmly to God’s message of salvation for us through faith in the Son.
The Substance of the Gospel
In Romans 1:17, Paul says that in the Gospel, “the righteousness of God is revealed.” John Stott explains this “righteousness of God” well when he writes, “It is a righteous status which God requires if we are ever to stand before him, which he achieves through the atoning sacrifice of the cross, which he reveals in the gospel, and which he bestows freely on all who trust in Jesus Christ.”1 The four verbs of this definition can help us to grasp what the substance of the Gospel is.
This “righteousness of God” is first of all the “righteous status which God requires.” To stand before a holy God, we must be in a state of moral and spiritual perfection. Yet we can never attain such a state by our own power. The law shows us our imperfections, making it clear that “all our righteousnesses are as filthy rags” (Isa. 64:6 KJV).
But nevertheless, it is also a righteousness that God “achieves” in the death of His Son. In the cross, God satisfies His perfect justice by meting out the punishment for sin upon the sinless God-man, Jesus Christ. And because Christ has taken the punishment for sin, God pardons those who believe in the Lord Jesus even though we have sinned and deserve condemnation.
Thirdly, God then “reveals” this righteousness in the proclamation of the good news of Jesus. That’s why Christians are Gospel men and women. That’s why we want to be about the Gospel. That’s why we want to declare the Gospel: because in this Gospel, in this great story, is God’s answer to our problem.
And fourthly, God “bestows” this righteousness on those who come to Christ in faith. Our sin is counted to His account, and His righteousness is counted to ours, so that we stand before God with the innocence of Christ.
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The Return of Christ
While the world is wholly and willfully foolish regarding the end of the world, the Lord our God “would not have us ignorant.” The series of articles and devotionals that follow bring us to the Word of God concerning the return of Jesus Christ through the parable of the ten virgins from the first thirteen verses of Matthew 25. By God’s Grace we will consider the topic of Christ’s return and the Parable of the 10 Virgins under four general parts, each of which will have several lessons attached.
And at midnight there was a cry made, Behold, the bridegroom cometh; go ye out to meet him.
Matthew 25:6
Its 2022 and thoughts of the end of the world are common and well documented both in the academy as well as in pop culture. It’s been a trend of the last several decades in countless books, Hollywood movies, and all types of shows, podcasts, and youtube channels to depict and orate on the end of the world as we imagine it. We have been left with shows depicting apocalyptic scenarios, zombie creatures, population destroying diseases, and other imaginations. As these ideas were hitting a fever pitch an actual pandemic came that killed many around the world, leading many of the survivors to embrace greater excess, anger, violence, drugs, science so called, in an effort to enjoy or extend their lives a little longer before the end.
For many cults the end of the world plays a prominent part in their history. The Jehovah’s Witnesses have been predicting dates for Christ’s return since their beginning in the late 1800s and as recently as 1975. Similarly, the World Mission Society Church of God grew in South Korea and around the world with promises of a heavenly jerusalem descending in Korea and ushering in the end of the world. This did not happen in 1988 or in 2010 as predicted but people keep following. In evangelical circles strange ideas of the end of the world are prevalent on the internet, social media, in best selling book series’s, and on the conference circuit. The 24 hour news cycle provides ample material for 24 hour newspaper exegesis wrecking havoc on many poor souls. In academia and business alike, scientists are regularly hypothesizing about when the sun will burn out and freeze the earth; when the ozone layer will disappear destroying our air, killing all life; or when an asteroid or comet will make a direct hit and wipe out humanity as we know it. All around us, the end of the world is considered, hypothesized, and modeled but few are searching for the truth where it is always found, in Scripture alone.
The end of the world, the day of judgment, and the return of Christ are all prominent themes in Scripture. Some of the longest chapters in the gospels are dedicated to Christ’s teaching concerning the end of the world. God spoke to us through the prophets in times past giving us lessons and pictures of the end of Jerusalem and the end of the world as a whole.
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Dead in Sin… but Alive in Christ
Jesus is our Rescuer. And, according to the Bible, He rescues from sin and death. Jesus jumps into the sea of sin and death and hauls our lifeless bodies to the shore. Then, He leans low, and breathes new life into us: “But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions—it is by grace you have been saved” (Eph. 2:4-5).
Because we live in a culture obsessed with self-esteem, the concept of sin is disagreeable. The popular message of the day is that happiness and contentment comes not in change, but in simply accepting who you are. The perceived fallacies and character flaws are really not flaws at all; they’re simply preferences and everyone’s preferences are okay. The world will finally be the great place it can be when we all accept that we are different, and that one person’s differences don’t mean they’re more right than any other.
That’s not what the Bible teaches.
Instead, we find a much more pessimistic view of humanity in the pages of the book that tells us our true stories. We all, regardless of our economic situation, nation of origin, or situational upbringing are dead in our sin and transgression.
“As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins, in which you used to live when you followed the ways of this world and of the ruler of the kingdom of the air, the spirit who is now at work in those who are disobedient. All of us also lived among them at one time, gratifying the cravings of our flesh and following its desires and thoughts. Like the rest, we were by nature deserving of wrath” (Eph. 2:1-3).
Imagine yourself stranded at sea. There is no boat in sight; no piece of driftwood to hold you up. Just you and the water. Sure, you’ve had some swim lessons, but you’re no fool – you know that in this vast ocean there is only so long you can tread water.
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Happily Ever After? Sexuality, Marriage, and the Gospel
Sex without permanence, like a gospel without permanence, provides no safety at all, only a miserable striving after what cannot be grasped. Without the joy and security of marital permanence, it utterly fails in its purpose to point to the joy and security of the gospel.
A recent discussion in my home centered around a television episode in which the “happy ending” consisted of the hero and heroine deciding to move in together but not get married. I suspect most readers of this post do not believe that that is truly a happy ending. But why? Is it just because God says so? Well, that would be enough, but there is more to say about it—God has given us more.
First, we must understand that sex, in its true form, is inseparable from marriage. This is more than just saying that marriage is the only proper context for sexual expression. It means that the very essence of sex, as its Creator designed it, includes it being an expression of the marital union. You can see this if you do a study of the passages in Scripture that use the phrase “the two shall become one flesh.” This phrase refers most literally to sex itself, but it also refers to the whole marriage union, of which sex is the physical expression. C.S. Lewis explained it this way:
The Christian idea of marriage is based on Christ’s words that a man and wife are to be regarded as a single organism—for that is what the words “one flesh” would be in modern English.… The inventor of the human machine was telling us that its two halves, the male and the female, were made to be combined together in pairs, not simply on the sexual level, but totally combined. The monstrosity of sexual intercourse outside marriage is that those who indulge in it are trying to isolate one kind of union (the sexual) from all the other kinds of union which were intended to go along with it and make up the total union. The Christian attitude does not mean that there is anything wrong about sexual pleasure, any more than about the pleasure of eating. It means that you must not isolate that pleasure and try to get it by itself, any more than you ought to try to get the pleasures of taste without swallowing and digesting, by chewing things and spitting them out again.¹
Sex as a physical union has its meaning only in the context of the relational, emotional, legal union that is the whole marriage. So while Paul speaks of sex with a prostitute as “becoming one flesh” (1 Corinthians 6:16), he does so only to point out how horribly such sex fails in its God-intended meaning. That meaning is only properly expressed when sex is an expression of the marriage union. Just like a word out of context can actually carry a different meaning, so, too, sexual activity outside of the context of marriage carries a meaning different than that for which God designed it.
And that God-intended meaning is nothing less than the gospel itself. In both 1 Corinthians 6:12–20 and Ephesians 5:25–32, the union termed as “the two shall become one flesh” is described as pointing to our union with Christ. And because sex is inseparable from marriage, it is not just marriage as a one-flesh union, but also sex as the physical expression of that union that is meant to picture the union of Christ and his Bride, the Church. Sex as an expression of marital union speaks the gospel; sex independent of marriage speaks anti-gospel.
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