I sometimes worry we have settled for a little gospel, a miniaturized version that cannot address the robust problems of our world. But as close to us as the pages of a nearby Bible, we can find the Bible’s robust gospel, a gospel that is much bigger than many of us have dared to believe:
The gospel is the story of the work of the triune God (Father, Son, and Spirit) to completely restore broken image-bearers (Gen. 1:26?27) in the context of the community of faith (Israel, Kingdom, and Church) through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ and the gift of the Pentecostal Spirit, to union with God and communion with others for the good of the world.
The gospel may be bigger than this description, but it is certainly not smaller. And as we declare this robust gospel in the face of our real, robust problems, we will rediscover just how different it is from the small gospel we sometimes have believed and proclaimed.
1. The robust gospel is a story. Jesus didn’t drop out of the heavens one snowy night in Bethlehem to a world hushed for Advent. Instead, Jesus’ birth came in the midst of a story with a beginning, a problem, and a lengthy history. When Jesus stood up to announce the “gospel of the kingdom” (Matt. 4:23), the first thing his hearers would have focused on was not the word gospel but the word kingdom – the climax of Israel’s story and its yearning for the eternal messianic reign. Gospel-preaching for Jesus had the same hope and vision one finds in Mary’s Magnificat (Luke 1:46?55), Zechariah’s Benedictus (1:68?79), Simeon’s Nunc dimittis (2:29?32), and John the Baptist’s summons to a new way of life (3:10?14) – namely, the fulfillment of the whole story’s hope, the kingdom of God. This is why Paul defines gospel after its first mention in Romans 1:1 with this: “which he promised beforehand through his prophets, the gospel concerning his Son, who was descended from David” (NRSV). To preach the gospel and to believe the gospel is to offer and enter into a story.
2. The robust gospel places transactions in the context of persons. When the gospel is reduced to a legal transaction shifting our guilt to Christ and Christ’s righteousness to us, the gospel focuses too narrowly on a transaction and becomes too impersonal. We dare not deny transaction or what’s called double imputation, but the gospel is more than the transactions of imputation. The robust gospel of the Bible is personal – it is about God the Father, God the Son, and God the Spirit. It is about you and me as persons encountering that personal, three-personed God.
Indeed, more often than not in the New Testament, the gospel is linked explicitly to a person. It is the “gospel of Christ” or the “gospel of God.” Jesus calls people to lose their life “for my sake” and, to say the same thing differently, “for the sake of the gospel” (Mark 8:35; 10:29). Paul preached the “gospel of God” (1 Thess. 2:9) and the “gospel of Christ” (3:2) and “the glorious gospel of the blessed God” (1 Tim. 1:11). Paul tells us that the gospel is the glorious power of God’s Spirit to transform broken image-bearers into the glory of God that can be seen in the face of the perfect image-bearer, Jesus Christ (2 Cor. 3:18?4:6). In our proclamation, too, the focus of the gospel must be on God as person and our encountering that personal God in the face of Jesus Christ through the power of the Spirit.
3. The robust gospel deals with a robust problem. Genesis 1?3 teaches us that humans are made in God’s image and likeness. These image-bearers were in utter union with God, at home with themselves, in communion with one another, and in harmony with the world around them. When Eve, with her husband in tow, chose to eat of the wrong tree, the image was cracked in each of those four directions: God-alienation, self-shame, other-blame, and Eden-expulsion. Sin results not only in alienation from God, which is paramount, but also in shame of the self, blame and antagonism toward others, and banishment from the world as God made it to be.
The proportions of the biblical problem are not small; the problems are so robust that a robust gospel is needed. The rest of the Bible, from Genesis 4 to Revelation 22, is about these cracked image-bearers being restored to union with God, freed from shame, placed in communion with others, and offered to the world. Any gospel that does not expand the “problem” of Genesis 3 to these cosmic dimensions is not robust enough.
4. A robust gospel has a grand vision. The little gospel promises me personal salvation and eternal life. But the robust gospel doesn’t stop there. It also promises a new society and a new creation. When Jesus stood up to read Isaiah 61 in the synagogue at Nazareth, then sat down and declared that this prophetic vision was now coming to pass through him, there was more than personal redemption at work. God’s kingdom, the society where God’s will is established and lived, was now officially at work in his followers. That society was overturning the injustices and exclusions of the empire and establishing an inclusive and just alternative. We find this in Jesus’ opening words (Luke 4:18?19), the Beatitudes (6:20?26), and in his response to John (Mark 7:22?23). This vision for a just society led to the radical practices of generosity and hospitality in the Jerusalem churches (Acts 2:42?47). Any gospel that is not announcing a new society at work in the world, what the apostle Paul called the church, is simply not a robust gospel.
Check back on Wednesday to read part two of this article.
Originally appeared as part of Christianity Today International’s “Christian Vision Project,” a three-year exploration of how the gospel impacts culture, mission, and faith.
