The Gospel--part 1

I've been mulling over what I wanted my first post to look like and what I wanted the content to include. I felt like the gospel was a good place to start. All the joy that we have in our lives begins with the gospel.

Over the last few years, the "gospel" has been one of the most precious and sustaining words in my vocabulary. It is a word that is not uncommon to believers and is generally not uncommon to unbelievers. I heard the word growing up, but never really investigated its meaning until I was much older. The gospel means: "good news". I suppose some would ask 'what is so good about it'?, and that should be a question that we are all prepared to answer.

The first answer to that question should be because God is good. He can only do good. In Genesis, we see that God created everything and saw it was "good". In Luke 18:15, Jesus says "No one is good except God alone." In Deuteronomy 32:4 the author says "His works are perfect", the Psalmist said the "law of the Lord is perfect", and Jesus says in Matthew 5 that the heavenly father "is perfect." So, with only a few verses we see that God is good and perfect--flawless. He is the ultimate standard of what is good.

Now that we know that God would only do what is good, we can continue with our answer as to what makes the gospel "good". The next part of answering that is the realization of how sinful we all are. Our hearts are naturally inclined to oppose God--we are born enemies of God (Romans 5:10). David said "behold I was brought forth in iniquity". I have often heard it said that you never have to teach a child to be selfish, it comes naturally to them. They must be taught to share and be kind to those around them. We are all predisposed to sin and selfishness. Romans 5:12 states that "just as through one man sin entered the world, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned." The key words are "all sinned"--not a few sinned, not only the bad people sinned, not just the murderers and theives and adulterers sinned--ALL sinned. Paul writes and reminds the people in Rome, "There is none righteous, not even one; there is none who understands, there is none who seeks for God...there is none who does good, there is not even one."(Romans 3:10-11) Sin is so offensive to God, that only Jesus' death could bring justice for the offense that we all have found ourselves guilty.

These two points, God's goodness and our sinful state, come together to summarize why the gospel is indeed "good". John Piper says "God is the Gospel". God is the author of the plan of salvation. God in his goodness has brought the "good news" to life in Jesus Christ. Because of our fallen, sinful state and our inability to do anything good at all, God being loving, compassionate and merciful, sent Jesus to receive the full wrath of what we deserved. I always think it is intersting to note that Jesus did not come to earth to atone for our sins in a time like today when the death penalty is administered by means of lethal injection. No pain associated with lethal injection--you just go to sleep. Jesus came to die for our sins, to endure the punishment we all deserve, in a period of human history when the death penalty was by means of crucifixion. Crucifixion was a terrible and inhumane way of dying. It was truly agonizing and humiliating. This was the kind of death we all deserved. This is how offensive our state of sin is to God. Jesus is our redemption--he has redeemed us from death that separated us from God. This is all "good news". In fact is the best news we could ever get.

You will never know how much you need God and his grace through Jesus Christ until you understand how desperate your sinful state is. The Gospel is good because it comes from God and it is good because Jesus' death is enough to cover our sin.

"But God demonstrates his His own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. Much more then, having now been justified by His blood, we shall be saved from the wrath of God through Him [Jesus]." Romans 5:8-9