What Is the Gospel?

Jesus Christ the Savior

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CHAPTER 4

Jesus Christ the Savior

But. I think that must be the most powerful word a human being can speak. It’s small, but it has the power to sweep away everything that has gone before it. Coming after bad news like what we just heard, it has the power to lift the eyes and restore hope. More than any other word that can be spoken by a human tongue, it has the ability to change everything.

  • The plane went down. But no one was hurt.
  • You have cancer. But it is easily treatable.
  • Your son was in a car wreck. But he’s fine.

 

Sadly, sometimes the but doesn’t come. Sometimes the sentence stops, and all we get is the bad news. Yet those moments only magnify for us the times when the but does come. And they are glorious.

Thank God the bad news of human sin and God’s judgment is not the end of the story. If the Bible had ended with Paul’s declaration that the whole world will stand, silenced, before the judgment throne of God, there would be no hope for us at all. There would be only despair. But (there it is again!) thank God there is more!

You are a sinner destined to be condemned. But God has acted to save sinners just like you!

A Word of Hope

Mark begins his account of Jesus’ life with the words, “The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God” (ESV). From the very beginning, Mark and the other early Christians knew that the coming of Jesus Christ was God’s good news to a world destroyed and dead at the feet of sin. In the wake of sin’s dark devastation, the coming of Jesus was his piercing, thundering announcement that now everything had changed!

Even in the garden of Eden, God had given Adam and Eve a word of hope—some good news in the midst of their despair. It wasn’t much, just a hint really, a phrase tacked onto the end of God’s sentence against the Serpent.

He shall bruise your head,
and you shall bruise his heel. (Genesis 3:15 ESV)

But it was something. God wanted Adam and Eve, rebels though they were, to know that the story was not over. Here was some gospel, some good news in the midst of the cataclysm.

The rest of the Bible tells the story of how this tiny seed of good news germinated, sprouted, and grew. For thousands of years, God prepared the world through law and prophecy for his stunning coup de grace against the Serpent in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. When it was all over, the guilt Adam had inflicted on his entire race would be defeated, the death God pronounced over his own creation would die, and hell would be brought to its knees.

The Bible is the story of God’s counteroffensive against sin. It is the grand narrative of how God made it right, how he is making it right, and how he will one day make it right finally and forever.

Fully God, Fully Man

All the gospel writers begin their accounts of Jesus’ life by showing that he was no ordinary man. Matthew and Luke tell the story of an angel coming to a young virgin named Mary and telling her that she would be with child. Incredulous at the news, Mary asks, “How will this be, since I am a virgin?” The angel explains, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be called holy—the Son of God” (Luke 1:34–35 ESV). John begins his story with an even more astonishing statement: “In the beginning” (words that point back strongly to Genesis 1:1) “was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. . . . The Word became flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:1, 14 ESV).

All of this—Jesus’ birth to a virgin, the title “Son of God,” John’s assertion that “the Word was God” together with his announcement that “the Word became flesh”—is meant to teach us who Jesus is.

Put simply, the Bible tells us that Jesus is both completely human and completely God. This is a crucial point to understand about him, for it is only the fully human, fully divine Son of God who can save us.

Put simply, the Bible tells us that Jesus is both completely human and completely God.

If Jesus were just another man—like us in every respect, including our fallenness and sin—he would no more be able to save us than one dead man can save another. But because he is the Son of God, without sin and equal in every divine perfection to God the Father, he is able to defeat death and save us from our sin.

In the same way, it is also critical that Jesus be truly one of us—that is, fully human—so that he can rightly represent us before his Father. As Hebrews 4:15 explains, Jesus is able “to sympathize with our weaknesses” because he “in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin” (ESV).

The Messiah King—Here!

When Jesus began his ministry, he proclaimed a fantastic message: “The time has come! The kingdom of God is at hand. Repent and believe the good news!”

Word of this man preaching that the kingdom of God had come spread quickly throughout the country, and excited crowds soon surrounded Jesus to hear this “good news” that he was proclaiming. But what was so exciting about it?

For centuries, through his law and his prophets, God had foretold a time when he would once and for all put an end to the world’s evil and rescue his people from their sin. He would sweep away all resistance and establish his rule, his “kingdom,” over all the earth.

Even more, God had promised that he would establish his kingdom in the person of a messianic King, one in the royal line of the great King David. In 2 Samuel 7:11, God promised David that one of his sons would rule on his throne forever. And the prophet Isaiah said of this kingly son:

He will be called
Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God,
Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.
Of the increase of his government and peace
there will be no end.
He will reign on David’s throne
and over his kingdom,
establishing and upholding it
with justice and righteousness
from that time on and forever. (Isaiah 9:6–7 NIV)

So you can imagine the excitement that greeted Jesus when he began announcing that the kingdom of heaven had come. It meant that the long-awaited Davidic Messiah was finally here!

The Gospel writers are insistent that this Davidic King is none other than Jesus himself. Luke records the words of the angel announcing Jesus’ birth to Mary:

He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. And the Lord God will give to him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end. (Luke 1:32–33 ESV)

Matthew begins his book with a genealogy that traces Jesus’ ancestry directly back to King David, and then on back to Abraham himself. Fascinatingly, Matthew stylizes his genealogy, dividing it into three generations of fourteen. And fourteen, as any good Jew would have known, was the number arrived at by adding up the values of the three Hebrew letters D-V-D, “David.” Matthew, like all the other Christians, practically screams as he begins his story about Jesus, “King! King! King!”

Content taken from What Is the Gospel? By Greg Gilbert, ©2010. Used by permission of Crossway.
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