Biblical Theology: The Gospel
Thursday, June 17, 2010 at 11:06AM The Gospel is the most important message of our faith, and yet so few of us know what it is, much less how to live it. Too many Christians think that the Gospel is, “You can go to Heaven when you die if you believe in Jesus”, or something along those lines. But this common misunderstanding gets it the wrong way around. We think the Gospel is about us, but it’s really about God.
As we try to understand what the Gospel is, maybe the best place to start is with Jesus. What did he think the Gospel was? What did he mean when he said, in Mark 1:15, “Repent and believe the good news (the Gospel)”? One thing he didn’t mean was how we typically read this: “If you stop sinning and believe in me then you can go to Heaven.” (Not that that statement isn’t true or important, it’s just not what he is saying here.) What does Jesus have in mind when he utters the word “Gospel”?
In order to answer this question, we have to go back to the only Bible Jesus had—the Old Testament. “Gospel” is not a word we find often in the Hebrew Scriptures, but there is one very important passage where it is found. It is this passage, Isaiah 52:7, to which Jesus is alluding in Mark 1:15. It reads:
How beautiful on the mountains
are the feet of those who bring good news,
who proclaim peace,
who bring good tidings,
who proclaim salvation,
who say to Zion,
“Your God reigns!”
It may not be easy to spot if you’re just giving this a cursory reading because Isaiah is building tension, but the “good news” is “Your God reigns”. You could circle good news (which, in the Greek Old Testament is the same word as good news or gospel in the Greek New Testament) and draw an arrow to the message “Your God reigns”. Whose God reigns? The God of Zion. And who is that? YHWH. The Creator God. God the Father. The Gospel of the Old Testament (and, therefore, the Gospel for Jesus and his disciples) is: YHWH is King.
When Jesus delivers his first line in Mark, he is saying, “The time has come! The kingdom of God is near. Lay down your agenda and believe that YHWH is King!” I’ve written about this elsewhere, calling it Gospel 1.0.
I call it Gospel 1.0 because Jesus has changed everything. Jesus came and, through his life, death, resurrection and ascension, provided a subtle but crucial nuance to the gospel.
When Jesus came preaching through Galilee he announced, over and over again, that the kingdom of God was now coming upon Israel. In fact, Luke records his first public teaching as the reading of a kingdom-passage from Isaiah. After reading this passage, Jesus sat down and simply said, “Today this Scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.” In other words, Jesus was saying that the kingdom of God was “breaking upon you through me.” YHWH is becoming King (truly, fully, and over against all the other gods of all the other nations that had oppressed Israel) in and through the life and ministry of Jesus. (This is a summary of what N.T. Wright writes in, among other places, The Challenge of Jesus.)
So Jesus is essentially walking around ancient Israel saying, “Believe the gospel that YHWH is King, and watch it happen through me.” The funny thing is that Jesus was probably not the first to say this (there were plenty of other would-be Messiahs in his day). But Jesus is the only one who could back it up, not by defeating Rome, but by defeating sickness, demonic powers, and in several instances even death itself.
Ultimately, of course, Jesus defeated his own death. His resurrection was the decisive victory over Israel’s (and all of humanity’s) true enemy—Satan, ruling through sin and death. His ascension was not so much spiritual space travel as it was the act of the true cosmic king taking his rightful place on the singular throne over all creation. As Paul writes in 1 Corinthians, the Father put everything under the authority of the Son. In other words, Jesus is King.
This is the Gospel 2.0—the good news as Christians understand it. Jesus is King (or, if you prefer, Lord). Because of the obedience of the Son, the Father placed him on the throne and put him over all things (except for himself, of course). The kingdom of God, then, is ruled and mediated by Jesus. It is his kingdom. YHWH is King because of what his Son did; and because the Son did what he did, the Father made him king. That’s the Gospel 2.0—Jesus is King.
