The “Gospel”.
What is it? Why does it matter? Is it still relevant today, 2,000 years later? What the heck could a bunch of camel jockeys riding around the desert know about me and my circumstances? How on earth could there possibly be a “Good” God with all this pain and suffering in our world?
So, many of you know, I have done a ton of evangelizing. I’ve spoken with thousands of people about Jesus, the Bible and so on. I’ve asked these questions with most of those folks, and I’ve tried my best to give it my “Take”. Although, it’s not really my take that matters. More on that in a second.
Let’s deal with the last question first, since in our “Post Christian” society, it seems to be “Trendy” to not believe in God, or to make a god of your own choosing, picking and choosing what you want from Buddhism, Christianity, and even Native American “Religions”, among others. Since it’s so trendy, we should even have a name for it, let’s call it “ReligionX”.
But anyhow, how and why does the real or “True” God differ from what all those other religions are about? Why is it important to hold a right view of God and who he is in order to understand Christianity? And, most importantly, are we just making this stuff up as we go along to try and fool people, to trick them into believing a pack of lies in order to use them somehow, e.g., for financial gain?
First, how can God be real? And, if he IS good (goodness would be the correct noun), then why is there so much suffering and pain in our world? As any true Christian can tell you, the Bible is the only book that tells us we humans are not good. Every other “Religion” out there will tell you that you are somehow “Good” and that you can make it to Heaven (or wherever) on your own power. If your good outweighs your bad (so to speak) on the “Scales” of justice, then you will wind up in Heaven (or a “Better place”) after you die.
That’s where I point out to folks that what they’re saying doesn’t make sense. If there is a “Judge”, and if he’s “Good”, then he cannot judge us on our “Degree of goodness”. That would be like a judge who tells everyone “Oh, your sin isn’t so bad, you only did it a few times, and didn’t do very much harm really.” That judge would be no judge at all, we would consider him capricious and somewhat random. Folks would be doing all sorts of things to try to “Appease” that god, rather than trying to obey him.
Think of it this way, you go to court on a traffic ticket. You tell the judge “Sir, I’ve driven many times in my life, and I was only speeding this one time because I was late for ______” Whatever excuse you give him. The Judge looks at you and says: “Son, I’m not judging you on the basis of your goodness, rather I must decide whether you are guilty of this infraction based on the evidence we have here today.” Your goodness is not on trial, but rather your badness.
The judge must decide whether you are guilty of what you are charged with, not whether your are innocent because of all your other circumstances!
So, as it turns out, the Bible says that our ancestors sinned, and gave us a “Genetic disease” that makes us all sin. And, as King David pointed out in the Psalms, all sin is ultimately against God, because it is rebellion against him and his authority.
Here, we get into the discussion again, as to whether he is real, and whether a good God could exist with so much evil, pain and suffering in our world. And this is exactly the cause: Sin. Because of sin, God gave man over to his “Sinful desires”. The “Sin nature” (the genetic component of sin) that all humans possess, makes us naturally want to do what we want to do, rather than what God wants us to do.
And that sin nature more than any other factor, is the cause of all the pain and suffering and evil in our world.
Why does God allow it? How could he? This is the intersection of what we term “Free will” and “God’s will”. Obviously, if you believe in an all powerful, all knowing, all seeing, eternal God, then you believe that nothing can happen outside of his will. Everything in our Universe is shaping itself towards some inevitable conclusion, that we would term “The end of history”. This end must have some purpose, some ultimate destiny for the creation, and of course, we Christians believe that will be the “New Creation”, or the new Heaven and new Earth.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
We set out to first answer the question of why evil exists? Did God create it? Is our world somehow a great cosmic joke that he’s perpetrated on us? Is he laughing at our suffering?
When you read the Bible, you find that God is not uncaring or unfeeling towards our suffering. Instead, he sent his Son Jesus Christ to BE one of us, so he would KNOW our suffering and our pain, so that he would “Be acquainted with our sorrows”, so that he would know what it was like to be one of us.
The Bible says clearly that “Evil”, or the opposite of “Good”, is not a creation of God per se, but is rather sin, or rebellion towards God, working against the will of God in all things. If this is so, and nothing can possibly happen outside of God’s “Permissive” will, then how can evil really exist? From that standpoint, we must rely again, on what the Bible tells us.
The explanation goes that there is an evil being who set himself up against God, and corrupted humans so that they would be in opposition to God as well. We were introduced to the “Knowledge of good and evil” and allowed to “Choose” for ourselves whether we would choose good (to follow and obey God) or to choose evil, or to quite literally CHOOSE for ourselves what is good and what is evil (what we think is good and evil).
Satan, the Devil, the “Accuser” somehow tricked man into believing that he could create his own system of morality, that somehow would stand apart from God (the Creator) and be separate from his system of morality, of right and wrong and so on. But the key is simply that in a Universe that God has created, that he has made, and creatures that are designed in his image, how could we possibly rebel against him and think that anything good would come of it?
Can the creation rebel against the creator and somehow become a creation apart from the creator?
No, obviously not. Satan lied to humans, and he is still doing so to this very day!
Clearly, I haven’t gone off here to prove the existence of God, his fingerprints are already everywhere. And of those thousands of people I spoke with over the many years I was evangelizing, only a small handful of them claimed to believe that God does not exist. The vast majority, like 99.9% said they believe there is something “More” than what we can perceive in our world. And that’s a good enough starting point I told them all!
If God exists, and because there is suffering, we can prove that evil also exists, and that God does somehow allow it.
Why does he allow it? Why? Why? WHY?
In all my reading, all my studying of the Bible and other books, history mainly, I have come to the conclusion that there are two main purposes for suffering in our world.
1. To bring us to God, and his Son Jesus Christ.
2. To make us more like him, i.e., to make us more like Jesus.
Nothing else makes sense, and all the evidence of the Bible, everything written down in there for us points to these two conclusions.
So how does this relate to the “Gospel”, the “Good news” of Jesus Christ?
First, let’s hear the Bible’s take on that “Good news”.
From the Book of 1st Corinthians, in Chp. 15, the Apostle Paul writes:
“Now I would remind you, brothers, of the gospel I preached to you, which you received, in which you stand, and by which you are being saved, if you hold fast to the word I preached to you—unless you believed in vain.
“For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have fallen asleep. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles. Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me.”
Notice there are 3 things in this gospel that make it what it is.
First, there are the facts of Jesus’s coming and dying and being resurrected.
Next, there is the key fact that all this was done “In accordance with the Scriptures”.
Finally, there are the post resurrection appearances of Jesus to the Apostles, and others, even 500 people at one time in one case!
The gospel then isn’t just “News” that something happened. No, the gospel is quite simply the most anticipated event in all history, because many people wrote about it happening many centuries before it did happen! There were promises, sayings, descriptions of Messiah, and descriptions of events that would happen both to him and with him written down in order so that folks would recognize him when he came.
Secondly, the facts of the coming of Jesus, and his sacrificial death on the Cross at Calvary, and then his resurrection are there for us to match up against those Scriptures Paul mentions. We are NOT to simply take anyone’s word about what happened at face value, no, we are all supposed to search those Scriptures (the Old Testament) and find out for ourselves whether what’s being told us is true!
Lastly though, the appearances of Jesus after he was resurrected prove everything, and seal it with God’s own seal of approval on all that happened “In accordance with the Scriptures”. It is God’s way of saying “This is true, you can believe it, and you can trust me to do what I say I will do.”
It is written down so that it can be BELIEVED, so that you can have faith in it, in Jesus Christ. You can be saved from your sins, from your tendency to do what YOU want to do, to a life lived for the one who CREATED you. The fact is that if you stay in your own kingdom, serving a god of your own choosing, you will die in your sin, and you will wind up in a place the Bible calls Hell, suffering for eternity.
But the bigger truth is that God didn’t want you to have to wind up there! He sent Jesus for YOU! You can believe in him right now, today and be saved! You must repent, and believe these truths. Repenting means you surrender your kingdom for God’s Kingdom. You stop serving yourself, and start serving him as of right now. It means you will make a commitment to find a group of believers, and join them in studying his word, and try to follow Jesus with all your strength every day.
We Christians don’t do this for money. We don’t do it for power. We don’t do this for our “Egos” or some such. We do it for love. Because we love Jesus, and because we don’t want to see lost people goto Hell, we try to give out this gospel, this “Good news” every single day. Our hope is that even if just one person reads this and is saved, then it is all worth it!
We, in reality, are not so very different from those “Camel jockeys” who rode around in the desert. They had hopes, dreams and aspirations just like we do. They didn’t have all the amazing technology we have, but that didn’t make them “Primitive”. They were just like us. And when they wrote this stuff down in the Bible, this was exactly their hope that folks would read what the Bible says, believe it and be saved to God’s Kingdom, the Kingdom of his Son, Jesus Christ.
I pray this helps someone today to find the truth of Jesus Christ and his Kingdom.
Do you know my Jesus?
Confessions of a Jesus Freak 