I grew up hearing the standard American Evangelical gospel message, the one focused on individual salvation: we are justified through faith by Jesus’s death, burial and resurrection so that upon death, we can be admitted into heaven. And all that is only by God’s grace, to be sure.
That was “the gospel”.
Along the way I was taught “The Romans Road”, I was shown diagrams of the cross bridging a gap between earth and heaven that I could never jump across, and I heard youth pastors and preachers “evangelize” by asking, “If you died tonight, do you know where you would go?”
I was told that before people could understand the “good news”, they would need to be made aware of the “bad news”: you are a sinner and you fall short of God’s perfect standard and there’s no way for you to earn your way into heaven. And all sinners go to hell when they die.
But, again, we would circle back around then to the good news: Jesus died for you. And if you believe, his perfect righteousness covers you so that when God looks at you, he doesn’t see your sin – he sees his Son's righteousness.
On the one hand, it made sense to me. And there were certainly Scripture verses to back up this approach to the good news.
And it certainly had repetition on its side.
But I had questions. And they grew over time, especially as I read more of the Bible for myself.
The turning point question for me was this one: If the gospel is roughly “Jesus died for you so that you can go to heaven”, then why does Matthew describe the beginning of Jesus’ ministry by saying he “went throughout all Galilee, teaching in their synagogues and proclaiming the GOSPEL OF THE KINGDOM and healing every disease and every affliction among the people”? (The first appearance of the word “gospel” in the New Testament, Matt 4:23.)
What is “the gospel of the Kingdom”? If that’s just a code word for heaven, then why does Jesus consistently speak about the Kingdom as if it entails godly behavior in the here and now? Why the constant emphasis on the Kingdom of God and its righteousness? Why do so many of his parables begin with “The Kingdom of God is like…”?
Furthermore, Jesus spends three years preaching and hardly mentions his own upcoming death. And when he does, it is heavily coded. If his own death, burial and resurrection is THE main message his followers are supposed to receive and believe, why didn’t he preach THAT clearly and repeatedly?
Even in John 3, where everyone goes to find Jesus’ clearest teaching about the gospel, there is one veiled reference to Jesus's death - to him being “lifted up” like Moses lifted the serpent in the desert.
But most of the focus in John 3 is on Jesus being the “Christ” and the “Son of Man” and the working of the Spirit and how Jesus is the only one who has “descended from heaven”. And as far as “belief” goes, Jesus speaks of believing “in the NAME of the ONLY SON OF GOD”.
And Jesus says that if we are going to see the Kingdom, we have to undergo a radical change - a new birth.
He explains that the world is already condemned to perish, but he brings with him the possibility of “eternal life” for anyone who believes “in him”. Furthermore, Jesus describes himself as “the light” coming into a world where most people prefer hiding in the darkness. BUT “whoever DOES what is true, comes into the light so that it may be clearly seen that his works have been carried out in God.” (John 3:21)
And so the typical modern gospel finds a few loose proof texts there in John 3, but only at the expense of leaving out a whole lot of other material.
Once it really sank into me that THE big question surrounding Jesus was whether or not he was the promised Messiah, the Christ, I realized that I had never really attempted to read the New Testament through 1st century eyes.
What did the crowds understand the controversy surrounding Jesus to be? What were the stakes?
Every time Jesus comments on any individual’s pistis/faith during his earthly ministry, it always has to do with whether or not the person believes Jesus is who he says he is: the Christ – God’s anointed King.
And now it makes much more sense to me that the gospel is less about getting into heaven than it is about God’s anointed King having arrived to re-establish God’s reign on earth and to populate that Kingdom with people whom he has rescued from the dominion of darkness and brought into the Kingdom of Light.
This Kingdom is bringing about the renewal of God’s creation, setting everything right that has gone wrong, defeating sin, death, and Satan.
This Kingdom starts now and finds its fulfillment when the Christ returns, bringing a fully renewed heaven down to a fully renewed earth. Likewise, eternal life starts now (the abundant life of John 10:10) and finds its fulfillment inside the gates of that New Jerusalem after our own bodily resurrection.
“Salvation” isn’t about stepping into heaven when we die. It is about being enabled – through the cleansing of Christ’s blood, and the power of the Holy Spirit – to become what we were created to be in the first place: the image of God.
Again, this starts in the present, where God calls us his children and offers lots of ongoing grace as we seek first his Kingdom and his righteousness – and eventually, One Day, we will “be like Jesus because we will see him as he is”.
In the end, I simply cannot conceive of what it would mean to truly “believe” that Jesus is the King of kings without bowing my knee to him.
And not out of some forced sense of obligation, but because bending my knee to my Creator is the very thing I was created to do and to be.
And it is the only thing that will ultimately make my joy complete, here and now AND in the future.
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