What Is the Gospel?

Greg Gilbert

• Publisher: Crossway
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781433524608
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

What is the gospel? It seems like a simple question, yet it has been known to incite some heated responses, even in the church. How are we to formulate a clear, biblical understanding of the gospel? Tradition, reason, and experience all leave us ultimately disappointed. If we want answers, we must turn to the Word of God.

Greg Gilbert does so in What Is the Gospel? Beginning with Paul's systematic presentation of the gospel in Romans and moving through the sermons in Acts, Gilbert argues that the central structure of the gospel consists of four main subjects: God, man, Christ, and a response. The book carefully examines each and then explores the effects the gospel can have in individuals, churches, and the world. Both Christian and non-Christian readers will gain a clearer understanding of the gospel in this valuable resource.

CHAPTER ONE

FINDING THE GOSPEL IN THE BIBLE

Did you know that GPS navigation systems are causing havoc in towns across the United States? That’s especially the case in small towns. For people who live in large cities, the little machines are lifesavers. Plug the GPS in, type in an address, and you’re off to the races. No more missed exits, no more wrong turns—just you, your car, your GPS, and ding! “Arriving at destination!”

I just recently got my first GPS device, which was primarily an act of defiance against whoever is responsible for the almost impossible road system in Washington DC. My first experience with it, though, wasn’t in Washington. It was in Linden, Texas, my very small, very rural, and very out-of-the-way hometown.

It turns out that my GPS has no problem whatsoever navigating the crisscrossing, back-and-forth streets of Washington. Oddly enough, though, it did have trouble in Linden. Roads that the GPS was quite certain existed, didn’t. Turns that it insisted were possible, weren’t. Addresses that it firmly believed would be in a certain place, turned out to be several hundred yards further down the street—or even nonexistent.

Apparently GPS systems’ ignorance of small towns is a growing problem. ABC News ran a story about neighborhood roads that have literally become commercial thoroughfares because GPS systems are routing traffic there, rather than along larger highways. There are other problems, too. One poor guy from California insisted he was only following his GPS’s instructions when he made a right turn onto a rural road and found himself stuck on a train track, staring into the headlight of an oncoming locomotive! He survived. His rental car, though, and presumably the offending GPS along with it, didn’t make out so well.

One representative from the American Automobile Association was sympathetic—kind of. “Clearly the GPS failed him in the sense it should not have been telling him to make a right turn on the railroad tracks,” he said. “But just because a machine tells you to do something that is potentially dangerous, doesn’t mean you should do it.” Indeed!

So what’s going on? GPS manufacturers say the problem isn’t with the devices themselves. They’re doing exactly what they’re supposed to do. Instead, the problem is in the maps the devices are downloading. It turns out that especially for small towns, the maps available to GPS systems are often several years, or even decades, out of date. Sometimes the maps are nothing better than planning maps—what city planners intended to do if their towns grew. The result? Sometimes addresses that show up in one place on the planning maps ended up being somewhere else when the town was actually built. Sometimes roads that city planners intended to build never actually got built—and sometimes they got built not as roads at all, but as railroads!

In the world of GPS, as in life, it’s important that you get your information from a reliable source!

What’s Our Authority?

The same thing is true when we approach the question, What is the gospel? Right at the beginning, we have to make some sort of decision about what source of information we’re going to use in order to answer the question. For evangelicals, the answer usually comes pretty easily: we find the answer in the Bible.

That’s true, but it’s useful to know up front that not everyone agrees entirely with that answer. Different “Christian” traditions have given a number of different answers to this question of authority. Some have argued, for instance, that we ought to base our understanding of the gospel not solely, or even primarily, on the words of the Bible, but on Christian tradition. If the church has believed something for long enough, they argue, we should understand it to be true. Others have said that we know truth through the use of reason. Building our knowledge from the ground up—A leads to B leads to C leads to D—will bring us to a true understanding of ourselves, the world, and God. Still others say we should look for the truth of the gospel in our own experience. Whatever resonates most with our own hearts is what we finally understand to be true about ourselves and God.

If you spend enough time thinking about it, though, you realize that each of those three potential sources of authority ultimately fails to deliver what it promises. Tradition leaves us relying on nothing more than the opinions of men. Reason, as any freshman philosopher will tell you, leaves us flailing about in skepticism. (Try to prove, for example, that you’re not just a figment of someone else’s imagination, or that your five senses really are reliable.) And experience leaves us relying on our own fickle hearts in order to decide what is true—a prospect most honest people find unsettling at best.

What do we do, then? Where do we go in order to know what is true, and therefore what the good news of Jesus Christ really is? As Christians, we believe that God has spoken to us in his Word, the Bible. Furthermore, we believe that what God has said in the Bible is infallibly and inerrantly true, and therefore it leads us not to skepticism or despair or uncertainty, but to confidence. “All Scripture is breathed out by God,” Paul said, “and profitable for teaching” (2 Tim. 3:16). King David wrote,

This God—his way is perfect;
the word of the LORD proves true. (Ps. 18:30)

And so it is to God’s Word that we look in order to find what he has said to us about his Son Jesus and about the good news of the gospel.

Where in the Bible Do We Go?

But where do we go in the Bible to find that? I suppose there are several different approaches we could take. One would be to look at all the occurrences of the word gospel in the New Testament and try to come to some sort of conclusion about what the writers mean when they use the word. Surely there are a few instances where the writers are careful to define it.

There could be important things to learn from this approach, but there are drawbacks, too. One is that often in the New Testament a writer obviously intends to give a summary of the good news of Christianity, yet he doesn’t use the word gospel at all. Take Peter’s sermon at Pentecost in Acts 2, for example. If ever there was a proclamation of the good news of Christianity, surely this is it—yet Peter never mentions the word gospel. Another example is the apostle John, who uses the word only once in all his New Testament writings (Rev. 14:6)!

Let me suggest that, for now, we approach the task of defining the main contours of the Christian gospel not by doing a word study, but by looking at what the earliest Christians said about Jesus and the significance of his life, death, and resurrection. If we look at the apostles’ writings and sermons in the Bible, we’ll find them explaining, sometimes very briefly and sometimes at greater length, what they learned from Jesus himself about the good news. Perhaps we’ll also be able to discern some common set of questions, some shared framework of truths around which the apostles and early Christians structured their presentation of the good news of Jesus.

The Gospel in Romans 1–4

One of the best places to start looking for a basic explanation of the gospel is Paul’s letter to the Romans. Perhaps more clearly than any other book of the Bible, Romans contains a deliberate, step-by-step expression of what Paul understood to be the good news.

Actually, the book of Romans is not so much a book at all, at least as we usually think of books. It’s a letter, a way for Paul to introduce himself and his message to a group of Christians he had never met. That’s why it has such a systematic, step-by-step feel. Paul wanted these Christians to know about him, his ministry, and especially his message. He wanted them to know that the good news he preached was the same good news they believed.

“I am not ashamed of the gospel,” he begins, “for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes” (Rom. 1:16). From there, especially through the first four chapters, Paul explains the good news about Jesus in wonderful detail. As we look at these chapters, we’ll see that Paul structures his presentation of the gospel around a few critical truths, truths that show up again and again in the apostles’ preaching of the gospel. Let’s look at the progression of Paul’s thought in Romans 1–4.

First, Paul tells his readers that it is God to whom they are accountable. After his introductory remarks in Romans 1:1–7, Paul begins his presentation of the gospel by declaring that “the wrath of God is revealed from heaven” (v. 18). With his very first words, Paul insists that humanity is not autonomous. We did not create ourselves, and we are neither self-reliant nor self-accountable. No, it is God who created the world and everything in it, including us. Because he created us, God has the right to demand that we worship him. Look what Paul says in verse 21: “For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened.”

Thus Paul indicts humanity: they have sinned by not honoring and thanking God. It is our obligation, as people created and owned by God, to give him the honor and glory that is due to him, to live and speak and act and think in a way that recognizes and acknowledges his authority over us. We are made by him, owned by him, dependent on him, and therefore accountable to him. That’s the first point Paul labors to make as he explains the good news of Christianity.

Second, Paul tells his readers that their problem is that they rebelled against God. They—along with everyone else—did not honor God and give thanks to him as they should have. Their foolish hearts were darkened and they “exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things” (v. 23). That’s a truly revolting image, isn’t it? For human beings to consider their Creator and then decide that a wooden or metal image of a frog or a bird or even themselves is more glorious, more satisfying, and more valuable is the height of insult and rebellion against God. It is the root and essence of sin, and its results are nothing short of horrific.

For most of the next three chapters Paul presses this point, indicting all humanity as sinners against God. In chapter 1 his focus is on the Gentiles, and then in chapter 2 he turns just as strongly toward the Jews. It’s as if Paul knows that the most self-righteous of the Jews would have been applauding his lashing of the Gentiles, so he pivots on a dime in 2:1 and points his accusing finger at the applauders: “Therefore you have no excuse”! Just like Gentiles, he says, Jews have broken God’s law and are under his judgment.

By the middle of chapter 3, Paul has indicted every single person in the world with rebellion against God. “We have already charged that all, both Jews and Greeks, are under sin” (v. 9). And his sobering conclusion is that when we stand before God the Judge, every mouth will be silenced. No one will mount a defense. Not one excuse will be offered. The whole world—Jew, Gentile, every last one of us—will be held fully accountable to God (v. 19).

Now, strictly speaking, these first two points are not really good news at all. In fact, they’re pretty bad news. That I have rebelled against the holy and judging God who made me is not a happy thought. But it is an important one, because it paves the way for the good news. That makes sense if you think about it. To have someone say to you, “I’m coming to save you!” is really not good news at all unless you believe you actually need to be saved.

Third, Paul says that God’s solution to humanity’s sin is the sacrificial death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Having laid out the bad news of the predicament we face as sinners before our righteous God, Paul turns now to the good news, the gospel of Jesus Christ.

“But now,” Paul says, in spite of our sin, “now the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the law” (v. 21). In other words, there is a way for human beings to be counted righteous before God instead of unrighteous, to be declared innocent instead of guilty, to be justified instead of condemned. And it has nothing to do with acting better or living a more righteous life. It comes “apart from the law.”

So how does it happen? Paul puts it plainly in Romans 3:24. Despite our rebellion against God, and in the face of a hopeless situation, we can be “justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus.” Through Christ’s sacrificial death and resurrection—because of his blood and his life—sinners may be saved from the condemnation our sins deserve.

But there’s one more question Paul answers. Exactly how is that good news for me? How do I become included in this promised salvation?

Finally, Paul tells his readers how they themselves can be included in this salvation. That’s what he writes about through the end of chapter 3 and on into chapter 4. The salvation God has provided comes “through faith in Jesus Christ,” and it is “for all who believe” (3:22). So how does this salvation become good news for me and not just for someone else? How do I come to be included in it? By believing in Jesus Christ. By trusting him and no other to save me. “To the one who does not work but believes in him who justifies the ungodly,” Paul explains, “his faith is counted as righteousness” (4:5).

Four Crucial Questions

Now, having looked at Paul’s argument in Romans 1–4, we can see that at the heart of his proclamation of the gospel are the answers to four crucial questions:

1. Who made us, and to whom are we accountable?

2. What is our problem? In other words, are we in trouble and why?

3. What is God’s solution to that problem? How has he acted to save us from it?

4. How do I—myself, right here, right now—how do I come to be included in that salvation? What makes this good news ...