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Christians talk a lot about “the gospel,” and many of them know that this term means “good news.” But what—precisely—is that good news? In this episode, Jimmy Akin reviews a bunch of proposals for what the gospel is and reveals why they do not correspond to the New Testament’s own understanding of the gospel. For example, the gospel is NOT the message of how to “get saved” or “go to heaven.” He then reveals what the actual New Testament understanding of the gospel is, where it came from, and who it’s actually about.
TRANSCRIPT:
Coming Up
Question: Pastor John. Many people understand foundationally that they’re saved by the gospel of Jesus Christ, but they don’t even know how to articulate that, and many people don’t understand what the gospel actually is. Can you define that for us and tell us what is the gospel
John MacArthur: You’re going to go to eternal hell and conscious punishment for unless you put your faith in Jesus Christ? But here’s the good news, if you trust Christ, repent of your sin, he will take you to heaven forever. You’ll forgive all your sins. The gospel is we’re all headed to eternal punishment in hell, conscious punishment out of the presence of God forever. But God has provided a rescue through the death and resurrection of his son, Jesus Christ. You’re not talking about the gospel unless you talk about sin, repentance, Jesus Christ dying, rising again and faith in him. That’s the gospel. But it has to do with the best news that anyone will ever hear, and that is you can escape eternal punishment, spend eternity in heaven.
Let’s get into it!
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“The Gospel”
Christians talk a lot about the gospel, but what actually is it?
An easy answer is that the gospel is the “good news.” That’s what the Greek and Hebrew terms translated gospel mean, and we even get the English word gospel from roots that mean “good news.”
So far, so good. But what actually is the good news that the gospel contains? What is it, specifically?
That’s where things get fuzzy, and the truth is that Christians don’t have a single, clear definition for what the gospel is. In reality, there are several different uses for the term, and they can vary from one group of Christians to another.
“A Different Gospel”
This is a problem, because St. Paul has some very stern things to say about people who don’t understand the gospel correctly. In Galatians 1, he writes:
I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting him who called you in the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel—not that there is another one, but there are some who trouble you and want to distort the gospel of Christ.
But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach to you a gospel contrary to the one we preached to you, let him be accursed.
As we have said before, so now I say again: If anyone is preaching to you a gospel contrary to the one you received, let him be accursed (Galatians 1:6-9).
In Paul’s view, anyone who has a fundamentally different understanding of the gospel is to be condemned and ejected from the Christian community. That’s part of what being accursed means.
So making sure that you have a correct understanding of the gospel is very important, and that means that figuring out what the gospel is is a very important task. And yet, this is where we run into trouble.
The Gospel = All of Scripture
Sometimes you encounter people who use the term very broadly. For example, GotQuestions states:
The gospel is broadly speaking, the whole of scripture.
This sounds inspiring since the gospel is a good thing and the whole of Scripture is a good thing, and so it sounds inspiring to link the two concepts and say that all of Scripture belongs to the gospel. If you don’t think about it carefully, it could even sound irreverent to propose that there are things in Scripture that are not part of the gospel.
But if you do think about it more carefully, problems with the claim quickly emerge. For example, there are various verses in the New Testament that say that Andrew was the brother of Simon Peter. That’s part of Scripture. But do we really want to say that the historical fact that Andrew was the brother of Peter in some acceptable, first century definition of the term “brother” is something that is part of the gospel?
Or what about verses like Deuteronomy 3:11, which says that Og king of Bashan had a bed that was nine cubits long? Is the length of a pagan king’s bed really part of the gospel?
Most Christians would not suppose so. It may be interesting that Og’s bed was 9 cubits—or between 13 and 14 feet long—but this curious fact is scarcely something that warrants being considered an element in the gospel.
It’s clear that what’s going on in this definition is a pious identification of one sacred concept—the gospel—with another—Scripture. But this is not how Scripture itself uses the term gospel.
Even GotQuestions expressed reservations by saying that the gospel is the whole of Scripture “broadly speaking,” suggesting that this is an extended use of the term and not how you’d define it in a more proper sense.
Of course, language changes over time, and communities of language users can use terms however they see fit. So if some group of Christians identify all of Scripture with the gospel, they can do that. But we need to be honest about the fact that this is not how Scripture uses the term.
The Gospel = All Christian Doctrine
Other Christians who have a very broad understanding of the gospel make it identical with the whole of Christian teaching. Any doctrine of the faith is part of “the gospel” on this usage.
For example, the Lutheran Book of Concord says that the term gospel is used two ways in Scripture and that:
In the one case the word [gospel] is used in such a way that we understand by it the entire teaching of Christ, our Lord, which in his public ministry on earth and in the New Testament he ordered to be observed (Book of Concord, Formula of Concord 2:5:4).
Here the term gospel would be identified either with all the teachings of the Christian faith or at least those taught by Jesus himself.
But it’s pretty easy to see that this is not how the Bible is using the term. To give an example I often use, one of the truths of the Christian faith is the existence of angels.
Jesus himself taught the existence of angels. But the biblical authors wouldn’t say that the existence of angels is part of the gospel.
One of the reasons for that is that the existence of angels is taught in the Old Testament, but the gospel is something new. It hasn’t been with us all through redemptive history. Whatever the good news of the gospel is, it’s something associated with the New Testament, not the Old.
Another problem with this approach is that—if St. Paul is correct that anyone with an incorrect understanding of the gospel is to be regarded as accursed, and if the gospel is identified with the whole of Christian doctrine—then you won’t be able to have fellowship with anyone who disagrees with you on any point of doctrine.
If someone disagrees with you on a point of Christian teaching, and if all Christian teaching is part of the gospel, then you’re going to have to regard that person as accursed and kick them out.
On this view, there could be no doctrinal diversity in the Christian community. All Christians would need to agree on all doctrines, and anybody who doesn’t agree—even on a single doctrine—needs to be expelled.
Needless to say, most Christians don’t hold this view. For example, in the Protestant community it is common to say that different groups of Christians can have different opinions on doctrines as long as they agree on “the essentials.”
The Gospel = Grace?
The trouble comes when trying to identify what counts as an essential. People have different views on what is essential and what is non-essential. For example, in many Protestant communities, the idea that we are saved strictly by God’s grace and not by our own efforts is common.
This claim is true, but in some circles it has led to an identification between the gospel and the concept of grace. You’ll recall that the Lutheran Book of Concord stated that the term gospel is used in two senses, one of which was identified with the whole of Christian doctrine. The other, more restricted sense is based on a Lutheran tendency to divide biblical teaching up into two categories that Luther referred to as law and gospel. The Book of Concord continues:
In addition, however, the word “gospel” is also used in another (that is, in a strict) sense. Here it does not include the proclamation of repentance but solely the preaching of God’s grace. . . .
Everything that preaches about our sin and the wrath of God, no matter how or when it happens, is the proclamation of the law. On the other hand, the gospel is a proclamation that shows and gives nothing but grace and forgiveness in Christ (Book of Concord, Formula of Concord 2:5:6, 12).
On this view, law is anything that discusses our sin or God’s wrath, while gospel is anything that deals with grace and forgiveness.
Now, it’s okay if Lutherans want to use the terms law and gospel this way in their own community and classify different verses in Scripture according to these two categories. But we need to be exegetically honest about the fact that these uses are not how Scripture itself employs these terms. They are definitions that come from a later age and are being used to classify Scripture, but Scripture does not conceptualize the terms in this way.
For example, the primary meaning of the term law in the New Testament is a reference not to human sin and divine wrath but simply to the Law of Moses that God gave during the Exodus, and while that law does have things to say about sin and wrath, it also contains promises of grace and provisions for forgiveness.
The Gospel = My Favorite Doctrine
Another problem with the idea of being united on essentials while allowing diversity on non-essentials is that people also have a notable tendency to identify their own movement’s distinctive doctrines as essentials and thus as parts of the gospel.
Whatever makes us special—whatever separates us from other Christians—well, those things are essentials. Otherwise, our identity as a group will be undermined.
For example, some Pentecostals use the phrase “full gospel,” and they hold that many Protestants are not preaching all the elements they need to for a full presentation of the gospel. One of the elements they hold is part of the gospel is the idea that God continues to give miraculous gifts today. GotQuestions.org explains:
A “Full Gospel Christian” believes that the Holy Spirit is still doing everything he was doing in the New Testament Gospels: He is still healing, giving the gift of tongues, performing miracles, etc.
So you don’t have the full gospel unless you include miraculous gifts in it. Most Protestants don’t teach this, and so for Full Gospel Christians, most Christians don’t have a complete version of the gospel but a truncated version.
On the other hand, Calvinism places a great deal of emphasis on what they refer to as “the doctrines of grace.” These are teachings connected with grace, predestination, and so forth, and they are often summarized with the acronym TULIP, which stands for total depravity, unconditional election, limited atonement, irresistible grace, and perseverance of the saints—the so-called “five points of Calvinism.”
Many Calvinists are of the opinion that the doctrines of grace are so important that you have to have them in order to have a correct understanding of the gospel, you must teach the doctrines of grace. I’ve known Calvinists who teach that, and if you point out that this would imply that non-Calvinists don’t actually have the gospel, they’ve somewhat sheepishly admitted that this is the case: Non-Calvinists don’t really teach the gospel.
These two views identify the gospel with the views of two fairly narrow groups—certain Pentecostals and Calvinists—but most don’t identify the gospel so narrowly with their own group.
The Gospel = Sola Fide? Sola Gratia?
Many in the Protestant community seek to identify the gospel with something that’s broader—something that most or all standard Protestants could get on board with.
For example, there are certain slogans in Protestantism like sola fide, which is a Latin phrase that means “by faith alone.” The claim is that we are justified by faith alone, and this was a big point of controversy during the Reformation.
To justify breaking away from the Catholic Church, Protestants accused it of teaching a false gospel, and this was often expressed in terms of justification by faith alone. In doing this, they appealed to the passage from Galatians that we read earlier, where Paul condemned anyone with a different understanding of the gospel than the one he preached.
According to the Reformers, Paul preached the idea of justification by faith alone, and so the slogan sola fide expressed an essential element of the gospel. If anyone taught that anything besides faith was involved in justification, it was argued that he was in some degree engaging in self-justification and adding “works” to the gospel, making it a false understanding.
John Piper: That is extended in an offer to the world that is free. If the offer were not free, there would be no gospel. If it were by works instead of by faith, there would be no gospel.
Got Questions: The gospel is good news when we understand that we do not and cannot earn our salvation.
There are a number of problems with this understanding, and we don’t have time to go through them all at the moment. However, it’s worth pointing out that “by faith alone” is not the language of Scripture, for the phrased is used only once—in James 2:24—where it is rejected.
It’s also worth pointing out that Catholics don’t actually have a problem with the formula “faith alone” provided you understand the faith in question correctly. Thus Pope Benedict XVI stated:
Luther’s phrase “faith alone” is true, if it is not opposed to faith in charity, in love. . . . So it is that, in the letter to the Galatians, in which he primarily developed his teaching on justification, that St. Paul speaks of “faith that works through love” (General Audience, Nov. 19, 2008, quoting Gal. 5:6).
In light of the growing Catholic-Protestant reproachment, some Protestants have backed off on the necessity of the faith alone formula and been more open to the idea that the gospel merely requires that it’s God’s grace that saves us rather than us doing anything to earn salvation. As a result, they might identify the gospel with another Reformation-era slogan, the idea that we’re saved sola gratia or “by grace alone.”
Gospel = How to “Get Saved”?
One of the most common ways of presenting the gospel is that it is the message of eternal salvation. It’s all about sin and forgiveness through Jesus Christ.
As British scholar N.T. Wright says:
N.T. Wright: I grew up in a world where “the gospel” was the message that we’re all sinners but Jesus died in our place so—whew!—we get to go to heaven if we believe in him.
As GotQuestions says:
GotQuestions: More narrowly, the gospel is the good news concerning Christ and the way of salvation. The key to understanding the gospel is to know why it’s good news. To do that, we must start with the bad news. Sin is anything that falls short of perfect. The righteous requirement of the law is so stringent that no human being could possibly follow it perfectly in order for us to go to heaven. Sin must be somehow removed or paid for. When Christ offered himself at Calvary, that symbol became a reality for all. Who would believe the work of atonement is finished now, and that’s good news. The gospel is the good news that God loves the world enough to give his only son to die for our sin. The gospel is good news because our salvation and eternal life and home in heaven are guaranteed through Christ.
And as John MacArthur says:
John MacArthur: You’re not talking about the gospel unless you talk about sin, repentance, Jesus Christ dying, rising again and faith in him. That’s the gospel. But it has to do with the best news that anyone will ever hear, and that is you can escape eternal punishment, spend eternity in heaven.
The idea thus is that you are a sinner, and you cannot save yourself. If left to your own devices, you will spend eternity in hell. That’s the bad news that many preachers say one needs to understand in order to appreciate the good news or gospel.
The good news is that God has not left us to our own devices. Instead, he has send his Son Jesus Christ to die on a cross for us, and as a result he graciously offers to forgive our sins—at no cost—if we will only repent and believe in his Son. That way, we can be saved from sin and from hell and spend eternity with God in heaven.
Now, it so happens that every one of the claims I’ve just described is true. But is this the way the New Testament conceptualizes the gospel, or does the New Testament understand it some other way?
What About Scripture?
You may have noticed that in our discussion thus far we haven’t looked at how Scripture itself uses the term.
We’ve seen how the term gospel is used in different Christian movements, and we’ve noted problems with these definitions, but what we haven’t done is start with the text of Scripture and see how it uses the term. So that’s what we’ll turn to now.
The root meaning of gospel is “good news.” That’s the meaning of the Hebrew term bsorah and the Greek equivalent euangelion. But people have been giving and receiving different kinds of good news all through history, so what kind is meant in the Bible?
Is the gospel really all about sin and salvation, about being rescued from hell and brought to heaven through the death of Jesus on the Cross? Or is the gospel about something else?
Good News in the Bible
When the concept of the gospel leaps to prominence in the New Testament, one of the things that’s clear about it is that it’s not coming out of nowhere. In Romans 1, St. Paul writes that he is
Paul, a servant of Christ Jesus, called to be an apostle, set apart for the gospel of God, which he promised beforehand through his prophets in the holy Scriptures (Romans 1:1-2).
So if we want to understand the New Testament’s gospel, it’s important to look back into the Old Testament to see what was prophesied.
When the Old Testament speaks of good news being announced, it frequently has in mind the announcement of a military victory (2 Samuel 4:10, 18:19-31, 2 Kings 7:9, etc.)—that God has given his people victory in battle—and this meaning needs to be borne in mind.
Good News in Isaiah
The term good news becomes particularly prominent in the book of Isaiah, which—together with the Psalms—is one of the books that Jesus quotes most frequently in the four Gospels. Since Isaiah is a prophetic work, it is here that we would be most likely to find material directly prophesying the emergence of the gospel in the New Testament.
It is thus no surprise when we consult Isaiah and discover that the end of the book—which frequently deals with the coming age of the Messiah—has multiple references to good news. For example, in chapter 40, we read:
Go on up to a high mountain, O Zion, herald of good news;
lift up your voice with strength, O Jerusalem, herald of good news;
lift it up, fear not;
say to the cities of Judah, “Behold your God!”
Behold, the Lord God comes with might, and his arm rules for him;
behold, his reward is with him, and his recompense before him (Isaiah 40:9-10).
Here the good news that is announced to Israel is the arrival of God as king. He comes with mighty power, and his right arm is going to rule. This hooks into the theme of military victory that we have already seen associated with the idea of good news.
Next, in chapter 52, we read:
How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him who brings good news,
who publishes peace,
who brings good news of happiness,
who publishes salvation,
who says to Zion, “Your God reigns.” (Isaiah 52:7).
Here the good news being announced is that there will be a time in which Israel’s God reigns, resulting in a time of peace, happiness, and salvation—the last of these being a common Old Testament reference to salvation from one’s enemies in battle, again hooking into the theme of military victory.
Finally, in chapter 61, we read:
The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me,
because the Lord has anointed me to bring good news to the poor;
he has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted,
to proclaim liberty to the captives,
and the opening of the prison to those who are bound;
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor (Isaiah 61:1-2).
Here the good news being announced includes encouraging the brokenhearted, proclaiming liberty to those who are captive or in prison, and the reason for this is the arrival of the year of the Lord’s favor—so once again God brings about a new and improved state of affairs for his people.
We thus see Isaiah building up a picture of a coming time when God will arrive with powerful might and a strong right arm, he will reign and bring peace, happiness, and salvation from their enemies to his people, and in this year or time of the Lord’s favor, he will encourage the broken hearted and announce liberty to captives and those in prison.
That is the essential content of the good news or gospel that Isaiah focuses on.
The Gospel in the Gospels
So how well does Isaiah’s understanding of the coming time of good news correspond to the way the concept is handled in the four Gospels—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John?
The earliest reference we find to Jesus preaching the gospel is in Mark 1:
Now after John was arrested, Jesus came into Galilee, proclaiming the gospel of God, and saying, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the gospel” (Mark 1:14-15).
This fits very well with the understanding of the gospel in Isaiah. Here the gospel is presented as being “of God”—that is, it is good news from or about God—and it is announced that “the time is fulfilled”—meaning that what has been previously prophesied is now arriving. The thing that is now arriving is “the kingdom of God.” And the appropriate response is to repent or turn away from one’s sins and believe in the gospel or good news of God’s arriving kingdom.
All of this fits with the vision of the gospel presented in Isaiah of a time when God would arrive with power and begin to rule in a new golden age, in which God’s people—those who have repented of sin and allied with God—will be blessed.
We also find a connection with Isaiah’s understanding of the good news in Luke 4, where we read:
[Jesus] came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up. And as was his custom, he went to the synagogue on the Sabbath day, and he stood up to read. And the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to him. He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written,
“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”
And he rolled up the scroll and gave it back to the attendant and sat down. And the eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him. And he began to say to them, “Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing” (Luke 4:16-21).
Here Jesus quotes Isaiah 61—the passage we read earlier about the year of the Lord’s favor—and he announces that it was being fulfilled in his ministry. So Jesus was directly hooking into Isaiah’s understanding of the coming time of good news in which God would reign and bless his people.
Just like he said in Mark, “the time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand.” This understanding of the gospel as the arrival of the kingdom of God is a common theme in the New Testament.
If you search the New Testament for references to “gospel of” or “good news of,” you’ll turn up more than thirty references where the concept is qualified to indicate where it comes from or what it is about. Of these places, seven passages speak of the gospel “of God” (Mark 1:14, Romans 1:1, 15:16, 1 Thessalonians 2:2, 8-9, 1 Peter 4:17), and six passages speak of the gospel “of the kingdom” of God (Matthew 4:23, 9:35, 24:14, Luke 4:43, 8:1, 16:16).
These references are all consistent with Isaiah’s presentation of the gospel as the time when God arrives and begins to rule in a golden age, and they reveal a strong New Testament linkage between the idea of the gospel and God and his kingdom.
What’s Missing?
You may notice that something has been been missing from the passages we’ve just covered. Starting with Isaiah and continuing through the New Testament passages just mentioned, there has been a focus on the gospel as being about God coming to rule and establishing his kingdom in a new and better way than has been the case thus far.
However, there has been no mention of his Son Jesus Christ, his death on the Cross, heaven or hell, or anything like that. All of those concepts have been conspicuously missing.
We can’t chalk this up to the individual passages simply failing to mention them. In particular, that proposal won’t work for the passages referring to the gospel and the kingdom in Matthew, Mark, and Luke.
The reason is that Jesus did not begin his ministry and immediately announce his death on the Cross. He was preaching the gospel. Mark 1:14-15 and Luke 4:16-21 both portray him preaching the gospel early on. But he didn’t reveal his coming death until much later on (Matthew 16:21, Mark 8:31, Luke 9:22), and even then the disciples didn’t understand what he meant (Matthew 16:22-23, 17:23, Mark 8:32-33, 9:32, Luke 9:45, 18:34).
And it wasn’t just Jesus preaching the good news. Before him, John the Baptist had preached it also (Luke 3:18).
So we see that—early on—there was a proclamation of the gospel that did not focus on Jesus and his death on the Cross. Instead, the focus was on the time arriving for God to come and inaugurate his reign in his kingdom. That’s why the gospel is so frequently referred to as the gospel of God and the gospel of the kingdom.
What role Jesus would play in these events had not yet been revealed.
Implications for the Gospel
This has important implications for how the New Testament understands the idea of the gospel.
It is true that Jesus died on a Cross so that we could be forgiven our sins, saved from going to hell, and brought to be with God forever. However, sin and salvation are not what the gospel is about. That is a fundamental misframing of the gospel as the New Testament understands it.
Instead, the New Testament understands the gospel as the good news that the time has arrived for God to begin to reign and inaugurate his kingdom, bringing in a new golden age for those who follow him.
This is done through his Son’s death on the Cross—so Jesus has the pivotal role in bringing God’s kingdom about—but it is the arrival of God’s kingdom that is the good news itself.
References in Other Passages
Once you realize this, you find echoes of the gospel in other passages that don’t even use the term. For example, if God’s kingdom is now arriving, who has been ruling the world up to now?
There are two answers to this question. One is the human kingdoms that have ruled the world thus far and oppressed God’s people. But now these kingdoms are being supplanted by the kingdom of God. In Revelation 11, we read:
Then the seventh angel blew his trumpet, and there were loud voices in heaven, saying, “The kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ, and he shall reign forever and ever” (Revelation 11:15).
So the kingdom of the world has been replaced by the kingdom of God and of Christ—a thought immortalized in one of the most beautiful musical pieces of all time, Handel’s Messiah. Love that!
But this announcement in Revelation—like the gospel itself—is not coming out of the blue. It’s also predicted in the Old Testament. For example, the prophet Zechariah predicts that there will be a day when:
The Lord will be king over all the earth (Zechariah 14:9).
And in Daniel 2 we read of a series of pagan kingdoms that oppress God’s people and then are told:
And in the days of those kings the God of heaven will set up a kingdom that shall never be destroyed, nor shall the kingdom be left to another people. It shall break in pieces all these kingdoms and bring them to an end, and it shall stand forever (Daniel 2:44).
Later, in Daniel 7 we read about a similar line of pagan kingdoms, and we learn about the role of the Son of Man in their overthrow. Daniel says,
I saw in the night visions, and behold, with the clouds of heaven there came one like a son of man, and he came to the Ancient of Days and was presented before him.
And to him was given dominion and glory and a kingdom, that all peoples, nations, and languages should serve him; his dominion is an everlasting dominion, which shall not pass away, and his kingdom one that shall not be destroyed (Daniel 7:13-14).
So the idea of the pagan kingdoms of the world being replaced by God’s kingdom through the Son of Man, or the Christ, is among the expectations established in the Old Testament. It is part of the gospel or good news that the Jews were expecting to be announced.
The Gospel on the Angelic Level
However, the pagan kingdoms of the world were not the only answer to the question of who was ruling before the time of God’s kingdom. The other answer is found on the angelic level—in the invisible world that operates behind the visible, earthly kingdoms.
Scripture gives us glimpses of that invisible world, such as when John tells us:
The whole world lies in the power of the evil one (1 John 5:19).
And when Jesus was tested in the desert in Luke 4, we read that:
The devil took [Jesus] up and showed him all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time, and said to him, “To you I will give all this authority and their glory, for it has been delivered to me, and I give it to whom I will. If you, then, will worship me, it will all be yours.”
And Jesus answered him, “It is written, ‘You shall worship the Lord your God, and him only shall you serve’” (Luke 4:5-8).
So God had allowed the devil to have spiritual control on the angelic level of all the nations of the earth. And to test Jesus, he offered to give him all these nations in exchange for worship, but Jesus knew this was not God’s plan and rejected it.
Consequently, John tells us:
The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the works of the devil (1 John 3:8).
And in John’s Gospel, as Jesus is preparing to go to the Cross, he says:
Now is the judgment of this world; now will the ruler of this world be cast out. And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself (John 12:31-32).
And so the book of Hebrews says that Jesus partook of flesh and blood so that
Through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil (Hebrews 2:14).
All of this forms the conceptual background to the New Testament understanding of the gospel. It’s the good news that—although the devil has reigned in the world up to now and there have been a series of pagan empires that have oppressed God’s people—the time has finally arrived for God to come and begin reigning through his kingdom.
This happens because his Son defeats the powers of darkness by his atoning death on the Cross and by his resurrection and ascension to the right hand of God, where he now sits and reigns while the final defeat of the powers of darkness and death is implemented. As St. Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15:
As in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive. But each in his own order: Christ the firstfruits, then at his coming those who belong to Christ.
Then comes the end, when he delivers the kingdom to God the Father after destroying every rule and every authority and power. For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. The last enemy to be destroyed is death (1 Corinthians 15:22-26).
The Gospel and the Son
We thus see that there is a central role for Jesus as the Son of God in the New Testament’s conception of the gospel, and that’s not surprising.
Of those more than thirty references you’ll turn up if you search for the “gospel of” or the “good news of,” they don’t all refer to God and the kingdom. Eleven of them—or about a third—refer to variations on the gospel “of Christ,” the gospel “of Jesus Christ,” the gospel “of our Lord Jesus,” and the gospel “of his Son” (Mark 1:1, Romans 1:9, 15:19, 1 Corinthians 9:12, 2 Corinthians 2:12, 9:13, 10:14, Galatians 1:7, Philippians 1:27, 1 Thessalonians 3:2, 2 Thessalonians 1:8).
Not to mention the fact that the four documents about the life of Christ are called gospels—a usage that dates back to the apostolic age in the first century.
So Jesus has a very prominent place in the New Testament understanding of the gospel, but this is not the original way it was conceptualized. The Old Testament prophets, John the Baptist, and Jesus all initially announced the gospel as the arrival of God’s kingdom, and this is how it was publicly announced for years—all through Christ’s earthly ministry.
Only Jesus understood the role that he would play in bringing that kingdom about, he only disclosed this role gradually, and even his own disciples did not understand it until he rose from the dead.
Therefore, the role of the Son in the gospel was a secondary announcement. It was added to the original, primary understanding of the gospel of God and his kingdom at a later stage to explain how that kingdom would come about. That’s why the earliest announcements of the gospel to be given all focus on God and his kingdom and the announcements of the gospel in connection with the Son were all given later.
So the primary proclamation of the gospel is thus the announcement that the time for God to inaugurate his kingdom has arrived, and the secondary proclamation is that this kingdom will be implemented through God’s Son.
What’s Still Missing
But notice that there’s still something missing from the way the New Testament conceptualizes the gospel. The passages where the New Testament refer to the gospel just do not focus on individuals. They don’t focus on you, your sin, your forgiveness, you being delivered from hell, or you being united with God in heaven.
That’s just not what we find in these passages, and that understanding reframes the gospel away from the New Testament’s conception to present the gospel as if it’s about what happens to individuals like you and me. To put it bluntly, the gospel is not about us. It’s about God, his kingdom, and his Son.
Of the more than thirty references to the “gospel of” and the “good news of,” only one of them explicitly refers to salvation. That passage is Ephesians 1:13, where Paul says:
In [Christ] you also, when you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation, and believed in him, were sealed with the promised Holy Spirit (Ephesians 1:13).
Here Paul identifies “the word of truth” with “the gospel of your salvation.” Salvation is one of the implications of the gospel for us. It is because of the gospel that we can be saved. But a single verse that mentions this fact does not radically change the focus of the New Testament in how its authors think of the gospel.
The primary proclamation of the gospel is still that the time for God’s kingdom has arrived. The secondary proclamation of the gospel is still that God’s kingdom will be implemented through his Son. And the fact that we can be saved through the Son is an addendum that is added on to these proclamations of the gospel, but it is not the essence of the gospel itself.
I was led to this conclusion a number of years ago when I did a careful study of the way the New Testament uses the word gospel, and I’ve been pleased to see other scholars arriving the same conclusion. For example, this is another area in which N. T. Wright has it correct.
N.T. Wright: In Isaiah, Isaiah chapter 40 and Isaiah chapter 52, you get the same word. How lovely upon the mountains are the feet of the one who brings good news, who publishes salvation, who says to Zion your God reigns. And when we find good news in the New Testament, so Jesus say, coming at the beginning of Mark’s gospel coming into Galilee saying The time is fulfilled, God’s kingdom is at hand. Repent and believe the good news. What he seems to be doing is very clearly evoking Isaiah. But what is the good news of Isaiah? It is that the creator God is at last, taking his power and reigning and putting things right. That’s what it means to talk about the kingdom of God. The good news of the kingdom is that the God who made the world who has longed to rescue and redeem it from its trouble is now at last doing so even though it’s not going to look like most people thought it would. When Jesus himself went about announcing that this was time for God to become king, he called what he was doing the gospel.
We also see this understanding of the gospel when Paul introduces the concept at the very beginning of Romans. He writes:
Paul, a servant of Christ Jesus, called to be an apostle, set apart for the gospel of God . . . concerning his Son, who was descended from David according to the flesh and was declared to be the Son of God in power according to the Spirit of holiness by his resurrection from the dead, Jesus Christ our Lord (Romans 1:1, 3-4).
And N. T. Wright correctly points out what’s missing from that articulation of the gospel.
N.T. Wright: In Romans one verses three and four, Paul actually gives his definition of the gospel. And his definition of the gospel isn’t about a mechanism whereby we can get saved. It is about the reality that Jesus, the Son of God, the descendant of the seed of David, according to the flesh, has now having been crucified, been designated son of God in power according to the spirit of holiness by his resurrection from the dead. And he is now the Lord of the world. And he summons all people everywhere to live under his lordship.
Gospel Misconceptions
We thus see that there are a lot of misconceptions about the gospel out there—at least if people are taking their own definitions to be what the New Testament means by the word.
Different groups can use terms however they like, but they are not representing the New Testament understanding of the gospel if they say it is equivalent to:
- The whole of Scripture
- The whole of Christian doctrine
- The whole of Christ’s teachings
- Lutheranism’s idea of anything that preaches God’s grace and forgiveness
- The distinctive doctrines of Full Gospel Pentecostals
- The distinctive doctrines of Calvinism
- The idea of justification by faith alone
- The idea of justification by grace alone
- Or even the idea that God has saved us—as individuals—through the death of his Son since we could not save ourselves
No, the core of the gospel, beginning with texts in the Old Testament, is that the time for God’s kingdom has arrived and all opposing powers will be overthrown. The elaboration of the gospel is that God’s kingdom will be implemented through his Son. And a happy consequence of that fact is that we can be saved through his Son.
The New Testament’s understanding is not about us as individuals and how we can benefit. The gospel is not about us. Instead, the good news is about what God and his Son are doing in the world, what they’re doing to their enemies—like the devil and the pagan world order—and how we can benefit as individuals, how we can get on board with God’s plan, is a consequence of the gospel, but it’s not the essence of the good news.
Conclusion
So what do we need to do to benefit from the good news of the coming of God’s kingdom through his Son? Jesus himself told us in Mark 1:
The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the gospel (Mark 1:15).
Or—as St. Peter put it on the day of Pentecost:
Repent and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit (Acts 2:38).
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SOURCES:
John MacArthur on the Gospel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHx5Bctu9X0
John Piper on the Gospel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NUB4I5vO12o
John Piper on the Gospel (2): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JaFRMaqHAdY
GotQuestions on the Gospel: https://www.gotquestions.org/what-is-the-gospel.html
- T. Wright on the Gospel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ji0XgjPumVI
GotQuestions on the “Full Gospel”: https://www.gotquestions.org/Full-Gospel-church.html
The Roaches’ version of the Hallelujah Chorus: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EiwMoW003Fo