What is the Gospel of Jesus Christ – Part 3 – Brad Jersak

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Part Three: The Gospel of Jesus Preached:

To read Part One: What is the Gospel of Jesus Christ?

To read Part Two: The Gospel Jesus Preached.

After his ascension to the right hand of the Father and the outpouring of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, the gospel Jesus preached throughout his earthly ministry became the Gospel of Jesus preached by his apostolic proteges and by Paul.

Post-resurrection, Jesus’ disciples could finally see how the gospel Jesus embodied in his life is the same gospel fulfilled in an ultimate and universal sense through his death, resurrection, and ascension. That is, the healing and deliverance seen in each pericope of the four Gospels is a microcosm now magnified to all people, in all times, in all places… even extending to our healing and deliverance from death itself. In his ascension to the Cross and then to Glory—Christ Jesus, the Alpha and Omega of Almighty Love—is revealed as the Logos who both holds and fills the Cosmos. This same Jesus, according to Paul in Ephesians 1, has unveiled God’s mysterious plan from eternity to eternity: “the summing up of all things in Jesus Christ.”

To be more specific, Paul distills this gospel message by focusing on the climax of Jesus’ earthly sojourn. In 1 Corinthians 15, he essentially says, “This is the gospel we received: Christ was crucified, suffered, and died according to the Scriptures, and on the third day, was raised from death according to the Scriptures.” Note that in proclaiming the gospel, Paul (i) identifies the death and resurrection of Jesus as the central gospel narrative—the Story—and (ii) that he now sees this story prefigured and proclaimed in his “Scriptures” (our Old Testament). After the Emmaus Road revelation, Christ-followers could see how their Scriptures foretold that “the Messiah must suffer and then enter his glory.” This is how they proclaimed the Jesus Story using their own tradition to perceive and proclaim its redemptive meaning.

Further, we see this pattern preached everywhere in the Book of Acts: (i) God sent his Son, (ii) you killed him, (iii) God raised him from the dead, (iv) Jesus is Lord (King), (v) re-Turn and believe the good news. Result: God consistently confirmed the good news Jesus Story through the same forgiveness, healing, and liberation that Christ had ministered…and continued to do so through the apostolic church.

A Call to Repent

Do we preach repentance? Of course. Jesus did. His apostles did. And we must preach repentance as they did—as a re-Turn to the cross-shaped welcome of Jesus Christ’s outstretched arms, to his scandalous forgiveness “while we were still enemies of God,” and to his loving care and liberating life.

Of course, repentance also implies a turning from. Implicit in the good news of reconciliation is our redemption from our chains. We don’t break our own chains so that God can free us. We can’t. But having been found and freed, we follow Christ into our joyful exodus. Sometimes we must even name those chains and ask people to leave them behind, though always at the risk that they’ll mistake this call to respond as a kind of striving that merits a reward. It doesn’t work that way. Christ alone is our Savior. And we’re meant to experience and enjoy his salvation. We don’t set up the banquet feast—but we are called to come and eat.

So, if we’re clear that the gospel is a proclamation of what Jesus has completely accomplished (tetelestai) for us and our invitation to enjoy our abundant inheritance, then I will humbly specify just a few of the chains we’re called to leave behind:

  • Let us re-Turn to Christ from the gospel of conditional grace;
  • Let us re-Turn to Christ from the moralistic perversions of repentance;
  • Let us re-Turn to Christ from the bondage legalistic repentance;
  • Let us re-Turn to Christ from the alienation of condemning rants;
  • Let us re-Turn to Christ from the threats of divine retribution;
  • Let us re-Turn to Christ from the narrow exclusivism of infernalist dogmatism;
  • Let us re-Turn to Christ from the puny false gods that are powerless to save.

As you can see, the Jesus gospel of divine grace reveals the infinite love of God with universal implications, established

  • in Jesus’ promise to draw all people to himself,
  • in Paul’s foresight that in Christ, all shall be made alive,
  • in Peter’s conviction that God is not willing that any should perish, and
  • in John’s conviction that Christ is indeed the Savior of the world.

Only after we see and embrace those promises do we have clear eyes to consider the ‘what about’ texts—where all judgment passages are subsumed within the grand and glorious plan that involves every eye, every knee, and every tongue of every and all human beings for whom Christ died. The rest, as they say, is details—but the big and beautiful Story is in the unambiguous promise of Jesus, Savior of the world. A smaller, shallower, more hollow or flaccid gospel that claims to be ‘orthodox’ will be of little interest to those who’ve met the living One. So, let us all re-Turn to this full-throated beautiful gospel of “the faith once delivered.”

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