By Mitch Chase
Important messages warrant the utmost consideration. If you had a crucial piece of information, you would likely not be careless with it. Instead, you would show care and determination to ensure that the message was accurately and appropriately delivered. You would labor to be clear, not confusing, when you conveyed it.
We should be the clearest and most careful regarding the most important message in the world: the gospel.
The word gospel means good news, and the news is not about us. True, the gospel has profound implications for us, but we are not the content of it. We are hearers of it, even beneficiaries, or perhaps rejecters. Our sin certainly shows our need for the gospel. But fundamentally the good news is about Jesus and what he has done for sinners. If you hear something which is passed along as the "gospel" but which doesn't focus on the cross of Jesus, you're not hearing the good news.
The New Testament consistently presents the Christian gospel as a message about Jesus. But this message about him is not general or abstract but very specific: it centers on Jesus' substitutionary death for sinners which satisfied the righteous wrath of his Father. Paul taught "that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures" (1 Cor 15:3b), and in Christ's death God showed his justice (Rom 3:25-26). Jesus knew that dying on the cross meant bearing and drinking the cup of his Father's wrath (Luke 22:42).
Paul's message of reconciliation included statements like this: "God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God" (2 Cor 5:21). Paul's understanding of the good news, then, is that Jesus has done a work that is worthy of worldwide proclamation, and this finished work concerns the dilemma of man's sinfulness before a holy God.
What makes the gospel good news is that God has done in Jesus what none of us could do: "God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross" (Col 1:19). To put it another way, "God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us" (Rom 5:8).
So the message of the gospel is for us, but it's not about us. The gospel is about the finished work of Christ, and the substitutionary aspect of his work is what makes the news good! Our work is not good news. For example, "All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God" (Rom 3:23). Also, "There is no one righteous, not even one; there is no one who understands, no one who seeks God" (Rom 3:10-11). In other words, we are bad news!
The Christ-centered nature of the gospel is evident in 2 Corinthians 4:5a: "For we do not preach ourselves, but Jesus Christ as Lord." In this verse Paul informs the Corinthians who the sovereign one is, and that title doesn't belong to any of us. Paul does not preach himself (or anyone else) as Lord. He preaches Jesus as Lord, as the sovereign ruler of the world. Jesus is supreme, exalted above all. He is "far above all rule and authority, power and dominion, and every title that can be given, not only in the present age but also in the one to come" (Eph 1:21).
The good news doesn't focus on someone with mere aspirations of significance. Rather, Jesus is the most important person in the universe, and the good news proclaims him as the Savior of all who trust and hope in him.
While the gospel is the best news for sinners, they do not gladly welcome it. Tragically, "The god of this age has blinded the minds of unbelievers, so that they cannot see the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God" (2 Cor 4:4). Put another way, what unbelievers so desperately need to see - the glory of Christ displayed in the gospel - is the very thing to which they are blinded.
Apart from the power of God, spiritual blindness cannot produce a saving response to the good news. "The message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing" (1 Cor 1:18a). A crucified Messiah is "a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles" (1 Cor 1:23). The good news is offensive news. But Paul has no other saving news to proclaim. "I am not ashamed of the gospel" - despite its offense - "because it is the power of God for the salvation of everyone who believes: first for the Jew, then for the Gentile" (Rom 1:16).
The good news is powerful news! Paul speaks about salvation in terms of the power which God exercised in creating the world: "For God, who said, 'Let light shine out of darkness,' made his light shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ" (2 Cor 4:6). In fact, Paul calls salvation new creation: "Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come!" (2 Cor 5:17).
We need to be Christians who think through the content of the gospel, the good news of Christ who became our sin-bearing substitute under the wrath of his Father. We need clear thinking about this message, because there is no more important message. The most important message in the universe is about the most important person in the universe: Jesus.
We must be careful to distinguish between the content of the gospel and those who need the message: Jesus is the former, and we are the latter. The gospel is good news about Jesus for sinners.
After pastoring in Texas, Mitch Chase is currently a student in the PhD program at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky. He and Stacie have been married for five years, and they have one son, Jensen.
