The Gospel as story

November 1, 2008 · Filed Under Lead, evangelism, faith 

‘The gospel is fascinating!’ said a young man who was attending our church for the first time Sunday. I was preaching on ‘the gospel – the story’, the first of a four part series on the gospel – the story, the person, the promise and the power. I started at creation and worked my way to Christ and His resurrection. It is as we know the gospel that it delights us, it is as it delights us that we live it and as we live it that we honour God and make it attractive to men.

The gospel is objectively delightful. It is in understanding the story from the beginning that we grasp the awesome genius of God and stand in awe at the miracle of Christ and salvation. My premise in this first part is that the Bible is narrative, one continuous narrative made up of different life stories, but from creation to final judgement it is one story.

In so doing i discovered I was not being original, rather putting baby steps in the footsteps of great men. Athanasius, the 4th century church father who played such a vital role in the debate on the divinity of Christ, wrote a treatise called ‘The Incarnation of the Word of God’ (De Incarnatione Verbi Dei), in which the first few pages were devoted to the doctrine of creation.

He said “You may be wondering why we are discussing the origin of men when we set out to talk about the Word’s becoming Man. The former subject is relevant to the latter for this reason: it was our sorry case that caused the Word to come down, our transgression that called out His love for us, so that He made haste to help us and to appear among us. It is we who were the cause of His taking human form, and for our salvation that in His great love He was both born and manifested in a human body.”

That basically says it all. Indeed our ‘sorry state’ goes back a long way, as far back as the very creation of man. The first ‘men’ walked away from the relationship of trust and intimacy God offered, allowed suspicion, pride, greed and desire for self-aggrandizement to overtake them and sinned against the Creator. As a consequence, humankind became fundamentally flawed, cursed and separated from the presence of God. The story begins here and continues with God’s eternal plan to repair that which was broken and restore that which was lost.

The awesome thing is that even after Adam turned his back on God, God continued to sustain His creation, forging covenants with diverse individuals who were willing to walk with Him even as humanity was being prepared for the coming of the One who would break the curse and bridge the divide at the appropriate time. He forged covenants with Adam, Abraham, Noah, David, successively, instituted the law, the tabernacle worship, came as close to His people as they could bear while under the burden of sin.

Through varying seasons of obedience and most often disregard of His commands, He sought by all means to preserve a people through whom the One who would bring a new order would come. The prophets repeated spoke of it, everyone awaited it, and one day, it finally happened. Messiah came, but differently from what many had imagined. Not as a king to break the yoke of Roman oppression and restore the earthly glory of the nation, rather as One who equated Himself with God and claimed to forgive sins. They were stunned, but He knew what they did not know.

He knew the human condition was akin to terminal illness, unless somehow the sick person could have all his ailments transferred to another and take on the healthy body of the other, he was as good as dead. That is what Christ did, by His death and resurrection; He carried the terminal illness of sin afflicting humankind, bore the brunt of it, and dispensed with it, He provided the remedy for the sin which impeded the once vibrant relationship and condemned man to eternal separation from God. He broke the curse and bridged the gap, such that anyone who chooses to accept Him can experience spiritual restoration, the re-establishment of the connection with God that was severed by sin and entry into God’s kingdom.

Without an understanding of the fundamental flaw of mankind, the dastardly situation he found himself in after the fall, there is no appreciation of the value of or need for redemption. As we understand the story, we see how we fit in and we revel in it and in the thinking behind it. It broadens our perspective of God, takes us beyond the utilitarian, highly personalised view of God’s interaction with mankind, which sometimes hinders our grasp of the extremely diverse range of His action in the earth.

Milton in writing Paradise Lost sought to retrace the whole gamut of man’s relationship with God and God’s dealing with man, with the avowed intent of ‘justifying the ways of God to men’. It is time Christians in our generation got a grasp of the whole story and began to tell it.

Related posts:

  1. the gospel – ?
  2. Should the gospel make you happy?
  3. Nick Vujicic – a story of courage
  4. Books, Gospel, Rick Warren etc
  5. Pondering Christmas – incarnational thinking
  6. What’s your story?

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