I recently asked a friend of mine named Titus “What is the Gospel?”
He replied “The Gospel message is that Jesus loved me so much that he came to this earth, wrapped himself in flesh, lived a perfect life, and died for me.
Sounds correct, right?
What if that’s only partially correct?
Lately I’ve begun to think that this way of telling the Gospel is only partially accurate and completely man centered. When reading the scripture, we have to determine whether it is primarily about God’s relationship to man or man’s relationship to God. I vote we go with God’s relationship to man.
I like what Mark Driscoll says:
“There is a strong drift toward the hard theological left. Some emergent types want to recast Jesus as a limp-wrist hippie in a dress with a lot of product in His hair, who drank decaf and made pithy Zen statements about life while shopping for the perfect pair of shoes. In Revelation, Jesus is a pride fighter with a tattoo down his leg, a sword in His hand and the commitment to make someone bleed. That is a guy I can worship. I cannot worship the hippie, diaper, halo Christ because I cannot worship a guy I can beat up. I fear some are becoming more cultural than Christian, and without a big Jesus who has authority and hates sin as revealed in the Bible, we will have less and less Christians, and more and more confused, spiritually self-righteous blogger critics of Christianity.”
Perhaps a more accurate picture of the Gospel is that Jesus died for God the Father so that you and I could be the beneficiaries of His grace and mercy.
When we say that “Jesus died for me…” we are exhibiting our pursuit of becoming our own God. Throughout scripture, this theme arises that Jesus does everything for the glory of His Father. If Jesus does everything for the glory of His Father, His death was also for the sake of His Father.
The Father has this enormous wrath that has to be poured out. And when we say that “Jesus died for me,” we downplay the wrathfulness in the character of God, an attribute that we dare not under communicate. If we do, we paint God as less than fully just and more human than divine.
May God be lifted high, our opinions of Him squashed, and our proclamation of His word of highest importance.
Truth is Immortal!!
