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Friday, November 5, 2021

What is the gospel? - a bad answer - 9marks

Found here. Our comments in bold.
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The most important message of God to man, salvation by repentance and faith in Jesus, better be clearly communicated. The below is a fail. It contains peculiar language about rescuing people from their enemies, complicates things with inaccurate explanations about the kingdom, and introduces concepts like "mediating priest" and "priestly sacrifice" that would be meaningless to the average non-Christian.

At the end we will offer a clarified version of the author's presentation.
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What is the gospel?

Answer

The gospel is the good news about what Jesus Christ has done to reconcile sinners to God. Here’s the whole story:
  1. The one and only God, who is holy, made us in his image to know him (Gen. 1:26-28).
  2. But we sinned and cut ourselves off from him (Gen. 3; Rom. 3:23).
  3. In his great love, God sent his Son Jesus to come as king and rescue his people from their enemies—most significantly their own sin (Ps. 2; Luke 1:67-79). (This is a puzzling assertion. While it is true that Jesus is king, His kingship really isn't part of the Gospel message. It unnecessarily complicates things. And in fact, Jesus did not come as king, He came as our sacrifice for sin, the sacrificial lamb. The Bible makes this clear: Jn. 1:29 The next day John saw Jesus coming towards him and said, “Look, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world! Other verses make this same point: 1Co. 5:7, 1Pe. 1:19, Re. 5:6)
  4. Jesus established his kingdom by acting as both a mediating priest and a priestly sacrifice (Any non-Christian would be puzzled by this language.) —he lived a perfect life and died on the cross, thus fulfilling the law himself (Again, a non-Christian would have no concept of Hebrew law being fulfilled.) and taking on himself the punishment for the sins of many (The Father did not punish Jesus.)  (Mark 10:45; John 1:14; Heb. 7:26; Rom. 3:21-26, 5:12-21); then he rose again from the dead, showing that God accepted his sacrifice and that God’s wrath against us had been exhausted (Acts 2:24, Rom. 4:25). (No, Jesus rose from the dead in victory, defeating death. An where in the Bible does it say that God's wrath against us is "exhausted?" Is this really what happened to God's wrath, that it sort of ran out of gas?)
  5. He now calls us to repent of our sins and trust in Christ alone for our forgiveness (Acts 17:30, John 1:12). If we repent of our sins and trust in Christ, we are born again into a new life, an eternal life with God (John 3:16).
Now that’s good news.

A good way to summarize this good news is to biblically unpack the words God, Man, Christ,
Response.
  1. God. God is the creator of all things (Gen. 1:1). He is perfectly holy, worthy of all worship, and will punish sin (1 John 1:5, Rev. 4:11, Rom. 2:5-8).
  2. Man. All people, though created good, (All people were created good? It is not a good idea to introduce a point of doctrine where there is disagreement.) have become sinful by nature (Gen. 1:26-28, Ps. 51:5, Rom. 3:23). From birth, (Now the author clarifies. Had he avoided the initial statement, all would be fine.) all people are alienated from God, hostile to God, and subject to the wrath of God (Eph. 2:1-3).
  3. Christ. Jesus Christ, who is fully God and fully man, lived a sinless life, died on the cross to bear God’s wrath (The Father did not punish Jesus.) in the place of all who would believe in him, (He did not substitute Himself, He offered Himself as the sacrificial lamb.) and rose from the grave in order to give his people eternal life (John 1:1, 1 Tim. 2:5, Heb. 7:26, Rom. 3:21-26, 2 Cor. 5:21, 1 Cor. 15:20-22).
  4. Response. God calls everyone everywhere to repent of their sins and trust in Christ in order to be saved (Mark 1:15, Acts 20:21, Rom. 10:9-10).
(Some of this material has been adapted from The Gospel and Personal Evangelism by Mark
Dever, p. 43)

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Our version:
  1. God, who created everything and rules the universe, is perfect in every way. He values His creation, including us.
  2. Mankind is condemned from the beginning of the world. Being condemned, man is dead in his evil. 
  3. There is no forgiveness without the shedding of blood. 
  4. God responded to this problem with the perfect solution, Jesus His Son. Jesus' purpose is to remove our condemnation. Jesus represents an innocent and perfect lamb, put to death to shed His blood for our sakes. 
  5. Because He died, we now have the solution to become clean of our evil. He then rose from the dead in victory, which means He defeated the death sentence. 
  6. We can be a part of His victory if we agree with God, believe in His Son, turn away from our evil and ask Him to forgive us. If we do this, we are given the same new life as Jesus when He rose from the dead. We become part of His family. 

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