The Good News is God

Treasured Friends,

One question all of us Christians need to be able to answer is: “What is the gospel?”, which is another way of asking: “What is the good news?” As Christians, we talk about the good news which we have received, which we believe, and which we are called to pass on. But what is that good news? What is that gospel?

For the longest time, I could not have given a clear, simple, and confident answer to that question. At one point in my journey, I might have said: “it’s the stories about Jesus, you know, the Gospels – Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.” That answer wouldn’t be entirely wrong, but it also wouldn’t be entirely right. The gospel is in the Gospels, but the Gospels themselves are not the gospel.

So what is the gospel? Let me invite you to rephrase the question, and to instead ask “who is the gospel?”

As we open up the Gospels – as well as all the rest of Scripture – we find one thing above all else: God is the focus. But not an unnamed hidden, mysterious, inaccessible god we must discover, approach, and convince to be favorable toward us. No, it is the Triune God – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit – whose work is for us and for our salvation.

Listen to the words of John 3:16, and notice who is doing what. “God so loved the world that He gave His one and only Son that whoever believes in Him would not perish but have everlasting life.”

When you slow down for just a moment and really let the grammar of this verse simmer, one thing becomes obvious: we have salvation, not because we have earned it, or purchased it, or found it, but because it (or rather, He) has purchased, earned, and found us. Salvation is the result, but God is its origin. Salvation is ours, in other words, not by our upward ascent to God through our own personal greatness or even our own personal purity or faithfulness, but because of the Son’s personal humbling (humiliation) in descending to us. The joyous end result of all of this is that we are no longer rebels and orphans cut off from God, but we have this precious gift so only because God Himself has freely chosen to be our God. It is only because, through His one and only Son, He has come to find us and gather us in.

So back to my struggle with how exactly to answer what is the gospel, I realize now I’d have hit the mark perfectly if I’d have just practiced the old Sunday School trick of I.I.D.S.J. (“If in doubt, say ‘Jesus.'”) What is the gospel? It is that God has loved sinners in Jesus Christ (1 Tim. 1:15). But really that’s just a longer way of saying something much simpler. The gospel is Jesus.

And why is He the gospel? Because He is God. But not only God: He is God with us (John 1:14), God for us, and God who has come to bring us home forever (John 14:1-7).