So what does God, through his incarnate Son — ‘Christ clothed with his gospel’ — actually reveal to us?
Start with where Christ is now. Through resurrection and ascension, Jesus Christ ‘has gone into heaven and is at the right hand of God, with angels, authorities, and powers having been subjected to him’ (1 Pet 3:22).
His right to rule all others is determined by kindness and shaped by pity.
What He’s Doing Up There
Having joined God the Father on his throne (Rev 3:21), Christ’s focus is to steadily destroy all enemies, evil, and opposition to God’s purpose and truth (Acts 2:34-35) — and eventually to transfer his totally victorious realm to God the Father (1 Cor 15:23-28).
And here’s what’s of capital importance to recognise: his right to rule all others is determined by kindness and shaped by pity.1‘The impelling cause whereby God within himself moves to declare the gospel is God’s unrestricted mercy and goodwill with which he purposed to embrace the wretched human race that had fallen into sin by the guilt of Adam’ (Leiden Synopsis, 22:12, 239).
The rule of Christ is a saving rule. Although his Kingdom saves through judgment, the character of his sovereignty is gracious. It seeks reconciliation between God and man based on forgiveness. The deeds, words and works of Jesus the Lord are designed to rescue, to liberate, to perfect.
‘Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners’ (1 Tim 1:15).
So the supremacy of Christ announced in the gospel seeks and accomplishes salvation — God’s saving action, built on the Saviour’s death and resurrection.
And that salvation means God knows us, and in that we know God. It means we now call God Father, and he calls us his children. And in it, as our Lord and mediator at the Father’s right hand, Jesus Christ is our elder brother (Heb 2:11-13, 17-18).
The Bible’s Main Character
The Lord Jesus Christ is the Bible’s primary personality. And the news about him — the message concerning his Kingdom and reign, originally declared by him and later taught about him — is the main message of biblical revelation.
Of all the Bible’s great truths, the gospel is its greatest truth, its most massive claim, its most monumental assertion.
Which makes Christ clothed with his gospel the ABC of biblical teaching, ‘the starting-point for knowing God … the fundamental revelation.’2Jensen, Revelation of God, 63; italics supplied.
The good news of ‘God in Christ’ (Eph 4:23), its teaching about Jesus’ supreme Person and work on our behalf ‘for our sins’ (1 Cor 15:3; Gal 1:4; 1 John 2:2), comprises the basic revelation of God. It is God’s prime written and preached revelation — reaching out to embrace and give meaning to all of Scripture, and in that way, to life.
‘The Christian gospel is the fundamental revelation of God. It affirms that the knowledge of God is the goal of human existence and comes preeminently through Jesus Christ (John 17:3). The gospel is preached in words, as the Word of God (Rom 10:14-17). In turn, it depends for its authenticity and its full explication on the whole Bible understood as God’s Word. God’s scriptural promises are fulfilled in the recognition that Jesus is the long-expected Christ (2 Cor 1:20).’3Peter F. Jensen, ‘Revelation,’ in Evangelical Dictionary of Theology (hereafter abbreviated EDT), ed. Daniel J. Treier (Baker, 2017), 747.
So the gospel of Jesus is good news above all because in it we hear from God, and through it we encounter God, meet God, and know God in him.
‘[T]he gospel is God’s account of his saving activity in Jesus the Messiah, in which, by Jesus’ death and resurrection, he atones for sin and brings new creation.’4Simon Gathercole, ‘The gospel of Paul and the gospel of the Kingdom,’ in Chris Green ed., God’s Power to Save: One Gospel for a Complex World? (Apollos, 2006) 149; emphasis supplied.
In the gospel, God reveals Christ’s provision for our unending need: ‘Whoever drinks of the water that I give him will never be thirsty again. The water that I will give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life’ (John 4:14).
Whose Idea It Was
Although the gospel in the Scriptures of both Testaments is written by human agency, it belongs to God.
It’s God’s idea, God’s initiative, God’s instrument. As we’ve seen from John and Hebrews, in that preaching and teaching God in Person makes himself present to us.
Through it God distributes his best answers to humanity’s biggest questions. It offers God’s lasting solutions to humanity’s deepest problems, and communicates his definitive resolutions of the eternal issues facing every individual.
So it remains the most astonishing information anyone ever receives — and also the most positive, good-willed and valuable. In receiving it, in trusting his promises, we receive God himself. Because the gospel is a matchlessly generous and effective word from God in a world of harm, horrors and hurt, it is precious beyond price.
Interception
The gospel tells of God’s intervention in the grand sweep of history, in Person.
And that intervention is interceptive — whether in the special history of the Jews (Acts 13:16-23) or the general religious quest (Acts 14:14-18; 17:23-28).
In the main historical events of Christ’s career — birth, life, teachings, healings, exorcisms, death, resurrection, ascension — God heads off and puts an end to otherwise terrible and inevitable consequences.
Scripture doesn’t often put it this way, but the good news does indeed involve a rescue.
History Split in Two
The original events on which the gospel is based — Jesus’ life, death and resurrection — split history in two, marking the end of one age and the beginning of a new epoch.
That new era is directed, deliberately and surely, toward a certain historical conclusion. Despite the death of individuals and the decay of the cosmos, the Christian good news promises endless ultimate victory and cast-iron eternal security.
And the victorious conclusion is this: God dwelling with us, and we being his people. When ‘God himself will be with them as their God. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away’ (Rev 21:2-4).
Fixed and All-Embracing
Another way to put it: the gospel of Jesus, the Word of God contained in Scripture, has a fixed material status.
That isn’t unexpected. God, who created all things by and for his Word, is the source of all being and meaning. So the coming of that Word to restore a creation alienated from its Creator by sin means the gospel of that Divine movement is unwaveringly all-embracing.
Its status is fixed, firm and definite, because the good news blends the world of facts with the realm of ideas — and above all, with the world of relationships.
The gospel embraces all things, material and spiritual. It connects dateable Divine events with definite Divine concepts. Read it in Scripture and you find it integrating information, evidence, commentary on that evidence, and interpretation of it.
It links the Person and deeds of God with words from God.
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- 1‘The impelling cause whereby God within himself moves to declare the gospel is God’s unrestricted mercy and goodwill with which he purposed to embrace the wretched human race that had fallen into sin by the guilt of Adam’ (Leiden Synopsis, 22:12, 239). ↩︎
- 2Jensen, Revelation of God, 63; italics supplied. ↩︎
- 3Peter F. Jensen, ‘Revelation,’ in Evangelical Dictionary of Theology (hereafter abbreviated EDT), ed. Daniel J. Treier (Baker, 2017), 747. ↩︎
- 4Simon Gathercole, ‘The gospel of Paul and the gospel of the Kingdom,’ in Chris Green ed., God’s Power to Save: One Gospel for a Complex World? (Apollos, 2006) 149; emphasis supplied. ↩︎