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Most of us are too busy to slow down. Kind of odd, huh? Our lives move at such a pace that we can barely remember what’s actually important. If our lives are a story, the narrative seems to have too much filler and too little real plot. It probably wouldn’t make a good novel. By contrast the story of Jesus moves with the feel of an epic drama. It is almost too grand to keep fully in view. A different kind of problem forces its way onto our conscience—can the Good News of Jesus Christ actually be simple enough to understand and integrate into life? After all, why do we need so many different books of Scripture to tell the whole drama of redemption? Why are there so many diverse words used to depict the nature of salvation?

One of the chief challenges today in keeping the gospel central to ministry and to life is the claim that there is just too much in Scripture to distill the gospel into a single framework. There are just too many parts and too many descriptions of Jesus to make it all cohere into one simple story. By analogy there are also just too many parts of ordinary life to keep it organized by one central idea. Life is too complicated to suppose there might be anything that makes it coherent.

One temptation that follows is to suppose that the gospel is simply one piece of a large and complicated puzzle that gets us started in the Christian life. But as Tullian Tchividjian has written in his blog on this site, “I’ve come to realize that once God rescues sinners, his plan isn’t to steer them beyond the gospel, but to move them more deeply into it.” The gospel is not simply a once-and-done phenomena. The gospel is more than just the forgiveness of sins. It is the redemptive arc of God’s creation, fall, redemption, and the new creation. Or as Don Carson has put it, “for many today the ‘gospel’ refers not to the glorious, comprehensive Good News disclosed in Scripture but to a very simplistic reduction of it. . . .  [The gospel is] God’s comprehensive Good News that not only initiates salvation but orders all of our life in this world and the next.”

No Simplistic Tag Line

Instead of congealing the whole of the Scriptures into a simplistic tag line, we must expound the depth and richness of the gospel that defy simplistic accounts. The plot line of redemptive history is deep and rich because redemption is deep and rich. The Bible’s articulation of the gospel mirrors the depth and richness of the gospel. It affirms what Kevin Vanhoozer calls “aspectival realism”—the notion that there are many aspects to biblical reality, all of which are not captured by a single “true” statement. An analogy might help. Husband and wife ought to be best friends, and yet they are more than friends. They share a legal relationship to one another, but they are not tied together merely by legal bonds. They share ownership of many possessions, but this common ownership does not exhaust their relationship. Marriage is rich and deep, and the language of friendship, legal bonds, and common possessions speak truly of marriage but by themselves do not express the fullness of what marriage is.

So the gospel must be articulated in a host of ways, to help congregations more fully grasp the depth and richness and thereby the centrality of the gospel. The gospel is the dynamic of life under God’s sovereign kingship. It is an upside-down, ironic kingdom in which the King extends grace to sinners rather than the powerful and the strong, and the privileged. It is a reversal of the values of what the world highly regards, namely, affluence, status, accumulation of wealth and power.  Better than anything else, the cross displays the gospel as the reversal of life through death, power through weakness, wisdom through foolishness, leadership through service.

The Bible uses different word pictures to articulate the breadth and depth of the gospel. The language of the law court (justification, punishment, judgment) illuminates the fundamentally moral character of redemption. The language of the temple (atonement, sacrifice, sanctification) highlights the mystery of the universal presence of God as creator interwoven into the local presence of God as redeemer. The language of the family (adoption, bride and bridegroom) explores the central relational quality of God’s dealing with his creatures. The language of the marketplace (ransom and possession) captures the dynamic of God’s ownership of his people in all of life.

Why so many word pictures? Not because God wants us to choose whichever one appeals to us the most. Rather it is because life is full of dimensions that can never be fully captured by one word picture. Different word pictures help us capture different aspects of this reality. Recognizing this helps us understand the multiple ways in which the gospel serves as the glue to the complexities of life. We must refuse to accept the realities of a distracted world at face value, and look instead for ways to build bridges between the disconnected parts of peoples lives through the richness and depth of the gospel.

Too often pastors don’t help congregations keep their hearts and minds focused on the gospel. The gospel becomes one program among many others. Sermons meander. Missions are short-term projects for people with special interests. Worship is disconnected from ordinary life. Churches build multiple “short attention span” programs in a cafeteria-like smorgasboard and inadvertently contribute to the “overload” problem so many of us experience in ordinary life. There are already too many distractions, and too often the gospel gets our attention only when the other distractions of life aren’t exploding in on us. Too many pastors and too many churches chase after the short attention spans of their congregants, only to find that the gospel sits light on people’s lives and may even be one more of the distractions. However, if the gospel is about finding ourselves in an alternative universe, it will not do to simply rearrange the furniture in the old universe. The gospel is not simply a piece of furniture in the “old” spiritual house. It is a different house altogether.

Is there enough evidence for us to believe the Gospels?

In an age of faith deconstruction and skepticism about the Bible’s authority, it’s common to hear claims that the Gospels are unreliable propaganda. And if the Gospels are shown to be historically unreliable, the whole foundation of Christianity begins to crumble.
But the Gospels are historically reliable. And the evidence for this is vast.
To learn about the evidence for the historical reliability of the four Gospels, click below to access a FREE eBook of Can We Trust the Gospels? written by New Testament scholar Peter J. Williams.

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