(Matthew 24:14) What is the True Gospel?

“And this gospel of the kingdom will be preached in all the world as a witness to all the nations, and then the end will come.” (Matthew 24:14)

To understand the gospel, we must first correctly diagnose the problem the gospel is designed to remedy. If we have the wrong law model, then humanity’s sin is a legal problem which put us in legal trouble which requires God (the Lawgiver) to pronounce us guilty (condemn us) and then use His power to execute us. In this model, something had to be done in order for God to be able to legally pardon us and not kill us, therefore the gospel we most often hear is that Jesus came and took our place legally and was executed by His Father on the cross so that God’s righteous wrath could be vented/placated and thus He would not have to kill us. Here’s how John Piper explains this theory on page 11 of his book, Fifty Reasons Why Jesus Had to Die:

“The ultimate answer to the question, Who killed Jesus? Is: God did.”

Why did God kill His Son? He further explains:

“The substitute, Jesus Christ, does not just cancel the wrath; he absorbs it and diverts it from us to himself. God’s wrath is just, and it was spent, not withdrawn. Let us not trifle with God or trivialize his love. We will never stand in awe of being loved by God until we reckon with the seriousness of our sin and the justice of his wrath against us.” (ibid, p. 21)

Another author, Clifford Goldstein, bluntly says:

“In short, rather than killing us for violating His law, the Father killed Jesus instead ... to put it crudely, the Father killed Jesus so that He wouldn't have to kill us." (The Review, Dec. 8, 2023)

It is my conviction however that this line of reasoning is all corrupt and comes directly from paganism. It teaches that Christ came and died, not to save us from our sins as Matthew 1:21 says, but to save us from God. In fact, this is exactly what Don Carson teaches on page 40 of his book, Romans

“It is commonly held that we need to be saved from our sins, but the sobering truth is that we need to be saved from God Himself, for His anger is personal and active.”

Dr. John R.W. Stott explains it this way:

“According to the Christian revelation, God’s own great love propitiated his own holy wrath through the gift of his own dear Son, who took our place, bore our sin and died our death. Thus God himself gave himself to save us from himself.” (Why is Propitiation Necessary? June 14, 2010)

In this mindset, the “gospel” we are to spread is that the problem mankind has is not really sin but God Himself who is angry with us. But don’t worry, instead of killing us, God killed His Son Jesus on the cross to satisfy His anger and let us go free, thus saving us from Himself.

Again, this comes straight from pagan thought. The truth is, as soon as Adam sinned, God didn't change, His Law didn't change, but the condition of humankind changed. Because of sin, we are now out of harmony with God’s Law, which is His design protocol upon which life is built. Any deviation from this Law results in NATURAL consequences.

Mankind now has a terminal condition and the only way for life to exist is to be reconciled back to perfect harmony with God and to have His living Law restored back into humanity. The Good News (Gospel) is that Jesus came to do that for us and to simultaneously open an avenue so that we could partake in that blessing.

Paul tells us that, as a human being, Jesus partook of humanity’s fallen condition through Mary (Galatians 4:4), thus Jesus was sent “in the likeness of sinful flesh” and in that flesh, “He condemned sin” (Romans 8:3). All through His life on earth, Jesus was tempted in every way just like we are yet without sin (Hebrews 4:15). He faced temptations of the carnal (fallen/selfish) nature tempting Him with fear and anguish. He was tempted to act in self-interest to protect and save Himself but with every temptation He exercised faith in His Father and love for us. He would not use His power to protect Himself but trusted His Father with the outcome. He gave us the perfect example of how we are to live righteously by faith.

Thereby, in the humanity that He assumed, He destroyed the infection of fear and selfishness. In Jesus a new human was created that was sinless and perfect as God intentionally designed and humanity was saved in the person of Jesus. We now have a sinless human who never deviated from God's Law and perfectly lived out and eradicated fear and selfishness (the new Adam, 1 Corinthians 15:45). 

Simultaneously, Jesus exposed Satan’s lies and revealed the truth about God and God's methods that win us to trust. As "the express image of the Father's person" (Hebrews 1:3), in everything Jesus did and said He was revealing the Father's true character to us. Jesus said, "If you've seen Me, you've seen the Father" (John 14:9). Not that He is the Father, rather "the words I speak are not My own, but My Father who lives in Me does His work through Me" (Verse 10). When we're won to trust, we open the heart, and He not only pours His love but the Spirit (life, attitude, presence) of His Son into us (Galatians 4:6), empowering us to live by the faith of Jesus– the same unfailing faith and trust that He lived by.   

When we trust God, we get new motives, new desires, new insights and wisdom. These all come from Christ who worked them out for us. As Paul said, “I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me” (Galatians 2:20). This is what it means to be covered in Christ’s righteousness— our hearts are brought into harmony with His heart, our desires are changed to be in union with His desires, we think His thoughts, and we live His life. Only then will the Father see the righteousness of His Son as a covering because His righteousness will be completely reproduced in us as we are recreated back into His image and likeness. This is why Paul says that Jesus made peace between us (Jews and Gentiles) and Him "creating in Himself one new man [humanity]" (Ephesians 2:15); "This means that anyone who is in [one-with] Christ has become a new person. The old life is gone; a new life has begun" (2 Corinthians 5:17). As Christ is formed in us (Galatians 4:19), we will fulfill (live out) the Law as Christ did because it will be written in our hearts and minds by His Spirit.

“I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you; I will take the heart of stone out of your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. I will put My Spirit within you and cause [empower] you to walk in My Statutes, and you will keep My Judgments and do them.” (Ezekiel 36:27-28)

“For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: I will put My Laws in their mind and write them on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be My people.” (Hebrews 8:10)

Hebrews 2:14 tells us that, through His death, Christ “destroyed” the Devil who holds the power of death. The Devil’s (i.e., the Slanderer’s) power of death are the lies he tells about God that we believe that keep us from truly knowing Him. The word for “destroy” in this passage is katargeo, which is not used to mean, “to kill” but “to render idle, unemployed, inactivate, inoperative.” Jesus, the only-begotten, divine Son of God, was sent to reveal the truth concerning His Father to render idle the lies of the Devil, which held us captive. This brings the Devil and his works into the status of unemployment— “this is eternal life, that they may know You [the Father], the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom You have sent. I have glorified You on the earth. I have finished the work which You have given Me to do” (John 17:3-4).

Death is caused by deviation from God's Law (the Law of life, Deuteronomy 10:12-13). This is called “sin” (1 John 3:4). If you're out of harmony with the Law of Life it'd be like you breaking the law of respiration by tying a plastic bag over your head, which naturally causes death. If I told you beforehand not to tie the bag over your head or you will die, I do not need to kill you if you disobey. The death is a natural consequence– “sin [not an angry God], when it is full-grown, brings forth death” (James 1:14).

On the cross, Jesus defeated the lie that God stands as the executioner against those who deviate from His Law. Although He could not see His Father’s face due to the weight of humanity’s sin upon Him (Isaiah 59:2), He, knowing His Father (Matthew 11:27), stood upon the platform of faith and trusted that His Father heard His cry (Psalm 22:1, 24). On the cross, Jesus did not disarm God, He disarmed the principalities and powers of darkness, making a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them (Colossians 2:15; Ephesians 6:12). It is Satan who is our accuser, not God! (Revelation 12:9-10). 

In this victory over fear and selfishness (i.e., unfailing trust in His Father), the only predictable outcome is life, and the proof we have is that the Father raised His Son from the grave (Acts 2:24; 13:30; Romans 8:11; 10:9). This victory can be ours if we permit Jesus’ unfailing faith to live in and through us (compare Revelation 3:21 with Revelation 2:11).

As you can see, this biblical model of the atonement is not about God needing to be paid (appeased) with death. God never needed to be paid anything in order to forgive us– His forgiveness is FREE. If Christ’s death paid off God, then God would have been paid and didn’t really forgive anything. "The Man, Christ Jesus" is our mediator (1 Timothy 2:5), not to convince God to forgive and heal us, but to convince us to accept God's forgiveness and healing remedy. It is God in Christ reconciling us to Him, not Christ and man reconciling God to us (2 Corinthians 5:19). We are the ones who naturally have enmity (hostility) towards God, not the other way around (Romans 8:7). But didn't Jesus give His life as a "ransom" (Matthew 20:28; 1 Timothy 2:6)? Yes, but it wasn’t God who demanded a ransom. A ransom is paid to the kidnapper, and it was God’s children who were kidnapped. Jesus paid with His life to rescue us just as a parent pays with their life by moving their child away from an oncoming truck, resulting in themselves being run over. Yes, the Father PERMITTED this, but He was not the truckdriver! As George Fifield once said in 1897:

“We did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted [Isaiah 53:4]. That was what we thought about it. We said, God is doing all this; God is killing him, punishing him, to satisfy his wrath, in order to let us off. That is the pagan conception of sacrifice."

Can you see that true reconciliation (at-one-ment) is not about appeasing an angry God and changing His mind toward us, but about us changing our minds toward Him. True reconciliation is accomplished when we, through the demonstration of Christ, see the evidence that we have a tender loving Father who loves us with "an everlasting love" simply because we are His children (Jeremiah 31:3). The atonement is not to appease God’s wrath so that we DARE come to Him but it is to reveal His love so that we WILL come to Him. We should not say, “I messed up, my father is going to kill me” but instead, “I messed up, I need to call my father.” This at-one-ment with our heavenly Father has been "the everlasting gospel" from the beginning (Galatians 3:8; Hebrews 4:2; Revelation 14:6-7)

Now I don’t know about you, but that sounds more like Good News than the penal-legal model which is nothing more than a cosmic domestic-violence situation.

For more info to what you have just read, see the article entitled, If Sin is Not a Legal Matter But a Deadly Disease, Why Do We Need Forgiveness?