What is the gospel? What isn't the gospel? - GotQuestions.org Podcast Episode 32

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Welcome to the Got Questions podcast. On today's episode, joining me are Jeff and Kevin.

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Jeff is the administrator of BibleRef .com. Hello. Kevin is the managing editor, makes everything we say sound better.

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Good morning. Yes. So on today's episode, we've been getting a lot of questions lately just related to the gospel.

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So we thought we'd do an episode on what is the gospel. On Got Questions, we take the need to share the gospel very, very seriously.

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We have over 50 articles that are just dedicated to presenting the gospel based on a different way of asking the question.

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For example, how can I know for sure I'd go to heaven when I die? How can I have eternal life?

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How can I receive forgiveness? What does it mean to receive Christ as your personal savior? Is there life after death?

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So all these articles give the same answer in outlining and explaining the gospel, but just based on a different theme, a different way of explaining.

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And we're going to do some of that today to help you to understand how to explain the gospel. What are the essentials of the gospel?

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And with that in mind, what I've always thought would be so helpful if there was a passage in scripture that actually just outlined what the gospel is, and praise

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God, there is. In 1 Corinthians chapter 15, Paul says,

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And then it goes on to outline all the numerous resurrection appearances of Christ.

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But I find most interesting about this passage is it's giving the facts of the gospel.

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Here are the items you need to believe about the gospel, that Jesus died for our sins.

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He died in our place. He died to pay the punishment for our sins. He died to take the judgment that we deserved, and that was placed on Christ.

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He was buried. Buried is evidence that he actually died. There's resurrection evidence that his payment was acceptable, that it was sufficient to cover the penalty for our sins.

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And then all the resurrection appearances are the demonstration that Christ was indeed resurrection. So always can go to 1

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Corinthians chapter 15. Here are the essentials of what you need to share with someone. The fact that Jesus died for our sins, that he was buried as evidence of his death, that he was resurrected, demonstrating his death was sufficient, and also delivering the promise that we too will be resurrected after our death.

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And then the resurrection appearances, of course, being the evidence that Christ was indeed resurrected.

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So that's the gospel in a nutshell. Now how we actually go about sharing this gospel, that's kind of what

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I was talking about earlier. There are many different methods, but Kevin's going to jump in here and just tell us a little bit more about what the

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Bible says about the gospel and the different ways it describes it. Well, I am so thankful for the gospel.

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It is good news. That's what the word gospel means, is good news.

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And it's good news because God did not leave us abandoned in our sin.

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He did not turn his back on the sinful world. Rather, he came into this world in the person of Jesus Christ to seek and to save the lost.

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And John 3 says that he did this out of his love. God so loved the world that he gave his one and only unique, one of a kind, only begotten son that whoever believes in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.

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Our God is a saving God. He's a missionary God. And he came to seek and to save us.

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This is good news indeed, that we have an opportunity to be forgiven of our sin and to know

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Christ and to know God, to fellowship with him forever, to have that fellowship restored with him eternally.

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And it's all because of Jesus, his death on the cross, his resurrection from the dead. And we can learn a lot about the gospel simply by what it's called in scripture.

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Scripture uses many different terms to refer to the gospel, this good news message that God has for the world.

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Jesus and John the Baptist talked a lot about the gospel of the kingdom in the early part of the gospels.

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We also have the gospel of Jesus Christ, the son of God. That's how the book of Mark starts. So the gospel centers on Christ.

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That's why it's called the gospel of Jesus Christ, the good news of Jesus Christ, the son of God. It's also called in the book of Mark, the gospel of God, because this message originates with God.

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It's not something that people thought of. It's not a human invention. We never would have thought of this plan.

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It's God's plan to save the world. It's the gospel of God. It's called the gospel of the kingdom of God, the gospel of the grace of God, because God's grace, his unmerited favor plays such a huge role in all of this.

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We are saved by grace through faith. It's the gospel of God's son in the book of Romans, the gospel of Christ in Romans 15, the gospel of the glory of Christ in 2

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Corinthians, the gospel of your salvation in the book of Ephesians, the gospel of our

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Lord Jesus, the gospel of peace, because we have that peace with God as we receive the gospel by faith.

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We have the glorious gospel of the blessed God in 1 Timothy. And then in Romans 16,

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Paul calls it my gospel a couple of times, indicating the special emphasis that Paul gave to the gospel in his ministry.

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He told the Corinthians that he determined to know nothing among them other than Christ crucified.

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That was his message. He did not get sidetracked. No rabbit trails for Paul. It was the gospel, the gospel, the gospel.

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Jesus died for us. He rose again. And that's the message. I think it's interesting that when we talk about the gospel, that as you said, there's so many places in Scripture where there's an identifier that's placed on that.

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The gospel of Christ, for example. Paul also in Galatians, he makes a point of talking about another gospel.

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So he makes a point of saying that other things that claim to be the gospel are not the same thing.

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And from a philosophical standpoint or a religious standpoint, the gospel of Jesus Christ is entirely unique.

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And I don't just mean that in the sense that it's not something that's based on prior stories or myths.

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Sometimes you'll hear people say that there's rising and dying gods and virgin births and everything else like that in other faiths.

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That's an entire series of podcasts on its own short version of that is no, it's not.

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But the gospel itself is unique. Every other religious system in the world effectively has a works based approach to salvation.

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It says something to the effect of if you're good enough, then this deity will reward you or you will see heaven or you won't be punished.

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And if you're not good enough, then you're in trouble. It's always based in some kind of ritual or some kind of work or some kind of effort on your own part.

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The core of the gospel message that's the true gospel from the Bible is that nobody's ever going to be good enough to earn that because we can't be perfect and God is perfect.

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But because of his love, he provided a means to let us be forgiven for those sins.

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We can choose to put our faith in Christ saying, I know I shouldn't do certain things, but I also know

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I'm not perfect and I can't make up for the bad things that I've done. And as long as I trust Christ, he takes the punishment for those sins.

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He takes the penalty for those things. And that's unique. There really isn't any other system that combines grace and forgiveness with an actual response to what's happening.

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So when we look at other faiths and other religions, the gospel, as Kevin was describing it,

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Paul's gospel or the gospel of Jesus Christ or the glorious gospel is very different from another gospel that Paul was talking about.

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It really isn't the same thing. And that's why Paul was so adamant about saying it doesn't matter if somebody who looks like an angel preaches some other gospel, that's a cursed thing.

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It's a serious, serious thing to promote some other version of that.

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And there's a lot of other aspects of the gospel that are unique that don't show up in other religions.

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Some of those things are more important for evidence. Some of those are more important for what the implications are. One of those is the resurrection.

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The resurrection is a very important aspect of Christianity, and it's always been a cornerstone of the faith.

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I think that's a part that sometimes people overlook when we're grasping just how unique the gospel is.

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Absolutely. That's true. And that's definitely been my experience. And when you look at 1 Corinthians 15, what we were talking about earlier,

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Paul gives several evidences of people who witnessed Jesus in his resurrected body.

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But then almost the entire rest of the chapter is a discussion of the importance of the resurrection, what it would mean if Jesus was not resurrected.

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And it's powerful. I've heard people share the gospel and just emphasize

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Jesus died for your sins. He died to pay the punishment that you deserve. He died to save you from hell.

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Trust in him and believe and receive his sacrifice as a payment for your sins, and you'll be saved and forgiven and promised to heaven and completely leaving the gospel out.

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I mean, the resurrection out. And it's so tragic because the gospel is so vitally important to the gospel as outlined by how much emphasis

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Paul gives it in 1 Corinthians 15. Yeah, the element of the resurrection is vital to the message of the gospel.

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You cannot dispense with it. In fact, in 1 Corinthians 15, Paul is addressing a group of people who are in Corinth that seem to have been trying to tailor the gospel to match their own philosophies.

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They're trying to come up with a designer gospel. And of course, you can't do that.

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That would be another gospel like Jeff was pointing out that Paul mentions in the book of Galatians.

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The resurrection is vitally important. In fact, in verses 12 through 19 of 1

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Corinthians 15, Paul goes through a list of seven things that would follow if there is no resurrection.

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These seven things include, first of all, Christ would not have been risen from the dead.

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Of course, if there's no resurrection, then Christ himself was not risen from the dead.

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Secondly, the apostles preaching is useless. Why are they traveling the known world and preaching the gospel if there's no resurrection?

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It was a useless endeavor if there's no resurrection. Third, Paul says your so -called faith is useless.

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You're believing in vain, he says. Also, the apostles would be liars because they're misrepresenting

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God and the things that Jesus had done. They would just be abject liars if there's no resurrection.

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Five, this is important. Paul says if there's no resurrection, you are still in your sins.

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In Romans 4, verse 25, Paul says that the resurrection is the basis for our justification.

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There's no forgiveness of sins. We are not made right with God unless the resurrection is true.

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Number six, Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15, all those who have died in Christ prior to now, well, they're lost forever.

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We'll never see them again. There's no resurrection. They're dead and gone. Seventh, he says, we are in a very pitiful state.

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He says we're the most pitiful people in the world if there's no resurrection because we have believed the biggest lie in history if there's no resurrection.

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You take those seven things, though, and you turn them around. You flip them on their head. Because the resurrection is true, then we could say this.

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Christ did rise from the dead. The apostles' preaching is powerful.

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It is effective. Your faith is not in vain. You are believing something true.

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The apostles are truth tellers. They are correctly representing who God is and what

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He's done for us. We are not in our sins anymore. We've been forgiven because of Christ's death and resurrection.

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We will see those who have died in Christ again. We have that hope.

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And rather than being the most pitiful people in the world, we're the most blessed because we have the hope of eternal life.

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We have the sure hope, the assurance of eternal life because of Jesus' resurrection and His promise to resurrect us as well.

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And that hope is crucially tied to all of those truths, which to reiterate is why

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Paul made such a big deal about the accuracy of the gospel message that we're presenting to people.

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In Galatians 1, he talks about anyone else, any other gospel is accursed.

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It's a curse. And the reason it's a curse is tied to the things that you were just mentioning, Kevin, is if some aspect of what we're believing isn't true, and we're talking about the core aspects, the fundamental beliefs, then all of these negative consequences come down.

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And I like what you said about people wanting to create their own customized versions of the gospel.

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That's part of what Paul was talking about. And that's part of how the uniqueness of the gospel sort of sustains itself.

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As soon as you start trying to add or subtract different aspects of other religious beliefs into it, it's not the gospel anymore.

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Even if people use Christian phrases, Christian terms, if somebody is saying that they represent a

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Christian perspective and yet they're saying you need to believe in Jesus Christ and participate in this ritual or go to this church or do this good deed, that's not the gospel anymore.

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That may have the appearance of it, but it is not the same thing.

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As soon as you start to add other things into it, then you are tacking on false things to that belief.

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And that's where a lot of people, I think, get confused when it comes to the gospel. We have these other ideas that get folded in that the gospel means believing in Jesus and doing this or not doing that.

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That the gospel just means saying a prayer. And then it doesn't matter what you think or do or believe after that.

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We fold all these things into the gospel that aren't part of it. And when people notice that those things don't seem to make sense or they don't play out in the real world, they rightly doubt whether that message is true.

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And what they wind up doing is they wind up rejecting a gospel that is another gospel.

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They're not actually responding to the gospel of Jesus anymore because what they're doing is they're saying, you're telling me something that's false and I don't believe that.

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But they're never even really being pointed at the truth in the first place. Yeah. Jeff, I've heard it expressed this way, that if you have to add an adjective before the word gospel, like is pretty common in our world today, then we have destroyed the gospel.

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For example, prosperity gospel is not the gospel. Social gospel is not the gospel.

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That type of thing where we're mixing in other things, we're bringing other elements into the gospel as necessary or just losing focus of what the gospel is truly all about.

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The object of the gospel is to save people from sin. And I know that one of the things people struggle with is the idea of how to discuss the gospel.

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It's one thing to say that we know what the gospel is. What does it mean? How does it come from Scripture?

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But I know that one of the things that a lot of people struggle with is how they're supposed to articulate this message to other people.

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And I think that's part of what gets us tangled up when it comes to what is the gospel, because we sometimes get too hung up on the method of delivery or the exact way that you're supposed to say it or do it to the point that people will say, oh, well, if that person came to faith because you used method

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A, then they're not really saved. You have to use method B. Now, in my circles,

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I'm not typically dealing with those problems. I'm more typically dealing with people who want to argue about whether or not basic aspects of reality are true or false.

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Shay, I know in your case, you've had more experience talking to people about how do you actually present this?

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What's your take on the right or wrong ways to tell people the gospel? And that's where it's key to go back to what

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Scripture talks about when it outlines the gospel in 1 Corinthians 15 and elsewhere. And again, just to make clear, 1

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Corinthians 15 gives us essentially the facts of the gospel. Here's what happened. Verses like Acts 16, 31, believe in the

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Lord Jesus Christ and you'll be saved. Or John 3, 16 or Romans 10, 9, 10, if you confess with your mouth,

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Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you'll be saved. It's not just intellectual assent to the facts that 1

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Corinthians 15 lines out. It's actually trusting in this, trusting in the death and resurrection of Christ as the full payment for your sins.

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And I think the best illustration, which I've heard many, many times, it's essentially like the chair. You can look at a chair and you say,

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I think that if I sit in that chair, it's going to hold me up. That would be intellectual assent.

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But biblical faith, trust, is actually sitting in the chair. So sitting in the chair of the gospel is trusting the death and resurrection of Christ as the payment for your sins, relying on that and that alone, not your own works, not anything else you've done, but trusting in Christ and Christ alone as your

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Savior. That is the essence of the gospel. That's what transitions a person from being unsafe to safe.

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It's not just believing facts. It's that. And then it got questions. I mean, over the years, we've had, all three of us have had many, many arguments or discussions, if you want to use a different term, with people about stuff they want to add to the gospel.

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I'd say the two most common, the first would be baptism. There's many

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Christians out there who, Christians or some of them not Christians, who have a tragic misunderstanding of baptism and view it as an essential part of the gospel.

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And granted, there are some passages in Scripture that emphasize the importance of baptism that, misinterpreted, could make it sound like baptism is necessary.

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But here in 1 Corinthians 15, Paul is outlining, here's the gospel, and baptism is completely absent from the passage.

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And numerous other places, here's what you need to do to be saved, and baptism is not mentioned in those passages at all.

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So, baptism, yes, a very important step of obedience, of identification with Christ, of a public testimony of your faith in Christ, but not required for salvation.

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And then, we mentioned it earlier, just briefly, the relationship of faith and works, to what degree are works involved in salvation.

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And the biblical message is that works are the inevitable result of salvation, that when you are saved, you are a new creation, your life will change.

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But so many people want to put the change ahead of the gospel, or at the exact same time you have to commit every aspect of your life, repent from every sin in your life, before you can be saved.

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That's not the gospel either. That's discipleship. That is walking closer with Christ.

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That's Him progressively conforming you to the image of Christ. That is not the gospel.

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That is the results of the gospel. So, it's very clear just to separate the results of the gospel and our obedience that comes after the gospel from the gospel itself.

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And those are the two biggest mistakes we see. I got questions and people confusing the gospel, adding things to the gospel.

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And as we've talked about, you add anything to the gospel, it's no longer the gospel. Very often when

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I see confusions that people have, they're involving something like that, where there's this sense of them objecting by saying, well, you're saying that I have to live a perfect life and then

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I can go to heaven. That's not what the gospel says. Or you have people who are objecting by saying, so all

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I have to do is say a prayer and then that's it. And it's just not, no, that's not what the gospel is.

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So accuracy matters. Another thing that some people object to that falls along the same lines of leaning towards those.

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The key theme in what you were talking about, Shay, right there is exactly what I mentioned before. Whether it's baptism or how clean a person lives, it's this natural tendency for us to always want to drag our salvation back to good deeds.

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What we do good versus what we do bad. That's just a normal human pull.

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And the flip side of that is some people object to the concept of the gospel in sort of an opposite sense.

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One of the objections that they have is the idea of saying that if the gospel is true, then they don't think it's fair.

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And that's typically phrased when people say something like, this bad dictator from the past, you're telling me that if that person were to repent on their deathbed, they could wind up in heaven.

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Whereas this nice neighbor who never hurt anybody and does good things, who just doesn't happen to believe, would not be forgiven.

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And you can understand where that thought process comes from, because as human beings, we see that as incredibly unfair.

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But there again, just like with a works -based system, the problem is that we're trying to look at this stuff from a human perspective.

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From God's perspective, it's like looking at people from a skyscraper down on the sidewalk.

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The height difference between Shaquille O 'Neal and me on street level is enormous.

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It's a big difference. But from a skyscraper, it doesn't really mean anything from that point in time.

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And it's difficult for us to understand, but it is important for us to understand that all sin is punished in the

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Christian concept, either in hell or on the cross. In other words, there is no such thing as people who get away with things.

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It's a scandalous thing, I guess, but it is an important thing for us to remember. And the gospel,

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I think, is so hard for some people to grasp, even though the message itself is so simple.

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It's hard to grasp because we have a hard time really with this concept of grace, unmerited favor from God, God's blessing on the undeserving.

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We don't naturally operate in a world of grace. You've got to earn it.

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You've got to merit it. You've got to deserve it. But as soon as we start talking about deserving, when we use the word deserve, we're not talking about grace anymore.

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Grace is undeserved blessing. That's a very hard concept for us to grasp.

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And I personally, I probably will never fully understand the grace of God. And yet that's the gospel.

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That's what the gospel is based on. One of the parables I think does a good job of explaining that is when

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Jesus talks about two men who owe money and one of them owes money to a king.

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And the number that Jesus gives, he says he owed, I believe it was 10 ,000 talents. And the specific number is not important, but it's worth remembering that in the language, in the era that Jesus was talking about, that would be like me saying somebody owed the government $40 trillion.

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It's a number that's deliberately said because it's so ridiculously over the top that, you know, there is no possible way anybody could ever repay it.

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The king forgives the man, the man goes away forgiven and then turns around and doesn't forgive somebody else.

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The other person owes a significant amount of money. It would be like saying this person owed him $10 ,000.

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It's a lot. It's meaningful, but that's where we struggle with the concept of grace.

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We have a tendency to want to say, yes, whatever I've done, I want

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God to forgive. But whatever that person's done to me or to God, that's not something that should be subject to forgiveness.

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And that's the thing that we forget is that relative to God, all of our sin, any sin is in that category of the 10 ,000 talents.

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And that's one of the things that we either have to understand as we come to faith or we need to mature and grow into after we have come to faith is really understanding the depth of the difference between us and God and the separation that sin causes between us and God.

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And the more we understand that, the less offended we are at God choosing to forgive other people who we think don't deserve forgiveness as much as we do.

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And once we get into that mode and that thought process, we find ourselves also being more forgiving to other people.

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Just to quote the Apostle Paul very briefly here, thanks be to God for his indescribable gift.

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That's the gospel. It is. Yeah, both Kevin and Jeff, you hit the nail on the head, and that's the gist of all of the objections or misunderstandings of the gospel is our inability to understand or maybe even to accept grace in our society and our culture and most other world cultures.

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The idea of people giving you something for free, it's difficult. You feel like, no,

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I need to pay for this. I need to earn it. I need to deserve it. And that's not the gospel.

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Again, 1 Corinthians 15 outlines the facts of the gospel. I invite you to study that passage in depth.

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Our response to these facts is to believe them as true and then to accept them in the sense of fully trusting in Christ alone, his death and resurrection as the atoning sacrifice for our sins.

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And that is both the gospel and what the appropriate response to the gospel is. There's a lot of other issues we could cover, but we're running short on time.

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A future episode, we're going to do what happens to those who've never heard about the gospel. And that's a very important issue.

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Or how are people saved before Jesus died for our sins? That's another very important question.

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So stay tuned for future episodes where we cover those. But I hope today's discussion with Jeff Kent and I just give you an idea.

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Here's what the Bible says the gospel is and what the appropriate response is. And the works issue, again, that's the key thing.

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The works are the result of salvation, not a requirement for salvation. The only requirement, biblically speaking, for salvation is faith, faith in Jesus Christ alone, trusting in him alone.

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So that's the gospel. And that's the main point we wanted to communicate today. So I hope this conversation has been encouraging to you and informative.

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If you have any questions about, obviously, the gospel, please submit a question at gotquestions .org. These are our absolute favorite questions to answer, anything related to the gospel.

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So please avail yourself of that opportunity. And of course, many, many articles already on the site that address these issues in more depth that we have the time to discuss today.

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So this has been the Got Questions podcast. Got questions? Bible has answers.