Sin AND Death (Telling the Story of God V)

About twenty years after the Emmaus Road, Paul writes to the church at Corinth:

Let me now remind you, dear brothers and sisters, of the Good News (evangelion) I preached to you before. You welcomed it then, and you still stand firm in it. It is this Good News that saves you if you continue to believe the message I told you—unless, of course, you believed something that was never true in the first place.  I passed on to you what was most important and what had also been passed on to me. Christ died for our sins, just as the Scriptures said. He was buried, and he was raised from the dead on the third day, just as the Scriptures said.[1] 

Paul’s skeletal recounting of the Gospel is simple: Jesus died, facing death and releasing forgiveness over our sins; Jesus was buried, facing the totality of death; Jesus was raised, triumphing over death.

If you want to tell the Gospel story from Scripture, this is a good passage to memorize.

Notice how Paul tells the story: First, he makes it clear that Jesus’ work is a victory over both sin and death. Oftentimes the Gospel, in America and the West, has been reduced to the “Forgiveness-Only Gospel” (see the chart above). This really misses the point of the story, and it ends up creating Christians who think being saved means “being sure you are going to heaven when you die” as opposed to “embodied participation in [God’s] new creation.”[2]

Picture it like this: imagine you are going to a party. The moment you cross the threshold of the house is a wonderful moment, but no one would say that’s the point of the party. The point is to go deeper into the house, where your host and his guests are. That’s where the party happens; that’s the heart of the entire evening. Imagine if you just hung out on the threshold all night!

So, if salvation is the house, forgiveness is the moment we cross the threshold, (what we often call conversion). It’s a wonderful moment and worthy of celebration, but it’s certainly not the point of the party. If you mistake that moment for everything that Jesus has in mind, you don’t really understand who Jesus is or what he’s up to. The point of the party—indeed, the party itself—is Jesus. It’s being with him and learning to become like him.

Thus, Paul points out that Christ forgives us, which is great news. However, Jesus’ vision is bigger than that: he has in mind the cosmic restoration of all things through the defeat of death. If salvation is reduced to hanging out on the threshold, knowing we are “going to heaven when we die” with no further demands on our participation in this restoration, we are missing the point. The Forgiveness-Only Gospel can give us security and assurance, but they come at the cost of real relationship with Jesus, and we end up bypassing the substance of salvation altogether.[3]

Indeed, Paul makes it clear here that Christ died to save us and that we must respond. He writes, “Stand firm” and “Continue to believe.” “Believing,” as Paul means it, involves far more than mental assent, though we unfortunately often interpret it that way. When Paul says “believe the message,” he’s not saying “just believe this in your minds and have good theology about it.” Matthew Bates argues compellingly that the Greek New Testament word pistis (most often translated “faith” and “belief”) is, in the context of our salvation, more accurately translated “allegiance.” Allegiance and loyalty to Jesus is our fitting and necessary response to what he has done for us. Faith is faithfulness. “[Continuing] to believe,” then, means participating in the life of God.

We participate with God to see all things made new; this is what walking out our discipleship consists of. We learn to love our families and friends well. We give generously in our community of faith. We become people who, with Jesus, confront death in all its forms.[4] We can confront the atrocity of human trafficking, knowing that this is God’s heart and work. We can confront the reality that children are suffering in the foster care system and don’t know if they’re ever going to land in a home. We can confront the reality of loneliness all around us. We can confront all the forms that death takes before we die physically, because Jesus himself came to confront the “principalities and powers” that stand against God.[5] Through all this, we tell the story: the King of Life has come to save us from death.

The Gospel story, then, is three core realities: a suffering God has come to save us; He releases us from our sin; He sets us free from death, to live in life. And we get to tell this story! We tell it with words and by being with people in their stories—and, if they will let us, in their suffering—just as God has done for us.

For all of these readings in one place, order my book 'Learning to Live and Love Like Jesus.'

[1] I Corinthians 15:1-4, emphasis mine.  See also 2 Timothy 2:8 and Acts 17:3.

[2] Bates, page 9.

[3] Again, Jesus’ own definition of “eternal life” in John 17:3 is knowing God. We are warned, too, (in Matthew 7 and 25) not to mistake mere mental assent—divorced from a faithful life of allegiance—as “knowing God.” Jesus clearly envisions salvation as a relationship with God in which we fully participate; otherwise, we don’t really know God.

[4] Jesus says in Matthew 16:18 (ESV) that “the gates of hell shall not prevail” against the work of the church. “The gates of hell” represents a defensive, not an offensive position. Jesus is implying that it is light, not darkness, that will be on the retreat against a fully activated, Spirit-led church.

[5] Ephesians 6:12.