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.

Jesus Tells the Story: The Suffering God (Telling the Story of God IV)

The way in which Jesus told the story actually reveals what the Gospel is. If we turn back to Luke 24, the encounter on the Emmaus Road, we read about Jesus explaining the Gospel story to crestfallen disciples who have been disappointed by his death. We read:

Then Jesus said to them, “You foolish people! You find it so hard to believe all that the prophets wrote in the Scriptures. Wasn’t it clearly predicted that the Messiah would have to suffer all these things before entering his glory?” Then Jesus took them through the writings of Moses and all the prophets, explaining from all the Scriptures the things concerning himself.[1]

Jesus then sits for a meal with these men, which is when they realize that the man they’re speaking to is, in fact, Jesus. After the encounter, the men say, “Didn’t our hearts burn within us as he talked with us on the road and explained the Scriptures to us?”[2] There was something about how Jesus was with people which caused hearts to burn.[3] This is the box that holds the story, without which the story itself is often missed.

Story is an operative word. Storytelling is always at the heart of hospitality, since telling stories is how we share our lives with one another. We tell stories over food, as Jesus ultimately does with these disciples. Eating together and telling stories is the biblical way to honor another person, to humanize them as creatures made in the image of God.

And what’s inside Jesus’ box of hospitality? What is the story that Jesus tells? It’s a story that none of the men could conceive, something entirely outside their field of possibility: God suffers for you, to save you. At the heart of Jesus’ hospitality is the story of a crucified God.[4]

It’s hard to put into words how strange this concept was to first-century Jewish minds. The idea that the Messiah—the one anointed and sent by God—was God, and further that this Messiah suffered, was not on anyone’s radar. It’s there in Scripture, of course. Jesus might have referenced Isaiah 53 in his on-the-road Bible study.[5] But in first-century Judaism, the popular conception of the Messiah was largely of a warrior-priest who would reign triumphantly after a great military victory.[6] A Messiah who was actually God embodied just wasn’t anywhere in the picture. So: “Wasn’t it clear, you guys, that the Messiah had to suffer in order to be glorified?” “Well, actually…no.” The story was a scandal to their understanding.

It often remains so. I have friends right now who are suffering from great tragedy, the loss of a family member at a young age. There are no words for their pain, no easy assuagement of their grief. I shake my head with them as they groan and cry. Their present struggle is great anger with God, and it’s hard to blame them. We need life to make sense and we need to put our pain somewhere, even if it’s on God. The biblical record makes plenty of space for lament and questioning, and even Jesus himself said, “My God, why have you forsaken me?”[7] My friends are wondering if God is capricious. After all, why would He let this happen? They feel that they’ve done everything right, or at least as best they could, and still they are touched by tragedy.[8]

The problem is, we always end up angry and resentful of God if we think He’s out there, looking down passively on us or, worse, pulling levers, sending blessing or tragedy our way. And yet, this is often how we think of God on a sub-rational level. We have a harder time believing, seeing, and knowing the God who is with us in our suffering. When you do see this God, it doesn’t make the suffering go away, but it makes it bearable in an entirely different way. It infuses the pain with tangible hope.

Indeed, this is why the God that Jesus reveals—reveals in his own self, hanging on a tree—is so important. Only the suffering God, present in all human suffering, can redeem reality. The God whom Jesus reveals is not an angry or ambivalent or absent Creator, not a detached or distant Deity, not a God so transcendent as to be beyond reach; the God whom Jesus reveals is instead a God who is imminent, right here, in the pain and mire of life.[9] Emmanuel, God with us.[10] The God who emptied himself to take on all human experience.[11]

Ultimately, only the suffering God can conquer death on our behalf, for our salvation. And death, after all, is the great human problem. We are all going to die, no matter how much money we have or how clever we are or how good a person we become. We experience this death long before we die physically, through the pain of things done to us, or in the world around us, or as the consequence of the bad choices that we make along our way.[12] Since only what is touched can be transformed and redeemed, God throws Himself into the heart of human suffering, even death itself, taking it onto and into Himself, liberating us into eternal life.[13] As much as I love Dead Poets Society, Jesus doesn’t say to those men on the Emmaus Road, “Well shoot, boys, we all die,” or “Carpe diem,” or “Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,” or “Eat drink and be merry.”[14] He instead presents the story of a crucified God. When we present the Gospel story, we are to tell the same story, of the God who confronts death on our behalf, to save us.

Good news, indeed.

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

[1] Luke 24:25-27, emphasis mine.

[2] Luke 24:32.

[3] See “The Container Matters” in ‘Chapter 10, The Slow Life: Hospitality.’

[4] See Greg Boyd’s work on the beauty of the crucified God and the cross as the central revelation of how beautiful God is. The Crucifixion of the Warrior God, Vols. 1 and 2 by Gregory Boyd. Fortress Press, Minneapolis, MN. 2017.

[5] Cf. Acts 8:26-40.

[6] See, for example, John Collin’s The Scepter and the Star. Anchor Bible Reference, New Haven, CT. 1995. Collins illuminates the understanding of the Messiah in the Qumran community, contemporary with Jesus.

[7] Matthew 27:46.

[8] Theologians note that even if tragedy lies outside of God’s desired will, he still allows it within his passive will—i.e., that which he does not prevent. We all know that in the moment of suffering, it’s hard to make these distinctions between what God causes and what He allows, but it’s crucial to understand that God does not cause suffering and, far from it, is actually with us in it. Paul’s theology of a suffering creation groaning to be redeemed in Romans 8 surely implies a God groaning with the suffering world. Again, if Jesus is the revelation of God, God is not only the All-Powerful but also the All-Vulnerable one. If you don’t know this reality of God, “God” will ultimately make no sense.

[9] As the Bible often points to. See, for example, Isaiah 63:9: “In all [His people’s] suffering, He also suffered.”

[10] Matthew 1:23.

[11] See Philippians 2:5-11.

[12] See “What is the Story of Scripture?” in ‘Chapter 11, The Grounded Life, Scripture.’

[13] See John 3:16, 17:3.

[14] Dr. Keating in Dead Poets Society. Film, directed by Peter Weir. Touchstone Pictures. 1989. “To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time” by Robert Herrick. And a paraphrase of Ecclesiastes 8:15.

Many Gospels (Telling the Story of God III)

Not only is the Gospel—as it is understood by our culture—easily dismissed, but even within the Church, the true Gospel—the good news of the Kingdom and of Jesus the King—is in competition with other gospels. When we ask, “What is the Gospel?”, we are up against all the competing models of the Gospel by which human hearts have caged and tamed Jesus’ revolutionary Gospel.

Jesus’ message is transformation: the kingdom of God is the place where all is made new. But, as we know from the Velveteen Rabbit, transformation is always painful. “Becoming real” hurts.[1] Transformation demands sacrifice, and sacrifice always costs. As Jesus himself said, you must “lose your life.” [2] Sounds like fun, right?

This costly Gospel is competing with other “gospels,” many of which humans find to be far more comfortable and, therefore, more compelling. The concept of “other gospels” may sound strange, but within twenty years of Jesus’ resurrection, Paul alluded to the possibility of “a different gospel” being preached.[3] And indeed, today we have a plethora of “different gospels.” Turn on any number of satellite TV channels and you’ll see that the Gospel is often portrayed as if you have enough faith, you’ll be saved from all suffering. This prosperity gospel is clearly not the message of Scripture, and it really misses the point of “the fellowship of [Christ’s] suffering.”[4] However, we humans really like the idea of a life of total ease, and the prosperity gospel merges easily with the cultural narrative of the American dream, so it often carries the day.[5]

My friend Bill Hull created a chart to display six of the most prominent contemporary gospels preached today.[6]

Notice that each gospel creates a different kind of disciple. If, for example, you preach a “forgiveness only” gospel, in which God gives us the forgiveness of sins but demands no further transformation (clearly not the New Testament narrative), you tend to create a passive disciple who thinks that actually following Jesus is optional. The “free grace movement” has taught millions of people that all you need to do is believe the right things—that Jesus died for your sins, that you can’t do anything to earn his grace—and you’ll go to heaven when you die. This message, while carrying seeds of truth, bastardizes Jesus’ invitation to a life of transformation through the grace of God.[7] You end up with disciples who are dogmatic about how right they are but who aren’t necessarily committed to following Jesus!

So it goes with each competing gospel—the gospel of the left, the prosperity gospel, the consumer gospel, the gospel of the right. Each creates a disciple made in its own image, according to its own values.[8] This is why it’s so important that we understand what Jesus taught, the Gospel of the Kingdom.[9] All this competition can dull us, keeping us from seeing the revolutionary call of Jesus’ Gospel, the good news of transformation in and through Jesus, both in this world and in the world to come.

Not surprisingly, to discover (or rediscover) this Gospel, we must turn to Jesus himself.

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

[1] The honest admission of the Skin Horse in Margery Williams’ The Velveteen Rabbit. (HarperPerennial Classics, New York, NY. 2013.)

[2] Matthew 10:39.

[3] Galatians 1:8.

[4] Philippians 3:10.

[5] The prosperity gospel is also catalyzed by The Human Paradigm and the belief that if I do well enough (e.g., “if I have enough faith”), God will bless me.

[6] Modified from Conversion and Discipleship: You Can’t Have One Without the Other by Bill Hull. Zondervan, Grand Rapids, MI. 2016. Page 33. Note that each gospel contains a measure of truth. The true Gospel does include forgiveness, we are called to social justice, God does care about our prosperity, and so on. But in each instance, half a truth ends up becoming a great lie.

[7] See Bates, 24-25.

[8] Notice that each gospel is based on a truth. Caring for the poor (Gospel of the Left), for example, is clearly a part of the Gospel (e.g., James 1:27, Matthew 25:31-46), God does care about our well-being (the Prosperity Gospel), and so on. The issue is a lack of balance among all the essentials, which only happens when we understand the Gospel that Jesus taught: a Gospel about Jesus as the atoning King, his coming kingdom, and the need to follow him as Lord. When we understand that, all the truths find their place and their balance with one another.

[9] For an excellent resource, see The Discipleship Gospel: What Jesus Preached, We Must Follow by Ben Sobels and Bill Hull. HIM Publishing. Nashville, TN. 2018.