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CHAPTER 1: OVERVIEW AND INTRODUCTION The following is a summary, from beginning to end, of the cardinal points of the Gospel as it is commonly understood today. It is preached more or less in this form by millions of speakers worldwide every seven days. It has affected our songs, our Bible translations, and our religious life. It will be very familiar to most Christians. And it is wrong. 1) In the beginning God created the universe. 2) Everything in the creation was good, including humanity. 3) While God has many attributes, two are of primary importance as it pertains to the Gospel: He is perfectly loving and He is perfectly just (righteous). 4) The creation was a manifestation of his love. 5) In order to assure that his justice might be known, and that we might remember that he is God and to be obeyed, he set one Tree in the Garden that Adam was forbidden to touch, as a test of Adam's obedience. 6) Adam, however, did partake from this Tree. 7) This act of disobedience angered God, and offended his sense of perfect righteousness. It missed the mark of proper obedience. This is called sin. It is rebellion against the perfect will/law of the creator. 8) God therefore punished Adam by casting him out of the Garden of Eden, cursing him with a life full of suffering. 9) This brought death and suffering into the world. The wages of sin is death, eternal separation from God. 10) God's perfect righteousness cannot abide the presence of disobedience, otherwise known as sin. 11) Therefore, due to this sin, Adam was destined to spend the rest of eternity apart or away from God. 12) However, God's loving heart could not tolerate such a thing. Though Adam justly deserved God's temporal and eternal punishment, God nevertheless wanted Adam to have everlasting fellowship with him. But Adam's sin made fellowship with the perfectly righteous creator impossible. 13) God needed a solution to this divine dilemma. 14) He found the solution in Christ. 15) God needed a sacrifice to atone for humanity's sin, a way to vent his righteous wrath in a way that would not punish all humanity forever. 16) And only a perfect sacrifice could atone for that sin. 17) So God sent his only begotten son, Jesus Christ, to suffer on behalf of all mankind. 18) Jesus was the only perfectly obedient man. True God and true man. He was therefore the only possible candidate for the righteous sacrifice. 19) God allowed Christ to be crucified. Christ took upon himself the sins of the world. 20) God punished Jesus for the sins of humanity. He gave to Jesus what we deserved in order to give us what he deserved. 21) Having obtained the perfect sacrifice, God's sense of justice was satisfied. 22) Jesus was then resurrected three days later, proving that he had broken the bonds of sin and death. 23) He now offers forgiveness to all those who will trust in the atoning sacrifice of Christ. If you believe that Jesus died for you, then God will not hold your sins against you. Elsewise, if you doubt or deny that Jesus died for you, then you stand condemned on the basis of your own unrighteousness. 24) There is nothing we can do to deserve heaven. We have all sinned and fall short of the glory of God. 25) Our only hope for everlasting life, then, is to have faith in the allavailing power of Christ's blood shed on the cross. 26) Washed by God's grace and forgiven through faith in Christ, we can now have fellowship with God. 27) We have been saved from eternal damnation. 28) This is the good news. This is the Gospel. I will be referring to these later. This is the common understanding of
the Gospel, so I will refer to these items as CUG#. The last item, therefore, is
CUG#28. A NARRATIVE PRESENTATION Here is a more narrative presentation of the Christian message as it is commonly understood and proclaimed. God made the world and all mankind. Being loving, he set many trees and
delights for man to partake. But he is also a God of justice, and as such must be obeyed.
So he set one Tree, just one, that he didn't want man to touch, providing mankind with the
opportunity to show obedience. But of course, man did partake of this Tree. This angered
God beyond measure. It was a spiteful, childlike rebellion, and it incited God's wrath. He
punished man by cursing him to a life of suffering and death, casting him out of the
Garden of Eden, condemned to die and spend the rest of eternity in suffering and torment,
separated from God. However, God's loving side was unable to accept this. What was needed
was a sacrifice to appease the wrath of this perfectly just God. Nothing else would do.
And the sacrificial offering had to be absolutely perfect. So God sent his own son, Jesus
the Christ, to earth. There he was mocked, scorned, beaten, whipped, crucified and finally
killed. In as much as Jesus was perfect, being true God and true man, the sacrifice was
acceptable. God had vented his wrath, pouring upon Jesus the suffering and condemnation
that we all deserve. This satisfied God, whereupon Jesus was resurrected from the dead
three days later. This broke the bonds of death. Forgiveness is now offered to those who
will have faith that Jesus died for their sins. There is nothing we can do to be worthy of
God's righteousness or forgiveness, for we have all sinned and therefore deserve eternal
damnation. All we can do, what we must do, is trust in the allavailing power of Christ's
sacrifice on the cross. THE POWER OF INTERPRETATION "Now wait one minute. You think that's wrong?" Yes, it is wrong. What we have here is a classic case of misinterpretation. We are called to interpret facts continually in our lives. It is a proper and necessary process whereby we transform external events into our personal reality, and therefore determine how we need to react to the situation. For example. I look at the gas gauge in my car. The needle is on empty. That is the objective fact. But what does it mean? And what am I to do about it? How should I react? How am I to appropriate this external truth for my subjective reality? It could mean: I'm about to run out of gas and should therefore proceed immediately to a gas station. No cause for concern, since my gas gauge is broken and I just filled the tank. Nothing at all if the car is turned off. Any of these could be correct, depending on the circumstances surrounding the event, and the knowledge and experience I am using to interpret it. This is a crucial point, worth repeating. We interpret present external events based upon our subjective reality, which is shaped by our knowledge and personal history. If I have incomplete information, or events in my history have prejudiced me to a certain perspective, it will be difficult for me to make an accurate interpretation of the situation. That is the case with our common understanding of the Gospel. We have misinterpreted crucial events in the unfolding of God's revelation of redemption through Christ, and in so doing have, for the most part, missed the point. Seen within the context of most people's lives, especially as it relates to the relationship they had/have with their parents, this is understandable. That is to say, there are specific reasons for these misinterpretations. Bringing them to light will, hopefully, give us a "cleaner" context with which to understand God's actions, opening the horizon to purer and deeper understanding. That is the purpose of this writing. Specifically, then, what is wrong with the understanding of the Gospel as outlined above? I) It makes God out to be fickle and arbitrary, and fails to understand the nature of the trees in the Garden of Eden (CUG#5). II) It does not comprehend proper punishment, presenting God as irrationally vindictive (CUG#12). The notion of eternal punishment is incompatible with the divine. III) It does not understand the nature of sin (CUG#7). Sin is not simply disobedience or inadequacy of performance. IV) Failing to comprehend the problem, it cannot possibly understand the solution. It slanderously ascribes to God the most abhorrent of behavior (CUG#21). Punishing someone else for what I have done is not good, let alone divine. It is sick. V) It keeps salvation within the realm of a form of workrighteousness, whereby one is accounted worthy of heaven on the basis of something one does or does not do (CUG#23). Vi) But above all this, it simply fails to understand the true goodness, glory, power and love embodied in the Gospel. The tragedy is that the good news is ever so much better than we realize. We are missing out on incomprehensible blessing. THE EVENTS OF THE GOSPEL ARE TRUE I wish to state quite clearly here that I am in no way calling into question any of the events or facts in the Gospel, only their interpretation. Specifically, God did create the world. There was a Garden of Eden. It contained two trees in the middle. Adam and Eve partook from one of the trees and were cast out of the Garden by God. The wages of sin is death. Christ was sent to atone for this problem. He was crucified, died, and three days later rose from the dead. And this is our only means of salvation. TWO WINDOWS INTO ETERNITY The Bible gives us two infinite windows into the spiritual world: the fall of man and the redemption. They go hand in hand, working in unison to reveal divine truth. If we fail to understand the one it will be impossible to understand the other. Therefore, what I will do now is begin with a discussion of the Garden of Eden, attempting to explain as clearly as possible where we have misunderstood its message, and present what I consider to be a much cleaner, purer interpretation. We will then be equipped to examine Christ's passion in the brighter light of comprehension. |
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