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What the Gospel is
I am joined by some very “special” guests on this month’s podcast…
What is the Gospel? The most straight forward answer that we could get from the Bible comes from Mark 1:14-15:
“Now after John had been taken into custody, Jesus came into Galilee, preaching the gospel of God, and saying, ‘The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the gospel.’”
 
The Gospel, according to Mark, is that the kingdom of God is “at hand”, that is, it was breaking into the world through the life and ministry of Jesus. And as the head of this movement, Jesus Himself was to be King of this Kingdom. This was and is the good news. This good news, this gospel, was a rival to the claim that Rome was making on the birthday of their celebrated leader, Caesar. On Caesar’s birthday, heralds would ride out into the wider realm of Rome and declare the good news, (in Greek, the “Euangelion”, from which we get our words Evangelist and Evangelism), that the world’s true Lord was born on this day and he is bringing justice and prosperity to the world. Jesus was making his own Gospel declaration that was meant to challenge Caesar’s.
The Apostle Paul wrote this in his letter to the church in Rome:
“I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek.”  Romans 1:16.
Is Paul using the term “gospel” in the same way as Mark does? Is Paul saying, “I am not ashamed of the announcement that the kingdom of God has arrived in the work and word of Jesus”? I believe that the answer to this question would have to be “yes”. Although, I am confident that this will sound strange to most people, Christian and otherwise today.
For most of us, when we hear the Apostle Paul talk about “the gospel”, we assume that he is referring to a message about how souls get saved from sin and hell so that they might go to heaven instead. Talk about the kingdom of God arriving on earth sounds too political and earthly. Most of us have been taught that this world is temporal but the Gospel is about “eternity”. Surely, we think, Paul would be concerned with eternity and not some earthly kingdom?
Yet, the Apostle Paul is nothing if not a Jew and the Jews believed that God was going to establish His Kingdom on earth as it is in heaven. One of the main Jewish prophets, Isaiah, had this vision concerning the coming day of God’s justice:
“Now it will come about that in the last days the mountain of the house of the Lord will be established as the chief of the mountains, and will be raised above the hills; and all nations will stream to it. And many peoples will come and say, ‘Come let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob; That He may teach us His ways and the we may walk in His paths. For the Law will go forth from Zion and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem. And He will judge between the nations, and will render decisions for many peoples; And they will hammer their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation will not lift up sword against nation, and never again will they learn war.’”
Isaiah 2:2-4
The vision of Isaiah, along with the other biblical prophets, anticipated a coming day when God would establish His authority on earth as it is in heaven and, as a result, everything within creation would be set right. This is one of the reasons why the Gospel for Paul, as well as for Mark, was not just about individuals getting their souls saved, nor was it simply about the Jews getting plot of land or some sort o...