The longstanding, traditional understanding of Scripture is that the Gospel refers to a particular thing. It is the root of Christianity (as in "real Christianity" vs fake). All religions have means by which you can end up in a better life, and all religions predicate that on your efforts ... except Christianity. Christianity alone begins with "you can't." The Gospel, then, is how it can come to be because you can't bring it about. So the story is that God sent His Son to ransom sinners -- pay their debt -- and be a "propitiation" -- to assuage the rage of a righteously angry God. And Jesus succeeded. Whoever believes in Christ has currently eternal life. Good news.
There are voices out there, however, who would like to correct that longstanding, traditional understanding of Scripture. They do so under the guise of "Scripture" (Acts 20:29-30; 2 Peter 3:16). They use it, but they like to twist it, and then they have to discard some because it won't "twist" far enough. So, even though the concept of death for sin is clear from Old to New Testament, they discard it in favor of another gospel. This gospel is the Social Justice good news. This good news is better than some old "saved from sin" stuff. This good news will give the poor and marginalized a better life. How do we get there? Well, Scripture, of course. Jesus said, "The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me, because He has anointed Me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent Me to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor" (Luke 4:18-19). So the "good news" is "to the poor" and "the captives" and "the blind" and "those who are oppressed." Not sinners. Certainly not salvation from sin. Absolutely not paying for sin. A better life now.
We know this because Jesus told them "Blessed are the poor," so He came for those with humble means. Or did He? In Matthew's version Jesus said, "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven" (Matt 5:3). In Luke's version He said, "Blessed are the poor, for yours is the kingdom of God" (Luke 6:20). Now, it's not unusual for one writer to record something the other did not; that's no contradiction. But in this case we do have a problem. On one hand, either Luke meant the same thing as Matthew and the "poor" in Luke are the "poor in spirit" in Matthew. If, on the other hand, we're talking about "the poor" in Luke as "those without means to live" (as opposed to those with poor spirits), then what we must conclude is 1) two different categories of people will receive the kingdom of God and 2) poor people (people without means) are blessed for being poor because they will receive the kingdom. If that's the case, it would be cruel to change their condition. If you change their condition, you would be depriving them of the kingdom of God. And that makes no sense in anyone's book.
Here's the thing. These false teachers want you to believe that Christians who believe that Christ died to save us do not care about the poor, the captives, the blind, the oppressed. This simply isn't true, or certainly ought not be. There are plenty of genuine Christians who are working diligently in those areas and it is to the embarrassment of others that they aren't doing so more. But all those things are genuine concerns of genuine Christians according to Scripture. On the other hand, these false teachers do eliminate salvation from sin as a possibility and consider their "gospel" a better one. They face a difficult problem. Leaving off the massive amount of Scripture from Paul's letters and the rest (as I said, they have to discard a lot of Scripture to hold their views), we can look to Jesus alone to see these folks are mistaken. Jesus said He had "come to seek and to save that which was lost" (Luke 19:10). They deny that by changing "lost" to "marginalized." Jesus said He would "lay down My life for the sheep" (John 10:15) and defined His sheep as those who believe and follow Him (John 10:26-27). They say He did no such thing. Jesus said He came "to give His life a ransom for many" (Matt 20:28). They categorically deny that He paid any such price. And perhaps the most difficult thing Jesus said was that He "accomplished the work which You have given Me to do" (John 17:4). If His job was to bring relief to all those people, He failed miserably. Did He feed some? Sure. Like the 5,000. One meal. In fact, He claimed, "You will always have the poor with you" (John 12:8). He claimed the job wouldn't be finished. He healed a lot, but not all. I'm not aware of Him freeing any captives from jails (although if the Gospel is salvation from the captivity of Satan, He did quite a bit of that). Jesus did some of that list from Luke, but not all, yet He claimed He had accomplished the work God had sent Him to do and He claimed "It is finished."
One of the common complaints against a Gospel that offers salvation from sin is that it isn't for everybody. Jesus Himself said, "The gate is narrow and the way is hard that leads to life, and those who find it are few" (Matt 7:13-14). So if it affects "few," how is that "good news"? To which I ask, "Jesus affected fewer than that. How is that better 'good news'?" No, this "Social Justice" gospel is a sham built on a scattering of Scripture that gets twisted by leaving out the rest of Scripture. True Christianity demands that we serve one another and if we aren't, we, not the Gospel, are at fault. But true Christianity also offers a payment for a condition that demands death (Rom 6:23) by a redemption price paid by Christ (Rom 3:24) who appeased an angry God (Rom 3:25) and demonstrated God's love for us (Rom 5:8). It is received not by our efforts but by faith (Rom 3:28). It's the message Jesus brought and it's the message that the rest of Scripture offers and it's far better news than "You can have a better lot in life right now." It is, then, an authentic gospel, not "another gospel" (Gal 1:6-9). The reason that the longstanding, traditional understanding of the Gospel is what it is is not "tradition," but text. Read it.
5 comments:
"So the "good news" is "to the poor" and "the captives" and "the blind" and "those who are oppressed." Not sinners."
Isn't it interesting that Jesus subsequently used those terms and others like "debt", "dead", "slave", to describe how sin affects us. It's almost like maybe He was actually talking about sin and not those categories of people. That we're all captive to sin, blinded by sin , separated from the inheritance of God's children by sin.
Almost like, except I think He was talking about both. He did the same thing in terms of prospering, where we understand it to mean spiritually but it sounds a lot like worldly terms. And Paul suggests He supplies what we need ("prosper") which makes that both categories, too. I think the "progressives" err when they say it is NOT about salvation from sin, but I think we can err as well when we lean so far away from "It's not about the world's oppressed" that we ignore the basic "Love your neighbor" thing.
I believe Christ's use of the terms was to provide a serious parallel for consideration. This is most true with "debt" forgiveness, as the debts we ask God to forgive is clearly not monetary (at least it isn't for me, though that wouldn't be a bad thing, if you know what I mean). That parallel also teaches us how to deal with monetary debt at the same time.
Stan,
I definitely agree that His use of the terms as proxies for sin and it's effects, doesn't mean that He also didn't mean that the terms were exclusively figurative. I think the problem comes when people insist that the terms are only referring to the material or physical and ignore the figurative uses.
What's baffling to me is that they seem to do it interchangeably. The same people that claim, "Jesus said he was here to make poor people's lives better" because it is the woodenly literal way of reading that text deny it when Jesus said things like, "There is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or lands, for my sake and for the gospel, who will not receive a hundredfold now in this time, houses ..." (Mark 10:29-30). Literally? Oh, no, that's just figurative. Spiritual. Not actual.
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