Short Courses on Tall Subjects

The Gospel

December 2002

Dear Family,

It’s been a few months since I wrote to you, and I couldn’t let the holidays go by without sending you at least one more letter.  Let’s just call it a very personal “Christmas card,” talking about one of the most important subjects in the Bible–the Gospel.

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The book that I am writing is just a collection of teachings and insights that God has given to me over the years.  But the Bible is a book that is entirely different.  It’s a story with a plot.

There is a reason that it took so many authors so many years to write God’s story.  That’s because it took so long for His plot to unfold; no one person could have lived that long.

But this long plot has a short title:  the main plot of “His-story” (=history) is the Gospel.

As you read the Bible, it’s important to know that everything recorded in the Old Testament looks ahead to the birth of Christ on that first Christmas day.  All of its laws, its prophecies, and its ceremonies are fulfilled in Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection.  Then, in the New Testament, all that is written in those letters looks back to His first coming and forward to His Second Coming.

Without Jesus, there would be no Bible.

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We said in Chapter 4 that Jesus began His ministry by preaching, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is near,” and he sent His disciples out to preach the same thing.  However, after His crucifixion and resurrection, He had a different message for His disciples to proclaim:  “Go ye into all the world and preach the Gospel to every creature.”

The two messages are closely related; if the kingdom of heaven was at hand, the Gospel was the gateway through which to enter into that kingdom.  And after Christ’s resurrection, the door to God’s kingdom was standing wide open, praise the Lord!  All that was left was to invite people to come in.

But for all of those wanting to enter the kingdom of heaven, they needed to know that the Gospel was the only way to get there.  Jesus said, “I am the way and the truth and the life.  No one comes to the Father except through me.”  There is only one plot to “His-story”–any other story is strictly fiction.

One time, back when your mother and I were in the Navy and living in Japan, we met a lady who had a different story to tell.  She belonged to one of those religious groups that go door-to-door talking about the Bible, and they mean well, but unfortunately their doctrine is not Scriptural.

So I simply asked her, “Do you have a Gospel tract?”  She looked at me, very puzzled, and I knew she didn’t have any idea what I was talking about.

But I also knew she was curious; so I asked her if she would be willing to do a quick Bible study with me.  She said that normally her group would not allow that, but she was from Australia, and was more independent in her thinking.  So she agreed.

In our Bible study, I took her through the early chapters of the book of Acts, to see what Jesus’ disciples preached when they went door-to-door.  While they used different approaches, and each one had his own story to tell, the main plot of every one of their testimonies was always the same:  the death and the resurrection of Jesus.

I told her this was what the Gospel was all about, and it should be the main plot of our story as well.

At the end of the Bible study, we turned to I Corinthians 2:1-2 (R.S.V.) where Paul says, “When I came to you, brethren,¼I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified.”

She agreed it was hard to argue with that.