One of the greatest blunders that many evangelicals have made is changing the Gospel presentation to starting with God and who God is to “God has a wonderful plan for you.” This not only makes the Gospel about man, how precious man is, and how God needs man, but it spits on the face of God and basically turns him to a pansy. When the focus of the message is wrong, it paints a wrong picture about God and those are not secondary issues we can just set aside.
The Gospel starts with God. The first words of the Bible are: “In the beginning, God…” It all starts with God. It was God’s plan to create a universe, a setting in which mankind would rebel against God and in which He would come down and rescue His people from their sin. God is the originator, the orchestrator, the plotter, the planner, and the architect, and He will finish everything that He started. But first, we have to know who God is, because if we get God wrong, none of the message of the Gospel is going to work. God is who the Gospel is about. He is the hero of the story. He’s not a mere genie who assists man in his own story, nor even merely the wise mentor, but the hero. And a severe problem we have today is we think we are the heroes of our own story. Hint: we aren’t. We are the damsel in distress in the best-case scenario. In reality, we are the villain. We are the ones who sinned. We are the ones who rebelled. We are the ones who deserve the cheers and jeers from an audience that wants to see the villain go down. We are the ones over whom the people will rejoice to see justice to be met. And God is going to see that justice is done. It is God who this story is all about, and when all is said and done, it will be God who eternity is focused on.
Who is God? I have both blog posts and a book about the character and attributes of God – who He is and what He is like. Of many different attributes, I will emphasize a few. First, God is the Creator. I’ll deal with this more next week, but the Gospel starts with God as creator. Being the creator means God not only knows but also controls every intricate detail about His creation. This is called sovereignty. This is a dreaded word in today’s soft evangelical world, where God is more treated like a divine butler, or a needy, sissified God who needs man, or a shampoo model who breaks if you breathe near them. God is sovereign. That means He rules over all things, including our circumstances. He can change them in an instant, and they are all there to establish and build God’s plan and God’s kingdom.
Many people do not like the idea of God as sovereign because it takes self out of the equation. One thing I will be addressing in this series is the deadly teaching and belief that we can come to God on our terms. It comes in many forms, but we have to understand that God is God, and we are not. We do not have a say in how reality works, and we most certainly do not have a say in what God should or should not do. In every case when we do that, we are projecting ourselves onto God and telling Him that He should do what we think should be done. Sometimes out of His compassion and love for us, He will. But sometimes for other purposes we cannot know nor understand at the moment, He does not. God has a much bigger plan involved than we can imagine, and it has many more pieces in play that we can understand. Sometimes He allows suffering due to consequences of sin and other times to train and prepare us for something much bigger. We don’t know why God allows some to sin against others in very grievous ways but part of what triggered me to write this seriously is to show how the Gospel is also for the victims of such sins. We know that God is still good despite the evil decisions of man.
God is a holy, righteous, and just God. This means when we sin against Him, He does not and will not let sin go unpunished. A wrong has been made, and He cannot let that slide or that would be unjust. Yes, God does and has allowed very evil things to happen, but they never happen without consequences. Nobody sins without consequences. Some are immediate, some are not, but our sins will find us out and justice will be had. Even for those who repent, there are still consequences. Just ask David. God forgave him of his sins regarding Uriah and Bathsheba, but he would deal with violence the rest of his life and it would be a permanent blemish on his record.
Yet, God is also kind, merciful, and compassionate. He is strict about His law and requires absolute, 100% perfection to keep it, but He also knows the propensity of the heart and weakness of man. He knew man would sin and rebel against Him, and as a means of showcasing His glory, He chose to create man anyway so He could save us from ourselves. God loves us enough to let us choose to do what we want to do, even if it hurts us, but He also loves us enough to come and save us when we come back to Him. However, His love and mercy work side by side with His righteousness, justice, and sovereignty.
So God gets all the glory, salvation is only offered when God offers it and on God’s terms. He gives man zero say on the terms – only to accept or reject them wholesale. As we will see as this series progresses, don’t mess around with God, because He is not messing around Himself. He has an agenda, and it’s His agenda. While He does indeed care for His children, He deals with things so that He gets the glory and His kingdom is advanced.
If we are going to preach the Gospel correctly, it must be God-centered, not man-centered. The Gospel is about God and what God does; it is not about man and how special man is that God needs to come get us to meet His needs. God has no needs, especially not any “needs” that could be fulfilled by sin-cursed people like you and me. We need Him, and the sooner we recognize that, the much better outlook we’ll have because it is not about us, nor dependent upon us. And that means we can rest and rely on God to do the heavy lifting. Life is so much easier to handle (not saying it will be easy, but easier to handle) when we can just roll things off for God to handle than try to deal with them ourselves.
Next week, we’ll look at Creation – how God designed everything at first, how He incorporates the Fall, and the eventual restoration of the creation.
This forum is meant to foster discussion and allow for differing viewpoints to be explored with equal and respectful consideration. All comments are moderated and any foul language or threatening/abusive comments will not be approved. Users who engage in threatening or abusive comments which are physically harmful in nature will be reported to the authorities.
0 comments:
Post a Comment