For the gospel to qualify as the power of God to save, it must address a clear and present danger.
The threat of hell isn’t something clear or present. The offer of personal improvement doesn’t offer salvation so much as mitigation. Paul’s gospel offers rescue from a clear and present danger which is the corrupt society in which we live.
Episode Notes:
If the gospel is God’s power to save, it surely would sell itself.
In Romans 1:16, Paul called the gospel “the power of God for salvation.” Talk about a product! If word got out that the church dispenses God’s power our buildings would overflow, and our ministers would never have a moment’s peace. That was the kind of response Jesus and the apostles encountered. Now we feel like we need to bribe people to listen. What has changed? Many factors have contributed to this cultural moment, but if we preach the same gospel Paul did then God’s power could surely overcome them. But we don’t preach the same gospel.
In this section I will examine the gospel as God’s power to save. I hope that a recovery of this potent message will embolden the church and disrupt the systems of this world.
The gospel is the simple announcement about Jesus contained in the Bible but not bound to it.
Before launching into an exploration of gospel as God’s saving power, we should probably all start on the same footing. I’ve found that definitions of the word, “gospel,” differ even among biblically literate Christians. So, before we go further into what the gospel does, I’d like to state what I understand the gospel to be.
I use the word, “gospel,” to mean “the announcement[i] about Jesus Christ crucified, raised to life and reigning at God’s right hand until he returns to restore creation.” This simple list outlines the shape of the gospel. The message is articulated in various configurations throughout the New Testament from the simple, “Jesus Christ and him crucified” in 1 Corinthians 2:2 to the extended sermons in the book of Acts.[1] These versions emphasize and/or explain certain elements of the gospel, but the core message remains consistent throughout.
This simple message is God’s power to save. To understand and appreciate that truth, we’ll need to consider what the gospel saves us from, what it saves us for, and how it achieves this salvation.
Gospel examples:
Paul, a servant of Christ Jesus, called to be an apostle and set apart for the gospel of God— 2 the gospel he promised beforehand through his prophets in the Holy Scriptures 3 regarding his Son, who as to his earthly life[fn] was a descendant of David, 4 and who through the Spirit of holiness was appointed the Son of God in power[fn] by his resurrection from the dead: Jesus Christ our Lord.
(Romans 1:1-4)
And so it was with me, brothers and sisters. When I came to you, I did not come with eloquence or human wisdom as I proclaimed to you the testimony about God.[fn] 2 For I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified.
(1 Cor. 2:1-2)
For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance[fn]: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, 4 that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures,
(1 Cor. 15:3-4)
Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ, 4 who gave himself for our sins to rescue us from the present evil age, according to the will of our God and Father, 5 to whom be glory for ever and ever. Amen.
(Gal. 1:3-4)
Remember Jesus Christ, raised from the dead, descended from David. This is my gospel, 9 for which I am suffering even to the point of being chained like a criminal. But God’s word is not chained.
(2 Tim. 2:8-9)
We don’t need the power of God to be saved from hell.
I walked the aisle of First Baptist Church when I was seven years old. Back in the ’70s, altar calls were essential at least in the Baptist tradition. The pastor would preach about the antichrist, the rapture, tribulation, and hellfire in explicit detail almost every week. Eventually, it seemed harder to remain at my pew than to respond to the invitation. On that front pew, I prayed the prayer and later was baptized. Nothing really changed but I didn’t expect it to. I was only seven after all. I just wanted to be assured that I would escape the tribulation and eventually hell.
That message of “turn or burn” left no ambiguity about what Jesus could save us from, but it doesn’t work anymore. After the fall of Soviet communism, the threat of imminent rapture and tribulation fizzled out. And today’s more cynical audiences wonder why they should fear hell without any indication that it exists. With all their ready access to a cache of worldview alternatives, they wonder whether any god who would use such threats could even be worthy of worship. I wonder whether they have a point.
I’m not saying we should tailor the gospel to accommodate modern sensibilities, but warnings of impending doom aren’t just unpopular, they’re inadequate. Warnings of imminent doom expire. Warnings of ultimate doom fall flat. Neither threat requires divine power to avert – especially since it is God who is said to bring about these trials. Couldn’t he just change his mind? What if I sent you a letter stating:
Dear [Your Name]
Your actions have made me violently angry. In fact, I was resolved to come to your house and shoot you dead, but I shot my son instead. You are officially forgiven. You’re welcome.
I now expect you to memorialize my son. If you fail to do this, I will become even more angry and come to kill you and your family.
Love,
Me
Would this letter inspire you to worship me, or would it make you think I’m unhinged? Would you be grateful for the “salvation” I’m offering you at such great cost to me? Or maybe you would think that my son died for nothing since I could have just controlled myself and let whatever offense it was pass. I doubt that you would think I had in any way saved you. If our gospel only offers amnesty from God’s definitive angry outburst, it doesn’t save at all. At least not in any way we can authentically appreciate.
I think somewhere in the back of their minds, most Christians struggle with this difficulty themselves. I think it’s why we don’t evangelize more. We’re secretly ashamed of the gospel.
But Paul said that he was eager to preach everywhere because the gospel is God’s power to save. Maybe we chalk his enthusiasm up to naivete on his part and/or on the part of his hearers. But that’s just naïve on our part. His audiences were as incredulous as ours.[ii] And he didn’t even have the benefit of representing an established religion. He was walking around making claims that he knew sounded foolish.[iii] If anything, Paul had more reason for timidity than we do. The difference wasn’t circumstances but in the message he preached. We don’t have Paul’s boldness because we don’t know what the gospel saves people from.
The claim that the gospel is God’s power to save presumes a clear and present, insurmountable danger.
A person might claim that a charm has the power to ward off fairies, but until fairies become an overt threat that claim will ring hollow. The common understanding of salvation as divine forgiveness which rescues people from hell requires no more power and carries no more weight than fairy’s bane. A sinner will need God’s mercy to find forgiveness but not his power. Salvation must be from present circumstances that are not caused directly by God.
Further, that clear and present danger must be insurmountable by human efforts. In recent years popular preachers have veered away peddling pie in the sky to “have your cake and eat it too” pitches. Joel Osteen’s breakout best seller, Your Best Life Now both typifies this approach. The book has obviously been well received having sold over 8 million copies. A quick look at five-star reviews on Amazon would suggest that it has had a positive impact on its readers. The gospel according to Joel Osteen seems to alleviate some suffering in the present, but it doesn’t rise to Paul’s standard since other self-help books seem to provide similar positive benefit without reliance on God. For instance, Tony Robbins’ ironically named book, Unlimited Power, has more positive ratings and equally if not more impressive reviews on Amazon. Motivating people and making them feel better hardly calls for supernatural intervention.
To recap, if the gospel is indeed God’s power to save, then whatever we’re saved from can’t be something God will do to us since he could simply choose not to do it. It also must be recognizable here and now since rescue from an imperceptible or eventual peril can’t be verified. Finally, the painful circumstance or existential threat must require divine intervention to overcome.
Sound fair?
Could the authors of the New Testament conceive of a threat that meets all three of these criteria?
They could and they did.
The gospel saves us from our corrupt society.
The very first appeal for people to “get saved” included the answer to “from what?”
With many other words he warned them; and he pleaded with them, “Save yourselves from this corrupt generation.”
(Acts 2:40 NIV)
Peter called on those observant Jews gathered to celebrate Pentecost to be saved from their corrupt society. You might wonder why they didn’t object to his indictment not only on them but on their people. Look a little up the page:
“Therefore let all Israel be assured of this: God has made this Jesus, whom you crucified, both Lord and Messiah.”
(Acts 2:36 NIV)
Was their generation corrupt? Only if you count crucifying the Son of God a sign of corruption. These pious Jews were probably like most religious people. They thought of themselves as a moral cut above irreligious people. Yet when confronted with innocence personified, they conspired with their pagan occupiers to have him executed.
This concept of the corrupt generation wasn’t new with Peter. Moses sang a song about it in Deuteronomy 32:5, “They are corrupt and not his children; to their shame they are a warped and crooked generation.”
According to Scripture, God wanted Moses to teach the song recorded in Deuteronomy 32 to Israel as a safeguard against falling away. This line mentions a two-fold tendency of the Israelites as well as of all humankind – “they are corrupt” and “they are a warped and crooked generation.” Peter compressed the two ideas into one in his appeal, but the concept remains the same. His hearers needed to be saved from the personal disintegration (corruption) that they had contracted from their society. They also needed to be liberated from its coercive and manipulative (warping and twisting) influence.
We can’t rescue ourselves from the corrupt generation because we’re part of it.
Sin is contagious. We catch it from others and spread it in turn. As this cycle continues, corruption eventually overtakes humanity until there’s nothing left to save. That’s what happened in Noah’s day.
Now the earth was corrupt in God’s sight and was full of violence. God saw how corrupt the earth had become, for all the people on earth had corrupted their ways. So God said to Noah, “I am going to put an end to all people, for the earth is filled with violence because of them. I am surely going to destroy both them and the earth.
(Genesis 6:11-13 NIV)
Yes, God does judge humankind and a cataclysm is coming. But it’s coming on a corrupt generation which is what we need to be saved from. This was true for Noah and the audience in Acts 2 and for us.
Consider this excerpt from 1 Peter 3:20-21:
God waited patiently in the days of Noah while the ark was being built. In it only a few people, eight in all, were saved through water, and this water symbolizes baptism that now saves you also—not the removal of dirt from the body but the pledge of a clear conscience toward God (NIV)
Wait. Wasn’t the water what Noah needed saving from? I thought it was the ark that saved Noah from the water. Somehow, I always thought baptism was like the ark, but that’s not what Peter said. Water saved Noah and his family from their corrupt generation. In Acts 2, Peter appealed to his hearers to make a public break with the corrupted norms of their old society through the waters of baptism.
In the story of Noah, we see the imperative to be saved from our corrupt generation. That is, we need to get free from the sinful attitudes and habits which pollute our inner selves. But we also need to get free from our corrupt generation. That is, the depersonalizing pressures exerted on us from without by our society.
When we speak of “salvation” we sometimes use the word, “redemption.” This word literally means “to buy back.” It speaks to liberation, to being purchased out of slavery. The word, “redeem,” debuts in the Bible in Exodus 6 with God speaking to Moses:
“Therefore, say to the Israelites: ‘I am the LORD, and I will bring you out from under the yoke of the Egyptians. I will free you from being slaves to them, and I will redeem you with an outstretched arm and with mighty acts of judgment. I will take you as my own people, and I will be your God. Then you will know that I am the LORD your God, who brought you out from under the yoke of the Egyptians.
(Exodus 6:6-7 NIV)
The Egyptians did have a corrupting influence on Israel, but here God’s primary concern is for their freedom. To be free moral agents, people must be free. Where one person controls another, the former arrogates himself to godhood while the latter becomes objectified. In bringing judgment on Egypt, God delivered Israel not from their own susceptibility to sin but from the conforming influence of other people.
Not coincidentally, their liberation from Egypt went through water at the crossing of the Red Sea in Exodus 14 marked their last encounter with the power of Pharaoh. In 1 Corinthians 10, Paul calls this crossing a “baptism.”
For I do not want you to be ignorant of the fact, brothers and sisters, that our ancestors were all under the cloud and that they all passed through the sea. They were all baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea.
1 Cor. 10:1-2 NIV
This was again salvation from a corrupt society, but this time it wasn’t so much from the corruption as from the society itself. Salvation for Israel was from the oppressive control of human overlords.
In both the case of Noah and that of the Exodus, the faithful were saved from a corrupt society. But neither of these salvations were final. After the flood, Noah and his family began immediately to corrupt one another.[iv] Several generations after Israel enters the promised land they will demand to be ruled by a human king.[v] God acted powerfully to save Noah from his corrupt society and to save Israel from their corrupt society, but these salvations didn’t stick. According to Paul, the gospel of Christ isn’t just the story about how God powerfully saved people; it is God’s power to save.
References
[i] As nearly as we can tell, the word euangelion referred to the announcement sent through the empire that a new emperor had ascended the throne in Rome.
[ii] Acts 17 and 1 Corinthians 1 for how the gospel was received by that society.
[iii] 1 Corinthians 1:18-23
[iv] Genesis 9:18-25 contains the strange story of Noah’s getting drunk and Canaan viewing his father naked.
[v] 1 Samuel 8:4-20