Greg D. Gilbert
The word “gospel” derives from the Anglo-Saxon term “godspell,” meaning “good tidings” or “good news.” The Greek word euangelion (“gospel”) and its verbal cognate euangelizomai (“evangelize” or “speak good news”) together occur more than 130 times in the NT. Whether used in a military, imperial, or religious sense, a “gospel” was always a message of good news. It was proclaimed with words, had a definite content, and expected a response from those who heard it.
The gospel that Jesus and his earliest followers proclaimed was no different. It was a well-defined message of good news: Jesus the Messianic King had come to establish God’s kingdom on earth and forgive sinful people through his own substitutionary life, death, and resurrection, thereby qualifying them to inherit God’s kingdom if they would turn from their sin and rely on him to save them.
Background of the Word “Gospel”
Neither Jesus nor the apostles coined the word “gospel.” It was commonly used as part of the Roman system of emperor worship, in which it referred to the announcement of the “good news” of a royal heir’s birth or coming of age or especially of a new emperor’s accession to the throne. While the use of “gospel” in the NT to announce the arrival of the Messianic King may have been to some degree a challenge to Roman imperial power, the background to Christians’ use of the word is to be found, not primarily in an anti-imperial polemic, but rather in OT prophecies.
The Septuagint, the pre-Christian Greek translation of the OT, often uses the words euangelion and euangelizomai to translate words deriving from the Hebrew root bsr. Usually, bsr refers to bringing a message of good news, such as the birth of a child (Jer 20:15), the choice of a king (1Kgs 1:42), a military victory (e.g., 1Sam 31:9; 2Sam 4:10; 18:19, 20; Ps 68:11), or deliverance from foreign powers (e.g., Ps 96:2; Nah 1:15; but cf. 1Sam 4:17, where the news is not good but still momentous). Sometimes, however, the word takes on a greater significance: when referring to God’s spiritual salvation of his people.
The Gospel According to Isaiah
The most important passages in the OT for understanding the background to the NT usage of “gospel” occur in Isa 40–66. In two crucial texts (Isa 40:9; 52:7), a messenger bringing “good news” announces that God is coming to Jerusalem as a victorious king to deliver his people from Babylon’s oppression. In both of these passages, the message of the “evangelizer” is that despite the apparent power of the enemy, it is God alone who rules: “Here is your God!” (Isa 40:9) and “Your God reigns!” (Isa 52:7), they declare. The deliverance God accomplishes for his people, however, is wholly undeserved; they are a sinful people (Isa 46:12; 48:1), and God saves them only by his grace. Because there is no righteousness in the people themselves, God promises that he will clothe them in a righteousness that is not their own (Isa 61:10–11) when they come to him in faith and repentance (Isa 55:1, 7). But God does not graciously redeem his people at the expense of justice. His people’s sins still cry out for judgment, and the Lord who loves justice (Isa 61:8) will not allow the penalty to go unpaid. But here is also where his mercy is most greatly magnified, for God determines that the punishment for his people’s sin will be executed, not on them, but on a divine servant-king appointed to be their substitute (Isa 52:13—53:12; see Isa 11:2; 52:13; and 61:1 for the identification of this servant and king, as well as his divine nature). This servant-king will be pierced for their transgressions and crushed for their iniquities, and because of his wounds, they will be healed (Isa 53:5). He will “bear [God’s people’s] iniquities,” make an “offering for sin,” and through his suffering “justify many” (Isa 53:10–11). Although this servant-king will be “cut off from the land of the living” (Isa 53:8), have his life “poured out . . . unto death” (Isa 53:12), and be “assigned a grave with the wicked” (Isa 53:9), yet “after he has suffered, he will see the light of life and be satisfied” (Isa 53:11). Moreover, after accomplishing the salvation of his people by dying in their place, the risen Savior-King will “reign on David’s throne and over his kingdom,” ruling “with justice and righteousness from that time on and forever” (Isa 9:7).
This announcement of undeserved, substitutionary salvation is the “gospel,” which the Spirit of God anoints the servant to preach to “the poor” (61:1). The “poor” are not primarily the materially poor but the spiritually poor, those who realize that they have no hope of salvation apart from the servant’s substitutionary work in their place. They buy, eat, and drink from God’s grace even though they have no money with which to do so (55:1–2).
The Gospel Fulfilled by Jesus
The Announcement of the Kingdom
The servant’s words in Isa 61 are of particular interest because Jesus opened his own ministry with this text, declaring to his audience in Nazareth that his appearance fulfilled what Isaiah prophesied (Luke 4:16–21). The essence of Jesus’ preaching through the first stage of his public ministry is stated in his announcement, “The time has come . . . The kingdom of God has come near. Repent and believe the good news!” (Mark 1:14–15). In other words, the good news Jesus announced is that just as Isaiah prophesied, God has acted now to inaugurate his long-awaited kingdom on earth, and he has done so in the person of his chosen Messiah-King, none other than Jesus himself.
It is clear from Jesus’ reading of Isa 61 and its surrounding context, however, that it is not the mere establishment of God’s kingdom that constitutes the good news. It is that the spiritually poor, captive, blind, and oppressed (i.e., those who have no claim on the kingdom by right) can enter it by God’s grace and the work of the servant-king standing in their place. Jesus’ healing miracles thus illustrate that God saves the spiritually hopeless: the blind receive sight (Matt 9:27–31), the lame walk (Mark 2:1–12), and the dead live (Matt 9:18–26; Luke 7:11–15; John 11:1–44; see Matt 11:2–6).
Most important, the good news Jesus proclaimed is that the guilty can be forgiven of their sins (e.g., Mark 2:5, 10; Luke 7:48–50). This was the ultimate mission of Isaiah’s kingly suffering servant (Isa 53:4–6, 10–12; 61:1–3), and it was also the purpose announced by the angel before Jesus’ birth: “He will save his people from their sins” (Matt 1:21; see Luke 19:10). The apostle Paul explains that this forgiveness is necessary because it qualifies people “to share in the inheritance of [God’s] holy people in the kingdom of light” and to be “rescued . . . from the dominion of darkness and brought . . . into the kingdom of the Son he loves,” i.e., Jesus (Col 1:11–14). Without forgiveness, by contrast, one can expect only God’s wrath, judgment, and fury (Rom 2:5, 8).
The Message of the Cross
For this reason, the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus stand at the center of the Christian gospel message. Thus, the gospel Paul preached was this: “that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas [Peter], and then to the Twelve” (1 Cor 15:3–5). Paul recognized, of course, that Jesus’ resurrection was critical to the good news of salvation: “If Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and . . . your faith is futile; you are still in your sins” (1Cor 15:14, 17). But since Christ was indeed raised, Paul emphasized the cross as the very center of the gospel message, even equating “the gospel” with “the message of the cross” and “Christ crucified” (1Cor 1:17–18, 23). Among the churches he planted, Paul said that he “resolved to know nothing while [he] was with [them] except Jesus Christ and him crucified” (1 Cor 2:2).
Paul focused on the cross because Jesus’ death is the event through which God provided atonement for the sins of his people. Throughout his public ministry, Jesus repeatedly foretold his death and resurrection, and he explained their purpose as well. By dying on the cross, he was giving his life “as a ransom for many” (Mark 10:45) and pouring out his blood “for the forgiveness of sins” (Matt 26:28). By willingly laying down his life by dying on the cross, Jesus was accomplishing the salvation that God promised in the OT and that the Jewish sacrificial system illustrated. By dying in his people’s place and paying the penalty for their sin, Jesus became a “sacrifice of atonement” for them (Rom 3:25), took upon himself the wrath of God that they deserved (1 Pet 3:18), and thereby qualified them to be welcomed into God’s presence and kingdom (Col 1:12–13). As a miraculous illustration of this, when Jesus died, the curtain of the temple, which symbolized that God exiled humans from his presence, was torn in two from top to bottom (Matt 27:51; Mark 15:38; Luke 23:45). Jesus had not just inaugurated the kingdom; he had also won forgiveness for the sin that separated people from God.
The Call for a Response
The Christian gospel always calls for and expects a response from those who hear it. Thus, Jesus himself preached, “Repent and believe the good news!” (Mark 1:15). Paul declared to everyone to whom he preached, “Turn to God in repentance and have faith in our Lord Jesus” (Acts 20:21). Through faith, sinners receive Jesus’ sacrifice of atonement on their behalf and are thereby justified—i.e., declared to be righteous—in God’s sight (Rom 3:21–26). At its essence, therefore, to have faith in Jesus is to trust God as completely as Abraham did, “fully persuaded that God had power to do what he had promised” (Rom 4:21). Faith is to trust Jesus, to believe in him, to rely on him alone for salvation.
Of course, faith in Jesus does not abrogate the necessity of turning away from sin to follow him; quite to the contrary, genuine faith in Jesus implies such repentance (Rom 6:1–6). To claim faith while refusing to repent is to identify oneself as a false professor of the faith, one who has the appearance of godliness without truly knowing its power (2 Tim 3:5–7; Heb 6:1–9; 1John 2:19). Those who truly love and trust Jesus as savior and king will turn away from sin, keep his commandments, and follow him even at the cost of life itself (Matt 16:24; John 14:15, 21, 23; 1 John 5:3).
The Gospel As Paul Proclaimed It
Of the 76 occurrences of “gospel” in the NT, 60 of them are in the writings of Paul, which makes him a crucial witness to how the earliest Christians understood the content of the gospel message. According to Paul himself, his gospel message was not a corruption of, or even a development of, the one Jesus preached, nor had he received it from or been taught it by any human being (Gal 1:11–12). On the contrary, Paul insisted that he had “received [the gospel] by revelation from Jesus Christ” himself (Gal 1:12; see 1 Cor 15:3), and therefore it was not subject to human judgment but rather carried in itself all divine authority (Gal 1:15–17; see Gal 1:1).
In Paul’s writings we see the content of the Christian gospel given full form. Human beings, because of their sin, deserve God’s wrath and judgment (Rom 1:18). No form of moral self-reformation or law-keeping can rescue them; indeed “by the works of the law no one will be justified” (Gal 2:16), since the law serves only to make sinners “conscious of [their] sin” (Rom 3:20) and thereby renders sin “utterly sinful” (Rom 7:13). What sinners need is “not . . . a righteousness of [their] own that comes from the law” (Phil 3:9; see Rom 3:21) but rather “the righteousness that comes from God” (Phil 3:9) that is “apart from the law” (Rom 3:21). That righteousness comes from Jesus, who suffered in the place of sinners “as a sacrifice of atonement” (Rom 3:25) and thereby “redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us” (Gal 3:13). Standing as their representative substitute, Jesus is himself his people’s righteousness (1 Cor 1:30), and as such, he secures for them before God a righteous status without regard to their works (Rom 4:6). Sinners appropriate all this—atonement for sin and righteousness before God—by faith. Just as righteousness was credited to Abraham through his faith in God’s promise (Gen 15:6; Rom 4:3), so also in the same way “God will credit righteousness [to us] who believe in him who raised Jesus our Lord from the dead. He was delivered over to death for our sins and was raised to life for our justification” (Rom 4:24–25).
Conclusion
The Christian gospel of the NT was thus a well-defined message of good news: Jesus the Messiah had come to live, die, and rise again in the place of sinners so that all who repent of their sins and believe in him will not suffer God’s wrath but rather be forgiven and saved. This was the message the earliest Christians preached. In his sermon at Pentecost, Peter announced Jesus’ atoning death and resurrection and then explained what people should do in response: “Repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins” (Acts 2:38). In another sermon, Peter again announced the good news of Jesus’ substitutionary atonement for sin: “This is how God fulfilled what he had foretold through all the prophets, saying that his Messiah would suffer. Repent, then, and turn to God, so that your sins may be wiped out” (Acts 3:18–19). Similarly, when he preached the gospel to Cornelius and his family, Peter said, “We are witnesses of everything he did in the country of the Jews and in Jerusalem. They killed him by hanging him on a cross, but God raised him from the dead on the third day and caused him to be seen . . . All the prophets testify about him that everyone who believes in him receives forgiveness of sins through his name” (Acts 10:39–40, 43). Paul proclaimed the same message in Acts 13:38–39: “Therefore, my friends, I want you to know that through Jesus the forgiveness of sins is proclaimed to you. Through him everyone who believes is set free from every sin, a justification you were not able to obtain under the law of Moses.” In each proclamation of the gospel, the message is clear: through the death and resurrection of Jesus the Messiah-King, there is righteousness, forgiveness of sin, and the inheritance of God’s kingdom for any sinner who will repent and trust in him.