The gospel of Jesus Christ reveals the full, unique glory of the God of the gospel, who will not allow us to reduce him to a generic God acceptable to Western sensibilities.
For eight months my weekly posts have examined the crucial theme of knowing God through the lens of the gospel. This is crucial because it is the gospel that brings into sharp relief the difference between the true God of the Bible and all other ideas of God.
In other words, if you do not understand and believe the gospel, then you do not know God as he truly is. You believe in a merely generic God, who cannot save anyone because he does not exist, or the God of some other religion, again unable to save anyone, but not the real God of the universe who actually exists and has revealed himself in the Bible.
Beliefs in common
Writing on this theme has reminded me how drastically different the God of the Christian gospel is from all other ideas of God.
Most ideas of God hold that
- God somehow created everything (through evolution or whatever).
- God is powerful and exerts more or less control over events on earth.
- He is good.
- God expects us to be good.
- He accepts any nice person who believes that he exists and leads a generally good life.
- That after this life God oversees some sort of punishment or reward for how a person lived.
- God will ultimately have mercy on many people—perhaps most or even all people—for their wrongdoing.
- He resides in heaven, and good people go to be with him after they die.
- God occasionally answers prayers.
There are some similarities between this generic God and the God of the gospel, but many significant differences.
The generic God
The Generic God is the one many unchurched Americans—who regard themselves as spiritual, not religious—believe in, and when they say they believe in God this is what they mean. They do not believe in the God of the gospel. Some may even say they believe in Jesus, but if pressed they will deny many distinctive beliefs of the Christian gospel (For example, in a 2020 survey,1 52 percent of Americans rejected the idea that Jesus is God.).
They may deny the biblical gospel for one or more of the following reasons: (a) some reject the idea of the supernatural and miraculous; (b) they find the Christian gospel offensively intolerant and exclusive; (c) they reject the idea that God judges nice people, in particular by sending them to hell.
The fact is, the God of the gospel is good and wonderful, perfect and desirable in every way, but he is a stumbling block to the unregenerate person, that is, the person without the Holy Spirit.
The stark difference of the God of the gospel
The gospel presents a sharp departure from the Generic God in these key areas:
- The Trinity: There is one God in three persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
- The Deity of Christ: Jesus is the unique Son of God. He is God. He is divine.
- The virgin birth: Jesus was born of the virgin Mary, conceived in her womb by the Holy Spirit.
- The resurrection of Jesus: Jesus the Son of God rose from the dead in an eternal, new kind of human body, not just as a spirit.
- The Lordship of Jesus Christ. Jesus is Lord over all God’s creation, all people, all things.
- Human depravity. No one can be good enough to be accepted by God. In fact, God has both love and wrath toward every person until they receive the forgiveness of sins through faith in Jesus Christ.
- Wrath and judgment. God is not okay with sin. He hates it, and because he is perfectly just he will eventually judge evildoers.
- The exclusivity of salvation through Jesus Christ. There is only one way to God, and that is through faith in and obedience to Jesus. (John 14:6)
- Justification by grace through faith in Jesus Christ. Christ’s death on the cross is central and essential to all God’s saving of human souls.
- The Second Coming. Jesus is coming again to the earth in glory to reward his people and to judge Satan and all evildoers.
Irreducibly unique
This is who God is. What the gospel reveals about God is at the heart of who he is. These truths are not optional. To reject these truths is to reject God as he actually is.
No matter how offensive the Christian gospel is to current Western sensibilities, God will not become who we want him to be. We are not the potter, and he is not the clay. He is who he is. He does not change with the never-ending flux of Western ideas about him or adapt himself to the contradictory, irreconcilable beliefs of 7 billion flawed potters. God is the perfect, unchanging Potter, and we are the clay. He requires what he requires.
It is not up to us to develop our opinion of who God is; rather, it is up to us to believe what he has revealed about himself in the Bible. He has revealed himself as the God of the gospel.
Our wonderful gospel-God
And what a perfect and wonderful God that is! Thank God he is the God revealed in the gospel! Anything less is infinitely less, and false.
He is the God of superlatives, perfections, and seeming paradoxes because he somehow harmonizes all that is good to the ultimate degree within his own nature and actions.
Thus the God of the gospel is both holy and loving, both righteous and gracious, both just and merciful. He is mysterious yet knowable. He is infinitely higher and greater than we, yet stoops to walk with the lowly. God loves to display his glory, yet in Christ is gentle and humble. He is far from us in heaven itself, yet near through the Holy Spirit. God is one, but three. He is God, yet in the Son he is also man.
He is an eternal community of love between the three members of the Trinity. God is spirit. He is truth. He is a person, not merely a force. God transcends his creation, yet is immanent with all. He is “over all and through all and in all” (Ephesians 4:6). Yet somehow he is also holy and separate from all wickedness.
“From him, to him, and through him are all things, to whom be glory forever.” (Romans 11:36). Yet somehow human beings are fully responsible for their actions.
The God of the gospel somehow was able to become fully man and yet remain God. He somehow was able to suffer himself the wrath that he had towards evil humanity, pouring out his wrath on himself in the person of the Son. The God of the gospel somehow was able to die as a man.
He is so amazing that no human could have imagined him, for he is so unlike mankind, especially fallen mankind.
If the thought of him does not take your breath away and leave you unable to comprehend his ways, then you are still living in the puny world of generic God.
The God of the gospel is singularly great and greatly to be praised. He is irreducibly unique. The God of the gospel is one of a kind. He is the wonderful stumbling block. Take him or leave him, he is gospel-God.
It is our privilege to know him, love him, and endeavor forever to know him better.
Jeremiah 9:23–24: “Thus says the LORD: ‘Let not the wise man boast in his wisdom, let not the mighty man boast in his might, let not the rich man boast in his riches, but let him who boasts boast in this, that he understands and knows me, that I am the LORD who practices steadfast love, justice, and righteousness in the earth. For in these things I delight, declares the LORD.’” (ESV)