Josh Broward
January 24, 2010
The Gospel and the Bible
(Read Forwards not Backwards!)
Gospel Series: Week 1
Isaiah 61:1-11, Matthew 11:1-6, Romans 1:13-17
When I was growing up in the 1980’s, there was a huge controversy about backmasked messages in rock music. Conservative Christian groups began accusing various famous rock bands of having secret backward messages in their music that would entice people to follow Satan, use drugs, or have illicit sex.
Ÿ Led Zeplin’s song “Stairway to Heaven” is alleged to have the backward message: “Here’s to my sweet Satan.”
Ÿ Queen was accused of including “It’s fun to smoke marijuana,” backmasked in their famous song, “Another One Bites the Dust.”
Most bands vigorously denied these claims. However, as the fury and controversy over backmasking raged in the 1970s and 1980s, some bands joined the backmasking trend with some funny messages.
Ÿ In 1979, Pink Floyd backmasked the message: “Congratulations! You’ve just found the secret message.”
Ÿ Weird Al Yankovic hid the message: “Wow, you must have an awful lot of free time on your hands.”
There are hundreds of real or alleged backmasked messages. Some of these backward messages are funny. Some are strange, and some are scary. But the simple truth is: when you play something backwards, sometimes you get an entirely different message.
Most of us here today really start reading the Bible at the end. We start with the book of Revelation and its dramatic pictures of heaven and hell. Heaven will be streets of gold and pearly gates and everyone will be filled with joy worshiping God, no tears, no pain, no sadness. Hell will be fiery furnaces and pits of sulfur and ash and eternal torment day and night. Of course, we all want to go to heaven and avoid hell. But how?
Well, we keep reading backwards. We go to the letters. We focus on a few key verses:
Ÿ 1 John 5:1 “Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ has become a child of God.”
Ÿ Ephesians 2:8-9 “God saved you by his grace when you believed. And you can’t take credit for this; it is a gift from God. Salvation is not a reward for the good things we have done, so none of us can boast about it.”
Ÿ 1 Corinthians 15:3b “Christ died for our sins, just as the Scriptures said.”
Ÿ Romans 6:23 “For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life through Christ Jesus our Lord.”
We usually read these key verses in the context of heaven and hell, and we come to the natural conclusion that Jesus came to earth and died on the cross so that our sins could be forgiven so that we can go to heaven and not to hell. This becomes our framework for understanding the entire Bible.
Then, we keep reading backwards. We get to the gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) – the stories of Jesus, and we read them through this backward trajectory. We interpret everything that Jesus said or did based on this framework.
But, honestly, we don’t really know what to do with most of Jesus’ teachings because they don’t fit our framework. Jesus’ teaching is mostly about doing the right stuff and almost nothing about sin or forgiveness.
So we focus in on the cross, and we pretty much ignore the rest of Jesus’ life and teachings. Jesus came to earth to offer a new way for people to be right with God and go to heaven – “by grace through faith.” That’s why he lived. That’s why he died.
As we move backward even farther, we keep on reading the Bible through the same framework. When we read the Old Testament prophecies, we read them like they were written to the people of Jesus’ time to convince them that he is the Messiah. The entire message of the Old Testament prophets shrinks down to one point: Jesus is the Messiah, the one who saves us from our sins.
As we read about the history of
We read the Torah (the Law) as a long silly list of rules. This was either the foolish human attempt to try to please God through our actions, or on the other hand, God’s (somewhat cruel) method of teaching people that we can never measure up – that we can never do good enough.
We read the creation story through the same lens. We read it as giving the simple message that God created people because he wanted someone to love. God formed us simply for personal relationship with God. But we are such big losers that we ruined the whole deal. Adam and Eve had to go and eat the apple – thus letting sin into the world and into our hearts. We would just have to wait several thousand years for Jesus to come to solve that sin problem.
When we read the Bible backward, the end result is a very small message: “We sinned. Jesus died. Trust Jesus. Go to heaven – not hell. The end.” This is like taking three pieces of glass out of a huge stained glass window and saying, “Here. Look at the picture.”
The end result of this kind of reading is believing that the only thing that matters is if you are going to heaven or to hell. This life and this world don’t matter. The environment doesn’t matter. Poverty doesn’t matter. Relationships don’t matter. In the end, other people don’t really even matter, because if you yourself are in heaven, you won’t be worrying about them anyway. This is not what the Bible teaches. This is not the Gospel.
To really understand the Bible and the Gospel, we have to read it forwards. We have to start at the beginning and work our way to the end, letting each part expand and enrich the picture.
When we start at the very beginning of the Bible, we start with God. “In the beginning, God …” (Genesis 1:1). God must always be the beginning of our thinking, and before our beginning God always was. “And the Spirit of God was hovering over the surface of the waters” (1:2). “Then God said, ‘Let us make human beings in our image, to be like ourselves” (1:26). The beginning is the Trinity. In the beginning, God was Community. In the beginning, God was love. In the beginning, God was Mutual Sharing and Creative Teamwork.
Out of the great, rolling, frothing Mystery of God’s internal loving relationships, our earth and our humanity was born. God created us like God – in God’s image, as God’s representatives in the world. We were to marry – to love like God. We were to multiply – to create like God. We were to rule over the earth, to tend the garden – to lead with compassionate care like God. We were to participate in God’s activity of creating and loving and tending the earth.
When Adam and Eve rebelled, things quickly went from bad to worse. Stealing some fruit moved on to jealousy. Jealousy moved on to murdering a brother. (See Genesis 3-4.) Sin and family breakdown slowly moved around the earth until it seemed like everyone everywhere was corrupt.
God decided to start over again. He made Noah like the new Adam, and he used the flood as his eraser on the sketchpad of earth. He redrew the plants and animals and everything else and gave Noah the same command he gave Adam: “Live like God in the world. Create, love, and care for the earth.” (See Genesis 6-9.)
God chose one man, one family, one nation to be the starting point. God wanted to change the whole world, but he started with one family. God made a covenant with a man named Abram (later Abraham): “Leave our native country, your relatives, and your father’s family, and go to the land that I will show you. I will make you into a great nation. I will bless you and make you famous, and you will be a blessing to others. I will bless those who bless you and curse those who treat you with contempt. All the families on earth will be blessed through you” (Genesis 12:1-3).
God’s people would be a blessing to others instead of keeping all the blessings for themselves. God’s people would be on the move throughout the world instead of staying in one place. God’s people would become famous, but that was not the point. The point was that everyone on earth would be blessed through them.
Again and again throughout the Bible, this fundamental promise is repeated and confirmed. God has made a binding covenant with Abraham’s family to restore the earth. God cannot allow the earth to slip into ruin. God cannot allow people to destroy themselves. God will act from within – using one family, one nation, to heal the world.
Throughout
Then, God works the great Exodus – setting his people free from slavery in
The people finally make it home, but home is not all they hoped for. They struggle on – trying to get a grip on their land and on what it means to be the people of One God – the only God. They continually seem to lose touch of God’s vision of connecting the entire world with God’s healing presence. They continually retreat into a smaller vision of being a great nation – or an even smaller, weaker vision of just surviving.
So God sends prophets to remind them of his vision. They call the people to account for their compromises and short cuts and selfishness. They call the people to live with justice and fairness and concern for the weak. But finally, the prophets aren’t enough to prevent another repeat of the leaving home theme. As the people continue to distrust God, they grow weaker and weaker – until they are conquered by Assyria and
But God keeps sending prophets. God keeps working on his people. He has made an eternal covenant with them to use them to heal the world, and he’s not giving up.
It is in this context that we first hear the idea that God has a “gospel” or “good news” for people. We hear it first in Isaiah 52, when the prophet tells God’s people the time has come for them to leave their exile and return home. “How beautiful on the mountains are the feet of the messenger who brings good news, the good news of peace and salvation, the news that the God of Israel reigns! … Let the ruins of
The second message of good news comes in Isaiah 61: “The Spirit of the Sovereign LORD is upon me, for the LORD has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to comfort the brokenhearted and to proclaim that captives will be released and prisoners will be freed. He has sent me to tell those who mourn that the time of the LORD’s favor has come” (61:1-2).
Isaiah’s good news is that God will bring healing to the world. Beginning with his own people, God will lift up the poor, heal the brokenhearted, free the prisoners, and comfort the morning. In other passages, God’s prophets explain and expand this good news to include the healing of all the world. God will make right everything that is wrong. God will heal all that is broken.
So when Jesus came “preaching the good news of the kingdom” (Matthew 4:23), the people would have understood the “good news” in this context: healing for God’s people and healing for the world. In case they missed the point, Jesus quoted Isaiah 61 for them at the beginning of his ministry. Mark explains that “Jesus went into
When Jesus talked about the Good News (or the Gospel), he didn’t talk about how he would die for people’s sins so that they could be forgiven and go to heaven. That wouldn’t have made any sense at all to them. No, Jesus was working in the tradition of the prophets. Jesus was calling forward all of God’s promises. Jesus was announcing that God’s great rescue mission was happening all around them with new force.
When Jesus talked about the Good News, he said, “The Kingdom of God is at hand.” God’s way of life is right here available to us. Jesus said we should pray that our earth will become more like heaven. Jesus never said we should pray so that we can go to heaven. Jesus taught people to pray, “May your Kingdom come. May your will be done on earth as it is in heaven” (Matthew 6:10).
When Jesus died and was resurrected, that gave fresh life to God’s rescue mission in the world. Jesus endured the ultimate exile – into death. And he came home again! Jesus blazed the trail for all of us to survive death. Jesus blazed the trail for all of us to survive life – to live in God’s
And God poured out his Spirit on his people to enable us to live his ways – to be a counter-cultural community living as citizens of God’s Kingdom. Through his Spirit, God is at work among us restoring us into his image as God-like creators, God-like lovers, God-like tenders of the earth, God-like friends of the friendless, God-like healers of the broken, a God-like community of love.
So the first Christian theologians – Paul and Peter and John – set to work gathering people together to live in these counter-cultural communities learning to live in Jesus’ way. They tried to understand what it means for Jesus to lead us all on the great exodus out of slavery to sin and death. (We’ll talk more about that next week.) They realized that even though this way requires so much from us – everything really – it is still built on grace every step of the way.
They also realized that it’s not about us as individuals. It’s about where God is leading us as a people. It’s about how God is incorporating us individuals into his great rescue mission of healing our world. So in the book of Revelation, when we read the Bible forward, we still see heaven and hell. But hell is the unfortunate result of rejecting God’s healing, and heaven is the beautiful climax of all God’s healing work. And heaven is inhabited by all who have been healed in and involved in God’s healing work. And we see the great homecoming, where all of God’s people are eternally committed to God and set up house with God as the Bride of the Messiah.
If we read the Bible backwards, we end up with a very small picture: “We sinned. Jesus died. Go to heaven – not hell.” These are all true and good, but they are not the whole truth. They are pieces of the full beauty God paints for us.
If we read the Bible forwards, we see a beautiful and full picture. God is deeply in love with the world. God has made an unshakable promise to heal us and our world. Amazingly, God’s unstoppable plan is to work through us to do his healing work. Amazingly, God forgives us and frees us from our sins. The Gospel is that we don’t have to keep being the same broken, messed up people we’ve always been. The Gospel is that our world doesn’t have to keep being the same broken, messed up world it’s always been. Through Jesus, we are set free to come home to God who heals us and heals the world through us. This is the Gospel. This is the Good News that has the power to change the world.
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