Introduction
The Christian Gospel (εὐαγγέλιον – euaggelion) is not what you’ve likely been taught. Yes, it is about Jesus of Nazareth’s life, death, and resurrection. And it is most assuredly the result of God’s gracious mercy.
But what it produced, and more importantly why, has been absent from the modern Christian church’s pulpits for most of its existence.
The purpose of this note is to expose and explain this hidden Gospel, and to show how the traditional Gospel misses its mark.
The New Covenant Gospel
Background
- God always desired to have a righteous people with whom to share eternity (Is 43:7). The narrative says the Hebrews, later Israelites, were the people he “chose” to be those people. They were to comprise his Kingdom – the Kingdom of God.
- The Genesis narrative portrays God choosing a man, Abram, to not only travel to a land God would promise to his progeny, but to be fruitful and produce descendants that would be numerous “as the dust of the earth” (Gen 13:16). He promises Abraham that his descendants will be blessings to all the families (Gen 12:3) and nations (Gen 22:18) of the earth.
- The Israelites, throughout their narrated history, not only were not righteous, but they refused to even acknowledge YHVH, let alone be gratefully faithful to him, despite his persistent calls and pleas[i] through his prophets to return to him.
- In response to their apostasy, the 10 northern tribes of Israel are attacked and exiled to the surrounding nations in 722 BC by Assyria.
- 140 years later, the southern tribes are attacked and exiled to Babylon after Jerusalem is razed.
- Through his prophets, God promises to regather his exiled people to himself, rejoining the northern (Ephraim) and southern (Judah) tribes (Eze 37:1-23). But we never read of any vestige of the northern tribes returning to their land, let alone their God. So, God has unfinished business.
- Similarly, God promised through his prophets to transform Judahites and Israelites within a New Covenant (Dt 30:6, Jer 24:7, Jer 31:33-34, Jer 32:39–40, Eze 11:19–20, Eze 36:26–27, Eze 37:1-22, Isa 44:3–5, Isa 57:15, Isa 59:21, Hos 2:23, Joel 2:28–29).
Taking Stock
At the turn of the millennium, according to the Bible’s narrative, all the nations of the earth had not been blessed through Abraham’s descendants; the people of Judah and the dispersed peoples of Ephraim had not been gathered and rejoined in YHVH; and those same people had not been transformed by the pouring out of God’s Spirit into them.
But these were represented as God’s promises. One of the hallmark truths the Bible insists on is that God is faithful. That is, if he makes a promise, he keeps that promise. So, we have at least these three outstanding promises he had yet to fulfill.
Enter Jesus
Jesus appears on the public scene in roughly 30 AD. He is devoutly dedicated to serving God (YHVH), whom he refers to as “my Father”. He was commissioned by God to regather his people to himself, to demonstrate what a life lived in the Kingdom of God looks like, and to offer that life to all who would follow his example of faithfulness.
His mission, he says, is Mt 15:24
24He answered, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.”
and cautions his disciples: Mt 10:5
5 These twelve Jesus sent out, instructing them, “Go nowhere among the Gentiles and enter no town of the Samaritans,
The focus of Jesus’s earthly ministry was clear. He was here as God’s agent to summon “Israel” to faithfulness to their God, just as God’s previous prophets had done for hundreds of years. Despite attracting a faithful following, like the earlier prophets, the vast majority of Judahites and all their leaders rejected Jesus. In fact, because he had humiliated those leaders, condemned their behavior (Mt 23:2-3), and rejected their profaning of the Temple with animals and money (Mt 21:12-13), they concluded that he had to be removed.
Most know the story of his trial, scourging, and crucifixion at the behest of the Jewish Sanhedrim and the hands of the Romans.
Following his burial for 2+days, he is reported to have been resurrected to life, taking on an unspecified but recognizable form, and seen by and interacted with by his followers over a period of some 40 days.
Ten days after that, God’s Spirit is poured out into Christ’s followers assembled in Jerusalem, inaugurating God’s New Covenant.
The Mainstream Gospel
The traditional Gospel says that Christ died to, somehow through that death, “forgive” our sins. The general idea is one of atonement. Jesus’s death, it is thought, constitutes a sacrifice or a payment that erases the sins of those who entrust themselves to him for which they would otherwise have to “pay” themselves.
However, Jesus never claims that of himself, either during his ministry or following his resurrection[ii]. Had that been the focus of his mission, you would think, having accomplished it, that he would have proclaimed that good news in his encounters with his followers. But he doesn’t mention it. Why?
The True Gospel
It’s at this point that we need to understand how Jesus perceived his mission as inaugurating God’s New Covenant. Jesus represented YHVH’s final appeal to the remnants of the nation of Israel to become faithful to him.
Many of those of the nation of Israel had been exiled with the northern House of Israel, whose descendants, having lived within the surrounding pagan cultures of the Ancient Near East for 800 years, had themselves become Gentiles. Calling them back to God would require someone to call them. Those who were appointed to this task were Jesus’s Apostles, as recorded in the Great Commission (Mt 28:18), as well as the Apostle Paul on his way to persecute Christians in Damascus (Acts 21:22).
Why the sudden shift in focus to the Gentiles? Because God had promised to regather the House of Israel, now Gentiles, back to himself together with the House of Judah, whom Jesus had been calling in his ministry for three years.
So, this is how the calling of Gentiles to faithfulness to Israel’s God came about. It wasn’t some spontaneous, random change by the unchangeable God. It was his committed intent from the very beginning as attested in his Abrahamic, Ezekielian (Eze 37), and Jeremian (Jer 31:31-34) promises.
Jesus’s Mission
Analyzing Jesus’s Words
Mt 26:28
28for this is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins.
Jesus says his blood, the carrier of his life, is to be “poured out,” signaling his death. He says it is “of the covenant”. What covenant[iii]? What’s he talking about?
There are seemingly two choices: 1) the existing “Mosaic Covenant”, reported to have been established between God and Israel via Moses at Mt. Sinai and 2) the “New Covenant” ((Dt 30:6, Jer 24:7, Jer 31:33-34, Jer 32:39–40, Eze 11:19–20, Eze 36:26–27, Eze 37:1-22, Isa 44:3–5, Isa 57:15, Isa 59:21, Hos 2:23, Joel 2:28–29) through which God promised to transform those who chose faithfulness to him so that they could be faithful, and would love him and their neighbor.
It wouldn’t make any sense for Jesus to say his blood was being given for the Mosaic Covenant. It had been in place for hundreds of years. It wasn’t being changed. However, it also wasn’t being followed by Israel, and later, the Jews (actually, they couldn’t follow it perfectly). Something had to change.
Therefore, we read in Jeremiah that God promised to make a New Covenant with those who chose to be faithful to him[iv]: Je 31:31-34
31The days are surely coming, says the LORD, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. 32It will not be like the covenant that I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt—a covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, says the LORD. 33But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the LORD: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. 34No longer shall they teach one another or say to each other, “Know the LORD,” for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the LORD, for I will forgive their iniquity and remember their sin no more.
It seems that this was the covenant that Jesus had in mind. And further, if we parse his sentence, he seems to be saying that his blood that is “of the covenant” is to be “poured out” (i.e., through his murder) … “for the forgiveness of sins.” His death is to somehow enable or lead to sins being “forgiven” for many.
Notice that he doesn’t say his death is going to cause the forgiveness of sins for many. Of course it’s possible, as modern Christianity believes, that the act of Jesus’s death itself is the cause of sin forgiveness in the sense of atonement. It is this focus on his death that results in the image of Jesus as being a “sacrifice”. But if that was his intended meaning, why didn’t he just say “…which is poured out to forgive the sins of many”? But he didn’t.
The other question raised by Jesus’s statement is that God had been routinely forgiving Israel’s general sins in accordance with the Torah for centuries. Of course, the big, covenant-shredding sins (e.g., murder, adultery, idol worship, etc.) had no provision for atonement; their only resolution was the death of the violator or, in some cases, his/her banishment. But if God routinely “forgave” (i.e. atoned for) Israel’s sins, why did he need Jesus to come and die? It seems God had more in mind than simple sin atonement.
This sin-and-forgive ritual had been embedded within Israel’s culture for much of the second Temple period (Ex 34:6-7). What it did not produce was the righteous people that God sought (Ro 3:20-22). It produced a people incrementally forgiven for their unrighteousness. How would Jesus’s death, cast as “of” the New Covenant, affect this Mosaic Covenant status quo?
What if Jesus’s death wasn’t the purpose of his ministry at all? What if the focus of his ministry was to teach and demonstrate through his Spirit-infused morality, values, ethics, and compassion, how to live in perfect observance of God’s will/law for all to see?
What if Jesus’s death was rather simply his fate, sealed by his ministry of calling to and demonstrating the ultimate faithfulness to his God – offering access to life with God to those who followed him, in tension with the Mosaic Covenant model? How could God have drawn a starker contrast between the unrighteousness of man (in the actions of the Sanhedrim and Roman officials) and the righteousness of Jesus’s Spirit-animated life lived in dedicated obedience to the Father?
Forgiveness
We have to understand what Jesus meant by the word rendered “forgiveness” in our English translations. The word is 859. ἄφεσις aphesis. It has a range of meanings. But they typically encompass our ideas of “release,” “letting go,” or “sending away”/”to cause to stand away”. This definition of ἄφεσις is all-important in understanding what Christ accomplished.
Dying to Live
Just as Jesus had to die to live transformed and glorified with God, so too do we. Our “death”, however, is not mortal but spiritual and quite self-sacrificial. Our death is rejecting our lives lived apart from God (i.e., repenting) and choosing a life lived with God through his Spirit[v]. Jesus speaks of this requirement in Mk 8:34-35 34And He summoned the crowd with His disciples, and said to them,
“If anyone wishes to come after Me, he must deny himself, and take up his cross and follow Me. 35For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake and the gospel’s will save it.
He presents this idea as “forgoing” the idea of possession in Lk 14:33
33 So therefore, any one of you who does not renounce all that he has cannot be my disciple.
Paul echoes the same message in Rom 6:8.
8Now if we have died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him.
This is precisely the message the church did not want to announce. So, they didn’t. For decades. Bonhoeffer[vi] was particularly impassioned in calling out the church on this issue. Speaking of his (German Lutheran) church’s wholesale adoption of no-cost grace, he says:
“The price we are having to pay today in the shape of the collapse of the organized Church is only the inevitable consequence of our policy of making grace available to all at too low a cost. We gave away the word and sacraments wholesale, we baptized, confirmed, and absolved a whole nation unasked and without condition. Our humanitarian sentiment made us give that which was holy to the scornful and unbelieving. We poured forth unending streams of grace. But the call to follow Jesus in the narrow way was hardly ever heard… What had happened to all those warnings of Luther’s against preaching the gospel in such a manner as to make men rest secure in their ungodly living? Was there ever a more terrible or disastrous instance of Christianizing of the world than this?”
Connecting the Dots
Based on Jesus’s own statement, he perceived that his death (and presumably his resurrection) was going to be instrumental in inaugurating the prophesied New Covenant. But how do we square that with his understanding that the sins of many would be “caused to stand away”?
The key to the New Covenant is God’s action to transform all those who chose faithfulness to him, enabling them to live righteously through the gift of his Spirit within them. In this condition, those transformed don’t want to sin; they don’t want to do that which is not within God’s will. Rather, they seek to do only those things that the Spirit leads them to and through.
Consequently, the sins that would have been committed by these people are dramatically diminished. (They are not totally eliminated, as people retain their human natures, and so some susceptibility to human weakness.) But the Spirit in them totally rejects these sins and so acts to cause the person to stand apart from them (i.e., not do them). This is the “forgiveness of sins” referenced by Jesus in Mt 26:28, and it is the work of the indwelt Spirit. No Spirit, no standing apart from sin (Rom 8:8-9).
Reconciling the Two Gospels
The differences between the traditional and the true Gospel are profound and extremely important to understand. The following table lists several questions/characteristics of what we might call a salvation doctrine to compare each of these Gospels.
| Characteristic | Traditional Gospel | New Covenant Gospel |
| Purpose of Jesus’s crucifixion and resurrection. | Remove our past and future sins from God’s sight. | Inaugurate God’s New Covenant for the Jews first, but also for the Gentiles. |
| Result of Jesus’s crucifixion and resurrection[vii]. | Our sins are “forgiven,” and as such we get to live with God in his heaven for eternity when we die. | For those who choose faithfulness to God, they are indwelt with his Spirit and so enabled to live righteously, a righteousness that God will honor on the Last Day. |
| Requirement for Salvation | Our “repentance” and agreement that Jesus was and did what the Bible says he was and did. | Our desire to live faithfully to God and so become his children, living in his Kingdom. |
| Purpose of Our Salvation | God’s mercy and love of us. “God so loved the world…” | God’s desire to adopt a family of righteous children with whom to live eternally. |
| Result of Our Salvation | We’re assured of “going to Heaven” when we die. | We are saved from continuing a life of sin to leading a life patterned after Christ’s, our Exemplar. The work of the Spirit in us is God’s ongoing salvation of us. It’s a process. |
| Role of God’s Spirit | The traditional Gospel’s words and beliefs are conflicted on the issue. | The transformation to righteousness of those who seek faithfulness to God. |
| Role of God’s Grace | Grace is the only reason we are saved: we don’t “deserve” it, but it is given nonetheless if we “believe”. There is no sense of attaining faithfulness to God. | God, through the gift of his Spirit, offers those who seek him the ability to live righteously within his will, obeying his commandments. He offers access to his Kingdom and eternal life with him. |
| Effect of “believing” | Forgiven sins, a perfected life in heaven when you die (but no change to the person}. | Justified by God, indwelt by his Spirit, enabling the ability to live righteously. |
Consequences
This confusion introduced by the traditional Gospel narrative has created several negative consequences. The most egregious is the millions of people who have been told, and so believe, that by agreeing that Jesus was the Son of God, that he died and rose to the Father, that their sins have been erased and they can confidently expect to join God and Christ in Heaven when they die.
This is the doctrine Bonhoeffer labelled “cheap grace”[viii], and it has been mainstream in Western evangelicalism for at least 100 years.
If it were just the confusion about sin, forgiveness, and waiting to die to cash one’s ticket to Heaven, we could perhaps understand. But it is far more serious than that.
The entire purpose of this eschatology is to create a righteous family to live with God. The lesson Israel taught was that that is not possible without God’s assistance. People are not made righteous by being declared righteous. Justification comes from a total turning from what one has been … to God, and having the Spirit conferred on those repentant. They then are enabled to live righteously, and are judged so on the last day for “his deeds in the body, according to what he has done” (2 Cor 5:10).
Conclusions
Whether Jesus’s death and resurrection “forgave” our sins (in the normal meaning of this English word) is actually not the question. The issue is: what did Jesus’s death and resurrection accomplish within God’s plan? To the extent you believe our mission here is to proclaim the Gospel, make sure you proclaim the real one.
Presenting a message that results in millions of people comfortable with sitting on their couch and waiting to die and go to heaven is not the result for which Jesus came and died[ix]. He came, and so was murdered, to call a righteous family to live with the Father eternally.
Jn 11:51-52
51He did not say this of his own accord, but being high priest that year he prophesied that Jesus would die for the nation, 52and not for the nation only, but also to gather into one the children of God who are scattered abroad.
Ro 8:14-16
14For all who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God. 15For you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the Spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry, “Abba! Father!” 16 The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God,
Ga 3:26
26for in Christ Jesus you are all sons of God, through faith.
[i] The Israelite people are essentially absent from the Tanakh until the Babylonian Exile (with the exception of the Exodus narrative). Nothing is noted about their actions on behalf of God, as for example in representing him to the surrounding nations (as his צֶלֶם tselem). In fact, just the opposite is true. (Is 52:5, Eze 36:20-23, Eze 20:9, 14, 22)
[ii] Jesus’s Post-Resurrection Statements
[iii] The Greek actually says the “fresh covenant” (καινης διαθηκης). The phrase “blood of the covenant” is introduced in describing Moses’s priestly sprinkling of sacrificial blood on the Tabernacle’s alter and on the Ark of the Covenant (Ex 24:6-8). See also the author of Hebrew’s reference Heb 10:28-29. The blood of animals was a common sign of the ratification of covenants in the Ancient Near East.
[iv] Choosing to be faithful to God is one-in-the-same action as repenting from one’s life apart from God and God’s will.
[v] For more on “dying to live”, or dying to defeat death, see Decoding Paul and YHVH – A Pilgrim’s Search
[vi] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship, Touchstone, 2017,. p 54
[vii] The New Testament contains between 60 and 100 verses describing aspects of the life in the Spirit, while it contains only 7-16 verses concerning heaven after death, both counts dependent on how explicit one wants the reference to be. So, one could conclude that the modern church’s focus on the traditional Gospel is, if not “unbiblical”, than certainly anti-biblical.
[viii] Bonhoeffer, op. cit., p 50
[ix] In characterizing this state of the institutional church, NT Wright quotes a common tongue-in-cheek saying within his Anglican Church that the average Christian life is “An awkward and embarrassing gap between one’s baptism and his funeral.”
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