A pair of scholars has made it a practice to poll Christians to see if they grasp what Jesus said his mission was. They report,
"We have asked thousands of Evangelical Christians in numerous contexts this most basic question—why did Jesus come to earth?—and fewer than 1 percent of respondents say anything even remotely close to the answer that Jesus Himself gave. Instead, the vast majority of people say something like 'Jesus came to die on the cross to save us from our sins so that we can get to heaven.' While this answer is true, saving souls is only a subset of the comprehensive healing of the entire cosmos that Jesus’ kingdom brings and that was the centerpiece of his mission" (Corbett & Fikkert, When Helping Hurts).
Jesus described his purpose in the following words, when he launched his ministry. “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor” (Lk 4:18-19).
Was Jesus claiming to be the Messiah promised by Isaiah who would usher in a kingdom unlike anything the world had ever seen? Could Jesus be the king in whose kingdom justice, righteousness, and peace would prevail forever? Would Jesus’ kingdom bring healing to the parched soil, the feeble hands, the shaky knees, the fearful hearts, the blind, the deaf, the lame, the brokenhearted, the captives? Would his kingdom bring the year of jubilee for the poor? Jesus’ answer to all these questions was a resounding “yes.” Jesus came to do more than die on the cross to save us from our sins. If we miss that, we will never be able to be faithful to the mission our Master assigned us.
The Messianic prophecy that Jesus claimed in his hometown synagogue to be fulfilling portrays Christ’s Kingdom of wholeness and righteousness prevailing over all creation. Jesus came to overthrow the tyrants who had usurped Adam’s throne of Kingdom Earth and brought devastation into every sphere of it—Satan, sin, and death. Jesus came not to rescue Christians from this sin-infested earth by giving his followers a ticket to heaven but to restore this sin-infested earth through the power of the resurrection, using us to spread this restoration. That is the true gospel, the Gospel of the Kingdom, which Jesus preached. But as Fickkert and Corbett discovered, many Christians today, especially those with Fundamentalist roots, have reduced the true gospel to a partial gospel. They would define the gospel as these two fundamental truths:
- I must recognize that I am sinful and broken.
- I cannot fix my own brokenness, so I need a savior, Jesus, to redeem me.
While sin and personal salvation are undeniable realities, they are not the complete gospel. They are not the gospel of the kingdom, which, as we saw last week, is the only gospel that Jesus proclaimed. If personal sin and salvation are all that is important to Christians, we have settled for a two-chapter gospel: 1) the fall, 2) redemption. If you think about it, this gospel doesn’t require Jesus’ physical, bodily resurrection. Since he paid for our sins at the cross, he could have just risen spiritually and ascended to heaven, where he stands at the gates of heaven and admits into the holy presence of God those who have trusted in his atoning work at the cross and turn away those who trust in their own works for salvation.
However, the resurrection of Christ’s physical, material body shows that God’s story from Genesis to Revelation is a four-chapter gospel about his creation. The resurrection of Christ’s physical body speaks volumes about the meta story of God’s plan for creation and our part in it. Understanding that story has practical consequences for our everyday lives. It answers significant questions that most humans have: Why am I here? What is God’s purpose for my life? Why is the world so broken? It teaches that eternal life is not US getting to HEAVEN but HEAVEN coming to EARTH to renew it and prepare it to be the eternal seat of God’s throne.
The fact that Jesus’ resurrection was not just a spiritual resurrection, but the resurrection of Jesus’ physical body is so important that when the Council of Nicaea convened in the 4th century, it intentionally refuted this two-chapter, spiritualized gospel (Docetism) in the creed it wrote to insure that believers understood that Jesus’ incarnation and resurrection took place in real, physical flesh. The importance of this truth is still recognized today, in the Apostles’ Creed, “I believe in the resurrection of the body and in the life everlasting.” It is noteworthy that this council, in seeing how precious God’s physical creation is to him, issued a mandate that all the towns in Christendom big enough to have a cathedral were to build hospitals to care for the physical body.
Belief in the bodily resurrection of Christ tells us that God has begun to redeem his whole CREATION from the decay of sin. Although today’s "two-chapter gospel" Christians do affirm the resurrection of the physical body, many have lost the understanding of its significance. God’s original intent to have man rule over and develop the potential of CREATION, and the biblical teaching that the second Adam will ultimately restore all of CREATION are inadvertently left out of the gospel story by many Christians today. Here are the four chapters of the true gospel.
1. CREATION (the way things were, along with God’s intention for Adam & Eve to develop its potential, rule it for God, developing culture that reflects God’s image)
2. FALL (the reason the world is so broken—Adam’s kingdom rule usurped by Satan, sin, and death)
3. REDEMPTION (God’s people set free by King Jesus from slavery to Satan, sin, and death—tasting and showing the world the way things could be)
4. RESTORATION (the way things will be—creation renewed with no more sin, sorrow, or pain.)
The four-chapter gospel answers the questions of meaning, origin, and ultimate purpose. It restores to Christians raised on the two-chapter gospel the importance of creation. Tim Keller writes:
Some conservative Christians think of salvation as the fall, redemption, heaven. In this narrative, the purpose of redemption is escape from this world; only saved people have anything of value, while unbelieving people in the world are seen as blind and bad. If, however, the story of salvation is Creation, Fall, Redemption, Restoration, then things look different. In this narrative, non-Christians are seen as created in the image of God and given much wisdom and greatness in them (cf Ps. 8) even though the image is defaced and fallen. Moreover, the purpose of redemption is not to escape the world, but to renew it…It is about the coming of God’s kingdom to renew all things. (cited in All Things New, by Hugh Whelchel.)
Much of the Bible-believing church today has its historic roots in a form of Christianity that held a two-chapter view of the gospel. Here is what results from devaluing creation. You might recognize some of these strains.
A. The two-chapter gospel doesn’t give a clear picture of our true destiny. Instead, it puts the emphasis on “going to heaven” when the complete story is that heaven comes down to renew the earth. King Jesus comes down from heaven to overthrow the tyrants ruining Adam’s kingdom, Satan, sin, and death. Those who have died before Christ’s final return will be united with their physical bodies and we will dwell eternally with God himself on a renewed earth where there is no more sin or decay.
B. The two-chapter gospel doesn’t give a full picture of what we were created FOR—our mission. Christian discipleship often completely ignores God’s creation mission for Adam and Eve. A true understanding of redemption is that Christians recover their creation calling to “secular” vocation—to develop the potential of God’s creation. God created humans in his image to be workers, just as he is. Sin corrupted our work ensuring that humans toil and sweat in their labor. Our redemption in Christ means recovering our original calling to our vocation—knowing that salvation is not escaping from this earth but being a part of God’s four-chapter plan to renew creation. T. M Moore describes the four-chapter gospel view of work:
"So the creation has been “subjected to futility,” Paul says, and we who have become the sons and daughters of God, who understand his purpose for his work, have been called in our work to repair, renew, and restore the original beauty, goodness and truth of God….Our work only takes on full significance when we see it in this light, as part of God’s ongoing work to bring everything to a higher state of goodness (Rom 8:28). So, no matter what our job, or whatever your work may be, God intends that you should devote your labors to something greater than personal interest, economic prosperity, or social good, alone. God intends your work to contribute to the restoration of the creation, and the people in it, to raising life on this planet to higher states of beauty, goodness, and truth, reflecting the glory of God in our midst." (TM Moore, “Work, Beauty and Meaning: A Biblical Perspective on the Daily Grind.”)
C. The two-chapter gospel creates a false sacred/secular divide. By ignoring the significance of creation, the two-chapter gospel creates a divide between what is spiritual and what is secular. Hugh Whelchel, in his booklet, All Things New, writes, "This divide is responsible for the popular mindset that our relationship with God is compartmentalized to church-related events and activities. Quite the contrary, our response to God should reverberate into every facet of life: at home, at work, in our families, in our communities and at church." Christ claims every part of our lives and every square inch of creation as his and wants us to pursue his righteous rule there. That is what seeking first the Kingdom of God means.
D. The two-chapter gospel leads to separation from the world that God commanded us to shape FOR Him. Since humans are made in God’s image and God is the supreme ruler, God gave humans a kingdom to rule. Genesis 1 reveals God’s command to the first humans, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” But in some circles, Christians have completely abandoned this calling because of a misunderstanding of John’s command, “Love not the world, neither the things of the world.” This command has been mistakenly understood as a call to separate from non-Christians and their activities. Here are some reasons why this interpretation cannot be correct.
- John the author of this prohibition in his letter is the same author who said in his gospel that God so LOVED the world that he gave us his only begotten son. He uses the same word KOSMOS. God loves his creation. So, world cannot refer this material, physical creatioin, which includes the lost.
- John qualifies exactly what he means by the “world” we are NOT to love. For all that is in the world—the desires of the flesh and the desires of the eyes and pride of life—is not from the Father but is from the world. He is referring to the fallen world-system of evil. We are to avoid the desires of the flesh (SARX). This is not the word for body, which is SOMA but describes our fallen, corrupted desires. We are to avoid the lust of the eyes, which seems to refer to over-desire for material things that we set our eye upon, which can lead to idolatry, envy, covetousness, materialism. We are to avoid the pride of life, also translated, vainglory, which is a corrupted view that over-desires respect, success, and accomplishment. John clealy uses this term, world, not for the sphere where humans live but for the sphere under Satan and evil's influence.
- John’s command in his letter to “love not the world” is best understood in terms of what he recounts Jesus saying in his gospel in John 12:31, Now is the judgment of THIS WORLD; now will the ruler of this world be cast out. It is the world corrupted by Satan and sin that we are to never love.
Christians should be careful about identifying the current culture as “the world.” The culture is not the world we are to hate. The culture is made up of ideas and inter-personal relationships that we are to love so much that we actively seek to redeem it, because God loves his world and appointed us to shape it. Cultural values are a composite of both biblical truths and the lies that emanate from Satan’s kingdom of evil. That is the part of culture which we are never to love or compromise with.
E. The two-chapter gospel leads to an escapist view of redemption. It views salvation as private, personal salvation only, a bus ticket to heaven. Christians are left with no understanding of what they are supposed to do while they wait for the bus, except to not be worldly and evangelize. This translates into a negative attitude towards non-Christians and the culture. Missing chapter 1 of the gospel, creation and chapter 4 of the gospel, restoration of creation, "two-chapter gospel" adherents miss the value of God’s creation, including unbelievers who bear the image of God. Ignoring God’s command to develop culture, they have no inclination to partner with non-believers who, through common grace, have much to contribute in God’s work to repair, restore, renew, and develop the glory of his creation. The true gospel calls us to spread Christ’s kingdom of shalom, reweaving the fabric of the culture in which all the key relationships that make up culture have been torn by Adam and Eve's sin. As Fikkert and Corbett remind us,
"Their relationship with God was damaged, as their intimacy with him was replaced with fear; their relationship with self was marred as Adam and Eve developed a sense of shame; their relationship with others was broken, as Adam quickly blamed Eve for their sin; and their relationship to the rest of creation became distorted, as God cursed the ground and the child-bearing process…because the four relationships are the building blocks for all human activity, the effects of the Fall are manifested in the economic, social religious, and political systems that humans have created throughout history" (When Helping Hurts).
Jesus’ mission was to overthrow sin’s reign everywhere in culture, not just in the personal lives of believers. That is what it means to seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness. That is what it means to be salt and light in the culture—as salt, to retard decay, as light to expose injustice and show the kingdom of righteousness to the world. It is to join in God’s redemption of his glorious creation right now. God has strategically placed each of us in our specific family, job, church, neighborhood and community so that we can repair, restore, renew, and develop the glory of his creation right there and right now.
F. The two-chapter gospel reduces our mission as Christian men to sin management. If your vision of Christianity is sin management, how much does it capture your heart? Although fighting for righteousness in our own lives is a high calling and central to our mission, battling personal sin is not a big enough vision to capture the hearts of men in the same way that the four-chapter gospel does. Dave Murrow, in his book, Why Men Hate Going to Church points out, “Every man wants to be a hero, to become a great man. Boys do not dream of sitting in a cubicle; they dream of slaying the dragon, rescuing the princess, and absconding with the treasure.“ Males want to be engaged in a mission that is worthy of the best they have to give. Buried in men’s hearts is a willingness to make great sacrifices for a mission that is worthy of their full devotion; but too often in our churches the remnants of the two-chapter gospel are producing a vision of discipleship that fails to engage that capacity. If discipleship is primarily about our personal struggle with sin, it will not capture their hearts.
In contrast, the four-chapter gospel has the power to connect the dots between men’s willingness to fully devote themselves to a great cause and the great cause for which Jesus came to planet earth—the overthrow of Satan, sin, and death—and the establishment of his righteous kingdom over the planet. Jesus began his ministry by calling attention to the cataclysmic intrusion of the kingdom of God into time. “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand” (Mk 1:15). Jesus came into the world to recover Adam’s kingdom from the usurpers of Adam’s throne—Satan, sin, and death— and reverse the curse brought upon the cosmos because of sin. In the same way that the curse spread decay, brokenness, and death throughout Adam’s entire kingdom, so Jesus’ mission to bring healing and restoration is cosmic in its scope.
As Christ-followers, we enlist in the great cause of our master, seeking the reign of Christ’s kingdom of righteousness over every square inch of life. King Jesus has come to reconcile to himself all things (Col 1:20). He is putting into right relationship everything he has created. He is using his power to fix everything in the universe that was broken by sin. Tim Keller writes, “The kingdom of God is the renewal of the whole world through the entrance of supernatural forces. As things are restored under Christ’s rule and authority, they are restored to health, beauty, and freedom.” (Ministries of Mercy: The Call of the Jericho Road). The four-chapter gospel is the reason that this podcast/blog, Mission Focused Men for Christ, defines our threefold mission as Called TO Christ—to whole-hearted loyalty to our king’s rule in our lives, Called TO BE LIKE Christ—to surrender to Christ’ righteousness in our heart attitudes, and Called TO EXERCISE DOMINION FOR CHRIST—to seek, in every sphere of our lives, to bring about kingdom righteousness and kingdom flourishing. Our mission is a little bigger than overcoming our personal sin.
Christopher Wright, in his book, God’s Mission: The Key to Unlocking the Bible’s Grand Narrative, summarizes the four-chapter understanding of our mission: "Our committed participation as God’s people, at God’s invitation and command, in God’s own mission within the history of God’s world for the redemption of God’s creation…This is THE STORY that tells us where we have come from, how we got to be here, who we are, why the world is in the mess it is, how it can be (and has been) changed, and where we are ultimately going.”
The resurrection of Christ’s physical body calls us not just to a private, spiritual relationship with Christ, but to do our part in Christ’s cosmic mission to fix everything in creation broken by sin.
For Further Prayerful Thought:
- Celebrate the fact that your calling from Christ is to part of the biggest enterprise in the history of the world—Christ’s overthrow of Satan, sin, and death and establishment of his kingdom of righteousness over nook and cranny of earth.
- The Council of Nicaea countered the heresy that Christ’s resurrection was just spiritual, by insisting that Orthodox Christianity believes in the resurrection of the body. It also decreed that all towns with cathedrals also build hospitals. How are these two decisions related to one another?
- How does the two-chapter gospel deny what Jesus said was his reason for coming to earth when he quoted Isaiah 61, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor”?
Resources Used
- All Things New by Hugh Whelchel
- Ministries of Mercy The Call of the Jericho Road by Tim Keller
- Discipling Men’s Hearts Through Kingdom Theology by Gary Yagel (doctoral dissertation)
