Simply Good News: Why The Gospel Is News And What Makes It Good

by Tom Wright

to the many other gods that filled the culture of t...

all these other gods were a sham, mere idols, but there was one God who really deserved that name. And he was alive and active.

this was the heart of his message: an event involving Jesus and a revelation of the one true God.

Something that had made the world a whole different place. Something because of which people were now faced with a challenge (like Herod faced with Octavian’s victory): if this is the ...

If you mention the Christian good news, most people today imagine that you’re talking about an option you might like to take up if you feel so inclined.

None of these ways of looking at things are, as they stand, totally wrong. The message of Jesus and the message about Jesus do include something about spirituality, something about morality, something about the ultimate future, something not least about our relationship with God. But all these miss the main point.

He was telling them that something had happened which had changed the world, that the world was now a different place, and that he was summoning them to be part of that new, different reality. He was telling them about an event that would cause them to adjust their entire lives in order to come into line with the way

things now were.

When Roman heralds came into a city like Thessalonica announcing that a new emperor had been enthroned, they didn’t mean, ‘Here is a new sort of imperial experience, and you might like to see if it suits you.’ They meant, ‘Tiberius (or Claudius, or Nero, or whoever) is the Lord of the World. You are the lucky recipients of this good news; he demands your ...

Paul used the word herald to talk about his own vocation of announcing the good news about Jesus (1 Tim. 2:7).

He wasn’t like someone offering people a new type of torch so they could see better in the dark. He was like someone saying that the sun had risen, and that if you would only open the curtains you’d see that you don’t need torches any more.

In particular, Paul was saying that they didn’t need the old gods any more. At this point he was presenting to the world an essentially Jewish message.

if anyone said something had recently happened to demonstrate that the old gods were a sham, and that the new God was alive and active, this was likely to cause riots. Paul found that out the hard way.

This news is either offensive or boring. Either scandalous or merely nonsense.

Paul was not simply offering people advice about a new religion. He was offering good news about a different God. A living God. A God who had made himself known in and through Jesus of Nazareth. This

people often imagine the main purpose of Christianity to be getting people to heaven and teaching them to behave along the way – or perhaps, getting them to behave in such a way that they will get to heaven. That is a gross distortion.

Remember what we said earlier: for something to qualify as news, there has to be (1) an announcement of an event that has happened; (2) a larger context, a back story, within which this makes sense; (3) a sudden unveiling of the new future that lies ahead; and (4) a transformation of the present moment, sitting between the event that has happened and the further event that therefore will happen.

the early Christian good news worked:

The Messiah died for our sins in accordance with the Bible; he was buried; he was raised on the third day i...

was seen by Cephas, then by the Twelve; then he was seen by over five hundred brothers and sisters at once, most of whom are still with us, t...

Everything pivots around the complex event that had happened: the Messiah died, was buried, was raised, was seen. Take that away and Christianity collapses.

Put it in its proper place and the whole world is different. That is the news.

Unless you know what has happened earlier, you won’t see the significance of the events. That was certainly so for Paul. That is why, twice within this little summary of the good news, Paul uses the phrase ‘in accordance with the Bible’.

Paul, like many Jews of the time, read this Bible as a single great story – but it was a story in search of an ending.

It was about how God, who had created the world, called a single people, Israel, to be his people

but not for their own sake. He called them and made them special, so that through them he could rescue the world – the human race and the whole creation – from the appalling mess that had come about. The trouble was, the people who were supposed to be carrying forward this divine rescue operation needed rescuing themselves. They shared in the same mess – the same rebellion against God, the same corruption and wickedness – as the rest of humankind. But their Bible still spoke of God doing a new thing, rescuing the rescuers, and getting the whole plan back on track. Some passa...

monarchs were anointed with oil. By no means did all Jews in Paul’s day believe in a coming anointed one. For those who did, this figure would embody the best news anyone had ever heard. He would rescue Israel, and with Israel all the human rac...

when Paul says, ‘The Messiah died for our sins in accordance with the Bible’, the news he is announcing means what it means within this ancient Jewish and biblical back story. The one true God has done, at last, what Paul and others believed had to be done for the world to be at last put right.

Many people, including many Christians,

assume a very different back story. For some, it...

Such notions are not one hundred per cent wrong, but they are caricatures and, as such, highly misleading if embraced as if they were the real thing.

The good news means what it means within the original back story, not within the various low-grade caricatures that people sometimes embrace as if they were the real thing.)

Jesus the Messiah is already ruling, but for the moment he has not completed the work of bringing everything, all rebel forces, under his authority:

The good news about what has happened points to the good news about what is yet to happen. And those who find themselves grasped by this double good news also find that their lives between the one and the other are utterly transformed as a result.

Once people grasp that the events of the Messiah’s death and resurrection have transformed everything and that they are now living between that initial explosive event and God’s final setting right of the world (when God is ‘all in all’), then everything will change: belief, behaviour, attitudes, expectations, and not least a new love, a real sense of belonging, which springs up among those who share all this.

That is what so much of Paul’s writing is about. Get the gospel right, and everything else will come right.

Paul’s equivalent. He knew that the good news came as a slap in the face to the two great ethnic groups in his world:

his message is shocking and usually unwelcome. A crucified Messiah?

The Messiah is supposed to defeat Israel’s enemies, not be killed by them. Crucifixion is shameful. It means God’s curse is upon you.

All his careful explanations about how this was in fact what the Bible had predicted would be waved away – especially when some of the hearers realized he was also saying that this Messiah was going to welcome non-Jews (Gentiles or Greeks) just as much as Jews.

Cities like Thessalonica, Philippi, or Corinth – all key centres of Paul’s work – knew perfectly well what a royal

announcement meant. ‘Good news – we have an emperor! He has saved the world! He has brought peace and justice to us all! He is our Lord! He is the son of God!’ Now here is Paul saying, ‘Good news – the world has a new Lord! He is the true Son of God!’

Already this sounds strange. Who is this odd little man, sounding as if he’s a royal herald making a proclamation about a new emperor? And who is this new emperor, anyway? Answer – he i...

How can a crucified man be the Lord, the Son of God? ‘No!’ answers Paul. ‘He’s alive! God raised him from the dead!’ Now the crowd is convinced Paul is mad. Everybody knows perfectly well that dead people don’t come back to life.

But this is the heart of Paul’s good news. The Messiah died for our sins in accordance with the Bible … and he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Bible.

He knows it makes no sense to his hearers. He knows that any Jews listening may well find it scandalous or even blasphemous. But he persists.

what happens when Paul announces this message? This is where the truly strange bit happens. As we saw a moment ago, Paul says that the gospel is a scandal to Jews and folly to Gentiles (non-Jews), but ‘to those who are called’ it will be ‘God’s power and God’s wisdom’. What does he mean by ‘called’? And in what sense is this message ‘power and wisdom’?

He declares in one passage that the good news is ‘God’s power, bringing salvation’ (Rom. 1:16). He speaks elsewhere about the gospel coming not ‘in word only, but in power, and in the holy spirit, and in great assurance’ (1 Thess. 1:5). So what does all this mean?

something that happens when this ...

annou...