The Gospel - God’s Wonderful Plan
“God Loves You and Has a Wonderful Plan for Your Life”?
* A Christian missionary to North Africa is on furlough visiting his home in America. While backing his car out of the driveway he accidentally runs over his own son and kills him.
* A famous Christian singer adopts three children from China and starts a charity organization to help others adopt both domestically and from abroad. His eldest son accidentally hits the youngest adopted daughter in the driveway and she dies.
* A Christian woman leaves America to bring a message of God’s love to the Middle East. One morning as she opens the very clinic where she has given herself to serve those in need, she is fatally shot at close range in the head.
* A man leaves Islam to follow Christ, is ostracized by his family and community, and flees to a another country where he continues spreading the gospel. While in “exile” in this second country, a bomb set outside his house explodes just as he is running past it and his body is blasted to pieces.
* Countless professing Christians in the “free world” have (just like the rest of society) their houses foreclosed, earthly investments plummet in value, loved ones die of cancer, paralyzing car accidents, unrelenting emotional/relational/spiritual struggles, prolonged unemployment, spouses leave them, etc., etc.
* Countless Christians around the world are thrown in jail, betrayed, tortured, killed, have their churches burnt down, their houses searched, and their reputations slandered.
Does reconciliation with God through the blood of Christ open the doors to experiencing God’s wonderfully comfortable plan for your earthly life? NO! NO, NO, NO, NO! Reconciliation with God through the blood of Christ *IS* God’s wonderful plan for your life!!!! Jesus is not only the golden key that opens the hidden treasure chest, He is Himself the full content of what is inside!!!!!!! Not promises of good grades or good jobs or good health or good relationships, but JESUS, the man of sorrows and acquainted with grief whose triumphal kingdom is in some sense “already” but also “not yet”! That is what (actually whom) you get in the gospel!
By way of contrast, a statement from a book on (supposedly) evangelizing Muslims in which the author gets the gospel dreadfully WRONG:
“[F]ollowing Christ should not–—and need not–—bring on persecution and blame from other Muslims. … It is incredibly good news [i.e. the gospel?] to a conscientious Muslim who has put his trust in Christ as Redeemer that he can know that his sins are forgiven, that he will assuredly go to heaven, and that he can have nothing to fear on Judgment Day–—AND STILL be a part of his community [emphasis added]!”
To which I respond: DOG CRAP! Scholars say the Greek “skubalon”, which appears only in Phil 3:8, derives from the word “dog” together with the word “cast out”, “that which is cast out from a dog”, i.e. feces. (Alternately, some think the etymological meaning is “that which is cast out TO the dogs”, i.e. scraps of rubbish; but in any case I would contend that the two ultimately turn out to be the same thing!) The incredibly good news is that everything you used to think was incredibly good news apart from Christ is in fact dog excrement compared to knowing Him. Your greatest earthly desires—remaining part of your kinship community for a Muslim or living the free and prosperous American Dream for a Westerner—smell like feces to those who have experienced the aroma of life in Jesus Christ. To wedge an imaginary promise of abiding earthly community with non-believers into the gospel as if that were on par with “forgiveness of sins” is nothing short of heresy!
Does God have a wonderful plan for your life? Yes! Not to spare you from tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or danger, or sword, but even better to reveal the all-surpassingly satisfying greatness of His love which is able to sustain you WHILE YOU ARE BEING SLAUGHTERED as sheep all day long (Romans 8:35-36). The abundant life in Christ (John 10:10) is the life of abundant joy amidst abundant trials and abundant earthly sacrifice that JESUS HIMSELF experienced; the abundant life is:
That I may know him and the power of his resurrection, and may share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, that by any means possible I may attain the resurrection from the dead (Phil 3:10).