Today I read something that reminded me of what I read in George MacDonald’s book, “Life Essential” several years ago.
The gospel is “good news,” not because it is a message of forgiveness alone, but because it is a message of life. Christ’s mission was not only to forgive us of our wrongs, but to cleanse us from those wrongs, and impart life and truth inside of us. His mission was to deliver us from the tyranny of sin, not just the consequences.
From George MacDonald’s book, “Life Essential”
“The Lord never came to deliver men from the consequences of their sins while yet those sins remained: that would be to cast out of the window the medicine of cure while yet the man lay sick; to go dead against the very laws of being. Yet men, loving their sins, and feeling nothing of their dread hatefulness, have, consistent with their low condition, constantly taken this word concerning the Lord {Matt. 1:21} to mean that He came to save them from the punishment of their sins. This idea—this miserable fancy, rather—has terribly corrupted the preaching of the gospel. The message of the good news has not been truly delivered. . . .
“The mission of Jesus was from the same source and with the same object as the punishment of our sins. He came to work along with our punishment. He came to side with it, and set us free from our sins. No man is safe from hell until he is free from his sins; free of them, hell itself would be endurable to him.”
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“To be saved from these consequences would be no deliverance; it would be an immediate, ever deepening damnation. It is the evil in our being—no essential part of it, thank God—the miserable fact that the very child of God does not care for his Father and will not obey Him, causing us to desire wrongly, act wrongly, or, where we try not to act wrongly, yet making it impossible for us not to feel wrongly—this is what He came to deliver us from—not the things we have done, but the possibility of doing such things any more.”
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“With the departure of this possibility, and with the hope and confession hereafter to those we have wronged, will depart also the power over us of the evil things we have done, and so we shall be saved from them also. The bad that lives in us, our evil judgments, our unjust desires, our hate and pride and envy and greed and self-satisfaction—these are the souls of our sins, our live sins, more terrible than the bodies of our sins, namely the deeds we do, inasmuch as they not only produce these loathsome things, but make us loathsome as they.”
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(End of excerpts.)
To present the gospel as merely a free ticket to heaven is to completely misrepresent it. Jesus proclaimed “abundant life” not just “abundant forgiveness.” Christ came to conquer death, to deliver us from it’s power, to set us free from our bondage to corruption, and to give us new life (see Romans 6-8).
Heaven is not the goal; it is not the Promised Land. It is CHRIST HIMSELF who is the Kingdom. Eternal life begins the process of “taking us over” the moment we cry out to Christ for redemption.
“This is eternal life, that they may know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom You have sent.” John 17:3
Selah.
