“Jesus answered and said unto them, I have done one work, and ye all marvel. Moses therefore gave unto you circumcision; (not because it is of Moses, but of the fathers;) and ye on the sabbath day circumcise a man. If a man on the sabbath day receive circumcision, that the law of Moses should not be broken; are ye angry at me, because I have made a man every whit whole on the sabbath day?” John 7:21-23
Jesus made people mad. No, really, he did! You just read it in John 7, where it states that he made the people he ministered to angry with him. Think about that for a few moments. Jesus is love, always has been, always will be, and he made some people angry by his words and deeds.
That’s a very important lesson in our days. God’s love isn’t what a lot of people think it to be. It is not acceptance of every lifestyle or behavior, and it is not the absence of any word, deed, or ideological stance that would offend. If it were, then Jesus never would have made anyone angry because, as God in the flesh, he was the epitome of love.
Jesus was love in the flesh, and that genuine love made some people mad when it opposed their own view of life and religion. That’s the way it was 2,000 years ago, and sadly, that’s the way it still is today.
The last few weeks we have written of Jesus’ rightful position in the Universe. The Bible declares that it should be “first place,” yet we don’t see Jesus in first place in many lives, even many Christian lives. What’s the solution? According to the Scriptures, a key in Jesus being able to ascend to his rightful position in the hearts of humanity is the proclaiming of his gospel.
So, we need to preach Christ’s gospel, but what really is the gospel of Jesus Christ? That’s a question whose full answer only comes from our source of absolute truth, the Bible, and so we’ve looked together at passages that tell us of the gospel of Jesus Christ. We’ve looked at Romans 15:29 and thought about the “fulness of the blessing of the gospel of Christ” and what that may mean. To gain clearer insight into what this fulness might be we’ve read further in Matthew 4:23, 9:35, 11:1-6, Mark 16:14-20, and Luke 4:18 and 9:6.
The takeaway? The gospel is not hiding—it’s there in black and white and red! Moreover, for clarity, Jesus didn’t just preach the gospel; he practiced it so all could understand its full potential toward mankind.
Jesus lived the full gospel because “in him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily.” (Colossians 2:9) He was, is, and always will be the living, breathing, walking, and talking “good news” of God to humanity!
It stands to reason, then, that if we want to understand the fulness of the blessing of the gospel of Jesus Christ to us, we need to pay attention to the record we have of Jesus and to what he said to and did for man during his previous time on this planet.
So, what did Jesus say, and importantly, what did Jesus do while he was here to demonstrate he was our good news?
Luke 4:18 sums it up beautifully as Jesus states, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised.” This testimony is confirmed by what we previously read in Matthew 4:23 and Matthew 9:35. Right? It was Jesus’ regular pattern to go about “teaching in their synagogues, and preaching the gospel of the kingdom, and healing all manner of sickness and all manner of disease among the people.”
Brothers and sisters, Jesus is the good news from God to humanity. He is God’s living testimony of goodness to us. He came and proclaimed that we could have peace with God through his atoning death on the cross, but his goodness to us didn’t stop there. We have it on record—it’s there in God’s Word—that his good news also includes the healing of all manner of sickness and all manner of disease among the people! Think about that!
Greg Crum is the pastor of Calvary Temple in Lovely.