What Is Essential to 'The Message'?

From a JD Greear article at The Gospel Coalition:

"I want to say this to church leaders in America: Don't make it hard for Republicans or Democrats to find God. Don't make it hard for black or white seekers, or for brown or Asian seekers. Don't make it hard for police officers or for public-school teachers. Preach the whole counsel of God, but don't make it hard for anyone turning to God by encumbering the message with things not essential to the message."

I appreciate his call to 'not make it hard' for anyone based on some important aspect of who they are (their skin color, their job, etc). If a church is making it hard for someone based on something other than their human being-ness, they're doing it wrong.

It's that last line though, that kind of begs a question. "don't make it hard for anyone turning to God by encumbering the message with things not essential to the message."...what is essential to the message?

What Is Essential to the Message?

I love the places in Scripture where the imperatives are simple and direct. Micah 6:8 for example, "He has shown you, o mortal, what is good. And what does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God." That is just two simple sentences, but it is packed with meaning and it's direct. Jesus makes several of those kinds of statements too:

John 5:

Jesus is in Jerusalem observing a Jewish festival and visits the pool called Bethesda. He comes across a man who has been paralyzed for 38 years. Jesus asks him, "Do you want to get well?" "Sir," the paralyzed man replied, "I have no one to help me into the pool when the water is stirred. While I am trying to get in, someone else goes down ahead of me." Then Jesus says to the man, "Get up! Pick up your mat and walk." He is healed. Then an interesting follow up a few verses later..."Later Jesus found him at the temple and said to him, "See, you are well again. Stop sinning or something worse may happen to you."

Let's Talk About Salvation

The topic of 'once saved, always saved' came up again recently in my world and it got me thinking. It made me wonder about the word 'salvation' itself...more specifically, what are we being saved from and what did an ancient Hebrew, or even a 1st century disciple of Jesus, think of when they thought of salvation?

Much of the messianic expectation that developed in the intertestamental period had to do with the messiah delivering the Jews from their oppressors (the Romans), as in a political or militaristic way. This was, in the end, one of the central reasons why many of the Jewish leaders rejected Jesus as messiah, because he didn't do one of the main things they were expecting a Messiah to do. If a messiah figure didn't do that, their logic goes, he wasn't the messiah. On this side of Jesus' death, we have the benefit of understanding what they could not see, both in the words of Jesus recorded in the Gospels, but also explicitly laid out by the writer of Hebrews who says, "so Christ, having been offered once to bear the sins of many, will appear a second time, not to deal with sin, but to save (or 'bring salvation to') those who are eagerly waiting for him." (Hebrew 9:28)

I want to share some of the insights I've read from others in attempting to understand the Hebrew/1st century understanding of salvation and then examine how that might be different from our modern understanding of it.