A Gospel Presentation - Part 6 (Culmination/Cure)

Previous Posts in this Series:
A Gospel Presentation: Part 1 (Two-Age Worldview)
A Gospel Presentation: Part 2 (Creation/Curse)
A Gospel Presentation: Part 3 (Covenant/Commitment)
A Gospel Presentation: Part 4 (Confirmation)
A Gospel Presentation: Part 5 (Charismatic Witness)

"After all of this I will pour out my Spirit on all kinds of people. Your sons and daughters will prophesy. Your elderly will have prophetic dreams; your young men will see visions. Even on male and female servants I will pour out my Spirit in those days. I will produce portents (wonders) both in the sky and on the earth - blood, fire, and columns of smoke. The sunlight will be turned to darkness and the moon to the color of blood, before the day of the Lord comes - that great and terrible day! It will so happen that everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be delivered. For on Mount Zion and in Jerusalem there will be those who survive, just as the Lord has promised; the remnant will be those whom the Lord will call." (Joel 2:28-32, NET)

"Then the angel showed me a river of the water of life, clear as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb (Jesus), in the middle of its street. On either side of the river was the tree of life, bearing twelve kinds of fruit, yielding its fruit every month; and the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations. There will no longer exist anything that is cursed [because sin and illness and death are gone]; and the throne of God and of the Lamb will be in it, and His bond-servants will serve and worship Him [with great awe and joy and loving devotion]; they will [be privileged to] see His face, and His name will be on their foreheads. And there will no longer be night;  they have no need for lamplight or sunlight, because the Lord God will illumine them; and they will reign [as kings] forever and ever." (Revelation 22:1-5, AMP)

I chose these two Scriptures to open this last post because they capture the essence of what all of time and history is leading up to: The Day of the Lord, followed by the restoration of the Kingdom of God. As I have mentioned many times during this series, our Great Hope and the essential, fundamental message of the full Gospel, is that God is working out a plan to restore all things (Acts 1:6, 3:21).

A Gospel Presentation - Part 1 (Two-Age Worldview)

This is the start of a six-part series I will be doing covering The Gospel. The core question I will be addressing is "what is the Gospel?" How I have arrived at this point is a longer story, but the impetus for tackling this question comes from two passages in the Messianic Writings (New Testament), Luke 3:15-18 and Mark 1:14-15, which I will share shortly. The overall arc of this series will be on five main points: Creation, Covenant, Confirmation (Christ), Charisma (Holy Spirit) and Culmination/Cure (Day of Judgement, Eternity). I learned these as "The Five C's" and so I'm preserving that structure because it makes it easier to remember. This first post will be introductory, but mainly covering the Worldview of a 1st Century Jew as a backdrop for the rest of the series.

"Now because the people were waiting in suspense and were all wondering in their hearts whether John himself might possibly be the Messiah, John, in response, told them all, "Though I have been baptizing you with water, the one who is more powerful that I is coming, and I am not fit to untie the strap of his sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. His winnowing fork is in his hand, to clear out his threshing floor and to gather the wheat into his barn. The chaff, however, he will burn in the unquenchable fire." It was with many, many other exhortations of this kind, then, that John was proclaiming the gospel to the people." (Luke 3:15-18, Blessed Hope Translation)

"Now after John was arrested, Jesus went into Galilee, proclaiming the gospel of God. "The appointed time has been completed," he declared, "and the Kingdom of God is drawing near! Repent and keep putting your faith in the promises!"" (Mark 1:14-15, BHT)

After coming across these two passages some time ago, the question arose in my mind - if John was preaching/proclaiming the Gospel before Jesus was ever on the scene, and if Jesus was preaching/proclaiming the Gospel at the very beginning of his public ministry, before having done and said all he did, before his death on the cross and before the resurrection, then what was the Gospel that they were preaching? In the Evangelical world, we are taught a lot of things about the Gospel, but usually it is something along the lines of, "Jesus died for our sins so that we could be with him in Heaven". If this is the full Gospel, then what was John saying? For that matter, what was the gospel that Jesus was preaching? To begin to answer this question, I want to start with an overview of the Jewish worldview, particularly of the 1st century Jew, by whom and to whom the Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke and John) and all of the Apostolic Letters, were written.