Only in the God of love do "we live, and move, and have our being" (Acts 17:28). Only in His goodness every meaningful want is met, ever so freely and yet so lavishly, and every wholesome possibility, finite and infinite is realized, ever so completely. This is in essence the transcendent and timeless gospel of which everything, from the center out to the circumference, is the person and personhood of God. Accordingly, to exclude God from the gospel is to steal its life. To relegate God to a being who may be summed up in a verbal phrase, calling it the gospel, is to undermine both God and His message.
In the plurality of the meanings and usages of the term gospel, the potential for serious tensions do arise between an emphasis on the person of God as the subject of the gospel versus the emphasis on the verbal message as a major medium for expressing the gospel. The etymological root of the term gospel is the Anglo-Saxon word god-spell, mean ing a story from or about a god. Subsequently, the meaning and usage of the term as "good news" or "glad tidings" became popular.1
However, in the definition and practice of the gospel, the message must never take precedence over the person of God. For it must always be under stood that the gospel is more incarnational "and the Word was made flesh" (John 1:14) than it is verbal; it is more personal, than it is credal "the glory of this mystery among the Gentiles which is Christ in you the hope of glory" (Col.1:27).
Moreover, relationally speaking, the message of the gospel is to the person of God what the mirror is to the person whose image it reflects. The person and the image may be logically interdependent but they are by no means interchangeable. The image is predicated on the person and not the person on the image. Similarly, the verbal representation of the gospel is predicated on the gospel as the person of God. The converse, however, cannot be true. Accordingly, any tendency to elevate the reflection of God in the message of the gospel above the encounter with the person of God will result in spiritual frustration and inevitable loss. Nothing and nobody but God in His person is to be the be-all and the end-all of the gospel, and in no other way can the gospel be authentically defined and presented but in the person and personhood of God.
So it is that the message of the gospel speaks of love only because God is love; of goodness only because God is good; of omnipotence, omniscience, immanence, holiness, mercy, justice, and life, only because God is all these and infinitely more. God Himself is the good news, the timeless good news, the timeless best news.
This God was the gospel that David identified in the twenty-third psalm. In the psalm David's spirit ascends above the wretched clouds of hopelessness, helplessness, and powerlessness, occasioned by his own sin and guilt, to the ultimate heights of fulfillment. "The Lord is my Shepherd" he trumpets, therefore "I shall not want." He express es from his own experience the universal and timeless truth of the all sufficiency of God for all. In God every fallen and unfallen being alike derives existence, well-being, and well-doing. This is the timeless gospel, the converse of which is essentially the denial and displacing of God as the only One in whom all live and move and have their being. "Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above" (James 1:17).
David concludes his best known psalm on a triumphant note, as all those who truly experience the gospel will affirm. "Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever" (Ps. 23:6). David points both to the timelessness and the timeliness of the gospel as it is expressed in God's eternal goodness and in His redemptive mercy. In this context the timelessness of the gospel is matched only by the timeliness of its redemptive application as it comes through grace to fallen and needy humankind. Therefore, let us claim the gospel.
From this wretched world every want may readily disappear. And in each heart there needs to be no lingering fear or despair. But to the world God must first its Shepherd become, and to His goodness and mercy each heart must say welcome.
The timeless gospel is the timeless God timely fitted to freely satisfy our every wholesome need and to realize forever all of our God-gifted possibilities. Let us by grace live the gospel, the life of God. And as part of living that life, let us proclaim Him as we evangelize the world of our time.
1 George Arthur Buttrek, ed. The Interpreter Dictionary of the Bible (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1962), 442.
