The King Jesus Gospel
The Original Good News Revisited
by Scot McKnight
Every now and then a book comes along that is both easy to read extremely seminal. This is one of those books. I could not put it down. For a good while now I have been pondering two questions:
- Are we doing an adequate job of presenting the gospel?
- Why are we not seeing more disciples step forward in abandoned submission to Jesus?
Scot McKnight shows how these two questions are connected. One big reason we do not see more committed followers of Christ who become fishers of men is because our hearers have not been impacted by the gospel as it was preached by the early church. Instead we have substituted what McKnight calls “salvationism.”
Instead of preaching the gospel, we have been pitching the plan of salvation.
As a result, we have been asking people to make “decisions for Christ,” which are profoundly self-centered responses to a “personal Savior,” instead of calling people to surrender to the Jesus of the gospels who is the Messiah of Israel and the Lord of all creation who died for our sins, rose again, appeared to his disciples, ascended into heaven, sent the Holy Spirit, rules over his church, and will someday come again to judge the living and the dead.
The gospel is the story of how Jesus came to fulfill God’s purposes on earth which began, in earnest, with Abraham and will be culminated when Jesus returns as King of Kings. The gospel is contained in the four books of the New Testament which are called by that name. The gospel is not merely a plan of salvation extracted from Paul’s Letter to the Romans. It is much grander than that.
Whereas, the plan of salvation asks people to make decisions to accept Christ as Savior; the gospel calls people to absolute repentance and surrender to him as Lord.
Forgiveness of sins is included in the gospel, but the gospel cannot be condensed merely knowing Christ as the Lamb of God. He is also the risen Lord, the seated Baptizer in the Spirit, and coming glorious Son of Man. McKnight points out that the early church would not have been persecuted by the Romans for proclaiming a “personal Savior.” They were thrown to the lions for preaching that Jesus is Lord over all. We can do no less.
McKnight is a Bible scholar who writes in a style that is easily digested by the average student of the Bible. He goes into great depth to dissect and explain what I summarized above. I found myself being energized to be more bold in my proclamation of the gospel, the “full” gospel, not merely the plan of salvation. May God raise up a generation of gospel announcers who are true to the original message, and may he raise up an army of disciples who will go make more disciples! Get this book and read it.
