In this week’s podcast of Jesus and Paul, Part 2, Warren Litzman helps us rightly divide the Scriptures to distinguish and understand the one true gospel for believers today.
First, we must take a look at the gospel of Jesus of Nazareth and define His gospel before we can understand Paul’s gospel. Before His death, burial, and resurrection, Christ preached the Kingdom message, that God’s Kingdom is at hand. For the Jews, this meant heaven on earth. Being under the Judaic law, He preached works as a condition of being pleasing to God. He was obligated by God not to destroy the law but to fulfill the law and prophecy. Jesus wasn’t obligated to bring the message of grace, yet He was grace personified by His unrelenting forgiveness of sins and keeping the company of sinners. He could not yet preach grace because He had not yet died as a sacrifice, as an atonement for our sins and the sin of Adam passed down to us.
When the Jews rejected Christ as their Messiah, the kingdom message was postponed. In obedience to His Father in heaven, Christ’s knew His death was imminent and needed to fulfill God’s plan for humanity.
Paul’s gospel is that of pure grace, of new life, and completion in Christ. Christ’s death and resurrection ushered in grace and now there was nothing we could do or not do (no more works) to be saved. Christ did the work on the cross and by His blood, by His grace, we are saved. Christ raised up only Paul to bring this message of grace and new life to humanity. By just believing, we are saved. Yet Paul doesn’t stop there. He reveals to us a message of completion. He calls it the “revelation of the mystery” which is the literal planting of Christ’s seed, the incorruptible seed, in every believer. This is what it means to be born again, to have new life. We are brand new creations by the completion of Christ in us, literally and not figuratively.
On the Day of Pentecost, the Holy Spirit planted the seed of Christ in the spirit of every believer, making us one Spirit in Christ (1 Corinthians 6:17).
“At that day ye shall know that I am in my Father, and ye in me, and I in you.” (John 14:20)
However, it wasn’t until Christ raised up Paul, and only Paul, that we would know exactly what happened on that Day of Pentecost. Paul calls it the mystery hidden from us through the ages yet planned by God before the foundation of the world (1 Corinthians 2:7).
“According as he hath chosen us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blame before him in love: having predestinated us unto the adoption of children by Jesus Christ to himself, according to the good pleasure of his will.” (Ephesians 1:4)
Paul’s gospel of grace and new life fulfills what Jesus said in John 12:24:
“Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.”
Only by Christ’s death and resurrection can we be born again, having a new life and even more so, an abundant life. The abundant life is Christ living in each of us, completing us, and bearing His fruit through us. We no longer live for our own glory but for Christ to be glorified through us. God no longer sees our works as pleasing to Him; He sees Christ. By Christ we are now His bona fide children, born into His family. We are complete by Christ, through Christ, and in Christ.
Paul’s gospel of grace, Christ in us, is a message of the fulfillment of Christ’s death and resurrection, which is our completion in Him.
“Even the mystery which hath been hid from ages and from generations, but now is made manifest to his saints: to whom God would make known what is the riches of the glory of this mystery among the Gentiles; which is Christ in you, the hope of glory.” (Colossians 1:26-27)
“And ye are complete in him, which is the head of all principality and power." (Colossians 2:10)
