The foundations of the Gospel story can be summarized into 4 main parts: Creation – Fall – Redemption – Restoration, involving 4 factors: God – Israelites – Fulfillment – Transformation. depicted in the diagram below:
Creation
The Gospel story starts with creation where God graciously chose to create a beautiful world and gifted it to us to steward. He also reached out to have a relationship with us by establishing a covenant with mankind. This is told in the book of Genesis, where God the creator of all things — the heavens and the earth — made everything on earth ‘good’. However, when it comes to mankind, male and female (Adam and Eve) — He described them to be ‘very good’ and called them to ‘bear His image and likeness’. We were created distinctively with a purpose and mandate in mind and everything was sinless (Genesis 1-2).
Fall
However, in Genesis 3, we start to see the downfall of mankind as Adam and Eve decided to rebel against God the creator by sinning against Him. Ever since then, man has been born bearing sin, including us. The nature of sin is pervasive and damaging sin. Through the Israelites, we see that our tendency is to keep falling into sin over and over again. They could be in one moment deciding to obey and trust in God, but another moment it completely shifted to complaining and taking God for granted. We are now alienated from God, alienated from each other, and alienated from the rest of creation. We no longer respond in the way we were created, with peace and unity. As a result, we are incapable of having a pure view of the world and living according to God’s original design. Instead, we are governed by our own rules and develop a human paradigm that is corrupted by sin which results in suffering and pain.
Redemption
Nevertheless, God chose to keep His covenant and did not abandon the humans He created. After the downfall of man in Eden, He promised that He will one day crush the source of sin under his feet (Genesis 3:15). Then later on this is reiterated with Noah as He re-established His covenant with us and His creations, using a rainbow as a symbol of this promise after the great flood (Genesis 9). For the rest of the Old Testament, through the Israelites the chosen nation, God’s covenant remained in display through His relentless pursuit of Israel, even after humanity kept falling short and decided to sin against Him. Yet, the entire account also entails a greater thing: no matter how much God gives us a chance, we are insufficient to redeem ourselves and we need something greater. The only way we can be fully restored is by the Salvation that Jesus Christ brought through His birth, death, and resurrection. He needed to come down to the world to live the perfect life that we could not live, to become a perfect sacrifice for our redemption. Through Jesus Christ, God’s redemptive plan is finally fulfilled.
Restoration
Through Christ dying on the cross, we are saved by grace through faith (Ephesians 2:8-9). We are saved from the punishment that we deserve out of our sinfulness. We are also enabled to live out our original design, where our brokenness is restored and our relationships with God, others, the rest of creations are all reconciled. Not only that, we are now invited to participate in God’s covenant and to help establish his Kingdom on earth – bringing justice and healing to the world, sharing the hope of Salvation that is readily available to all mankind. Christ’s redemption demolishes the human paradigm and helps us to view everything with the Gospel paradigm in mind — “who is God?”, “what has God done?”, “how has God been good to me?”, “how can I respond in light of who He is and what He has done?”. The Gospel paradigm revolves around who Jesus is and what Jesus has done. This Gospel is “the power of God for salvation to all who believe” (Romans 1:16). For us, as we understand the Gospel deeper, we can experience the transformative power of what Jesus has done for us. Even if we continue in the cycle of sin, there is hope that God will restore us to be more and more like Christ on this earth until we ultimately meet Him face to face in heaven.
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