What is the Gospel?   

Several years ago I undertook a detailed study of the word gospel. I had heard some use the word to refer to all of New Testament teaching, but that did not sound consistent with my understanding of what the word meant. And so I looked at every occurrence of the word throughout all of Scripture to see how the word was typically used.
What I found were several specific themes that were included whenever the gospel was preached: the divinity of Jesus, His death on the cross, His burial and resurrection, salvation through God’s grace, the necessity of faith and repentance, being born again through obedience to baptism, and our hope of an eternal inheritance.
It would thus seem reasonable to give this definition: the gospel is the good news that Jesus is the Christ (anointed Messiah), the Son of God, that He died on the cross, was buried, and rose again, and that, by the grace of God, we can be born again, added to His kingdom and saved by believing in Jesus and obeying the command to repent and be baptized.
In short, the gospel is the good news that we can be saved through Jesus. And it is indeed the best news ever given! As the apostle Paul wrote, the gospel “is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first, and also to the Greek” (Romans 1:16).

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