Certainly, today, that is at the present time,
there is only one gospel and that is “the glad tidings of the grace
of God” (Acts 20:24) as preached by Paul. But to say, or even
suggest, that there has only ever been one gospel is to take matters
beyond Holy Writ. Paul speaks of the gospel as “my glad tidings”
(Rom. 2: 16; 16: 25; 2 Tim. 2: 8). The use of the possessive pronoun
my should be sufficient in
itself to tell us that his gospel is not the only one in Scripture,
for it says of John the Baptist that “he announced [his] glad
tidings to the people” (Luke 3: 18). Unless the good news proclaimed
by the Baptist was identical to that proclaimed by the Apostle Paul,
we have therefore more than one gospel. Certainly, glad tidings were
announced when the Lord was on earth, but are those now announced
the same?
In the Epistles, the gospel is described in
various ways. Paul speaks of “the glad tidings of the glory of the
Christ” (2 Cor. 4: 4). But when the Lord was here we are distinctly
told that “for [the] Spirit was not yet, because Jesus had not yet
been glorified” (John 7: 39). How then could today’s gospel be the
same as that told out when the Lord was here? Again, Paul speaks of
“the glad tidings of peace” (Eph. 6: 15) but also says of the Lord
that He has “made peace by the blood of his cross” (Col. 1: 20). How
then can the gospel proclaimed before the cross be the same as that
proclaimed now? Yet again, with Gentiles in mind, Paul speaks of
“the glad tidings of your salvation” (Eph. 1: 13) and a little later
on of “the glad tidings of peace to you who [were] afar off, and
[the glad tidings of] peace to those [who were] nigh” (Eph. 2: 17).
Those far off were Gentiles, those nigh were Jews. But the Lord’s
order to the Twelve before they were sent out with the proclamation
of their glad tidings was “Go not off into [the] way of [the]
nations, and into a city of Samaritans enter ye not; but go rather
to the lost sheep of the house of Israel” (Matt. 10: 5, 6). The
gospel announced when the Lord was here was clearly limited to
Israel. There is no such limitation now.
During the Lord’s sojourn on earth, the gospel
proclaimed is described in just three ways. Firstly, it is “the glad
tidings of Jesus Christ” (Mark 1: 1), secondly it is the “glad
tidings of the kingdom” (Matt. 4: 23; 9: 35; 24: 14) and thirdly it
is “the glad tidings of the kingdom of God” (Mark 1: 14; Luke 4: 43;
8: 1; 16: 16). No other descriptive expressions are employed.
Thus the only gospel in the
Synoptics was Jesus as the Christ in relation to the Kingdom of God.
No other gospel was proclaimed. By contrast the gospel in the
Epistles is never described as that of the kingdom. However, the
reader will observe that all my quotations are from the synoptic
gospels. What of the Gospel of John? What has John to say?
While the Lord taught His disciples directly,
He did not teach the crowds apart from parables so that we read “All
these things Jesus spoke to the crowds in parables, and without a
parable he did not speak to them” (Matt. 13: 34). When this was
queried by the disciples, the Lord replied “Because to you it is
given to know the mysteries of the kingdom of the heavens, but to
them it is not given” (v11). The subject matter of the most of the
parables was the kingdom. Now then, what about John’s record?
Trawl
through the 21 chapters of John and you will not find a single
parable—even the word parable is not there. The Olivet prophecy concerning the kingdom,
present in each of the Synoptics, is also absent. The so–called
Sermon on the Mount,
dealing with the kingdom, occupying three chapters of Matthew, and
referred to extensively in Mark and Luke does not have a single
saying quoted from it by John. As for the words
gospel or
glad tidings, they are just not there—and this in a NT book that we
rightly call a Gospel! Surely, that speaks volumes to any Bible
student! There is only one explanation: there had been a change of
gospel when John penned his book. The gospel of the kingdom was for
Israel but when John wrote that nation had been set presently aside
in the governmental ways of God. Accordingly, the subject of the
kingdom is never once in the public arena in John and is only spoken
of in private (see John 3: 1–12; 18: 33–38) whereas the topic is
dominant in the public setting in the Synoptics.
It is of course vital to stress that in the
present day there is only one gospel (see Gal. 1: 6-12), but to say
there has
only ever been one gospel is to contradict the plain record of
Scripture. It is regrettable when an influential teacher fails to
cut “in a straight line the word of truth” (2 Tim. 2: 15), thereby
unwittingly sowing confusion and error.
