The Gospel is a Command
Three times in the New Testament the Gospel is explicitly treated as a command by the use of he word obey, and all in the context of those who do not obey.
The good news is a command: repent and believe. It is not merely an opinion for a person to adopt to make their life more meaningful. Nor is it merely a historical fact to which one must intellectually assent. Not to obey is to disobey, and to bring on oneself the terrible things spoken of here.But they have not all obeyed the gospel. For Isaiah says, “Lord, who has believed what he has heard from us?” (Romans 10:16)
This is evidence of the righteous judgment of God, that you may be considered worthy of the kingdom of God, for which you are also suffering— since indeed God considers it just to repay with affliction those who afflict you, and to grant relief to you who are afflicted as well as to us, when the Lord Jesus is revealed from heaven with his mighty angels in flaming fire, inflicting vengeance on those who do not know God and on those who do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus. (2 Thessalonians 1:5-8)
For it is time for judgment to begin at the household of God; and if it begins with us, what will be the outcome for those who do not obey the gospel of God? (1 Peter 4:17)
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7 comments:
I sympathize with construing our belief in the Gospel along the lines of obedience.
Behind every assertion that God does not exist hides the presumption that I do not need God to exist. For to the extent that I depend on God for my existence, I am unlikely to question His.
However, at the same time I sympathize with doubters, especially here and now. Perhaps in Israel in Jesus' time, responding or not to the Gospel was more unequivocally a matter of obedience.
--Matthew Axvig
Another wonderful paradox of the faith!...we're saved by grace alone through faith alone, and yet our obedience is critical.
Matthew, I have to agree with your sympathy.
One of the reasons that I so sympathize is that so many people on our continent have heard the gospel presented as an invitation to personal choice rather than a command for universal obedience. Consequently, they see their indifference or doubt not as further evidence of our rebellious hearts, but as the expression of their own rationality.
So I think we should be full of compassion, and that compassion will be manifest in making clear that it is not merely a matter of personal choice, and both calling and showing them the way into the Kingdom.
Hmmmm. I agree with your reason, though it wasn't what I was thinking.
I'd contrast the epistomological situations of there and then with here and now: How there and then the field was indeed ripe for harvest God's people having been educated by His law and having themselves educated many Greeks with it as well; How here and now many meta-narratives compete with each other to define our world view, among them a secular humanism buttressed by the theory of evolution, which in my mind, at least, offers a plausible atheistic account of things. A Christian might argue that what doesn't change is a nagging, intuitive sense of God's reality and His call upon our conscience. The question is how a Christian should respond to someone who really does think Christianity is far from indubitable and that to simply believe as a matter of obedience would be intellectually irresponsible.
However it may be, this would take nothing away from the main point that we tend to evade God's call upon our lives by interposing a self-important "spiritual quest" between His call and our responsibility.
I totally agree: "The question is how a Christian should respond to someone who really does think Christianity is far from indubitable and that to simply believe as a matter of obedience would be intellectually irresponsible."
And I would agree that the issue is epistemology. According to the modern scientific worldview, in which we in the West have been educated, believing the good news is intellectually irresponsible.
I think that is exactly what Paul was trying to press on the church at Corinth. This message of the cross is foolishness, and we only come to embrace it through the work of the Spirit. It does not compete among worldviews for the status of "best" or "most plausible" (which is why I have no problem affirming with you that secular humanism is a decent plausibility structure, even though there are some serious experiential gaps). The gospel is an announcement, in word and deed, of the reign of God in the world.
So proclamation and embodiment are necessary for the person who sees Christianity as intellecutally irresponsible, not as that which will persuade the modern mind, but as that through which the Holy Spirit will witness to the reality of Jesus and give life to dead people.
Well put and Amen.
Does Bonhoeffer talk about this in a chapter on belief and obedience in Radical Discipleship?
Thanks, Matt. I've missed our face-to-face times so much that I'm glad to get a little of that interaction online, and in a way that encourages others.
As to Bonhoeffer, I haven't read Radical Discipleship, so I'm not sure. But from what I know of Bonhoeffer, he probably did say it, and much more clearly than I can.
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