Rob Bell tries to define the Gospel
April 25, 2009
When asked by Christianity Today how he would present the gospel on Twitter Rob Bell said that the Gospel is too big to present on Twitter's limited character space. But Bell then offers this definition of the Gospel:
I would say that history is headed somewhere. The thousands of little ways in which you are tempted to believe that hope might actually be a legitimate response to the insanity of the world actually can be trusted. And the Christian story is that a tomb is empty, and a movement has actually begun that has been present in a sense all along in creation. And all those times when your cynicism was at odds with an impulse within you that said that this little thing might be about something bigger—those tiny little slivers may in fact be connected to something really, really big.
Not a word about Christ or His cross. Not a word about sin or repentance. There is a cryptic reference to an empty tomb but absolutely nothing to explain it. I'm not quite sure what Rob Bell is describing here but it most certainly is not what Paul described as the "matter of first importance" (1 Corinthians 15).
Friends, it matters what we do with the Gospel. The Gospel is the good news of what God has accomplished through the doing, dying, and rising of Christ Jesus. Our task is to gratefully receive this good news and proclaim it as it is, not as we might reimagine it. Why would we want to change this best of all good news? When did preachers start believing that they had a better gospel than the one given to us by God in the Scriptures?
