The Gospel Message
So what is the “Gospel Message”?
Why do we believe it, and who exactly needs it?
At its heart, the message is simple and perfectly reasonable to anyone with eyes to see and an active conscience.
Both the Hebrew Scriptures, from beginning to end, and the reality we see outside our window reveal an important spiritual truth...
Something is terribly wrong with this world!
Death, pain, disease, and crime. Corruption, hatred, jealousy, and greed. Cruelty, wickedness, sexual immorality, and selfishness. So many things in this world are utterly broken!
Every so often, someone appears with “new” ideas for curing the world’s ills—strange philosophies, revolutionary political systems, and new technologies. Yet despite all this, after thousands of years of trying to improve ourselves, the world only seems to grow colder and darker, and the inclination of the human heart, despite all our education, technology, and knowledge, is still evil from its youth.
Why would a good God create such a cruel world?
Many people are quick—even reckless—to conclude that perhaps there is no God at all and that the entire universe came into being through sheer chance.Otherwise, how can this world, with all its endless problems, be explained?
But could it be that we have forgotten one crucial point before drawing such hasty conclusions?
The Torah tells us that God did not create the world as it exists today. He created a perfect world—a world in which the relationship between mankind and creation was perfectly balanced, a world without pain or suffering, without corruption, and without evil.
But something happened in that Paradise. Because of it, the entire world, which had been created for mankind, became thoroughly corrupted, together with the human beings who had been entrusted with its care.
The first man and his wife, although they had been created very good, were enticed by an outside being to rebel against the one commandment given to them by their Creator. In doing so, despite God’s clear warning, they brought death, decay, and corruption into the world of the Holy One, blessed be He.
From that original sin onward, and with ever-increasing force, human nature became corrupted beyond recognition.
The closeness, innocence, and holiness in which mankind had walked with God in the garden were replaced by distance, sin, and defilement, which have corrupted nearly every good part of human nature.
Despite the repeated warnings of Israel’s prophets to repent, and despite the LORD’s repeated calls for mankind to return to Him with all their heart, all their soul, and all their strength, human beings cannot seem to lift themselves out of the mire, and clothe themselves in holiness and righteousness by their own power.
Many of the best among us have tried and failed. Our fathers Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, despite their good intentions, fell into sin. Moses our great teacher, who stands as the human face of the Torah, also failed—despite his immense efforts—to overcome the inclination to sin. After forty years in the wilderness with the people of Israel, who never ceased grumbling and complaining, he sinned in a moment of anger and was not permitted to enter the Promised Land.
Joshua, his faithful disciple, was ultimately the one who brought us into possession of the land. Yet even he, despite his sincere efforts, fell into sin. Kings Saul, David, and Solomon each, in turn, fell into many sins.
Even the prophet Elijah, despite the special Spirit that rested upon him, lost his confidence in the LORD in a moment of weakness and sinned in unbelief when he fled in fear to hide in the wilderness.
And if such giants of faith—whose stature most of us do not even approach—failed to withstand temptation and sinned, what can be said of us, who sin every day and every hour?
Who among us can honestly say that he or she has never sinned?
Who among us has never lied?
Who among us has never stolen anything?
Who among us has never spoken evil of another person?
Who among us was never tempted by some form of forbidden sexual lust?
Who among us has never coveted what belongs to someone else?
Those among us with a functioning conscience surely know that, when measured by the Ten Commandments—the commandments God wrote with His own finger upon the tablets of the covenant—we have all failed.If the LORD were to give each one of us immediately the punishment we deserve for our sins and evil thoughts, we would all stand condemned to hell.
But the LORD has mercy upon us and is patient with us again and again. In the Torah, the LORD commanded Moses to establish the sacrificial system, in which the pure blood of innocent animals was poured out as an atonement for human sin.
The problem is that this system could never remove sin altogether. The blood of clean animals could only “cover” human sin temporarily and symbolically; it could never provide a permanent solution. Every year, at every appointed time, and every day, the priests had to offer more and more sacrifices for our sins, and they were never enough.
The blood of a clean animal cannot fully cover the sin of a human being, simply because the life of a person created in the image of God is worth far more than the life of an animal, however clean that animal may be.
Thus, even the sacrificial system established by Moses at the command of the LORD could offer only a temporary, rather than permanent, solution to the problem of sin—the sin that corrupted, and still corrupts, this world, and because of which we all die, both physically and spiritually.
The LORD Himself had to provide another solution to the problem: a deeper and more fundamental solution, one that He had known from the beginning He would one day have to provide in order to redeem mankind from the sin in which it is lost.
But before I continue and tell you about the astonishing and almost unbelievable solution the LORD provided for the problem of sin, I would like to set before you a challenge.
If I have not yet convinced you that mankind is utterly lost in sin, and that although our conscience bears witness within us that good and evil are real, we are unable to do only what is good, then please try not to sin at all for just one week.
Just seven days in which you make every effort to keep perfectly all the commandments of the LORD written in the Torah and upon our conscience. One full week in which you do not sin at all—not in your actions, not in your words, and not in your thoughts.
If, after a week of sincere effort, you can look back and say, “I did it! I did not commit a single sin, speak a single idle word, or entertain a single vain thought,” then perhaps you do not need the solution I am about to describe.
But if you too, like me and all my fellow believers in the Messiah, already understand that sin is stronger than you, and that you cannot defeat it by your own power even for a single week, then you too now understand that we face a serious problem that demands a solution. I would therefore like to tell you about the solution that the LORD, in His immense and incomprehensible grace, has provided for us.
The Hebrew Scriptures, with their many prophecies, together with the New Covenant Scriptures, tell us that about two thousand years ago the LORD did something so great and so radical that, to this very day, human beings are judged according to how they respond to it.
The LORD sent forth His own mighty Word—the Word through whom He created the entire universe—and sent Him to earth as a man like us.
A man who lived among us and suffered with us through heat, cold, and all the other afflictions of this world, yet unlike us, never sinned.
A man who was fully human, yet at the same time possessed an incorruptible divine nature—one whom even Satan himself could not entice into transgression.
Yeshua—Jesus—of Nazareth is that man. He fulfilled hundreds of prophecies in the Hebrew Scriptures that point to Him, and to Him alone, as the true Messiah of Israel.
For about three years, Yeshua traveled throughout the Land of Israel, teaching the perfect Torah of the LORD, opening the eyes of the blind, healing the sick, casting out demons, and even raising the dead, until many thousands among the people of Israel became fully convinced that He truly was the Messiah, the Son of God.
In fact, so many believed in Him that He became a threat in the eyes of the religious leadership—a threat that had to be removed.
But the story did not end there.
The LORD sent that same Yeshua—the innocent and unblemished Lamb—to die as a sacrifice for our sins: to die upon a cross like the worst of criminals, rejected and cast outside the city walls.
The LORD sent His only Son, Yeshua the Messiah, to pay with His pure blood the price of human sin once and for all, and to enter by His lifeblood before the true altar in heaven in order to redeem us from our sins.
After Yeshua the Messiah, the Son of God, had completed the purification of our sins, God the Father raised Him from the dead as a sign that His sacrifice had been accepted and that, because of Him, our sins had been forgiven once and for all. After His resurrection from the dead, Yeshua the Messiah appeared to many hundreds of people and remained upon the earth for forty days. He then ascended into heaven before the eyes of His disciples, until the time of the restoration of all things.
The Scriptures promise us that everyone who believes in Yeshua the Messiah and in His sacrifice for our sins, and who sincerely repents before God, receives in His name true forgiveness of sins and eternal life in the coming Kingdom of Heaven.
At His first coming, Yeshua the Messiah came to earth to save everyone who repents and believes in Him, in His sacrifice for our sins, and in His resurrection from the dead.
At His next coming to earth, however, the Messiah will no longer come to save, but to judge the world for refusing to repent and to believe in the LORD and in His amazing grace.
Until then, we live in a season of favor before the LORD—a time in which the LORD calls Jews and Gentiles alike to repent of their sins and place their trust in Yeshua the Messiah for the forgiveness of their transgressions.
We who believe in Yeshua the Messiah with all our hearts receive the Spirit of the LORD into our hearts. There He works in us each day, teaching us holiness, righteousness, and grace. There He bears witness that, by grace, we are children of God; that our spiritual restoration will soon be complete; and that we will be able to return to His presence with hearts cleansed from a condemning conscience and sanctified by the blood of an innocent Lamb.
This is the Gospel Message.
It is very good news for those of us who are willing to repent and trust in the grace of the LORD revealed in Yeshua the Messiah. But it is very bad news for those who, in their wickedness, reject the LORD’s outstretched hand and, in empty pride, refuse to accept His sacrifice or attempt to invent a “righteousness” of their own through their own strength and power.God saves those who believe in Yeshua the Messiah from all their sins. But He justly condemns sinners who refuse to accept the sacrifice of His only and most precious Son, and who will not return to Him in complete repentance and sincere faith.
We hope and pray that you too will be saved through a simple and wholehearted faith in Yeshua the Messiah. We do our utmost to tell you about this wonderful grace that the God of Israel has shown to us and to the whole world.
“Behold, the days are coming, declares the LORD, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah, not like the covenant that I made with their fathers on the day when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt, my covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, declares the LORD. For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declares the LORD: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts. And I will be their God, and they shall be my people. And no longer shall each one teach his neighbor and each his brother, saying, ‘Know the LORD,’ for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, declares the LORD. For I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more.”
(Jer. 31 31-34 ESV)
Would you like to learn more?
We would be glad to read the Scriptures with you, answer honest questions, and explain the gospel more fully.