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THE MESSAGE OF THE GOOD NEWS

Mark 1:14–15

After John had been committed to prison, Jesus came into Galilee, announcing the good news about God, and saying, ‘The time that was appointed has come; and the kingdom of God is here. Repent and believe the good news.’

THERE are in this summary of the message of Jesus three great, dominant words of the Christian faith.

(1) There is the good news. It was pre-eminently good news that Jesus came to bring to all. If we follow the word evangelion, good news, gospel through the New Testament, we can see at least something of its content.

(a) It is good news of truth (Galatians 2:5; Colossians 1:5). Until Jesus came, it was possible only to guess and grope after God. ‘O that I knew where I might find him,’ cried Job (Job 23:3). Marcus Aurelius said that the soul can see but dimly, and the word he uses is the Greek word for seeing things through water. But with the coming of Jesus we see clearly what God is like. No longer do we need to guess and grope; we know.

(b) It is good news of hope (Colossians 1:23). The ancient world was a pessimistic world. Seneca talked of ‘our helplessness in necessary things’. In the struggle for goodness, humanity was defeated. The coming of Jesus brings hope to the hopeless heart.

(c) It is good news of peace (Ephesians 6:15). The penalty of being human is to have a split personality. In human nature, the beast and the angel are strangely intermingled. It is told that once Schopenhauer, the gloomy philosopher, was found wandering. He was asked, ‘Who are you?’ ‘I wish you could tell me,’ he answered. Robert Burns said of himself, ‘My life reminded me of a ruined temple. What strength, what proportion in some parts! What unsightly gaps, what prostrate ruins in others!’ The human predicament has always been that we are haunted both by sin and by goodness. The coming of Jesus unifies that disintegrated personality into one. We find victory over our warring selves by being conquered by Jesus Christ.

(d) It is good news of God’s promise (Ephesians 3:6). It is true that the tendency has been to think of a God of threats rather than a God of promises. Non-Christian religions think of a demanding God; only Christianity tells of a God who is more ready to give than we are to ask.

(e) It is good news of immortality (2 Timothy 1:10). To the pagan, life was the road to death; but Jesus came with the good news that we are on the way to life rather than death.

(f) It is good news of salvation (Ephesians 1:13). That salvation is not merely a negative thing; it is also positive. It is not simply liberation from penalty and escape from past sin; it is the power to live life victoriously and to conquer sin. The message of Jesus is good news indeed.

(2) There is the word repent. Now repentance is not so easy as sometimes we think. The Greek word metanoia literally means a change of mind. We are very apt to confuse two things – sorrow for the consequences of sin and sorrow for sin. Many people become desperately sorry because of the mess that sin has got them into, but they know very well that, if they could be reasonably sure that they could escape the consequences, they would do the same thing again. It is not the sin that they hate; it is its consequences.

Real repentance means coming not only to be sorry for the consequences of sin but to hate sin itself. Long ago, that wise old writer, Montaigne, wrote in his autobiography, ‘Children should be taught to hate vice for its own texture, so that they will not only avoid it in action, but abominate it in their hearts – that the very thought of it may disgust them whatever form it takes.’ Repentance means that anyone who was in love with sin comes to hate sin because of its exceeding sinfulness.

(3) There is the word believe. ‘Believe’, says Jesus, ‘in the good news.’ To believe in the good news simply means to take Jesus at his word, to believe that God is the kind of God that Jesus has told us about, to believe that God so loves the world that he will make any sacrifice to bring us back to himself, to believe that what sounds too good to be true is really true.