9. What is the Gospel

Worldwide Mission Fellowship

9. What is the Gospel

The Gospel Volume 1

March 26, 2015 • WWMF Media

"And he went throughout all Galilee, teaching in their synagogues and proclaiming the gospel of the kingdom and healing every disease and every affliction among the people." (Matthew 4:23, ESV)

"The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God." (Mark 1:1, ESV)

"The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed," (Luke 4:18, ESV)

"But when they believed Philip as he preached good news about the kingdom of God and the name of Jesus Christ, they were baptized, both men and women." (Acts 8:12, ESV)

"Paul, a servant of Christ Jesus, called to be an apostle, set apart for the gospel of God," (Romans 1:1, ESV)

"For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith for faith, as it is written, "The righteous shall live by faith."" (Romans 1:16-17, ESV)

As we can see from the verses we have just seen and heard, the word Gospel is used often in the New Testament. In fact this is just a small sample of over 90 occurrences of the word.

It was the first imperative of the ministry of John the Baptist, The Lord Jesus Christ, The Apostle Peter and The apostle Paul.

To understand the meaning of this word we need to ensure we are interpreting the use of the word in context to the passages where the word is found or as Pastor Dennis Greenidge warns "When we take a scripture out of context all we are left with is a pretext"

Lets focus on just the last verse from Romans chapter one verses 16-17. Paul says he is not ashamed of the Gospel which means the gospel is something tangible or that has substance and is definitive rather than a loosely defined idea, to the point that a person might feel shame over it.

He goes on to say it is the power of God unto salvation for everyone who believes. What is the object of belief here? The Bible is clear, the object of belief is the message to be found in the Gospel (or the Goods News).

1. What is the Gospel

March 26, 2015 • WWMF Media

What is the gospel? Do we know what the word means? Can we be 100% sure? Is there a source of objective truth to confirm the nature of the gospel? How important is the Gospel today? All these questions can and will be answered definitively in today's presentation so hold onto your seat as we go on the journey of a lifetime to find "The Gospel".

2. Can the Bible be Trusted

March 26, 2015 • WWMF Media

The Bible is the source of objective truth against which we can measure all beliefs, ideas and opinions to test their validity. How can we make such a bold statement. Well we have 5 clear proofs that the Bible IS God's verified Word. 1. Bibliographical or Documentary evidence 2. Scientific evidence 3. Archaeological evidence 4. Fulfilled Prophecy 5. Empirical evidence

3. Bibliographical / Documentary Evidence

March 26, 2015 • WWMF Media

The Old Testament The original Bible manuscripts (called autographs) were written on material such as papyrus, which deteriorated quickly. Consequently, scribes were needed to copy and recopy the Old Testament books letter by letter. These copyists knew they were duplicating God’s Word, so they went to incredible lengths to prevent error from creeping into their work. The whole process of recopying the Bible was controlled by strict religious rituals, and the scribes carefully counted every line, word, syllable, and letter to ensure accuracy. As a result of their diligence, the Old Testament in our Bible today is virtually identical to the autographs. Bible scholars have demonstrated this by comparing ancient copies of the Bible with more recent copies. For example, prior to the discovery of the Dead Sea Scroll manuscripts in 1947, the oldest existing (extant) Old Testament manuscript was the Massoretic Text, dated around a.d. 900. But with the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, fragments of almost every book in the Old Testament were found, many of them dating back to around 150 b.c., a thousand years earlier. One of the most important manuscript discoveries was two copies of Isaiah. So far they are the oldest known copies of any complete book of the Bible. What did textual critics discover when they compared the Dead Sea manuscripts of Isaiah with the Isaiah preserved in the Massoretic Text dated a thousand years later? Old Testament scholar Gleason Archer provides the answer: “Even though the two copies of Isaiah discovered in Qumran Cave number one near the Dead Sea in 1947 were a thousand years earlier than the oldest dated manuscript previously known (a.d. 980), they proved to be word for word identical with our standard Hebrew Bible in more than 95 percent of the text. The 5 percent of variation consisted chiefly of obvious slips of the pen and variations in spelling.” From manuscript discoveries like the Dead Sea Scrolls, Christians have undeniable evidence that today’s Old Testament Scripture, for all practical purposes, is exactly the same as it was when originally inspired by God and recorded in the Bible. The New Testament We do not posses any of the autographs of the New Testament. Like the Old Testament, the New Testament books were originally written on materials that quickly wore out and therefore had to be copied and recopied by hand for centuries before the invention of the printing press. So we need to determine how closely the existing copies represent the autographs. That is, how do we know that the New Testament we have today is close enough to the original writings as to be equally reliable? One of the areas of evidence has to do with the available number of New Testament manuscripts. What we discover is that there are more extant New Testament manuscripts than any other document from antiquity. More than 24,000 partial and complete copies of the New Testament are in existence today. By comparison, the ancient document second in number of available copies is the Iliad, which has only 643 surviving manuscripts. And this number is extremely high compared to other ancient documents. In fact, there are enough quotations from the early church fathers that even if we did not have a single copy of the Bible, scholars could still reconstruct all but 11 verses of the entire New Testament from material written within 150 to 200 years from the time of Christ.