09/22/2023 – What is the Primary Purpose of the Gospel?
Romans 1: 16 For I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God that brings salvation to everyone who believes: first to the Jew, then to the Gentile. 17 For in the gospel the righteousness of God is revealed—a righteousness that is by faith from first to last,[e] just as it is written: “The righteous will live by faith.”
What is the Primary Purpose of the Gospel? The answer that comes first to our mind is: our salvation. That is certainly true! The original Manuscript in Greek says that Gospel is dynamis. We recognize this Greek word because it is so close to the word dynamite. The Gospel of Christ pulverizes hearts of stone, as our hearts were, breaks down all barriers to bring to us the conviction of God’s love.
But the ultimate purpose of the gospel goes even further. Its ultimate purpose is to establish the Kingdom of God on earth, first in a spiritual and invisible way, and ultimately also in a visible way, encompassing all spheres of humanity and society.
The prophecy about the Kingdom of Heaven is first pronounced in the context of the conquest of the people of Israel by the Babylonian empire. The king of Babylon saw in a dream a statue representing the kingdoms of the earth. He then sued his fortune tellers that he interpreted it; but that they also guessed the dream. No one can do that, they told him. Daniel, one of the captives of Israel in Babylon, he received the revelation.
Daniel 2: 34 As His Majesty looked, a huge stone which no one cut came off a mountain and struck the feet of iron and clay in the picture, and shattered them. 35 Then iron, cooked clay, bronze, and silver and gold were also torn to pieces, until they became like the dust of the wheat that is milled in the summer, and the wind took them away without leaving the slightest trace. Instead, the stone that struck the image became a large mountain that filled the entire earth.
The Gospel is the power of God to save every person, and it has the power to overcome the kingdoms of the world to establish the kingdom of God on this earth.