Gospel Spiral: A Proposal

Written by Jesse Furey

What is the Gospel?

Evangelicalism in America is in the midst of unprecedented fragmentation. A fault line has opened up, dividing evangelicals between progressive values of social justice and racial reconciliation, and conservative values of personal responsibility to God and traditional moral norms. Though it may not seem so at first glance, the divide is far more complex than answering the question, “How woke are you?” In fact, there is a more fundamental misunderstanding hiding and working beneath the surface. The fault line runs deep, and at the deepest point of divide is an unspoken disagreement on what is meant by the gospel itself. 

Before they were known primarily as a voting bloc, evangelicals were known as “gospel people.” But what exactly is the gospel? We might just as easily ask what an “evangelical” is, but the answer to that question must, in the end, depend on an agreed upon definition of the gospel. So then, let’s return to the question of what the gospel is. Is it the good news of our justification by faith? Is it the way to gain the righteousness of Christ through the grace of God by faith alone? How central is the substitution theory of atonement within the gospel? Does the gospel include multi-ethnic reconciliation? Social justice? The victory of Christ over sin, death, and Satan? Did Jesus preach the gospel? How important is the Old Testament for understanding and proclaiming the gospel?

I witnessed this confusion firsthand when I recently asked one of my classes, “When you are sharing the gospel, what must be included...what can be included...and what ought to be left out?” A lively debate followed, in which a few students argued that what usually passes as gospel presentations are actually redemptive-historical biblical theologies (Creation—Fall—Redemption—Consummation). In contrast, they argued that the gospel is not all the news, just the good part; that “Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am the foremost” (1 Tim 1:15). Some students focused on Ephesians 2:14-16 and argued that ethnic reconciliation must be included while others argued that it ought not be, focusing instead on Ephesians 2:1-9. Some viewed the gospel as a worldview while others considered it a presentation to be shared with the aim of personal salvation through a faith-filled response. Amidst the noise of the debate, the only certainty was that they were right and the others were wrong! 

Debating the meaning of the gospel isn’t a new phenomenon, but it is especially volatile in our postmodern age. In The Twilight of the Idols, Frederick Nietzsche declared that “the text has disappeared under the interpretation.” Nietzsche stands at the fountainhead of the postmodern hermeneutic, in which meaning is determined by the interpreter and put to use explicitly for power. This has become the de facto hermeneutic of our age—an age where expressive individualism has unseated God, tradition and community in making meaning. This meaning-making power is often wielded by tribes within Christianity attempting to define the gospel over and against other tribes and definitions, without rooting their definition in the external, eternal and authoritative source of the Scriptures. Misunderstanding and confusion abound when the same word means different things to different people, and the resultant fragmentation displays an ugly aesthetic to the watching world. One need not look far on social media to see evidence of this. One arena that displays this misunderstanding fragmentation clearly is the recent debates about the Statement on Social Justice.

This should not be so. Christ said that the world will know him through both our love and our unity (John 17:23). The aim of this paper is to present the gospel in a way that is sourced in the Scriptures and unifies the vertical and horizontal aspects of the gospel, with the hope of unifying the church around the Biblical gospel. 

The Vertical and the Horizontal

One reason statements like the Statement on Social Justice exist is that the authors see announcing good news on the horizontal axis (sometimes called “the gospel of the kingdom” and including justice, obedience, love of neighbor, etc.) as “outworkings” of the gospel, rather than definitional components. These things, they argue, are the fruit of which the gospel is the tree. By safeguarding the gospel in this way, they attempt to steer clear of stale religious legalism on one side and the slippery slope of theological liberalism on the other. 

Progressive evangelicals would do well to consider these dangers. In fighting against fundamentalists, many progressives have unwittingly become fundamentalists in their own way. Rather than change the game, they have only shifted the lines of the field. In their primarily horizontal axis gospel, there are a new set of fundamentals requiring near total agreement: “wokeness” to social injustices, guilt and repentance for privilege, demonstrated concern for the poor and the immigrant, and antagonism toward Donald Trump. This is a new kind of legalism—albeit one with a liberal veneer. 

On the other side of the divide, a strictly vertical axis understanding (sometimes called “the gospel of the cross”) starves the gospel of much of the demonstrated power of the good news of the kingdom to unite all things in Christ (Eph 1:11), creating in its place an anemic gospel of personal salvation of souls. Additionally, it seems unaware of and may contribute to a different danger—the danger of expressive individualism. As modern Christians in the West, expressive individualism is steeped into the cultural water we swim in. We can look back at Descartes’ famous undoubtable truth, “I think, therefore I am,” and see the fountainhead of expressive individual autonomy. Our search for truth and meaning was turned inward. This inward turn has, in our postmodern times, become untethered to God, suspicious of authority and timid, leading us from “I think, therefore I am,” to “I am who I feel I am...I think.” 

This orientation—which neither side of the evangelical divide is immune from—has caused us to view ourselves primarily as autonomous, expressive decision makers. A strictly vertical understanding of the gospel—one in which I make the decision to affirm a set of propositional truth statements about what God has done for me through the life, death, and resurrection of his son—appeals to this orientation. The irony of the strictly vertical view is that the very thing it seeks to preserve—the authority and glory of God—is emptied by focusing so much on me and my personal salvation through my personal justification by my personal expression of faith. Any inclusion of cosmic and corporate news of the King and his Kingdom threatens the centrality of our individual autonomy, and must be relegated to “implications” and “out-workings” of second-order (rather than “definitional”) importance. 

Rather than offering a way out of the chaos, these attempts to give meaning to “gospel” has bogged evangelicals further down into tribalism, in which conservative evangelicals build theological walls to safeguard the purity of the gospel, while progressive evangelicals demand that an ever-growing list of works of justice be included in the gospel. Sadly, this tribalism often sinks to the type of name calling (Social Justice Warriors! Marxists! Racists!) that breaks the ninth commandment and drives a wedge deeper into the growing divide. Both sides of this debate have valid biblical truths to offer, but those truths are often missed under the noise of the debate itself. Missing from the discussion is a fully-orbed gospel that draws from the New Testament understanding of the good news and unites the vertical and the horizontal axes while remaining centered on the gracious saving activity of God. 

The Gospel Spiral

One barrier to a unifying definition of the gospel is a zero-sum, either-or way of thinking. It is either this or that. My way or your way (which really means, of course, my way!). This way of thinking causes us to view the gospel as either vertical or horizontal, either cross or kingdom, either individual or corporate, either personal or cosmic. Our current theological reality within evangelicalism mirrors our current political reality with a two-party system, in which there are the good guys (us) and the bad guys (them). This causes us to view the two competing definitions of the gospel on a gradient from good to bad, and any movement toward the other is a slide away from the good. 

A better vision for understanding the gospel is a spiral. The center of the spiral is the announcement of good news. The fullness of the biblical story—with all the historical events and salvation motifs—invites us on a trail inward to this unifying announcement. Just as God draws us in, he also sends us out. From this center, the news gains more fullness as it spins out into both the horizontal and vertical axes. And as it spirals around, it integrates kingdom and cross without seams and borders. Finally, the gospel spiral ends by directing us out into action through vocational callings to love God and neighbor with all our lives. 

The central announcement of the gospel is that God has sent his Son in the person of Jesus as the Messiah-King, to live, die, rise, and ascend for us and our salvation, uniting the strands of promise running through the Old Testament. He is the suffering servant, anointed by God to be wounded for our transgressions and crushed for our iniquities (Isa 53:4-6). He is God over all the earth, who delivers his people and brings peace and gathers the nations (Isa 40:9-11; 52:7). He is the only begotten son of God, coronated as king in power upon his resurrection, becoming the refuge of the nations (Ps 2). He is the true God who loves justice (Isa 61:8) and who clothes us with garments of salvation (Isa 61:10). He is the true king who sits on the throne of David (2 Sam 7). All of these strands are either explicitly declared as gospel in the Old Testament, or are connected to explicit declarations of the gospel in the New Testament.

The Gospel is Good News

One important aspect of this definition is that the gospel is essentially an announcement. The word “gospel” comes to us from the old English words god (good) and spell (tale). The gospel is the “good-tale.” As we go further back we find the Latin word “evangelium” and the Greek word “euangelion,” both of which mean “good news.” In the Greco-Roman world of the New Testament, a message from the emperor was evangelium, or news so good that it claimed to change the world for the better. One familiar example of this is the story of Pheidippides, a messenger who ran the (roughly) 26.2 miles from the Battle of Marathon to Athens to declare the good news of their victory over the Persian army. 

The Roman emperors falsely claimed to be god-in-the-flesh, and their gospels failed to deliver a good, true and beautiful kingdom. But what they falsely claimed actually happened when the true King came and announced the in-breaking of the Kingdom. This gospel of Christ the Lord, the true evangelium, does what all the other “good news” only could claim to do: it both announces and performs. It is both a true story of the King’s victory and the performative power to save sinners like you and me. 

New Testament Example

When John was baptizing in Bethany, he saw his cousin Jesus approaching and said, “Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!” (John 1:29). At first blush, this seems like a purely “vertical” gospel, with its mention of sin removal. Upon closer inspection, however, this statement would have sounded odd to his listeners. John and his audience of devout Jews were familiar with their enscriptured stories, especially the story of the Passover and Exodus from Egypt (Ex 12). The Exodus would immediately jump to the mind of a first century Hebrew listening to John preach about a “Lamb of God.” The Lamb of God would have conjured up images of blood smeared on doorposts, not to pay for sins but to deliver Israel from unjust slavery and suffering at the hands of their Egyptian oppressors. God, seeing the Lamb’s blood, passed over his people and took the firstborn of their oppressors in order to give them freedom and bring them to a promised place of flourishing. The Lamb of God, then, was an image that helped Israel remember that God had once delivered them from injustice. It was also an image that gave them hope that he may do it again. This is a radically “horizontal” good news for God’s people. In a fact neither John nor his listeners would have missed, there is no place in the Old Testament where a Lamb is offered as a propitiatory (sin-bearing, wrath-atoning) sacrifice. 

Israel did have an offering to take away their sins. In the annual ceremony of Yom Kippur, two goats were brought before the high priest. One was sacrificed, and its blood was sprinkled over the people to cleanse them. The priest would confess the sins of Israel over the other one before sending it away into the wilderness. This “scapegoat” symbolized the removal of their sin (Lev 16). So what was John doing by calling Jesus, “the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world?” He was uniting these two rich salvation motifs through exalting Jesus to the position of God himself. 

His language not only hearkens to the Passover and Yom Kippur, but also to Exodus 34:6-7: “The Lord passed before him and proclaimed, ‘The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin [this is indirectly quoted in John’s announcement], but who will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children and the children’s children, to the third and the fourth generation.” John is announcing that Jesus is both Lamb and Goat, and even more shockingly, YHWH himself! And as YHWH, he was bringing freedom and justice for the captives (horizontal) and cleansing his people and removing their sin (vertical). 

Of course, John does not actually use the word “euangelion,” so perhaps more New Testament proof is needed to show that the gospel is rich with vertical and horizontal news. One often overlooked source is the gospels themselves. The first four books of the New Testament are each titled “The Gospel of…” Each book then, in ways unique to their author, aim and audience, tell of the climactic entrance of Jesus as the Messiah-King. Each book taps into the rich and varied biblical narrative of redemption and presents Jesus as the promised Hero. Each book says, “This is the gospel. The Messiah came to take away our sins and make us right with God again (vertical)! And, the King came to deliver his people from slavery to sin and to inaugurate his kingdom on earth (horizontal)!”

Another often overlooked source is the early gospel preaching of the church. Each of the seven earliest gospel sermons, as recorded in Acts 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, and 8, lead the audience into the grand narrative of redemption with the climactic action of Jesus coming as Messiah-King. Not one of these sermons is strictly vertical, offering a plan of salvation through justification by faith. And not one of these sermons is strictly horizontal, promising justice and peace through following in the footsteps of Jesus. These early sermons proclaim that the Messiah-King has come and is offering salvation and a new way of life in his kingdom. These apostolic sermons spiral in—to the central announcement that Jesus, the Messiah King, has come!

The Romans Road Less Traveled 

Paul’s letter to the Roman church gives more evidence of a gospel spiral uniting vertical and horizontal salvation motifs. Typically, the “Romans Road” gospel presentation goes something like this: God (Rom 1-2)—Man/Sin (Rom 3:23)—Christ (Rom 6:23; 5:8)—Response (Rom 10:9-13). This is certainly part of the gospel, and is a clear and biblical path to personal salvation through faith in the finished work of Christ. And it should be preached! But is this the Gospel Paul is preaching in the book of Romans? 

Consider how he begins his letter in Romans 1:1-6: “Paul, a servant of Christ Jesus, called to be an apostle, set apart for the gospel of God, which he promised beforehand through his prophets in the holy Scriptures, concerning his Son, who was descended from David according to the flesh and was declared to be the Son of God in power according to the Spirit of holiness by his resurrection from the dead, Jesus Christ our Lord, through whom we have received grace and apostleship to bring about the obedience of faith for the sake of his name among all the nations, including you who are called to belong to Jesus Christ.” 

This gospel is more than a path to personal salvation. It is the announcement of good news—that the story of Jesus fulfills the story of Israel. This story has an audience, the Roman church trying to make sense of their identity as a mixed people of Jewish and Gentile heritage. It has a narrator, Paul, who speaks as a witness to the truth and power of the story (it has transformed him from a prideful Pharisee to a slave of the king). It has a setting, which directs the listener back to the fullness of the Old Testament story promising a Davidic King to set the world back to rights. And it has a hero, the risen Son of God, who demands the allegiance (“obedience of faith”) of the nations (not just the Jews). 

Additionally, this story comes with the power for salvation: “ 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” (Romans 1:16). The gospel is the announcement of the climactic moment in the redemption story, the moment when the Son of God—the promised Messiah-King—came in the flesh to redeem fallen humanity, reconcile us (Jews and Greeks) to God and to each other, and give us hope for eternal life in the Kingdom through his death and resurrection. 

Consummation: New Life and Future Hope

By his death on the cross, Jesus purchased our redemption as our Messiah-King. But he did not stay dead. In what many scholars believe is the earliest gospel tradition, Paul said, “For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve” (1 Cor 15:3-5). Through the resurrection of Jesus, God signaled his acceptance of the sacrifice of the Son. The risen Christ, then, gives us the immediate hope of sharing in a new kind of life—a resurrection life in the pattern of Jesus. He sends his Spirit to give us that new life now, a life that will extend into eternity. His resurrection gives us hope that we too will be resurrected in the same way as Jesus. And it will be Jesus who, after putting the world to rights, welcomes us into the new creation, wiping our tears away and making all things new. The kingdom will be consummated, the King will live among us, and the tree of life, lost to us at the Fall, will heal the nations (Rev 21). 

Later in the same chapter, Paul continues to unpack the hope of the resurrection for us, “Death is swallowed up in victory. O death, where is your victory? O death, where is your sting?” (1 Cor 15:54-55). This apostolic gospel is the good news of the victory of Jesus, the Messiah-King, through his wounds and resurrection. He has struck the decisive blow, crushing the serpent’s head, and he has offered us entrance into the Kingdom of God. We no longer need to worry about the old tyrant ruling us in darkness. We no longer need to live in bondage, chained to our sinful nature and awaiting death and punishment. We no longer need to live in fear, fighting our neighbors as we claw our way up in life. 

The gospel is the means by which we enter into the eternal kingdom of God. But the good news demands a response of faith. While the gospel is more than simply presenting a plan of personal salvation—it is not less! We enter the kingdom through faith and repentance. We turn from our sin and trust God, receiving the gift of the alien righteousness of his Son. And we bend the knee in allegiance to the true King, apprenticing our lives to Him in joyful servitude. This gospel is the power that keeps us in the kingdom and unifies us into the multi-ethnic people foretold in Revelation 5:9-10: “Worthy are you to take the scroll and to open its seals, for you were slain, and by your blood you ransomed people for God from every tribe and language and people and nation, and you have made them a kingdom and priests to our God, and they shall reign on the earth.” This is good news! This gospel is the power to save and to finish the work God began in us the moment we trusted him. 

May this gospel bring us together, even as it saves us and sustains us and brings us all the way home. 

Amen.

A Sermon on Race and the Gospel

Written by Jesse Furey

A few years ago, I preached a sermon at Valley Bible Church that describes my journey in thinking about race and the Gospel in the New River Valley...and includes some challenges for a way forward in empathetic action. I thought it was worth reposting this to accompany our recent interview with Charles Wilson on the Hammer & Quill about Responding to Racial Injustice.  

Race, the Gospel, and Valley Bible Church

Most nights after I pray with my kids, I sing to them. It’s not a sweet sound, but they are sweet words! One of the songs in the routine is Amazing Grace, a hymn written by John Newton in the 18th century:

“Amazing grace, how sweet the sound
That saved a wretch like me
I once was lost, but now I’m found
Was blind but now I see.”

Sweet, powerful words about the effects of believing the Gospel—words written by a former slave trader. John Newton was a captain of slave ships, bringing young Africans as property to be bought and sold and used. He was introduced to Jesus and believed the Gospel and slowly his eyes began to be opened. He left his vocation, became a pastor, and eventually became a spiritual advisor to William Wilberforce and many in the abolition movement in England. Just before his death he was overjoyed to hear the news that the slave trade had been abolished by parliament.

When Newton wrote about amazing grace, he knew he didn’t deserve it. He was a wretch, one who was complicit in the personal and systemic evils of racism. And when he wrote that he was blind, he didn’t just mean that he was blind to God’s goodness or presence or even to the truthfulness of the Gospel of Christ. All of those, yes. But he, wretched man that he was, was also blind to the sins of slavery, to the image of God in all its dignity and value and beauty in the Africans aboard his ship. He was blind to his neighbor.

Grace in the Gospel powerfully opened his eyes and he would never be the same.

This morning is not a typical VBC sermon. I won’t be working through a text in an expository series. This is my testimony as one of your pastors, a short story about my eyes being opened over the past few weeks, followed by an apology, a promise, a plea, and a hope.

Like many of you, I watched the footage from the Alton Sterling and Philando Castille deaths and felt the visceral pain that comes with witnessing that kind of violence. But I began to do what I did every other time I watched similar footage or read similar reports, whether it be Michael Brown or Trayvon Martin or Eric Garner or whoever, I resolved to wait for the facts to come out before I made an informed decision about what happened. And I am sure I would have soon stopped caring—like I had in each previous event—and settled into an informed but emotionally removed opinion about them.

But then I read parts of three different letters written by three different men in the same day and something changed.

First I read something Martin Luther King Jr. wrote: “It may well be that we have to repent in this generation. Not merely for the vitriolic words and the violent actions of the bad people, but for the appalling silence and indifference of the good people who sit around and say, ‘wait on time’.”

That hit me. I was, after all, one of the good people. And I was silent and indifferent, paralyzed by the complexity of race and violence and injustice in our country.

Then I was reading a letter written by one of my heroes, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, written a few months before he would be arrested by the Gestapo for his defense of the Jews in Germany: “Mere waiting and looking on is not Christian behavior. The Christian is called to sympathy and action, not in the first place by his own sufferings, but by the sufferings of his brethren, for whose sake Christ suffered.”

That hit me in the same place. I had been waiting and looking on for a while, and Bonhoeffer put his finger on exactly why that was: I wasn’t suffering. We are called to sympathy and action not by our own sufferings but by the sufferings of our brethren, for whose sake Christ suffered.

I felt as though I had been worked over and my guard was down as I was reading Paul’s letter to the Ephesians later that morning. The first ten verses in chapter two contain some of the most powerful descriptions about how amazing grace is and how wretched we are. We are by nature enemies of God, and yet he came to us and died for us and united himself with us in Christ. This is such good news!

It is such good news that it doesn’t stop with changing our relationship with God but extends to our relationship with fellow man: “For he himself is our peace, who has made us both one and has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility by abolishing the law of commandments expressed in ordinances, that he might create in himself one new man in place of the two, so making peace, and might reconcile us both to God in one body through the cross, thereby killing the hostility” (Eph 2:14-16).

Jesus came to kill the hostility. To kill it, crushing it with his crushed body. First he, God in the flesh, kills the hostility in our hearts toward God—this is what makes it amazing grace! We were not merely blind, but were hostile enemies and he came for us and he sought us and he died for us.

But also the hostility between Jew and Gentile, black and white, neighbor and neighbor. The dividing wall between races was broken by the broken body of our savior. These letters compelled me—and so I spent some time this week grabbing coffee or a meal with some of my black friends, some of whom are members of our church, to ask how they are feeling. 

Rather than wait and watch from a distance, I wanted to move toward them with sympathy and become a learner. What I learned moved me. I heard fear and sadness and confusion and stories of racism. I heard their experience with comments like “I don’t really think of you as black,” which begs the question, what do you have in mind when you think of a black man?! Of hearing “you’re pretty for a black girl,” or “you’re well spoken for a black guy.” Of slurs shouted from passing cars, threats made to families, purses clutched tight. In other words—things I never notice or have to worry about.

I have become convinced that I must stop waiting and watching. Working for biblical justice and peace are complex things, and I don’t have all the answers (or hardly any perhaps?), but there are people in our community who are hurting and we must follow our savior in moving toward those who suffer.

And so, I want to offer an apology, a promise, a plea, and a hope.

An apology: As one of your pastors I am sorry for my inactivity; for waiting and watching too long. We ought to have stepped into this earlier. We ought to have reached out to our black members and neighbors and neighboring churches with sympathy. We are sorry for not leading the way in bearing each other’s burdens and sorrows.

A promise: We promise to become a place and people of peace. We promise to continue to hold up the Gospel of Jesus as the exclusive place of eternal hope and justice. We promise to work to become one of the safest and most charitable places in our valley for conversations about race and the Gospel and the culture of our valley. We promise to work to become a safe and welcoming place for our black neighbors to belong to and worship. We promise to move toward our neighboring black churches and pastors to promote friendships and to create opportunities for conversation and prayer together.

A Plea: Root out any racism hidden in your heart and repent of it. Before you assume there isn’t any to root out, remember that racism is a sin and one of the most insidious characteristics of sin is how it hides behind and below other things, just out of sight. Consider the most patient person you know and ask yourself if you think they ever struggle with impatience, with selfishness. Of course they do, because selfishness remains in your heart’s room even when it doesn’t reign on the throne. Root it out and bring it into the light of the Gospel and turn away from it, decide not to feed it or give it room to breathe.

Next I want to plead with you to disengage from social media debates. There can be a place in social media for working toward justice, but facebook comment sections are not that place. Social media debates don’t soften hearts and open minds, they calcify opinions and bring out the worst in us. They separate ideas from people and so we say things we would never say if we were looking a friend in the eyes. Just stop. If you disagree with something someone posts use your phone the old-fashioned way and call them. Or, even better, take them to coffee and have a conversation. Remember that the right way to debate someone is with charity and with the aim of moving together towards the truth, not to win at all cost.

In the same vein, I want to plead with you to stop being more shaped by the media than by the Scriptures and by flesh and blood people. We must reject any media narrative that tells us there is a villain to hate, a flesh and blood person or people (black or white or blue) to hate. We don’t fight against flesh and blood but against powers and principalities. We don’t wage a physical war with swords but a spiritual war with co-suffering and prayer. We want a target that easy to see and strike, and we swing our swords wildly like Peter in the madness of the dark garden betrayal, but Jesus picks his accusers’ severed ear off the dewy grass and puts the man back together because his way wasn’t the way of the sword but the way of loving enemies and bearing burdens and sorrows.

Let’s engage with flesh and blood. Let’s make charitable judgments about people, assuming the absolute best about them. Let’s begin conversations with our black friends and neighbors about their experience being black in the New River Valley. Let’s reach out to our friends and neighbors with different ethnic backgrounds and ask how we can better love them, better make them feel welcome in our homes and our church.

Finally, A Hope: W.B. Yeats wrote a powerful poem just after WWI titled “The Second Coming,” in which he captured much of the same sentiment we are feeling in our nation now, especially in one line: “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.”

He was wrong. Yes, things fall apart. But the center will hold because Christ is the center. He is the Lord of history. He will come again to judge the living and the dead and his kingdom will have no end. He will vanquish evil once and for all. Cornelius Plantiga puts it well: “Evil rolls across the ages, but so does good. Good has its own momentum. Corruption never wholly succeeds. Creation is stronger than sin and grace is stronger still…human sin is stubborn, but not so stubborn as the grace of God and not half so persistent, not half so willing to suffer to win its way.”

Let’s be a people who hope in the power of the amazing grace of God shown to us and given to us in Christ, who hope in the coming kingdom in which people from every tribe and tongue—a kaleidoscope of colors!—will live together in harmony and peace and eternal happiness. Who hope in a King was willing to be crushed in order to crush the dividing wall of hostility and who will wipe away all his friends’ tears with his nail scarred hands as he makes all things new.

Let’s hope in him as we move toward our neighbor with sympathy and action and the Gospel of His amazing grace.