Better than what? Better than how it has often been imagined and presented! In this chapter of Love Wins Rob Bell wants us to hear the good news that is better than the good news we think we have heard. What is this good news that is not quite so good?
It is the supposed good news that following Jesus is about doing certain things to get your ticket punched so that when you die you will go to heaven (178).
It is a gospel of a God who expects more and more of his followers so that God is essentially a slave driver (180-181).
It is a message that Jesus came to rescue us from the wrath of God, which means that Jesus came to rescue us from God (182).
It is a gospel that says that God is always watching, waiting for you to slip up (184).
Bell is not making these up. I know. I’ve lived them. I’ve even told these stories. But they are not good news. A lot of people outside of the Church instinctively know this and figure they can get that kind of “Gospel” outside of Church. No need wasting a Sunday morning.
I have come to believe that these stories are based on a wrong notion of salvation. Salvation, we have been told, is about escaping this world and going to be with God. But if salvation is something much different than that, maybe we would tell a better story.
The Greek word for “Save” is SOZO. The interesting thing about the word is that it is not limited to discussions about someone’s eternal destiny. I will use the Gospel of Luke to demonstrate this. In Luke, SOZO is used to refer to…
- A woman whose sins are forgiven (Lk. 7:50).
- People who have demons cast out (Lk. 8:36)
- A woman healed of bleeding (Lk. 8:48).
- A leper who has been healed (Lk. 17:19).
Clearly the word “Save” is not limited to being in a state that, if we should die, we will go to heaven. This is because salvation is much more holistic than that. Salvation is about being made whole. Once again I will use the Gospel of Luke to make my point.
In preparation for Jesus, John the Baptist went around preaching a message from the Old Testament prophet Isaiah. He spoke of filling in valleys, bringing mountains low, and making crooked roads straight (Lk. 3:5). It was a message of social justice. It was a message that Jesus himself echoed just one chapter later when he too quoted Isaiah.
“The Spirit of the Lord is on me,
because he has anointed me
to preach good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners
and recovery of sight for the blind,
to release the oppressed,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” (Lk. 4:18-19).
In other words, Jesus came to make things right for people. That didn’t simply mean forgiving them of sin so that they can go to heaven when they die. It means curing them of leprosy, bleeding, and evil spirits. It means making people whole.
The good news is that God wants to make us whole. While it is true that this wholeness has an eternal element to it, it is not limited to eternity. Salvation is about God rescuing us from all of the things that ail us as a result of sin. Loneliness. Alienation. Divorce. Greed. Pride. Abuse. Exploitation. Violence. Sickness. It is also about releasing us from guilt and shame. It is about freeing us to enjoy the life God wants for us. It is about rescuing us from evil and death, not from God.
Granted, we live in the time between the times when the enemy has been defeated but the defeat has yet to be consummated (see Rev. 12: 12). But in Jesus, a time is coming…and has now come, when all of those things that ail us can begin to be overcome because of the power of Jesus in our lives. That is the better good news.
