When Christians talk about or preach the Gospel, they often mean, “Jesus died for my sins so I can go to heaven when I die.” But the New Testament gives a very different definition of the saving Gospel. Take for example the early church’s preaching in Acts 8, the one saving Gospel in three closely related ways.
First, Luke tells us that those who were scattered “went about preaching the word as gospel” (Acts 8:4).
Second, he focuses on Philip and says that he “went down to the city of Samaria and proclaimed the Messiah to them” (Acts 8:5).
And third, a few verses later Luke summarizes:
“When they believed Philip as he proclaimed the gospel about the Kingdom of God and the name of Jesus Messiah, they were being baptized, both men and women” (Acts 8:12).
These are not three different messages.
To “preach the word as gospel,” to “proclaim the Messiah,” and to “proclaim the gospel about the Kingdom of God and the name of Jesus” are three ways of describing the same saving Gospel, about the kingdom and its king.
So in Acts 8 the saving Gospel is the good news about the coming Kingdom of God and about Jesus, whom God has made “both lord and Messiah” (Acts 2:36).
And by “the word,” Philip did not mean “your Bible”; he meant the concrete news that the one God, the Father, announced His coming Kingdom, and that He has chosen a unique human person—His own Son by procreation and Son of David by Mary—to rule in that coming Kingdom.
Philip is not changing or inventing a new message; he is continuing the very same Gospel preached by Jesus himself.
Mark 1:14-15 shows us that “Jesus came into Galilee, preaching God’s Gospel meaning, “the Kingdom of God is near (or at hand); repent and believe the gospel.”
And Luke 4:43 records Jesus’ single-purpose mission—the reason he was sent and commissioned by his God and Father–was to “preach the kingdom of God to the other cities also, because for this purpose I was sent.”
Later Luke shows Jesus going through cities and villages, “proclaiming and bringing the good news of the Kingdom of God” (Luke 8:1a).
By extension, Jesus sends out his apostles to do the same.
In Luke 9:1–2, 6 Jesus calls “the twelve together… and sent them out to proclaim the Kingdom of God and to heal… And they went out and went through the villages, proclaiming the gospel and healing everywhere.”
The same commission appears in Matthew 10:1, 5–7:
“As you go, proclaim, saying, ‘The Kingdom of Heaven is near.’”
The task is explicitly to announce that the Kingdom is near—not that it is already here. So the Gospel as Jesus and the apostles preached it is clearly about that coming Kingdom of God. It is this Kingdom message that is tied to Jesus’ own identity.
When Peter answers Jesus saying:
“You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God” (Matthew 16:16), Jesus immediately goes on to speak of the future glory of the Son of Man in his coming Kingdom.
“You are really blessed, Simon son of Jonah, because human flesh and blood did not reveal this to you, but my Father who is in heaven! I also tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I intend to build my church, and the gates of Hades will not overpower it. I will give you the keys of the Kingdom of Heaven, and whatever you bind on earth will have been bound in heaven, and whatever you allow on earth will have been allowed in heaven.” (Matthew 16:17-19)
The point is Jesus is building his church now—the community founded on the confession that he is the uniquely procreated human “Messiah, the Son of the living God.”
He has given that church authority—the keys—to preach the Gospel of the Kingdom. This does not mean the church is the Kingdom. Jesus and the apostles primarily describe the Kingdom as a future reality that Christians will enter and inherit at his parousia, not that the kingdom is the church itself.
After Jesus’ death and resurrection, no one changed this Gospel into a different, more abstract message—a “spiritual,” non-literal feeling of “the kingdom in your heart” or “the kingdom as your church.”
In Ephesus, Paul enters the synagogue and for three months “reasoned and persuaded them about the Kingdom of God” (Acts 19:8). Later, speaking to the elders from Ephesus, he describes his ministry as testifying to “the gospel of the grace of God” and then reminds them that they will no longer see his face, “among whom I went about proclaiming the Kingdom” (Acts 20:24–25).
For Paul, “the gospel of the grace of God” and the proclamation of the Kingdom are one and the same overall message: grace is how God forgives and calls people into that coming Kingdom, and the Kingdom is the end result of His grace.
Just as Jesus reminded his apostles back in Luke 12:32:
“Do not be afraid, little flock, because your Father is delighted to give you the Kingdom.”
And Anthony’s footnote makes clear:
To be given the Kingdom means to inherit it when Jesus returns and to be granted a position of management responsibility in the Kingdom of God on a renewed earth (1 Cor. 6:2; 2 Tim. 2:12; Mt. 19:28; Rev. 5:10; 2:26; 3:21; Dan. 7:14, 18, 22, 27).
At the end of Acts, Luke underlines the importance of the kingdom as gospel.
In Rome, Paul is found “testifying about the Kingdom of God and trying to convince them about Jesus from the Law of Moses and from the Prophets” (Acts 28:23).
The book closes with Paul “proclaiming the Kingdom of God and teaching about the Lord Jesus Messiah with all boldness and without hindrance” (Acts 28:31). This is the bookend to the beginning of Acts, where the risen Jesus is speaking to the apostles “about the Kingdom of God” (Acts 1:3).
The book begins with Jesus teaching about the Kingdom and ends with Paul preaching the Kingdom of God and Jesus, as the lord Messiah, meaning the king of that coming Kingdom.
Paul’s letters agree by reflecting the same pattern.
In Romans he says that he has been “set apart for the gospel of God… concerning His Son,” and he describes Jesus as coming from “the seed of David according to the flesh” (i.e., Mary, Luke 1:30-35) and being “appointed Son of God in power by resurrection” (Romans 1:1–4).
The gospel of God is “concerning His Son,” the promised descendant of David, now exalted as lord Messiah. Again, we see the same core Gospel message: God’s coming Kingdom and His Son, the King. This biblical definition saves us from a truncated or abstract gospel, in other words another gospel.
If you say, “Jesus died for my sins so I can go to heaven when I die,” you are not yet preaching the apostolic Gospel. In fact, you are preaching a lie, because half of that message is never taught in Scripture.
The final destination for Christians is not going to heaven, but entering and inheriting the kingdom established on earth by Jesus. In Scripture, the cross and resurrection are essential because they are God’s way of dealing with sin so that people can inherit the Kingdom. But forgiveness by repentance and acknowledging Jesus as both lord and Messiah is not your final destination.
His death is not only proof that “God loved the world in this way, that He gave His unique procreated Son” (John 3:16a), but also God’s declaration “that every person who believes in him should not perish but have the life” of that Kingdom age to come.
This also reshapes our Christian hope.
Jesus did not promise that Christians would escape to heaven when they die. Jesus clearly blessed the meek, “for they will inherit the earth” (Matthew 5:5).
He spoke of “the renewal of all things,” when the Son of Man will sit on his glorious throne and the apostles will sit on twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel (Matthew 19:28–29).
These things cannot be in heaven but on a restored earth, which we will possess in new spiritual bodies. As Paul says:
“If there is a natural body, there is also a spiritual body. So as it is written, ‘The first man, Adam, became a living person’; the last Adam became a life-imparting spirit. Yet the spiritual did not come first, but the natural. Then the spiritual came after that” (1 Corinthians 15:44–46).
Paul also summarizes the faith of Christians like this:
“For us there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things and we for Him, and one Lord, Jesus Messiah, through whom are all things and we through him” (1 Corinthians 8:6).
The one God is the Father; the one lord is the human Messiah through whom God will rule the world.
If this is the one saving Gospel, then it demands your complete attention and, more importantly, a change of mind and perspective.
“Repent and believe that Gospel,” Mark 1:15.
As Anthony once again nicely summarizes in his footnote to this verse:
The first command of Jesus is thus first to believe the Gospel about the Kingdom of God (Acts 8:12), which is the empire of the Messiah, certainly not a figurative kingdom “in the heart.”
To believe the Gospel is to accept as true that God’s Kingdom is coming, that Jesus has been made both lord and Messiah (Acts 2:36), that God has raised him from the dead, and that he will return to establish that promised Kingdom.
To be baptized, then, is to publicly pledge allegiance to the king of the coming Kingdom.
In sum, the saving gospel is the good news of God: that he has appointed a unique human—his own procreated Son, the Messiah—whom he raised from the dead to rule over the kingdom of his father David on earth. The pressing question for each of us is whether we have believed this gospel of the kingdom and the name of Jesus the Messiah.
May your “Christian living,” then, be marked by loyal obedience to the Law of Messiah (Gal. 6:2; 1 Cor. 9:21), so that when the kingdom finally comes, we may inherit the earth and rule the survivors from the nations with our King Jesus (Zech. 14:16–19; Ezek. 36:23–24, 36; cf. 1 Cor. 6:2; Rev. 2:26–27; 5:10).
