The
Gospel in Your Hands presentation seeks to use one’s hands as in means to
share and demonstrate the gospel of Christ. He begins by saying that his
right hand is God, and that his left hand is us as we are created in his image,
a reflection. We share certain characteristics with God, and we were once
in a perfect relationship with Him. Our failure is breaking the
relationship by breaking God’s trust and thinking that we can exist on our own
without God. As a result, mankind died spiritually and physically, and
this death brought fear and suffering into our lives. If we could restore
our relationship, we would have life, but since we cannot restore the
relationship, God must do it for us through Christ. Christ experienced
our suffering and sin on the cross as a result of our sin and us causing the
broken relationship. By dying on the cross, Christ bore our sins and
suffering unto their respective deaths. If we trust Christ, He will bring
us back into a relationship with the Father just as He Himself rose from the
grave to be reunited with God.
The
Gospel in Your Hands presentation lacks several important facets of the gospel
of Christ which cannot be removed or diminished. The most glaring failure
of this particular gospel presentation is its complete lack of God’s judgment
and righteous wrath. No mention of hell or heaven is made in a direct
statement, and man’s sin becomes boiled down to a broken relationship, or a
broken trust. In a sense, the gospel story presented revolves around
God’s goodness in allowing us to come back into a relationship with him, and it
leaves out how our sin ought to have brought the wrath of God upon us and sent
us to eternal damnation in hell. The presentation can lead the listener
to believe that he or she is just wrong because of how they feel or currently
live in alienation to God, and they might never understand how the wages of our
sin is eternal death in hell and being labeled as God’s enemy. A listener
may never grasp the true significance sin as the reason God must judge.
If
the gospel story contains a failure in demonstrating the wrath of God, then it
follows that the announcement of the gospel, the actual good news, will be
skewed. In the presentation, Christ’s death on the cross is rightly
designated as paying for our sin and shame, but because our failure is a broken
relationship, Christ’s death only acts as a bridge to God when it ought to
include how Christ’s death has averted the wrath of God from falling on our
shoulders. A saved person becomes someone who feels restored and purpose
filled rather than someone who has restoration and purpose because they have
escaped damnation and been given new life.
Also,
the gospel community which would form around the gospel of this presentation
would have not have an understanding of how they are continually restored into
the graces of God, and a listener would not understand even that a community of
believers ought to form or what they ought to do after being saved. It could
be understood from this gospel presentation that we ought to live lives which
are in unity with God, but our only explanation of how this takes places is
tied up in how Christ brings us back. No mention of the Holy Spirit is
given, and as such, a listener will have no understanding of how they can be
regenerated into new life. Also, without the spirit of God living inside
of us, we will have no means of sanctification, and the gospel community would
bear no distinctions from the world. The gospel community must have an
urgency to evangelize, but if this urgency revolves around restoring people
into a relationship with God, it loses its strength as it doesn’t acknowledge
that those who are lost are enemies of God and doomed to die. The presenter
does acknowledge that we will die without Christ, but if us being “with Christ”
does not entail His Spirit dwelling in us, His love being shown in the church
community, and our ever perseverant efforts in Christlikeness, then we will not
understand what being “without Christ” would entail. We would be dead without
Christ’s life in us, a community which loves us, and a life which meets God’s
standards of justification and faith. If the presenter would have spent
more time on the story of the gospel and included things such as hell, God’s
wrath, God’s law, and the Holy Spirit, then the announcement of the good news would
become more evident, and the community which should follow would be better
understood. The use of the hands in the presentation should be used more
as an attention getter and less as an analogy; perhaps then, the presentation
of the gospel will reach its fulfillment.
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