The True Meaning of the Gospel of Christ

See, the gospel of Christ is not about saving us from hell and delivering us into heaven. The gospel of Christ is about redeeming, reconciling, and restoring mankind to the family of God. That is what the gospel of Christ is. And all of these words are different.

When you talk about the word redemption, to redeem something means to purchase it back. To get it back. And why do we have to be redeemed? Because of sin. Because when Adam sinned, all of us were condemned because of his sin. We're also condemned because of our own sins. But those are two different things.

See, we we're a body of sin because because of Adam. Adam in his fallen condition was divorced from the family of God. And we inherit the corruption through Adam. Sin and death and entropy and degeneration, we inherit it from Adam. And because of Adam's sin, Adam and his offspring were condemned with the dragon and his angels. So we are born, the human condition is one of condemnation, degeneration and condemnation. We degenerate, we die, and we are condemned with the enemies of God.

That is part of the story of the prodigal son because the prodigal son becomes indentured to the swine herd. Who is the swine herd? He's an archetype of Satan. So when we are born into the world, we are born into a we are born as indentured servants, slaves to the swine herd. And because we are slaves to the swine herd, legally so because we chose to rebel against God, to throw our lot in with his enemies. That was what happened in the garden. That was about allegiance, the garden of Eden. And they chose to listen to the enemy of God and to heed his voice over the voice of their father. And so what was the result? They would be condemned with him. Condemned. Condemned with the dragon and his angels, right? And so the devil has this legal hold over mankind. He's the chief of sinners, Satan. And and all sinners, all the rep probate belong to him and are condemned with him. Belong to him in the sense that they're they're going to be condemned with him. Right?

So that's where the word redemption comes in. Because in this fallen state, in the state of condemnation, we had to be purchased, bought back from the swine herd. Somebody had to pay our debt. See, that's what in being an indentured servant means. When you would enter into indentured servitude, you it meant that you had a debt and you couldn't pay it off and you had to work for your master until you could pay your debt off. But see, our problem is that we are unable to pay our debt off. And so, we needed a kinsman redeemer to pay it for us. And that's called redemption. Remember the song of the lamb in the book of Revelation. You purchased men for God. By your blood, you purchased men for God. That is redemption. We're redeemed from the swine herd.

Why are we redeemed? So that we might be reconciled. See, redemption happens through the cross of Christ. He paid with his blood. He paid for our sin. And I want to remind everybody that Jesus had the power to forgive sins before he was crucified. Remember when they lowered the parapolgic in in into the house and and they said and Jesus said to him, "Your sins are forgiven." And the Pharisees and the Sadducees were insensed. How can who are you to say his sins are forgiven? Only God can forgive sins. And what did he say to them? So that you may know that the son of man has the authority to forgive sins. He looked at the man and he said, "Take up your bed and walk." And the man, the parapolgic, was healed. He stood up, took up his bed, and walked.

How is it that Christ had the power to forgive sins before he went to the cross? Because there's two kinds of sin. Your sins that you've committed personally, your offenses, and the sin of Adam. your sins could be forgiven through sacrifices and so forth in the in the in the uh at the temple and in the and then in in in the Hebrew system. Your sins could be forgiven by the appropriate sacrifice of animals and so forth. It was still blood. It was still a blood sacrifice, but the sin of Adam, the original sin of mankind, the one that caused us to become indentured to the swine herd. We could not, we had no power to be forgiven from that sin. It took a son of Adam to walk perfectly before the father and to offer up himself as the sacrifice and as the recompense for our sin to take upon himself the penalty of Adam's sin and to crucify it and redeem us by doing so redeem us from the dragon in condemnation with the dragon.

So we're redeemed so that we might be reconciled. And what does the word reconciliation mean? Brought back into fellowship, brought back into friendship. And what does the New Testament teach us? That we are enemies of God. Or we were once enemies of God. Enemies of God. But the cross of Christ brings reconciliation. and reconciliation is being restored to fellowship and friendship with the father. So we are enemies. We are indentured to the swine herd and we are enemies of God just like the dragon is an enemy and our fate is going to be his fate. But the gift of God, the son of God, came as a kinsman redeemer to redeem us from the swine herd, from the from from condemnation with the dragon and through his sacrifice reconcile us to the father so that we might be restored to everything that was lost in Adam. Everything that was lost in Adam is regained and restored through the second Adam, through the son of God, through Jesus of Nazareth.

So the gospel is much more extraordinary than we've ever thought. We're redeemed so that we might be reconciled so that me we might be restored back into fellowship in the divine family, back into the family of God. Restored to the genetic blueprint of Adam and all those abilities that are inherent in the human species but are deadened because of degeneration are going to return and be rectified. Our biology, our physiology is going to be rectified at the resurrection. So the resurrection is about transforming us, resetting us back to the blueprint of our original progenitor of Adam, our father. So we're not only going to be restored to the family of God, reconciled, brought back into fellowship, but our biology is going to be rectified.

We have this misconception that the kingdom of heaven is this spiritual place, this intangible ethereal place, the spiritual dimension. That's how a lot of Christians talk about it. But the question is, is that really a biblical concept? And I think that the idea, the notion that heaven is an ethereal spiritual place, it it resonates more withnosticism than it does with Christianity, with biblical Christianity, at least with the ancient Hebrew perspective, because in the Gnostic tradition, the material world is evil. And it's and and gnostics uh would conceptualize a world that was a that was a spiritual world that was pure and good and the and the physical and the material was evil and corrupt. But that's a false dichotomy. The the spiritual and the physical are two sides of the same coin. We are physical and spiritual beings. And it's not that we have a physical person and a spiritual person. I'm not a divided person. I am one person, a whole person who is a physical person with a spiritual component that is part and parcel to my biology. In other words, I'm not just inhabiting flesh. I'm not the real me is not just inhabiting flesh. The real me is composed of my flesh. It's a facet of who I am. And I know that because there's something called the resurrection. And the resurrection is the hope of the gospel. And the resurrection makes no sense at all if we're just driving around these meat sacks for a little while and then we get rid of them and we become these ethereal beings. If that's the case, then what is the purpose of the resurrection? Because at the resurrection, our bodies are resurrected. We're we we are are going to be who we are right now. We're going to be just like the resurrected Christ who still bore the marks of the crucifixion. He was Jesus of Nazareth in every way. The same Jesus that the disciples knew. He wasn't an ethereal version of Jesus or a spiritual version of Jesus. He was a physical version of Jesus. He was the same God but in a resurrected condition. And that's why when he appeared to the disciples, they were afraid. They thought he was a ghost. And what did he say to them? This is so many people pass over this and they don't realize what's going on. What did Jesus say to them? He said, "Touch me. See that I am flesh and blood. Touch me. Touch my hands." They touched him. And then he said to further prove his corporal reality, his his physical reality, he said, "Do you have anything to eat?" And they had fish and bread and they gave it to him. And it says he ate it in their midst. That was to demonstrate that he was a human being. He was the same human being with whom they had sucked before he was crucified. and he was eating and he was drinking with him.

So what is the resurrection? First of all, we must recognize that going to heaven is not the hope of the believer. That is an unbiblical concept. The hope of the believer is the resurrection. And Paul says if the res if Christ had not been raised from the dead, then we are to be pied among men. We are to be most pied because our hope hinges on the resurrection. What is the resurrection? The resurrection is the restoration of mankind to the blueprint of Adam. So when we are resurrected, we are going to be resurrected with our DNA. We're going to be who we are now, but our genetic code is going to be completely purified, restored to the unadulterated blueprint of Adam, the genetic blueprint of Adam. We're not all going to look like Adam. We're all going to retain the genetic trademarks that make us who we are. But without the mutations, we will become at the resurrection more human than we are right now. It's a full circle back to where we started.

And this is, of course, the parable of the prodigal son. And the parable of the prodigal son really is a summation of everything that we've been talking about. And we're all familiar with the parable of the prodigal son. There's five characters in that story. There's the father, there's the older son, there's the younger son, there's the servants in the father's house, and there's the swine herd. And the story as the story goes is a parable of Jesus that Jesus told the older son and the younger son were co-inheritors of the father's estate. They shared the father's estate. Why? They were siblings. But there was an older sibling and a younger sibling. And the younger sibling said to his father, "Give me my inheritance so I can go spend it now. Give it to me now." And the father gave him his inheritance. And of course, we know that the son went and spent his inheritance on wild living and prostitutes and whatever, wild living, drinking and whatever. And a great famine struck the land. And he became destitute. He spent all of his money. He became destitute. and he became indentured to a swine herd because he no longer had money and he had to go work for a swine herd to try and work off his debt. And during this famine and during this famine he was so destitute, he was so depraved that he had to eat the slop of pigs. So he cared for the pigs and he had to eat what they were eating. He was the lowest of the low. He hit rock bottom. He was eating the slop of pigs. And that is representative of our enslavement to sin and to Satan. That's what that represents. That represents our condemnation with the dragon. We're indentured to the swinehood. We're indentured to Satan because of sin.

And the prodical son, it dawns on him that even the servants in my father's house are living better than this. So, I'm going to go back to my father and I'm going to plead with him, "Father, I'm no longer worthy to be called your son. Just receive me back as a lowly servant. I'm just I've forfeited my sunship because I I went and squandered my inheritance. So, I'm not asking to be a son. Just make me a servant. The least of your servants is better than being indentured to the swine herd." So, he went back to his father.

So before I progress, see this is a depiction of a person receiving the gospel of Christ. Receiving the gospel of Christ isn't saying a prayer. It's recognizing your depravity. This is what happens. The first thing that happens is repentance. This is what the prodical son did. He recognized the depravity of his condition. Look at me. I'm filthy. I've wasted my inheritance. I'm eating the slop of pigs. I need to go back to the father's house. If only to be received as a lowly servant. This is repentance. He recognized his depravity and repented in his heart and determined he would go back to his father. And so he went back to his father.

And the prodigal son expected his father to be to be bristling with anger. And instead, to his surprise, he found the father waiting for him at the door. The father was waiting for him to return, looking out over the landscape, eagerly waiting for the his son to return. And when he saw him, he ran out to meet him. And rather than being bristling with anger like the like the son thought, the father was brimming with joy. And he and he fell on his son and embraced him and kissed his neck and and said to his servants, "Quick, quick, bring new clothes. Bring new sandals." So they brought him new clothes and and put new clothes on him and they shot his feet with sandals. The new clothes that are placed on the sun, remember this is a parable of Jesus. The new clothes that that he's draped with is representative of the resurrection and the righteousness of Christ. This the sandals that are that are brought to shod his feet are representative representative of sunship because in the ancient world during the Roman times when Jesus was saying this was telling the people this parable it's the Roman Empire. It was it was a mark of a slave in many cases was that they did not wear shoes. They went barefoot. And so by the father saying bring sandals to put on his feet, that's a signal that he's being received not as a servant but as a son. And then the final the final symbol of sunship was a ring was put on his finger. That's the seal of the father's house. He's being brought back in to fellowship with the father in his house, not as a servant, but as a son, even though he had squandered his inheritance. And so the father brings him in and he tells his servants, "Let's let's have a feast. Let's celebrate. Kill the fattened calf." And so they began to celebrate.

And the older son who was out in the fields heard all this commotion coming from the house and he called a servant and he said, "Hey, what's going on?" And he told him, "Your younger brother has returned and the father your father has thrown him a feast." And the older son is insensed. Remember, they were co-inheritors of the father's estate. The older brother's insensed and he goes to talk to the father and he says, "I have been loyal to you. I've been with you this whole time. I never left. I never squandered my inheritance. And yet you've never thrown me a feast. You've never even allowed us to to to kill a goat and celebrate and and celebrate with my friends. Why are you doing this for my younger brother who who squandered his inheritance and basically slapped you in the face?" And the father's reply is the heart of the gospel. He says, "Because this brother of yours was lost and is found. He was dead and is alive again." And that is the heart of the gospel.

Remember when when Jesus says that that that the the good shepherd leaves the 99 or whatever it is and to go and and get the one to to go and get the prodigal son. What does he mean? Us. We are the prodigal son. We are the prodical son. That's us. Because that prodigal son is representative is symbolic of Adam. Adam is the younger brother who squanders his inheritance, who becomes indentured to the swine swine herd. That's Adam. Who's his older brother? It's the other sons of God, his elder siblings who did not squander their inheritance. Now, of course, we know that a faction of them were in a state of rebellion and those that's the swine herd and Adam's lot was thrown in with them because of sin. He was condemned with them. But the older siblings in that story with whom we share a co or we're supposed to share a co-inheritance of the kingdom, that's the only place. And so the gospel of Christ is perfectly portrayed in the parable of the prodigal son.

Remember on the eve of his crucifixion when he's sitting with his disciples and Jesus says to them in my father's house are many ruins and I am going there to prepare a place for you and if I go and prepare a place for you I will also come back and get you so that so that you may be where I am. And one of the disciples said to him we don't know where you're going. How do we get there? We don't we don't know where you're going. He said, "I am the way, the truth, and the life. No man comes to the father but through me." Jesus in that occasion on the eve of his crucifixion was invoking the parable of the prodigal son that he had told to his disciple to his disciples previously. He was he was invoking that parable. Remember the parable of the prodigal son. You are the prodigal son and I am going to bring you back to the father's house. That's the gospel of Christ. Redeemed from the swine herd, reconciled to the father, and restored to sunship in the family of God. And that happens through the resurrection.

Remember when Jesus said to Nicodemus that you must be born again, you can't even see the kingdom of heaven. See, we've misinterpreted that. We think that being born again is some kind of an emotional experience or it's a reorientation of our morals. It's a moral thing. We were I used to drink. I used to sleep around. I used to take drugs. But then I got saved and I got born again and I don't do those things anymore. See, what we're doing unintentionally is we're belittling what it means to be born again. To be born again means that you are literally born again. In other words, the resurrection. To be born again is the resurrection. You are remade in the likeness of Adam, restored to the blueprint, the original blueprint. You're going to be you still. You're going to look like you, but you're going to be restored. And you are going to be returned to the family of God as a son of God. That's being born again, going back into the family. That is the gospel of Christ.

And so and so many people are are missing the story. They're they're preaching the hellfire and they're preaching the what they believe is is is the testimony which is I used to do bad things and then I got born again and now I don't. That's not the testimony. The testimony is mankind is condemned with the dragon. We were once with the father. Our purpose was fellowship with the father. But because of sin, we became indentured to the swine herd. And we are now enemies with go of God. We are enemies of God. But the gift of God, the son of God has made a way of reconciliation to go back into the family. That's the gospel. Yes. If you reject the gift of God, then you will be condemned with the dragon and suffer his fate. But the good news of the gospel is, hey, we can go back into the family through Christ who has made a way. And that is why the old the the ancient church referred to the gospel and to their their fellowship as the way because Jesus was the way back to the father back to fellowship and friendship with the father. That's what it meant. He is the way back into the family.

See, that's the culmination of the gospel. Not we go to heaven. No, it's much more remarkable and extraordinary than that. We're going back into the family and we're being restored to the blueprint of Adam. And all those capabilities inherent in the human species are going to be restored. And we're going to be with the son of God in the family of God and with our elder siblings. And there's nothing more there there's nothing better than being restored to your original purpose.

Not only did the son of God come to redeem us and take us back into the family of God, he had to pay for arson, for the sin of Adam with suffering. He had to be broken and whipped and take upon himself the suffering and the sin of mankind and the suffering that we deserved as a result of the penalty of our sin. He took it upon himself. That's why the apostle writes by his stripes we are healed. And you see we interpret that as by his stripes oh we're healed of cancer, we're healed of heart disease. We're healed of whatever. No, that's not what it means. It means by his stripes, the whipping that he took, the the abuse, the suffering that he went through, the crucifi crucifixion. Because of that, we who are in Christ are healed in the sense that we are reconciled and restored. We're going to be restored to what we were. Healed in the grandest sense, not your temporary condition. Because even if you have cancer and you're healed, you're still going to die. That's the healing that that verse is referencing. It's not your temporary affliction. It's the resurrection. By his stripes, you are going to be reconciled to God, resurrected to the blueprint of Adam, and brought into the family, made whole again, restored. That's what those stripes accomplish. Not some temporary alleviation of a temporal affliction, but an eternal restoration of your condition reset to the blueprint of Adam, brought back into the family.

So, the gospel of Christ, unfortunately, is only being preached by degrees. the the whole story has yet to really be be brought forth and expounded to mankind since since the early church who I believe and it's evident in the New Testament that the the apostles were rocked by the gospel. They understood and if you read the gospels you're going to see that the theme primary theme of the New Testament is the resurrection. That's the primary theme. the whole the whole New Testament uh the the the the epistles, all the writings of the apostles hinge on the resurrection because that's the culmination of our story. Divorced from the family, destitute, indentured to redeemed, reconciled, and restored. the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Paul says that you're going to sin until the day you die. Why? Because you are wearing a body of sin. That's the reason why the resurrection is necessary. Praise God. So that's why Jesus said, "You can't even see the kingdom of heaven, let alone enter it without being born again. You have to be resurrected if you are going to go into the kingdom. You are not a son until the resurrection. And we know that because Jesus when replying to the I forget if it was the Pharisee I believe it was the Pharisees who were trying to perplex him with this with this parable of a woman who had multiple husbands while she was alive. And they said when she dies because she had all these husbands whose wife is she going to be in heaven basically. And Jesus says, "No, you don't understand. You know, you're neither neither marry the sons of God neither marry nor are given in marriage, right?" But he says that basically paraphrasing, you're going to be like the angels being sons of the resurrection. So, you're not a son of God again until you're reborn at the resurrection. And it is the power of the resurrection that makes you a son of God again like Adam was. Adam did not have a physical father. In the same way when we are born again through the resurrection. Our new birth is effectuated not by flesh and blood but through the power of God. Literally resurrected and reset. That's the power of God. It's not through the will of the flesh. It's not through the birth canal. It's not water and blood. It's the spirit of God. We're being born again and reset. That is the entry into the into the kingdom of heaven. And that is why everything hinges on the resurrection. And I believe that Christians need to return to the resurrection and need to hinge the gospel on the resurrection because the resurrection of Jesus was the validation that what he said was true. It was the validation and that's how the apostles preached the resurrection of Christ. And just as he is, he was resurrected if you believe in him.

That's what baptism is. By the way, baptism isn't just a confession of faith. Baptism is an affirmation of the gospel of Christ, which says that I, in my sinful state, am putting my hope in Christ, and I am identifying with his death. That's going under the water. I'm identifying with his death. I'm putting my hope in Christ and believing that he was raised from the dead and sits at the right hand of the father so that when I die, I too may be raised with him and be as he is a son of God in the kingdom of heaven. And that is the hope of the gospel. That is the meaning of baptism. And we and and I believe that Christians need to return to these fundamental principles that we've gotten so far away from. And because that's the power of the gospel. That is the power of the gospel when you understand the story because that's that's what the biblical narrative is. It is a story and it's laid out before us. And and we have so many Christians have become bored with the gospel because they think they've understood it. They've comprehended it. And I'm telling you that we have not truly comprehended the glory and the gravity of the gospel of