The term "Gospel" comes from a Greek word "euangelion" which literally means “Good News.” So what is this good news? Well in Short! The Good News is nothing but the very person of Jesus Christ and the Salvation that comes through him. But there is more to this good news.
The opening chapters of the Bible teach us that the Gospel begins with God as the one who created all things. As the creator of all things He therefore gives us inherent value and meaning for our lives. It also means that, since God is our creator we are not autonomous beings, rather we are owned by him and therefore God has the right to tell us how to live. As his creation we have every duty to acknowledge him and to live under his soverign reign and rule over us as God.
Not long after God creating man , we see that Adam and Eve, our first human representatives, sinned by disobeying God and as a result sin entered into this world. According to the Bible, sin is a lot more than just the violation of some impersonal, arbitrary, heavenly traffic regulation. It’s the breaking of a relationship, and even more, it is a rejection of God himself—a repudiation of God’s rule, God’s care, God’s authority, and God’s right to command those to whom he gave life. In short, it is the rebellion of the creature against his Creator and as a result we became sinful by nature. Every part of our human existence is corrupted by sin and under its power. Our understanding, our personality, our feelings and emotions, and even our will are all enslaved to sin.
One of the most frightening statements in all the Bible is in Romans 3:19. It comes at the end of Paul’s indictment of all humanity—first the Gentile, then the Jew—as being under sin and utterly unrighteous before God. Here’s what Paul says, as the grand conclusion of the matter: “Every mouth [will] be silenced and the whole world held accountable to God” (NIV).
Man's rebellion and nature of sin offers nothing but the bad news. The Bible teaches that the final destiny for unrepentant, unbelieving sinners is a place of eternal, conscious torment called “hell.” Revelation describes it as a “lake of fire and sulfur,” and Jesus says it is a place of “unquenchable fire,” (Rev. 20:10; Mark 9:43).
BUT GOD.......These two words are among the most powerful words that a Human can ever speak. and coming after the bad news like what we just heard, these two words change everything. The bad news is not the end, there's more to the story....
Mark begins his account of Jesus’ life with the words, “The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.” From the very beginning, Mark and the other early Christians knew that the coming of Jesus Christ was God’s good news to a world destroyed and dead at the feet of sin. In the wake of sin’s dark devastation, the coming of Jesus was his piercing, thundering announcement that now everything had changed!
Put simply, the Bible tells us that Jesus took on flesh is both completely human and completely God. This is a crucial point to understand about him, for it is only the fully human, fully divine Son of God who can save us. If Jesus were just another man—like us in every respect, including our fallenness and sin—he would no more be able to save us than one dead man can save another. But because he is the Son of God, without sin and equal in every divine perfection to God the Father, he is able to defeat death and save us from our sin. In the same way, it is also critical that Jesus be truly one of us—that is, fully human—so that he can rightly represent us before his Father. As Hebrews 4:15 explains, Jesus is able “to sympathize with our weaknesses” because he “in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin.”
So, Jesus who was fully God ad man perfectly obeyed God's law, which is something no human was ever able to do. And he humbled himself to the point of then voluntarily allowing his own creation to nail him to the cross as he bled and died for the sins of His people.
King Jesus came to bring sinners into unto God by dying in their place and for their sin, taking their punishment on himself and securing forgiveness for them, making them righteous in God’s sight, and qualifying them to share in the inheritance of the kingdom (Col. 1:12).
Paul described it like this: “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us” (Gal. 3:13–14). And in another place he explained, “God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Cor. 5:21 NIV). Peter wrote, “Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God” (1 Pet. 3:18). And, “He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, that we might die to sin and live to righteousness. By his wounds you have been healed” (1 Pet. 2:24).
When Jesus died, it was not the punishment for his own sins that he endured. (He didn’t have any!) It was the punishment for his people’s sins! As he hung on the cross at Calvary, Jesus bore all the horrible weight of the sin of God’s people. All their rebellion, all their disobedience, all their sin fell on his shoulders. And the curse that God had pronounced in Eden—the sentence of death—struck.
That is why Jesus cried out in agony, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matt. 27:46). God his Father, who is holy and righteous, whose eyes are too pure even to look on evil, looked at his Son, saw the sins of his Son’s people resting on his shoulders, turned away in disgust, and poured out his wrath on his own Son.
Ultimately, it means that I’m the one who should have died, not Jesus. I should have been punished, not he. And yet he took my place. He died for me as my Substitute.
They were my transgressions, but his wounds. My iniquities, but his chastisement. My sin, his sorrow. And his punishment bought my peace. His stripes won my healing. His grief, my joy.
His death, my life.
If Christ had remained dead like any other “savior” or “teacher” or “prophet,” his death would have meant nothing more than yours or mine. Death’s waves would have closed over him just as they do over every other human life, every claim he made would have sunk into nothingness, and humanity would still be without hope of being saved from sin. But when breath entered his resurrected lungs again, when resurrection life electrified his glorified body, everything Jesus claimed was fully, finally, unquestionably, and irrevocably vindicated. esus now sits in splendor at the right hand of his Father in heaven, reigning as the King of the universe!
Mark tells us that Jesus began his ministry by preaching, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the gospel” (Mark 1:15). That command—repent and believe—is what God requires of us in response to the good news of Jesus
Faith and repentance. This is what marks out those who are Christ’s people, or “Christians.” In other words, a Christian is one who turns away from his sin and trusts in the Lord Jesus Christ—and nothing else—to save him from sin and the coming judgment.
Faith is one of those words that’s been misused for so long that most people have no idea what it really means. Faith is not believing in something you can’t prove, as so many people define it. It is, biblically speaking, reliance. A rock-solid, truth-grounded, promise-founded trust in the risen Jesus to save you from sin. But what exactly are we relying on Jesus for? To put it simply, we are relying on him to secure for us a righteous verdict from God the Judge, rather than a guilty one
When we put our faith in Jesus, we are relying on him to stand as our substitute before God, in both his perfect life and his penalty-paying death for us on the cross. In other words, we are trusting that God will substitute Jesus’ record for ours, and therefore declare us to be righteous (Rom. 3:22).
This salvation comes only through faith in him. There is no other way, no other savior, nothing and no one else in the world on which we can rely for salvation, including our own efforts. Putting your faith in Christ means that you utterly renounce any other hope of being counted righteous before God. To put it another way, it means jumping off the edge of the pool and saying, “Jesus, if you don’t catch me, I’m done. I’ve no other hope, no other savior. Save me, Jesus, or I die.”
If faith is turning to Jesus and relying on him for salvation, repentance is the flip side of that coin. It is turning away from sin, hating it, and resolving by God’s strength to forsake it, even as we turn to him in faith as our Lord. Repentance is more fundamentally a matter of the heart’s attitude toward sin than it is a mere change of behavior. Do we hate sin and war against it, or do we cherish it and defend it?
Placing our faith in Jesus and the good news of the Gospel is not a one time event that gives us entry into the the Kingdon of God but it must be our ongoing foundation for all spiritual growth and joy and purpose in life. On one hand drifting away from the cross drives us to legalism and selfrighteounesness and spiritual pride and on the other hand drifting from the cross leads us to feel the burden and guilt of not being able to keep the law and it leads to despair, sorrow and a burdensom Christisnity.
As we keep the cross at the centre it will righty correct our joys and purpose as believers to look to Christ and rely on him.