UNIVERSAL GOSPEL What went wrong?

UNIVERSAL GOSPEL What went wrong?

Paul was entrusted with the Gospel of the Word of Reconciliation. And he entrusted that to Timothy and it has been entrusted to us. 
2Timothy 2:2 and what you have heard from me in the presence of many witnesses entrust to faithful men, who will be able to teach others also. 

The Gospel Word of Reconciliation.
2Corinthians 5:18 All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, God was  in Christ reconciling the world to himself, not counting their sins against them, and entrusting to us the message (logos) of reconciliation (katalasso).

Logos – (Strong’s Concordance)the Divine Expression (Christ) — account, cause, communication concerning doctrine. 
This is the ‘logos’ message, the Good news that God entrusted to Paul. Reconciliation is
Katalasso - kata thoroughgoing intensity, alasso means to alter or change and in God’s work of reconciliation he brought Divinity into humanity in a thorough mutual exchange. This was done through the incarnation of Jesus who became eternally changed from pure spirit being into the divine plus human spirit being of Jesus as a new creation, and we become this New Creation in Christ (Isaiah 7:14 – Virgin has a Son, Emmanuel ‘God with us’).

Peter also received the revelation of being made one in the spirit with Jesus and he preached the same message about the logos word of God as the seed that brings forth the life of the New Creation. He uses a simpler more organic language to convey it.
2Peter 1:4 we have been given exceedingly great and precious promises, that through these you may be partakers of the divine nature.
1 Peter 1:23 having been born again, not of corruptible seed but incorruptible, through the word of God (logos) which lives and abides forever. All flesh is like grass and all its glory like the flower of grass. The grass withers, and the flower falls, but the word of the Lord remains forever +++. And this word (logos) is the good news that was preached to you.

With Peter the illustration is that as that seed grows through faith, the outer husk of the seed, our outer soul-self life, is burned away by the fiery trials of faith.
1 Peter 4:12 Beloved, do not think it strange concerning the fiery trial which is to try you, as though some strange thing happened to you; 19 Therefore let those who suffer according to the will of God commit their souls to Him in doing good.
This redemptive transformational suffering result in the forever saving of our souls.
1Peter 1:9 Receiving the goal of your faith, the salvation/healing of the soul. 

Peter and Paul both had the same gospel, which was that Jesus the new seed of Heavenly life is sown into humanity (Incarnation) so that Divine life and human life become one new life. That describes the initial saving of the human spirit. Then occurs the ongoing salvation of our soul through faith and the purifying of our soul by the fiery trials of faith. John and James also preached this same universal work of the human spirit being eternally joined to God through the incarnation of Jesus.
John 1:10 That was the true Light which gives light to every man coming into the world.
Vs.16 And of His fullness we have all received, 

James 1:21 receive with meekness the implanted word (logos), which is able to save your souls.
There are people who are getting this revelation of the exchanged life of ‘God with us’ day after day because of the work of the Holy Spirit revealing the truth taught in the Bible. They can have this truth without knowing exactly what Paul wrote concerning Reconciliation or what Peter wrote about the logos seed of life, or what John or James wrote, but their hearts have received grace and been purified by faith - that is God’s work of grace. I am not insisting upon a dogmatic compliance to what I have found in these Scriptures - but having understood it by the grace of God I am compelled to not withhold anything that may be profitable to you for the sake of the Gospel.

Galatians 1:11 For I would have you know, brothers, that the gospel that was preached by me is not man’s gospel. For I did not receive it from any man, nor was I taught it, but I received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ. But when he who had set me apart before I was born, and who called me by his grace, was pleased to reveal his Son in me, in order that I might preach him among the Gentiles, I did not immediately consult with anyone;

The Gospel comes by revelation from the Holy Spirit in a myriad of ways. 

Peter comments on Paul’s message of Reconciliation – and politely says that it can be difficult to understand, but that it is inspired and should not be diminished or twisted.

2Peter 3:15 consider that the longsuffering (withholding of condemnation to achieve transformation) of our Lord is salvation—as also our beloved brother Paul, according to the wisdom given to him, has written to you, as also in all his epistles, speaking in them of these things, in which are some things hard to understand, which untaught and unstable people twist to their own destruction, as they do also the rest of the Scriptures.

Paul and Peter and James and John jealously guarded the integrity of this amazing salvation of the human spirit by the grace of God and the ongoing transformation and salvation of the human soul. 

Paul warns the legalistic Galatians about this.
Galatians 1:6 I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting him who called you in the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel— not that there is another one, but there are some who trouble you (tarasso - to strike one's spirit with fear and dread)
and want to distort the gospel of Christ. But even if we or an angel from heaven or anyone else should preach to you a gospel contrary to the one we preached to you, let him be accursed (anathema)

Being ‘accursed’ or being ‘anathama’ in the Greek is ana- handing up and tithemi – the gift. It is handing something up to God as a sacrificial gift to be purified from corruption.
The handing over leaves that person ‘cut off’ in isolation but the purpose is that the corruption will be destroyed so their spirit and soul can be purified. This is a redemptive act to transform and resttore someone from corruption. 
Paul makes this clear later when he says that Jesus has become the anathema curse for us. That is because Jesus took his incorruption up to the altar of the cross as a sacrifice to redeem humanity’s corruption. 
Galatians 3:13 Christ has redeemed us from the curse of the law, having become a curse for us (for it is written, “Cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree”), that the blessing of Abraham might come upon the all people in Christ Jesus, that we might receive the promise of the Spirit through faith. 

In 1 Corinthians 5:5 Paul even handed a man over to Satan for the ‘destruction of the flesh’ - his embodiment of a serious sin - that his spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus. It was the sin of committing adultery with his father’s wife. The man was cut off from the church community and afterwards turned from his sin and was forgiven and restored. That was not done out of a desire to punish but out of a redemptive desire to see forgiveness and transformation and restoration, which is what happened. 

Paul took the integrity of the true Gospel message very seriously. He sought to embody the Gospel in his soul as being one of love and care, and not one of motivating people by fear or from a place of assuming power over other people’s lives.
1Thessalonians 2:4-10 But as we have been approved by God to be entrusted with the gospel, even so we speak... But we were gentle among you, just as a nursing mother cherishes her own children. So, affectionately longing for you, we were well pleased to impart to you not only the gospel of God, but also our own souls (psyche), because you had become dear to us.

The Gospel message became diminished and narrowed over time, starting when Rome lorded Christianity over people turning it into Christendom, but then Martin Luther received the revelation of justification by faith in the reformation in the 1500s till denominational conflict and legalism crept back over the years. there are some who trouble you (tarasso - to strike one's spirit with fear and dread)
Jonathan Edwards was a profoundly spiritual man of puritan and reformed theology who preached powerfully and sincerely in the eighteenth century about the death and resurrection of Jesus as our saviour from sin, and many thousands responded to his message. But his influence of puritanism and Calvinism shaped the character of American Protestantism for many years, and it still distorts much modern evangelicalism, a gospel of retribution rather that transformation and restoration. The following is an excerpt of Jonathan Edward’s preaching from ‘Sinners in the hands of an Angry God’.

‘The bow of Gods wrath is bent, and the arrow made ready on the string, and justice bends the arrow at your heart and strains the bow and it is nothing but the mere pleasure of God and that of an angry God, without any promise or obligation at all that keeps the arrow for one moment from being made drunk with your blood.’
And why should God be obliged to express such wonderful love to you, who never exercised the least degree of love to him in all your life? You never have loved God, who is infinitely glorious and lovely; and why then is God under obligation to love you, who are all over deformed and loathsome as a filthy worm, or rather a hateful viper? 
(1John 4:18 perfect love casts out fear, because fear involves torment–kolasis punishment. But he who fears has not been made perfect in love. We love Him because He first loved us). And why then should God be looked upon as obliged to take so much care for your happiness, as to do such great things for it, as he does for those that are saved? 

there are some who trouble you (tarasso - to strike one's spirit with fear and dread)
This has resulted in a retributive Gospel of shame and guilt and condemnation that emphasises the fear of a likely future of eternal punishment in hell, which Paul never once mentions. 
A false gospel doesn’t just harm behaviour—it distorts our perception of God Himself.
The western Church has grown weaker in love and unity and stronger in pseudo spiritual performance and judging others and falling away.

Compare the angry God Gospel with the original early Christian era of Church Fathers like Athanasius who wrote around 350 AD. He was an Egyptian Coptic Christian Theologian and Church Father - the chief defender of the teaching of the Trinity. 

‘It was unworthy of the goodness of God that creatures made by him should be brought to nothing by the deceit wrought upon man by the devil, and it was supremely unfitting that the work of God in mankind should disappear either through their own negligence or through the deceit of evil spirits. As then the creatures whom He had created reasonable like the Word were in fact perishing and such noble works were on their way to ruin, what then was God, being good, to do? Was he to let corruption and death have their way with them – and in that case what would be the use of having made them in the beginning? Surely it would have been better never to have been created at all than have been created to be neglected and perish. And besides that, such indifference to the ruin of his own work before his own eyes would argue not goodness in God, but limitation, and that far more than if he had never created man at all. It was impossible therefore that God should leave man to be carried off by corruption because it would be unfitting and unworthy of himself…’ He writes further,Thus, taking a body like our own because all our bodies were liable to the corruption of death, he surrendered his body to death for us all, and offered it to the Father. This he did out of sheer love for us so that in his death all might die, and the law of death be abolished because having fulfilled in his body that for which he was appointed, death was thereafter voided of its power for men. This he did that he might turn men again to incorruption who had turned back to corruption and make them alive through death by the appropriation of his body and by the grace of his resurrection thus he would make death to disappear from them as utterly as straw from fire. 

Straw from fire is those fiery trials of faith that burn off straw and reveal the gold (1Corinthians 3:11++) But over time the gospel shifted from a cosmic announcement of what God has done for the world to a power based institutionalised message which gave a selective, conditional offer of what God might do if people believed that Jesus could forgive them and save them from going to hell if they obeyed what the church told them. 

What went wrong? there are some who trouble you (tarasso - to strike one's spirit with fear and dread).Since the time of Christ, a World population of almost 70 billion people has existed. How many people have heard the true gospel? What is true and what is false? Certain English words have been prejudicially translated from the original language that have altered the nature of the gospel and altered our perception of a loving, saving God - Words such as torment, wrath, eternity, hell, and perishing, and many others. How has that affected our current global Western culture relationally and morally? What questions remain? We will consider some possible answers in our next session - the Lord willing. 2Peter 3:9 The Lord…is longsuffering toward us, not willing that any should perish but that all should come to repentance (metanoia – a change of mindset).

Paul OSulivan - pauloss@me.com