The Good News Is Better Than You Think

How the gospel both inspires and frightens us

Photo by Brooke Cagle on Unsplash

(An eight-minute read.)

Back when I was in my collegiate years and trying to figure out faith, I read a book, recommended to me by my dad, that was extremely helpful.

Written by a family friend, and a somewhat well-known (and controversial) figure in my denomination, it was entitled The Good News Is Better Than You Think, and it unpacked the utter unbelievable-ness of what Jesus-followers call “the gospel.”

Literally, the word “gospel” means “good news,” and the author, Robert J. Wieland, was trying to communicate that the “good news” is even better than we could ever think or imagine.

After all, not only does the gospel tell us God loves us apart from anything we do; the gospel tells us that we’re born into the world already in good standing with him.

We don’t have to do anything—even exercise faith—in order for God to approve of us.

Indeed, when Jesus experienced death on the cross, he experienced death for every person—and, thus, anyone who is eternally “lost” will be so because they’ve thrown away what God has already accomplished for them.

Of course, for many people, this “good news” sounds too good to be true. And the human tendency is to add “buts” and “howevers” and caveats and qualifications.

But such a move, Wieland proposed, can be deadly. Even a small amount of arsenic in your food will kill you, he pointed out. And thus, even a small amount of “yeah, but . . . ” mixed in with the “gospel” will neutralize the power of that good news, leading to spiritual (and, I’d add, emotional and relational) decay.

As I said, the book—and other similar books by Wieland—was extremely refreshing and inspiring to this young soul, though I’m not sure I understood the full implications of the concepts back then.

In fact, I think if I was to interact with Wieland (who passed away in 2011) today about those implications, he and I might disagree a little on how that gospel gets “cashed out.”

And that’s one of the reasons I bring all this up.

I thought of the title of that book, and the theology it espouses, after a conversation I recently had with a friend of mine. As I was explaining to him what I understood some of the implications of the gospel to be, it suddenly dawned on me that the gospel (or at least the “gospel” I was touting) actually probably sounded scary and unsafe to him.

As I’ve written before, I think one of the reasons the gospel is so “scandalous” is because it not only declares that we’re the recipients of God’s unmerited love—as amazing as that is. I think the gospel is so scandalous because it liberates us from certain actions and behaviors that we previously thought we needed to do (or not do).

Thus, to use a very simple (and Pauline) example: the first Jesus-followers concluded that, since God’s love was unmerited, Gentiles no longer had to get circumcised in order to be part of God’s covenant people.

In other words: the gospel liberated people from behaviors they previously understood they had to observe.

And this is a pattern that has been repeated throughout history.

Simply put, whenever people have come to richer and deeper understandings of the gospel, it has manifested in liberation from externally-imposed restrictions and behaviors (again, think of the Protestant Reformer, Martin Luther, and his attitude toward and criticism of the sale of indulgences).

For some people, this is a breath of extremely refreshing air. For others, it sounds frightening and scary—and sometimes the same person experiences both emotions at the same time.

Why?

Because there’s a lot of security that derives from having a “check list” religion. As long as I know what’s expected of me—as long as I can easily perform the simple duties that are required of me—I can feel good about my eternal standing.

What’s more, it’s also easier for me to determine if someone else is spiritually safe. When I see someone who eats the right things, wears the right things, watches the right things, sleeps with the right people, I can very easily determine their spiritual fitness and safety.

I can then either avoid them if they don’t toe the line, lest I become negatively influenced by them, or I can try to push them back into line so I can feel more secure about my own standing with God (since their participation in the behaviors I’m convicted of validates the basis for my security).

On the flip side, emphasizing “love” as the driving principle of human action is also scary to me. This is because it’s squishy and a bit nebulous, requiring some level of emotional intelligence and a reliance on the Spirit.

I just want to be able to have a “check list” that can tell me what the right action is toward others in every situation so I don’t have to be in tune with their feelings or understand their larger context.

Of course, there are “big” actions that I understand love will never allow me to do (love will restrict me from ever murdering someone, for example).

But the vast majority of situations I find myself in will be a lot more ambiguous and unclear (also: not murdering someone is a pretty low bar—and something I can do and yet still not really love a person).

When my nine-year-old thus comes into my room after bedtime for the hundredth time, saying she can’t sleep and she wants reassurance, what type of “check list” can help me determine the “proper” response?

And yet this situation is of far greater importance in determining my spiritual maturity than whether I wear a wedding ring or not.

I understand, of course, that it doesn’t have to be one or the other—and I don’t want to set up a false dichotomy.

Yet I’ve repeatedly noticed that whenever I’ve been the most preoccupied with worrying about externals—what someone wears, what someone eats, what someone watches, the style of music they use in their worship—it’s then that I become the most self-righteous and the least loving.

Laying down our arms

All this makes me think of something Paul wrote to believers in Corinth. In his second letter to them, he emphasized the audaciousness of that good news—how, amazingly, Christ’s death takes in every human being who ever has or ever will live. And because of this, none of us exist in a condemned state, having been liberated from what our selfish choices deserve.

And what are the implications of this reality?

Paul takes a turn after spelling this out, using the term “Wherefore” to inform how we live in response to this stupendous reality.

“Wherefore,” he goes on to explain, “we have stopped evaluating others from a human point of view” (2 Corinthians 5:16, NLT). We have laid down our arms and now refuse to judge people based on externals (The Message puts it even more incisively: “Because of this decision we don’t evaluate people by what they have or how they look”).

In short, we’ve been liberated from the human proclivity to divide into the “haves” and the “have-nots.” We’ve been freed from the tendency to sit in the judgment seat and declare who’s living in right relation to God and who isn’t.

This is not to say, of course, that we’ve forfeited the prerogative to organize spiritual communities that prioritize certain values, beliefs, and actions rather than others—and to expect those who want to participate in those communities to embrace and seek to live those out.

Neither is it to say that “everything goes” in a “cheap grace” sort of way.

It’s simply to say that the “good news” completely undermines any hint of self-righteousness and refuses to prescribe for other people what we’ve determined they need to do—or what we’ve determined the Bible says they need to do—in order to be on good terms with God.

We thus judge no one—including, and perhaps especially, ourselves—realizing that the good news is, indeed, radically better than we could ever think or imagine.

But as I said, this all sounds very scary to some—perhaps most—people. Going “all in” on the good news—going “all in” on Jesus—feels like too vulnerable of an act because it forces me to give up a bit of the control I thought I had when I thought the “check list” was the basis of my security.

So out of fear, I try to do Jesus plus the “check list” to hedge my bets.

But that’s a dead-end street that will eventually catch up to me—leading to either burnout, loneliness (because people who live by the “check list” aren’t the most pleasant people to be around), or the death that the “spiritual arsenic” inevitably leads to. Or some combination of all three.

But maybe there’s a better way. Maybe the good news is better than we think.

And maybe, just maybe, we might dare believe this radical and revolutionary thought from William Ellery Channing, delivered in 1832:

[Christianity is not] a narrow creed, or a mass of doctrines which find no support in our rational nature. It may be summed up in a few great, universal, immutable principles, which reason and conscience, as far as they are unfolded, adopt and rejoice in as their own everlasting laws, and which open perpetually enlarging views to the mind. As far as I am a Christian, I am free. My religion lays on me not one chain. . . . It speaks of God as the Universal Father, and sends me to all his works for instruction. It does not hem me round with a mechanical ritual, does not enjoin forms, attitudes, and hours of prayer, does not descend to details of dress and food, does not put on me one outward badge. It teaches and enkindles love to God, but commands no precise expression of this sentiment. . . . Christianity is eminently the religion of freedom.

Could this good news be true?

Simply put, I’d say if our “gospel” doesn’t liberate us from at least some of the old restrictions we imposed upon ourselves and others, then I’m not sure it’s truly the “gospel.”

Indeed, if the “good news” doesn’t sound too good to be true—if it doesn’t sound perhaps even a little scary—then I’m not sure it’s really the good news.

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Shawn is a pastor in Maine, whose life, ministry, and writing focus on incarnational expressions of faith. The author of four books and a columnist for Adventist Review, he is also a DPhil (PhD) candidate at the University of Oxford, focusing on nineteenth-century American Christianity. You can follow him on Instagram, and listen to his podcast Mission Lab.