In yesterday’s study we said that people need a simple Gospel, not a simplistic Gospel—which we defined as one that is superficial and does not grapple with the deepest problems people have.
But when I am talking about a “simple” Gospel, that is something else. It is a gospel that is simple because it brings simplicity to areas that would be hopelessly confusing without it. Probably all great scientific and intellectual breakthroughs are simple in this sense. Before them, there was confusion. Afterward there was clarity and light. It is this way with the Christian Gospel, centered in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ; and the resurrection is the capstone of it all.
Accept that and the rest falls into place. Believe in the resurrection, and you have no difficulty with the other miracles, the full divinity of the Lord Jesus, the inspiration of the Scriptures, and a host of other things. Together these truths simplify man’s need and speak of that simple (though profound) remedy for that need which God has provided in Christ.
It is a great pity that Christian preaching does not always sound forth a clear note on this theme. Instead of the clear and certain sound of the trumpet we hear musical variations, and the truth is lost. A number of years before his death, when the noted Swiss theologian Karl Barth was in this country for a series of lectures, he was invited to speak to the National Press Club in Washington. Carl F. H. Henry, the founding editor of Christianity Today, presented him to the other reporters, and then asked this question: “Dr. Barth, you have written a good deal about the resurrection of Jesus Christ and you are standing before men who are accustomed to reporting unusual events. Tell us, according to your outlook, if these men had been present in the garden on that first Easter morning, would they have seen anything that they could later have reported in their papers?”
Barth did not like the question, He said, “What did you say your magazine was called? Christianity Yesterday?”
Henry answered, “Jesus Christ, the same yesterday, today, and forever.”
But then Barth went on to give a complex answer which, as anyone who knows his theology well would imagine, had to do with the belief that miracles are not actually a part of history but rather are tangential to it. They are real, according to Barth, but unobservable.
After a time Barth finished, and Carl Henry turned to a reporter who was near him. “Did you understand what he said?” Henry queried.
“I’m not sure,” the reporter answered, “but I think I did. I think he said ‘No.’”
Men do not need that kind of confusion, and the true nature of the resurrection does not encourage it. Christ rose, literally and bodily. That we have received. That we believe. That we earnestly declare to others. Moreover, men understand such teaching. Once, when the late President Harry Truman and his fellow Democrat Adlai Stevenson were together in an office high up in one of our modern buildings, Stevenson was bemoaning his traditional lack of success in politics.
“What am I doing wrong, Harry?” he asked.
Truman walked to the window and pointed to the milling people many floors below. “You don’t speak to the man down there,” he replied.
Unfortunately, we who are Christians often fail to do that also. But we need not fail, so long as we have that simple Gospel that is based on an historical and demonstrable resurrection.
