3. The use of the word in the New Testament. The history of the word in the New Testament books is worth notice. It seldom occurs in those lives of our Lord which are now emphatically so called, and where it does occur, it is " the gospel of the Kingdom " quite as frequently as " the gospel " of the King. The word is never used in Luke, and only twice in the Acts of the Apostles, both times in quotations. The Apostle John never employs it, either in his " Gospel " or in his Epistles, and in the Apocalypse the word is only once found, and then it may be a question whether it refers to the good news of salvation in Jesus Christ. John thought of the word which he had to proclaim as " the message," " the witness," " the truth," rather than as " the gospel." We search for the ex- pression in vain in the Epistles of James, Jude, and to the Hebrews. Thrice it is used by Peter. The great bulk of the instances of its occurrence are in the writings of Paul, who, if not the first to use it, is at any rate the source from which the familiar meaning of the phrase, as describing the sum total of the revelation in Jesus Christ, has flowed." ^
1[ I was a little girl, and scarcely knew anything, and this old man seemed to me such a different sort of a man from any- body I had ever seen before, that I thought he had perhaps come down from the sky to preach to us, and I said, " Aunt, will he go back to the sky to-night, like tne picture in the Bible ? "
That man of God was Mr. "Wesley, who spent his life in doing what our blessed Lord did — preaching the Gospel to the poor — and he entered into his rest eight years ago. I came to know more about him years after, but I was a foolish, thoughtless child
* Introduction to the New Testament, ii. 373. ^ A. Maclaren.
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then, and I remembered only one thing he told us in his sermon. He told us as " Gospel " meant " good news " The Gospel, you know, is what the Bible tells us about God.^
4. The Gospel is described in the New Testament by different phrases.
(1) The " gospel of Christ." It is His, not so much because He is the author, as because He is the subject of it. It is the good news about Christ. He is its contents and great theme. And so we are led up at once to the great central peculiarity of Christianity, namely, that it is a record of historical fact, and that all the world's life and blessedness lie in the story of a human life and death. Christ is Christianity. His biography is the good news for every child of man.
(2) The "gospel of God." This form of the expression, though by no means so frequent as the other, is found through- out St. Paul's Epistles, thrice in the earliest — Thessalonians (1 Thess. ii. 8), once in the great Epistle to the Eomans (i. 1), once in Corinthians (2 Cor. xi. 17), and once in a modified form in the pathetic letter from the dungeon, which the old man addressed to his "son Timothy" (1 Tim. i. 11). It is also found in the writings of St. Peter (1 Pet. iv. 7). In all these cases the phrase, "the gospel of God," may mean the gospel which has God for its author or origin, but it seems rather to mean " which has God for its subject." It was designated mainly as the good news about Jesus Christ, but it is also the good news about God. So in one and the same set of facts we have the history of Jesus and the revelation of God.
IF There is a double modification of this phrase. We hear of " the gospel of the grace of God " and " the gospel of the glory of God," which latter expression, rendered in the English version misleadingly "the glorious gospel," is given in its true shape in the Eevised Version. The great theme of the message is further defined in these two noteworthy forms. It is the tender love of God in exercise to lowly creatures who deserve something else that the Gospel is busy in setting forth, a love which flows forth unbought and unmotived save by itself, like some stream from a hidden lake high up among the pure Alpine snows. The story of Christ's work is the story of God's rich unmerited love, bending down to creatures far beneath, and making a radiant ^ Dinah Morris in Adam Bede, ch. ii.
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pathway from earth to heaven, like the sevenfold rainbow. It is so, not merely because this mission is the result of God's love, but also because His grace is God's grace, and therefore every act of Christ which speaks His own tenderness is therein an apocalypse of God.
The second of these two expressions, " the gospel of the glory of God," leads up to the great thought that the true glory of the Divine nature is its tenderness. The lowliness and death of Christ are the glory of God ! Not in the awful attributes which separate that inconceivable Nature from us ; not in the eternity of His existence, or in the Infinitude of His Being; not in the Omnipotence of His unwearied arm, or in fire-eyed Omniscience, — but in the pity and graciousness which bend lovingly over us, is the true glory of God. These pompous "attributes" are but the fringes of the brightness, the living white heart of which is love, God's glory is God's grace, and the purest expression of both is found there, where Jesus hangs dying in the dark. The true throne of God's glory is not builded high in a remote heaven, flashing intolerable brightness and set about with bending principalities and powers, but it is the Cross of Calvary. The story of the " grace of our Lord Jesus Christ," with its humiliation and shame, is the "gospel of the grace," and therefore it is the " gospel of the glory of God."