The Gospel: The Most Sacrificial Love Story in History.

The players: A Triune God. A rebellious people. A scrappy enemy.

The plot: The scrappy enemy of God entices a people to rebel and seek life outside their creator. No sacrifice made by the people in penitence satisfies a holy God, nor can they pull themselves up by the bootstraps to walk the way He would have them walk. So He becomes the solution by sending Himself in the flesh, providing an example and empathy. Once on earth, He destroys the paltry, cheap tricks and works and words of the enemy by living a life of irresistibility, sinlessness, and radical love. He washed the rebels’ feet with his sacred hands and told them to do likewise. Then He became the ultimate object lesson by giving those same hands and feet as nail-platforms. The perfect, irresistible, holy, beautiful, loving One chose the devil’s tool (death) for our sake, obliterating our sin, throwing it farther than east from west, inviting us back to Eden, to perfect, open, whole, healed relationship. And after his heart beat no more, he rested in the earth while the devil sang shrill victory songs, only to hear his whiny whimper when the God of Everything rose again, thrust away death’s icy grip, and revealed afresh just who God was and is and is to be.

That is the Gospel.