The Gospel has the Answers!

We often hear it said that the Bible has the answer, in fact it is claimed by some that the bible contains within it the answer to all life’s problems. What do they mean by this? Do they mean that each particular question in life will find a particular answer in the Bible? Or do they mean that it will give the answer to all the questions that matter – and if your question isn’t answered in the bible then maybe it wasn’t worth asking in the first place.

Or perhaps they mean that the Bible gives you only one answer but that one answer, Jesus Christ, is sufficient as the answer to any question you would care to ask, as the solution to any problem you could think of.

I don’t like the first idea - that the Bible has an individual answer to every individual question. I don’t think it’s true, I think it makes an idol of scripture and leads us away from Christ. The Bible is not the Qur’an and we should not treat it in the same way that Muslims treat their scriptures. For them the major miracle is the Qur’an. Muhammad is important because he was the means by which they receive what they consider to be the Word of God.

For Christians the opposite should be true. For us the major miracle, the word of God is the person of Jesus Christ, God-incarnate, second person of the trinity, saviour, redeemer, crucified, risen and ascended, powerfully present and available to us here and now. The bible is so important because it is the means by which we are able to receive Christ. Be clear about the difference, Muhammad brings the Qur’an, the Bible brings Christ.

The second idea is less likely to lead us so far astray. I think it serves us better though to say the Gospel has the all answers not the Bible.

When I say the Gospel I’m not referring to Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. The Gospel existed in the years before these ‘Gospels’ were written. Think about whether you agree with that statement or not, and if you do what are the implications of it?

The Gospel – singular – means what God has done, not a book or story about what God has done.

God didn’t write a book, he chose a people and spent several thousand years communicating with them through prophets.

God didn’t write a book he sent his Son into the world to be crucified and resurrected.

God didn’t redeem us in the pages of a book, he really did it, he really did it when his Son died and rose again.

So when I talk about the Gospel I’m talking about God’s interaction with us. It means the incarnation, the resurrection, the pentecost. The book is not more important than these events described in it.

So I prefer to say that the Gospel has all the answers.


Remember the Gospel is God’s communication with us, God’s action for us. The Gospel is God incarnating, resurrecting, redeeming. What can we learn from these events?

Put like this doesn’t the Gospel give us more questions than answers?


The resurrection plants a huge question mark over everything else. The resurrection tells us that there is another world beyond this world and we know nothing about it. The resurrection tells us that there’s an eternity and infinity beyond our space and time and we have no knowledge of it. It puts up a wall, if you like. It tells us that there is more, much more to life than we can understand. It puts everything we humans achieve in the shade, every bit of human knowledge is shown to be really not very much compared to this other world, this other power, this other reality that is revealed to us in the resurrection.

So we’ve gone from saying that the bible has all the answers to saying that it’s the Gospel that has the answers. And we’ve gone from thinking about this revelation, this set of actions performed by God, as something that brings us questions every bit as much, if not more than it brings us answers.

We’ve been thinking about this on a very grand scale up to now. After all Jesus was sent for all people: he has redeemed people in every corner of the earth; this Gospel of Jesus Christ has been preached to men, women and children for ever such a long time and by the grace of God this will happen for a long time to come. So when we say that the Gospel plants a question mark over the human race we might think first of all about a question mark being placed over the grand achievements of humankind – our inventions and discoveries, our culture and history, all the towers of Babel that we always build; and of course our collective disgraces in the form of wars, famine, injustice, genocide.

I’ve no doubt that all of humanity’s achievements and disgraces have to be seen against the question mark of the Gospel. Putting a man on the moon or curing small pox are very small things if we take seriously the idea that God became man and offers us eternal life. War, slavery, the holocaust, all these things even are relativized by the cross – that is to say that no matter how evil or stupid or hateful humankind is we cannot overcome the saving love and forgiveness that God provides in Christ.

But Christ didn’t just die for all of humanity. He died for us as individuals. He died for you and me. He died for the man next door, for the person you sit next to but never talk to on the train, for the person going the other way on the motorway. And he plants a question mark on you and me.

We believe in a living God, and we have a living dynamic spiritual relationship with God through Christ and the Holy Spirit. This means that everything we do stands under judgement – there’s nothing that we can do, nothing we can achieve, no good work or brilliant idea that is really any good at all, that is really any thing at all when seen from the point of view of the cross. But there again there’s no sin that we might commit, no carelessness or stupidity or even evil in us that is enough to overcome God’s grace. Our goodness, our evil, our actions, our power, our authority, our everything is shown up as really very limited, as barely anything at all when put beside the cross – the cross that is a reality in each of our lives.

The Gospel, because it is a real and living spiritual entity, is not just able to give us answers– it is able to ask us questions. What sort of questions does Jesus ask of us?


‘What are you going to do today?’ That’s not much of a question, it doesn’t seem very profound and so when we ask each other this question we tend to get a rather ordinary answer.

Lets imagine then that when you open your eyes tomorrow morning Jesus will be standing in front of you, he calls you by your name and then asks you ‘What are you going to do today?’ If Jesus asked me that question I would think very hard indeed about the answer, we all would wouldn’t we? If Jesus asked me that question I would have to give a satisfactory answer. I think I’d have to change my plans.

If Jesus stood in front of you right now as you’re reading this and asked you: ‘What are you going to do for the rest of the day?’ What would you say?

And if Jesus phoned you up and asked you ‘What are you going to do with your life?’ what sort of answer could any of us give?

Isn’t it the case that the most simple, straightforward questions become profound and searching if we imagine Jesus asking that question of us. There’s something about who and what Jesus is, the fact that we cannot lie to him, we cannot bear to disappoint him, that should make us question ourselves constantly.

Because if we would live our life under the cross then the cross will ask questions of us. ‘What are you going to do with your life?’ ‘How will you act towards other people today?’ The most every day activity, the most seemingly unimportant matter is transformed the second that we imagine that Jesus is questioning us about it.

What are you going to eat for dinner? What are you going to say to the people that you meet tomorrow? How are you going to behave the next time someone does something to annoy you? What are you going to spend your money on? Jesus asks us all this because he is a living saviour, because he sees us, he hears us, and he loves us.

As a child it never occurred not to do what I was told by my parents. I used to marvel at some of my mates who would be called by their parents and they simply wouldn’t answer, they’d act like they couldn’t hear them, like they weren’t even there. Sadly I think I might have become someone who does the same thing but in a much worse way. The voice of Jesus calling us and questioning us, ‘what are you going to do about this?’ ‘how are you going to follow me today?’ I don’t just give the wrong answer and do the wrong thing. I pretend that I can’t hear him.

There isn’t a single thing that any of us will do today that can’t be transformed by the Gospel. There may not be a ready made answer in the pages of Matthew, Mark, Luke, John or even anywhere in the Bible. But there’s a question mark there, always, against everything we do and everything we think. We believe in a God that isn’t buried in texts, in the pages even of scripture. Try letting God be active in your life by exposing yourself to the question mark that the Gospel has placed in front of you. In everything that you do Jesus asks you to explain yourself. Try it with the simplest of questions but imagine that Jesus is standing in front of you asking it and see what happens.