1v6 God and his gospel

I'm indebted to Trevor Burke's recent book Adopted into God's Family for helping me see this very obvious thing.

"I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting him who called you in the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel"

The gospel was being deserted by the Galatians, but notice it was God himself that they were fleeing from intimacy with. You can't draw a line between God and his gospel. Inseparable. With God, with his gospel. With the gospel, with God. John Piper is right on track - God is the gospel. God called us in the grace of Christ to himself - where else would you want to go?

That's why evangelicals should be so keen to guard the gospel because it's about guarding the new life that Christians have as those who know God and are known by Him. To depart from the gospel is to depart from God - nothing could be worse than that.

We find a similar closeness between God and his gospel when Jesus commissions his disciples in Luke 10. There he says that those who reject the disciples teaching reject Jesus and the Father. God comes to us clothed in his gospel. To exchange the gospel for a different gospel is to exchange the worship of God for the worship of not gods - whether the idol of self or something else.