Jesus has come to fix life. That's basic. But to really get it a person has to have a grasp of what the real problems are, the root issues. You need to be clear about what ills the Great Physician has come to heal. I'm going to be explaining three root issues that the Gospel addresses. Here, I'll start with the one that is familiar to most of you.
At our beginning, humanity was innocent. Think of that in a positive way. It's not that we just weren't guilty, a neutral condition. We were innocent, a very positive condition. To use a Bible word, we were fully righteous. But then, Adam and Eve rejected God's idea of life lived well. They refused to trust His wisdom - to say nothing of His love. So, they sinned. And the result? Guilt. Likewise, we are guilty because we sin. Make that as negative as you can. The evil of sin is not tied to the nature of some behavior. After all, how evil can eating a piece of fruit be. The evil of the sin is all about who that sin is against. It's about the rejection of the God who loves. So, this guilt of sin needs to be seen as very dark. Humanity is not innocent. We all sin. We are all guilty. And that means that we all deserve justice. And who decides what penalty fits this crime? That's up to the God who created all of this, the God whose love we reject and whose law we ignore. He has determined the penalty and has applied it to us. Our guilt is a root issue from which other problems come.
This is where Jesus comes in. He offers healing. In this case that means restoring us to a state of innocence. Again, think of that in a positive way. It's not just that disciples of Jesus aren't guilty anymore. No, they are innocent, righteous. God deals with them as if they had never sinned. That is the offer of the Gospel. Jesus fixes life. He removes the guilt of sin and replaces it with perfect innocence.
However, here's something to consider. Guilt is passé. Increasingly, our culture doesn't deal in terms guilt or innocence. Many people in our culture just don't have a developed sense of guilt. 'It's not my fault!' So, trying to connect with these folk in terms of their guilt won't work very well. They just won't get it. They will not see the problem that Jesus offers to fix. It won't make much sense. That's why it's increasingly important to understand the other two ways that the Scripture presents the Gospel. And that's where I'll go next.