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The gospel is called “The Good News” because it solves “the bad news,” which is that God is just and that we are guilty. By the time anyone is old enough to even realize there is a God, they are guilty of countless sins and a just Judge cannot forgive crimes if He is to remain just. This is in fact the greatest problem of the universe, the problem of God’s mercy in light of His perfect righteousness as the Judge, and a problem that only the gospel uniquely solves.
The way that the gospel solves this problem is through the incarnation of Jesus, who was both God and man. Paul writes that the appearance of Christ was firstly to vindicate the name of God as a righteous Judge, because He had passed over so many former sins. (Romans 3:21-26) To understand the importance of this we have to understand what God has revealed about His sense of justice, as well as what the bible reveals through history about God’s interactions in space and time.
The basic problem is this: God being merciful made God look like He was compromising on His own perfect standards. In Proverbs 17:15, it says that justifying the wicked and condemning the righteous are abominations to God, yet in Romans 4:5 Paul writes that God justifies the ungodly, and Christ being put to death even though He was righteous is the greatest injustice in history.
The only way to solve these apparent contradictions is through a unique situation, and that unique situation is the incarnation of Jesus.
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