There are a couple of questions that seem like they should be easy for Christians to answer and yet they provide a lot of difficulty and challenge. One of those questions might be, “what is the gospel?” Now, there are some clearly wrong answers to this question, some clearly right answers, but there are potentially a lot of different ways of characterizing the one true gospel. We've done an episode on this before. It's a surprisingly difficult question to answer. Because on the one hand you might want to say, "Well, it's the good news of Jesus." Okay, well it is good news, but what is that good news? You didn't tell me the news yet. Is the gospel the saying that there is good news without telling you what that news is or not?

I would say it's actually the news itself, it's not simply the proclamation that there is news. This just illustrates, very briefly, that sometimes there are some simple questions that are difficult to give good answers to. Along with the question, "What is the gospel?" Is the question, "What is a gospel?" By that, I mean, one of the four gospels in our Bible: Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. They are called gospels, but what are they? What makes them a gospel? What makes it different than Romans? Well, that's what we're going to talk about today.

I want to tell you why this matters, first off. Because, when we come to Scripture and we treat it like it's one book with one binding, we have this tendency to read everything in the same way. That's dangerous, because poetry in Psalms is not going to read the same way as the legal code in Exodus. It's not going to read the same way as Paul writing to the Galatians. It's not just that they're going to feel differently, they're different genres. Just like what makes good heavy metal music isn't going to necessarily tell you what makes good jazz music because the genres are different, we need to know what makes a gospel a gospel. What is that genre of gospel? How does that compare to, let's say, law or apocalypse (which is what Revelation is)? The genre of something really affects how we read it.

Now, this is an apologetics oriented podcast, so “why does this matter apologetically,” you might ask? Well, because how we read Scripture often will either create or answer questions, it will either create or answer problems. Some people have a very, let's say, wooden way of reading certain passages of Scripture. It actually creates something that looks like a contradiction because of the way they read it. As apologists whether you speak on these topics on a weekly basis or whether you just are faithful to have conversations with co-workers (which is probably much more of us than the former group) we still need to know how to rightly divide the word of truth, how to correctly understand different biblical genres so we don't create problems where there aren't problems, and so we can answer questions when those questions arise.

I want to talk about gospel today. What is this genre called gospel? Well, the word gospel does mean good news, and the gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John do contain good news, but they're more than that. It's actually difficult to describe what a gospel is, because gospels are somewhat unique. There's nothing totally like them outside of the Bible. Now, there are other genres in the ancient world that are very close to our gospels, but our gospels are unique, and so they have some unique considerations. The gospels in our Bible are really the culmination of three different things, and this is really important.

They are history, narrative, and theology all brought together. You can't always separate the historical events that Mark is describing from the theological point that he's trying to make. It's the same way with narrative of…