Proclaiming the Gospel in the Psalms
But when Paul spoke of ‘gospel’ he thereby denoted a message which, in fulfilment of the scriptural prophecies and in implicit confrontation with the newer imperial realities, declared the ‘good news’ of God’s kingdom in and through the life, messianic achievement and supremely the death and resurrection of Jesus. This gospel message far transcended the individualistic message of ‘how to be saved’ which the word ‘gospel’ has come to denote in much contemporary western Christian expression. It remained intensely personal in its radical application, but only because it was first cosmic and global in scope: the world had a new lord, the Jewish Messiah, raised from the dead. That is why, as we saw, for Paul ‘the gospel’ even included the news of the just divine judgment against all human wickedness. In a world of moral and social chaos, ‘judgment’ is good news, as the Psalms insisted repeatedly. Now, for Paul, the ‘good news’ of Jesus told a story which (a) stretched backwards to Abraham and the prophets, (b) looked on to an eschaton in which the creator God would be all in all, (c) focused on the crucial events to do with Jesus as Messiah and (d) challenged its hearers to respond with hypakoē pisteōs, ‘faithful obedience’.