What is the gospel? Plan A vs Plan B Someone asked me a few years ago whether the Incarnation would have happened if sin had never entered the world. I was totally stumped. From my perspective at the time, everything about my understanding of Jesus -- his incarnation, life, death and resurrection -- revolved around the very basic story that God had created us perfect, we fell into sin, and he had to send Jesus to fix the whole damned mess. I couldn't conceive how the coming of Jesus into the world could have to do with anything but the fact we'd all sinned and God needed to launch a rescue mission to repair the damage.
What I never saw in all the years I believed in that story was that it was a story that in effect had Jesus as a Plan B when Plan A fell through. We could have done it on our own, we should have done it on our own, but something went wrong. Oops. God had quickly to look for an alternative, and that alternative was Jesus.
Paul (or someone trying very hard to sound like Paul, depending on your critical perspective) had a different take on the matter, although evangelical eyes might not see it without it being pointed out. (I know my evangelical eyes didn't.) It was the opening passage of Ephesians that got me one day:
Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in the heavenly realms with every spiritual blessing in Christ. For he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight. In love he predestined us to be adopted as his sons and daughters through Jesus Christ, in accordance with his pleasure and will--to the praise of his glorious grace, which he has freely given us in the One he loves.
As an evangelical, I somehow managed to pad out the story to include the Fall, and how none of this would have happened if it weren't for sin entering the world, and how lucky it was that God had decided before the creation of the world that he was going to send Jesus as Plan B when the original bombed. But that isn't the story given us here. The story here is about God's eternal purpose, that even before sin entered the equation his plan and goal was fixed: Our adoption as sons and daughters in Jesus Christ. There is no indication that this was the back-up plan. This was the only plan that ever existed, the "mystery of his will according to his good pleasure, which he purposed in Christ, to be put into effect when the times will have reached their fulfillment--to bring all things in heaven and on earth together under one head, even Christ."
So much Christianity misses this grand, cosmic vision of the gospel, and settles for a gospel where Jesus is a kind of heavenly lifejacket, an emergency measure. In fact, it's interesting just how often that exact analogy is used by evangelicals of a certain stripe. The evangelist Dwight L Moody, for example, famously remarked that God had given him a lifeboat and said to him, "Moody, save all that you can". And yesterday I read this snippet from a radio preacher:
The world is like a boat that is sinking, and nobody on it knows how to swim. God looks out at the boat, sees that we're all going to drown, and so He throws a lifeline to us named "Jesus." Some of us grap the lifeline, and Jesus pulls us to safety. The rest of the people on the boat all drown, because they reject the lifeline.
The Incarnation wasn't an emergency rescue. In trinitarian terms, it was the Godhead stepping into humanity to bring humanity into the Godhead. In the terms of the writer to the Ephesians, it was not a purpose that only came about when we threw a wrench in the works with our sin, but an eternal, unchanging purpose that was the very reason for creation: Our adoption as God's children in Jesus Christ.
Dave
12:04:05 PM 
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