Some of the oldest questions
humankind has been asking are,
“How can I know God?” What is
He like? What can we do to please
Him? How can we get to Heaven? If
we work hard enough to be a good
enough person will He accept us
then? If we do enough religious
activities to get His attention, will
that do it?
Fortunately for us, the answer is
surprisingly simple. The “Gospel”
that the Bible talks about literally
means, “the Good News,” and the
news is good indeed!
We have to start at the beginning. In Genesis 1:26, when God created the first humans, He said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness”, then God blessed them and spent the days walking and talking with the people He had created. In short, life was good.
But why isn’t life like that anymore? What happened to mess everything up? This brings us to the second point: when we (humankind) chose to do the opposite of what God told us, sin poisoned the world. Sin separated us from God, and everything changed. Romans 3:23 says, “For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God,” and in Isaiah 59:2 we’re told, “your iniquities have separated you from your God; your sins have hidden his face from you so that he will not hear.”
This is especially bad news because there is no way for us to get across that gap on our own. We (humankind) have tried to find our way back to God and a perfect world on our own ever since then, and without any luck. We try to get there by being good people, or through religion, money, morality, philosophy, education, or any number of other ways, but eventually we find out that none of it works. “There is a way that seems right to a man, but in the end it leads to death” (Proverbs 14:12).