Understanding the Gospel starts by understanding that God is, by his very nature, both perfectly loving and perfectly just. Both.
If you want the real God, you can’t have just one or the other. It’s a package deal.
Here are the opening lines of perhaps the greatest poem ever written, Milton’s epic “Paradise Lost”:
Of Man’s First Disobedience, and the Fruit
Of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal taste
Brought Death into the World, and all our woe,
With loss of Eden, till one greater Man
Restore us, and regain the blissful
Seat
In these thirty-eight words, Milton has summarized all of history: We were originally given everything we needed in order to live joyfully, in wholeness and love. We traded our happy condition for a lie, with tragic, cosmic implications. We have since lived a broken existence in a broken land east of Eden.
Justice could not let our act of disobedience stand. Someone had to pay. And someone did.
Enter love, which led God to take on human flesh in the form of “one greater Man,” who lived the perfect life we should have lived, and then died the death we deserve.
Justice served. Love wins. In Christ, we are restored, regaining “the blissful Seat.”
That’s good news.
Photo credit: Ben Swayze, 2013