To understand the Gospel, you must understand the original promise. The original promise was to Abraham. God told him, “In you all the families of the earth will be blessed.” (Genesis 12:3) So then, worldwide “blessing” was the promise.

But let’s clear something up. What did God mean by “blessed” in His promise? That’s a word that gets tossed around a lot. People say they are “blessed” when they are able to pay their cable bill, they get a nice car, or they recover from sickness. That’s fine, but God’s promised “blessing” through Abraham to the whole world is something infinitely bigger.

Paul unpacks the magnitude of Abraham’s promise in Galatians 3-4. He wrote, “in order that in Christ Jesus the blessing of Abraham might come to the Gentiles (nations), so that we would receive the promise of the Spirit through faith” (Galatians‬ ‭3:14‬). First off, see that the promised “blessing” of Abraham came to the nations “in Christ Jesus.” Secondly, see that Paul connects the “blessing” of Abraham with the “promise of the Spirit.”

Paul wasn’t doing anything wrong with that connection. He was simply articulating what most Jews knew. God’s original promise to Abraham was explained more and more thoroughly through the prophets. The prophet Joel, one of Abraham’s descendants, prophesied that “it will come about after this that I will pour out My Spirit on all mankind” (Joel‬ ‭2:28‬). It was understood that the promise to Abraham involved God pouring out His very own Spirit on all the people of the earth.

Next, Paul gets even more specific. He defines the promised “Spirit.” He says, “God has sent forth the Spirit of His Son into our hearts, crying, “Abba! Father!” (Galatians‬ ‭4:6). Receiving the “Spirit of His Son” into your life is the promised blessing to Abraham.

All Things “In Christ”

How exactly does one acquire the Spirit of the Son into their life? Let me break something quite simple down to you. From the beginning, the whole universe was created “in Christ.” Paul and John made this abundantly clear in Colossians 1 and John 1 respectively. “For in Him all things in heaven and on earth were created… All things have been created through Him and for Him. He Himself is before all things, and in Him all things hold together” (Colossians 1:16-17).

Everything, absolutely everything, was created “in Christ” and continues to be sustained “in Christ.” When Christians talk about people “coming to Christ” and “getting saved” they are using human language to describe a transformation in someone’s life. But the reality is, the whole world, every single human being, is already “in Christ.” They are only believing a lie of the devil that they are not, and they are acting accordingly in evil behavior, enslaved to sin. So when people “come to Christ” they are really just waking up to reality.

The truth is that Christ the Son is everywhere in this universe, hiding within everything. He is the glory of God that fills the whole earth. Isaiah saw the angels singing, “The whole earth is fill of His glory.” And then the apostle John pointed out that Isaiah saw the glory of Jesus in that encounter (John 12:41).

Here is a simple way to understand where I am going with this: As Christ goes, so goes the universe. The universe lives only because Christ lives and gives the universe life. The whole earth belongs to Christ and everything in it.

As He Is So Are We

So understanding the original promised blessing to Abraham and that all things are “in Christ” sets the foundation for understanding the simple gospel. Here’s the good news in a nutshell: Christ died, was buried, rose again, ascended, and was seated at the right hand of God . . . and so were we.

The Gospel comes like a piercing sword slashing through all our “moral programs” and the nice, self-improving religions of the world. The Gospel declares that we actually needed to be killed and then made alive again. And that is just what God did in Christ.

Colossians 2 sums it up really nicely. Paul wrote that our sinful nature was “circumcised” and then buried with Christ. Then we were raised “with Christ” by the power of God (Colossians 2:11-12). It’s made clear again in Ephesians 2: We were dead in our sins but God made us alive with Christ and seated us with Him in heaven “in Christ” (Ephesians 2:5-6). And the death sentence to our sinful nature is articulated excellently in Romans 6: “We know that our old self was crucified with Him.” Paul adds, “We have been buried with Him by baptism” (Romans 6:4, 6).

The power of the Gospel is that God did everything through Christ. We needed freedom from sin and we needed to be brought back to new life with God. And so God took our sin and put it in the body of Christ (2 Corinthians 5:21). He then crucified and buried it. This is amazing news. It is especially good news for anyone who has ever attempted to get rid of their sin in their own moral efforts. The Gospel declares that God went ahead and killed our sin at the cross. We are called to fix our eyes on the cross and believe that our sin was put to death there in Jesus.

And if the old was put to death than of course there is new life. This new life is completely held together in Jesus. He is seated in heaven at the right hand of God, and so are we. It might be hard to accept this, but in Jesus we have already entered into heaven. That is one of the main points of the book of Hebrews; that Christ’s body was the veil that was torn so that we may enter the Holy of Holies, which the author makes clear, is heaven itself (see Hebrews 9:24). And of course all of this might sound like foolishness to you or the world but I suppose that’s why this can only be taken hold of by faith.

Back to the Start

Now let’s wrap this up by going back to that promise to Abraham. The promise was that the whole world would be “blessed.” We discovered through Paul in Galatians that this “blessing” is to have the “Spirit.” And the Spirit is specifically the Spirit of the Son who makes us children of God as well

Now let’s think back all the way to what we discovered about the Trinity in the beginning. We found out that the Father rejoices in His own image, the Son, and with Their Spirit there is infinite love, happiness, and peace. Now here’s the promised blessing and the very reason we exist: to be included into the relationship of the Trinity.

This was the Happy Trinity’s plan from before the foundation of the world. “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, just as He chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world to be holy and blameless before Him in love” (Ephesians 1:3-4). Let’s stop right there. God decided before the world began to give us every blessing “in Christ.” In other words, He decided that we would have every blessing that Christ the Eternal Son of God had from before the world began. And what does that blessing look like? It looks like us completely blameless before God our Father who loves us just as He loves the Eternal Son.

Does this sound too good to be true? These are the exact things that Jesus, the Son, prayed to the Father for in John 17. That passage reveals the heart of the Happy Trinity like nowhere else in Scripture. Jesus prayed, “That they may all be one. As You, Father, are in Me, and I am in You, may they also be in Us.” (John 17:21) The Son of God, eternally loved by the Father, prayed that we would be included in Him and the Father as well.

Then Jesus makes this out-of-this-world statement to the Father that, “The glory that You have given Me, I have given them.” (John 17:22) Are you starting to see this yet? The very glory of God that the Son of God eternally possessed with His loving Father and Holy Spirit has also been given to us!

Now here’s the kicker. I want you to get ready for this one. If there is one statement in the Bible that sums of the Gospel, it might be this next one. Jesus makes another statement that just seems too good to be true, so much so that it made the first Christians coin the message of Jesus as Gospel, or “good news.” Jesus says in John 17:23 that the Father has “loved them (us) even as You have loved Me.”

Drop. The. Mic. (Let the whole universe stand in awe at this revelation as the Trinity eternally drops the mic for all of creation to see)

We . . . us . . . the little frail human beings we are . . . we are loved by the Eternal God and Father the same way He infinitely loves, rejoices, and delights in the Eternal Son of God, the exact image and representation of the Father’s glory (Hebrews 1:3). This is where the mystery of the gospel starts passing our understanding and filling our hearts with complete astonishment.

It is in this same passage that Jesus reminds us that the Father loved Him before the foundation of the world (John 17:24). He prays to the Father that He would be in us. “I made Your name known to them, and I will make it known, so that the love with which You loved Me may be in them, and I in them” (John 17:26).

And of course, this discovery that as He is, so are we, leads to tremendous joy and happiness. And of course, Jesus prayed for this too. He told the Father, “I speak these things in the world so that they may have My joy made complete in themselves” (John 17:13). The eternal joy of the Son of God, the joy that comes so naturally when you are perfectly and infinitely loved by the God and Father of the universe, is now ours.

So then, what C.S. Lewis said in The Great Divorce is true. The Happy Trinity is your home. Paul said that it was God’s “good pleasure” to do all of this. In other words, killing off our sin nature and including us right in the middle of the Happy Trinity was the happiest decision He could have made. Be free from all guilt and shame and raise your eyes to your Father.

He is happy you are home (Luke 15:20-24).