Faith In The Ordinary

The Most Important Story Never Buried — Christ Died, Rose, and Changed Everything

“For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures.” 1 Corinthians 15:3–4 (ESV)

Every newsroom has a moment when the anchor sets down the prepared script, looks straight into the camera, and says: We are interrupting this broadcast with breaking news. What follows in that moment is usually an event so significant that everything else — the scheduled programming, the ordinary concerns of the day — must be set aside.

The Gospel is that interruption.

In fact, the word itself — euangelion in Greek — was the word the Roman Empire used for the official public proclamation of a world-altering event: a military victory, the accession of an emperor, a moment that changed the course of history. When the Apostle Paul and the early Church borrowed that word for the message of Jesus Christ, they were making a deliberate, bold claim: the most significant announcement in human history has just been made, and it is not Caesar’s. It is the death and resurrection of the Son of God.

This is not a philosophy, nor a self-improvement programme or a religious system for the spiritually inclined. It is an announcement of something that happened — something so decisive, so permanent, and so universe-altering that every person who hears it and receives it is changed forever.

Here is the story.

THE STORY THAT STARTED BEFORE TIME

Most news stories have a backstory. This one’s backstory predates the universe.

Before creation existed, before the first atom was spoken into being, the Triune God — Father, Son, and Holy Spirit — had already purposed the gospel. Revelation 13:8 speaks of “the Lamb who was slain from the foundation of the world.” The crucifixion of Jesus Christ was not a contingency plan God devised when things went wrong. It was the eternal intention of a God who knew, before He created, exactly how He would redeem.

“…he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him.”  Ephesians 1:4 (ESV)

Before time began, the names were known. Before the fall, the rescue was planned. The gospel is the outworking in history of an eternal love that was never reactive, never surprised, never scrambling for a solution. It was always the plan.

Fifteen Centuries of Headlines: The Old Testament’s Preview

The moment sin entered the world, the first gospel headline ran. God spoke to the serpent in the garden: “he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel” (Genesis 3:15). The enemy would wound the Deliverer — but the Deliverer would crush the enemy. Every subsequent century of Scripture was a further instalment of that breaking story.

The Passover lamb, slaughtered so its blood could cover the doorposts of Israel as the angel of judgment passed over, was a broadcast of what was coming. The prophet Isaiah, seven hundred years before the event, ran the most detailed preview in history:

“But he was pierced for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his wounds we are healed.” Isaiah 53:5 (ESV)

When Philip encountered an Ethiopian official reading these very words and asked whether he understood them, Philip “opened his mouth, and beginning with this Scripture he told him the good news about Jesus” (Acts 8:35). Isaiah 53 was already the gospel. It was waiting seven centuries for the event it described to occur.

“ The Old Testament is not the era before the gospel. It is the era of the gospel in shadow, in type, in prophecy — fifteen centuries of advance previews pointing to the same story”.

THE BULLETIN: WHAT THE GOSPEL ACUTALLY REPORTS

Paul, the most precise theological mind of the first century, issued the definitive news bulletin in four movements:

1. Christ died for our sins. Not merely died — died for our sins. He stepped into our place. He bore what our sin had incurred. He absorbed the full weight of the divine judgment against everything wrong in the human story, so that it would not fall on us. The cross is not a tragedy or a martyrdom. It is the most deliberately executed substitution in the history of the universe.

2. He was buried. The burial is not a footnote. It is the guarantee. He was not unconscious. He was not partially alive. He was dead and in the ground, which means what happened next was not a recovery — it was a resurrection.

3. He was raised on the third day. This is the hinge on which everything turns. Paul says it plainly: “If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins” (1 Corinthians 15:17). The resurrection is not a spiritual metaphor. It is the bodily, physical, historical raising of Jesus of Nazareth from genuine death to genuine new life. It is the Father’s declaration that the payment was accepted, the penalty was fully served, and the verdict is: not guilty, permanent and irrevocable.

4. He appeared. To Peter. To the twelve. To more than five hundred people at one time, most of whom were still alive when Paul wrote and available for questioning. This was not a vision. It was the verifiable, physical, touch-it-and-eat-with-it presence of the risen Lord. The people who proclaimed the resurrection were the people who saw it — and they died rather than deny it.

“…who was delivered up for our trespasses and raised for our justification.” Romans 4:25 (ESV)

Why This Is Actually Good News: The Diagnosis First

Good news only registers as good news when you understand the bad news it addresses.

The bad news is this: every human being who has ever lived stands before a holy God in a condition they cannot fix. Paul’s diagnosis in Romans 3 is unsparing: “None is righteous, no, not one… for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” Not most. All. The diagnosis is universal, and that means the Gospel offer can be equally universal: whoever believes.

The problem is not merely behavioural. It is structural. Guilt: we have transgressed what the holy God requires. Corruption: our nature is bent in a direction that no human effort can straighten. Mortality: sin introduced death, and death is not what we were made for. Alienation: the relationship between Creator and creature has been broken at its root.

No philosophy addresses all four. No religion resolves all four. No self-improvement strategy touches all four. The Gospel addresses all four simultaneously: justification for guilt, regeneration for corruption, resurrection for mortality, and reconciliation for alienation.

“The Gospel is not good news about what you can do. It is good news about what has already been done — on your behalf, in your place, without your contribution”.

WHAT THE NEWS DOES TO THOSE WHO RECEIVE IT

The gospel is not merely information that improves your outlook. It is an event that transforms your existence. Here is what it actually does:

1. It justifies you. The legal verdict of righteous is pronounced over you — not because of anything you have done but because of everything Christ has done and what His righteousness, credited to your account, means before the divine court. “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus” (Romans 8:1). That “now” is permanent.
2. It reconciles you. The estrangement between you and God — introduced at the fall and maintained by every subsequent act of sin — is ended. You are not merely acquitted. You are brought home. The prodigal is embraced. The alien is received into the family.
3. It redeems you. You are set free from every form of slavery that sin imposed: slavery to sin, to fear, to death, to the endless cycle of performance and failure. The freedom the gospel gives is not the freedom to do whatever you want. It is the freedom to be what you were created to be — which is exactly what sin had made impossible.
4. It adopts you. You are not merely a forgiven criminal. You are a received child. “You have received the Spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry, ‘Abba! Father!’” (Romans 8:15). The entire inheritance of the Son is shared with the adopted child: the kingdom, the glory, the eternal life, the new creation — all of it.
5. It transforms you. The gospel is not a static transaction. It is a living reality that is progressively changing the person from the inside out. The same Spirit who raised Christ from the dead is at work in the believer, conforming them to the image of the One who was proclaimed. You were declared righteous; now you are being made righteous.
6. It commissions you. “We are ambassadors for Christ, God making his appeal through us” (2 Corinthians 5:20). Every person who receives the gospel becomes a carrier of it. You are not a spectator of the story — you are a participant in its proclamation.

THE STORY IS STILL RUNNING: WHERE THE GOSPEL IS HEADED

Breaking news stories develop. There are updates, new angles, future chapters. The gospel is no different.

The cross and resurrection are the central event — the moment the anchor said, “we interrupt this broadcast.” But the story is still developing. The risen Christ ascended to the Father’s right hand and is currently reigning over everything (Ephesians 1:21). The Holy Spirit was poured out and is currently at work in every person who has received the Gospel. The Church is currently proclaiming the news in every language and culture on earth. And the story has a final chapter:

“Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.” Revelation 21:3–4 (ESV)

The final chapter is not the end of the story. It is its completion. The separation between God and humanity, introduced by the fall, is permanently and completely ended. The tears of the entire redemptive journey are wiped, personally, by the God who was never indifferent to a single one of them. Death — the last enemy — is gone.

And the redeemed will spend eternity discovering that the good news is always, somehow, better than they yet knew.

THIS IS THE STORY. RECEIVE IT.

The gospel is the oldest news in the world and the most urgently contemporary. It was planned before creation. Foreshadowed for fifteen centuries. Accomplished in thirty-three years. Proclaimed across two thousand years of history in every language on earth. And it is addressed, right now, to every person who hears it.

It is not addressed to the deserving. It is not earned by the religious. It is not a reward for the spiritually talented. It is the announcement of what has been done — what God has done, at infinite cost to Himself, for people who could do nothing for themselves — and the invitation is as wide as the word whoever:

“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.” John 3:16 (ESV)

The God who loved. The Son who was given. The whoever that makes the invitation universal. The belief that receives it. The perishing that is avoided. The eternal life that is given.

The whole story is in one sentence. Go deep and you will find it never ends.

“This is the gospel I preached to you, which you received, in which you stand, and by which you are being saved.”  1 Corinthians 15:1–2