In Part 1 of this post I gave the background of the Ghengis Khan and the amazing takeover of the Mongols in the 1200’s. They were Steppe people and were unmatched in their military might especially after they learned to use gunpowder from the Chinese.
The purpose of this 2-part blog post is to highlight the importance of the completeness of our gospel message. Most people when they hear gospel or when the preach Jesus Christ they essentially summarize the romans road to salvation. Specifically “all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. The wages of sin is eternal death, God sent his son while we were sinners. The free gift of God is eternal salvation through belief in his name. And if you confess Jesus Christ with your mouth and believe in your heart that God rose him from the dead you will be saved.”
I don’t mean to minimize the importance or truth of the romans road scriptures, people who are ready to give their lives to Christ need to understand them. BUT, there is much more to the story, the romans road scriptures are a summary of the final step of God’s plan of salvation. If we compare this gospel to what we read in the first 3 chapters of Pauls letter we call Ephesians then the romans road gospel seems incomplete… or even shallow. True, accurate, powerful but only the end of the story. There are people who only need to hear the romans road scriptures then quickly respond to Christ, they are ready for him, they are ripe, I was one of those at the age of 18.
But I think there may be many more people who will respond to the Ephesians gospel since it explains things much deeper and much further back, it goes back to before creation in the heart of God. The Romans Road gospel seems to be all about what we get from Jesus and the many benefits of salvation, the Ephesians gospel emphasizes God’s purpose from the beginning.
Paul understood this and many scholars believe recorded his gospel message in the first 3 chapters of the circuit letter that we now call Ephesians.
What if the gospel that Pope Innocent IV wrote to the Khans was instead similar to the book of Ephesians? What if it contained the same message but customized for the Mongols? If I were a friar working for the Pope in the 1240’s, and knowing what I’ve read in Ephesians and he asked me to approach the Khan’s Mongolia it may look something like this:
Kuyuk Kahn,
Thank you for inviting me here to appeal to you face to face. Your power and conquering strength is unmatched anywhere on earth, there is a God in heaven who has given you this power for his purpose in the earth. Perhaps the reason for your great power and unmatched rise to power on earth is to hear this letter from me, his servant.
There is something I hope to make you understand of great importance that I feel I must share with you about why we exist, about the meaning of life. I feel compelled to reveal this to you and to all of your people. Human beings, you and I, are the chief creation of a all powerful all loving creator, we are his chief work of art created in his own image.
The reason that he made us is to expand the love, the fellowship and the mutual indwelling that existed between the Father and the Son before the creation of the universe, he decided to expand into a people like himself and into a created universe, it pleased him to create a family and to dwell with it. He made us but then we rebelled against him, all of us together rejected and abandoned him so our connection to him and our purpose for living was lost. He later penetrated into humanity to provide a way back to him, a way to reconcile, a way to make peace with Himself available freely through Jesus Christ and his blood sacrifice.
He didn’t have to do this but he did this for several reasons:
- He did this in order to put his people on display to all the earth as his redeemed children, to display his great grace and mercy to all of mankind.
- He also did this to put on display his wisdom to all authorities, to all spirits, and to all the people of the earth.
- He also did this to make his people into his very own dwelling place on earth.
When we believe in Jesus Christ, who is God’s savior, God’s messiah, and is God’s plan to reunite us with himself, we become set apart, we become God’s dwelling place, we his people who gather together for only him become his new temple, his new home and his growing family on earth.
When we believe in Jesus Christ we find new peace with God where there was no peace, we are made members of God’s household, and we can come near to our creator God because of Jesus’ blood. Now we even can fully know God and his thoughts and live his life. We can approach him directly without go-betweens, and we can know his great love, and be filled with the fullness of God; his great power is no on display in us, the same power exerted when Jesus Christ was resurrected.
When we believe in Jesus Christ we become a new kind of human being, not a Jew, not a gentile, but a human with God living through us. When we believe in Jesus Christ our inheritance is great, beyond what we can imagine, and we are literally seated with Christ in heaven. All men have sinned against God, the result of which is death and hell, but the free gift from God is eternal life through Jesus Christ, there is no other name under heaven whereby men must be saved.
I implore you, I beg you and beseech you to believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, to confess with your mouth that he is Lord and cease from warring and destroying mankind and instead join his kingdom and his family within Jesus Christ who has promised to return one day.
Friar Adam
Imagine now what if the Khan’s and the Mongols would have responded to this letter, read it everywhere they went, and became Christians. Who knows how history would have changed. Would they still have destroyed Baghdad and everyone in it?, not if they were following Christ. If they hadn’t destroyed the Muslim world of that time how would have history played out? Would the Mongols have skillfully spread this gospel throughout Asia, Europe, and the Middle East? Who knows? Had they accepted Christ would they have become politically dominant beyond the hundred years of their military dominance? Would they still have self-destructed in just a few decades? If not would the Catholic countries in Europe still have become much more powerful than the Muslim countries in the Middle East with a Christian Mongol super-power present to their east? It is fun to dream about what could have been.
Now apply this to today as we preach at church or at crusades, or on our missionary trips, to our friends how would people respond differently? How would our colleagues at work respond? How about our children who stray in their teens and 20’s? Imagine if we told them the entire story, if we memorized the entire gospel with its ties to the creation and our reason for existing.
To be clear I am proposing that the preaching of Jesus Christ should include God’s reason for creating in the first place, how salvation ties into God’s eternal purpose, and the how-to’s of getting saved (Romans Road)… just as it does in Paul letters.
