The Difference Your Interpretation of Reconciliation Makes

Frank Sells warned his students not to try to learn their "XYZ's" before they learned their "ABC's". Here are ABC questions: What is the Gospel? What makes the Gospel necessary? More specifically what make "the blood of His cross" necesssary to effect reconciliation? The correct answer to these questions will effect a needed adjustment in our thinking about the state of things in society around us. I am a Tennessee Temple Graduate. In my opinion the demise of that school was tied largely to dear Dr. Roberson's shallow topical preaching. The truth be told if that good man ever seriously taught the very fundamental doctrine of reconciliation in any real depth the whole church would have thought it was a new theological era beginning. Tennessee Temple, and other institutions of that fundamental genre, got people to the Bible but did not really get people in the Bible. Temple is gone now. Dear brethren do we understand the limitedness of national moral reform without the gospel? Moral reform such as the Tea Party, Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, even the Heritage Foundation-- which I give to? I do not say these things are worthless. I do say they are not the gospel. The truth is that it is not cultural decline, cultural corruption etc... that is even in view at all when Paul talks about reconciliation through the blood of the cross. What makes the gospel necessary is the unalterable righteousness of God. When you compare the crisis of a sinner headed for a collision with the unalterably righteous God with the upheaval and discomfort in modern society or old pagan society--the latter practically dissappears into insignificance. What is the cross But such a collision?