The Gospel According to Job
In your English Bible, you’ll probably find that the Book of Matthew is titled “The Gospel According to Matthew”; Mark, “The Gospel According to Mark”; and likewise for Luke and John. The Four Gospels, as we often call them, tell the story of Jesus Christ’s ministry, miracles, teachings, death, and resurrection. But the gospel begins elsewhere. Whenever Jesus or His apostles preached the gospel, the good news of salvation, they preached from the so-called “Old Testament,” the only Scriptures that existed then. Jesus began His ministry by reading aloud from the Book of Isaiah: “The Spirit of the LORD is upon Me, because He has anointed Me to preach the gospel to the poor; He has sent Me to heal the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed” (Luke 4:18; quoting Isa. 61:1). So the gospel begins in the Old Testament. The Book of Hebrews declares that even the Israelites under Moses heard the go...