peace to live by

Not Shifting From the Hope of the Gospel, Part 1 (TMF:2580)

Friday, March 28, 2025
Peace to Live By: Not Shifting From the Hope of the Gospel, Part 1 (TMF:2580) - Daniel Litton
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       Anyhow, continuing in verse 23: “not shifting from the hope of the gospel that you heard, which has been proclaimed in all creation under heaven, and of which I, Paul, became a minister” (ESV). What does Paul mean that the Gospel “has been proclaimed in all creation under heaven”? That doesn’t seem to make sense, considering that by his time, early on, that Gospel had not gone into all the varying parts of the world. Well, we could, for one, say that it is a prophecy. Maybe Paul is telling us, giving us a hint through the Spirit of God, of what is going to happen in the future—that the Gospel is going to reach all the different parts of the world. That’s possible. Or, two, he could mean that it has been already proclaimed in all the known or populated areas of the time. Three, we could say that the Gospel had been proclaimed to all the known people groups. (This obviously would have excluded people like the Native People of America since they weren’t a known people at the time). All of these theories of what Paul is saying here are reasonable, and perhaps it is a combination of all of them.