Prescription vs Description – Which is the Gospel?

Dec 18, 2020

Here is one set of lenses through which I'm learning to see both the Gospel and myself more clearly, so I'm shining ‘em up real nice to let you take a gander through them, too.

I've noticed that much of the way we in American evangelical culture interact with the Gospel is based on the assumption of "prescription."

We all know what a prescription is –we can go and get a prescription from our doctors to treat almost any kind of ailment we experience – but I'm going to do a little defining anyway.

The idea of prescription boils down to: here's the problem, here's the solution, if you follow these instructions everything will be fine. The operative phrase in my definition here being "follow these instructions," because of course we must follow the instructions if we need to get something back to how it should be, right? A prescription is a solution offered because of a problem, after all. If there was no problem, there would be no need of a solution – there would be no prescription.

A "description," however, is completely different. A description is a detailed explanation of the way something is.

"Ok, but what about the problem of sin? Isn't it right to say Jesus is the solution (prescription) for that?"
In this case, that would be like asking "isn't it right to say that healing is the prescription for cancer?" Chemo and radiation are the prescription for cancer – healing would be freedom from cancer, the resetting of the body back to a state of wholeness. Remember too, once a problem is taken care of, there is no more need of a prescription.
It works the same way with sin: the Law is the prescription for sin – Jesus is freedom from sin. (Galatians 3:19, "Why then the law? It was added because of transgressions, until the offspring should come to whom the promise had been made...") His blood applied to us is the resetting of our beings back to a state of wholeness. Jesus cannot be a prescription, by virtue of the fact that once our problem with sin was taken care of, we would no longer need Him.
"But wait, we still live in a fallen world! We aren't whole! We do need prescriptive Jesus because the problem hasn't gone away!"
Here is the very crux of my whole point:

If we believe Jesus is prescriptive, then we remain caught in an understanding of the Gospel that starts with the problem and is contingent on us "following the instructions"... we're living in the Old Covenant and calling it the New. We take the role of subject, instead of object, and we are the ones responsible for the action of getting the Jesus-drug into our systems so we can do some living in spite of our ultimately terminal illness: sin. But our quality of life will be tainted by the weight of our prognosis, and the only hope of getting even a little bit better lies in our ability to do better, to follow Jesus better. The responsibility of it all falls on us. Yeah buddy, that sounds like good news to me!

I would argue that the Gospel of Jesus is not prescriptive, but descriptive; and as such, it starts at the beginning, not with the problem. God created us for a relationship of complete connection and mutual adoration. Sin entered the garden and whispered that God was holding out on us. We judged this to be correct and traded the Truth of that relationship for the lie that there MUST be more to it, and we were separated from our Creator and have had to live under the curse of our own judgment ever since. Of course, the Lord Almighty is not concerned at all about our judgment; His purpose in creating us had not changed, and our value to Him had not decreased in the slightest. Of course He had a plan to prove the immensity of His love for us, in which He, Himself, would go through utter devastation and humiliation – to very hell and back – to return us to Himself. The Gospel is descriptive, because it describes who He is, who we are to Him, and what He did (and is still doing) for us. It is about the story of everlasting adoration, from wholeness back to wholeness. It's not a crutch to get us through, it is abundant life that defies any judgment except that of our Creator.

"But what is required of us, then, in the realm of a descriptive Gospel?"