Rethinking God With Tacosਨਮੂਨਾ

Day 1: The Gospel of Union:

Welcome to Day 1 of Rethinking God with Tacos! Today, we’ll explore a more beautiful, relational, and personal gospel than we’ve frequently seen—a gospel of union, not separation.

So, let’s start at the beginning: What is the gospel?

For much of my life, I tried to engage in a gospel of distance—one that said I was separated from God because of sin and that Jesus had to step in as a kind of shield between me and a wrathful Father. Maybe you’ve heard something like that too. It’s the theology of penal substitutionary atonement: the idea that Jesus was punished instead of us, to satisfy God’s retributive justice. But what if that’s not the gospel at all?

What if Jesus didn’t come to change God’s mind about us, but to change our minds about God?

Let’s look at Jesus’s words from the cross: “My God, my God, why have You forsaken Me?” (Psalm 22:1). Many of us have heard that and believed the Father turned His face away. But in quoting that verse, Jesus was doing something deeply intentional—He was referencing the whole psalm, one every Jewish listener would’ve known by heart.

Psalm 22 begins in anguish but ends in revelation. Verse 24 flips the narrative entirely: “For He has not despised nor abhorred the affliction of the afflicted; nor has He hidden His face from him; but when he cried to Him for help, He heard.”

Jesus wasn't expressing divine abandonment. He was stepping into our delusion—the lie humanity has carried since Eden—that God leaves or turns His back when we mess up. And from the cross, Jesus exposed that lie for what it is.

There has never been separation—only the perception of it.

That’s why Paul writes in Romans 8:38–39 that nothing can separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus. Not death or life, not angels or demons, not our present struggles or future fears. Nothing. Because Jesus didn’t just come to tell us about God’s love—He embodied it. He is it.

And even more—He brought us into Himself. Ephesians 2:6 says that “God raised us up with Christ and seated us with Him in the heavenly realms.” You’re not on the outside trying to get in. You’re already in. You're already home.

This is what Jesus prayed in John 17:21: “I pray that they will all be one, just as You and I are one . . . so that the world will believe You sent Me.” Union. Oneness. The gospel is not about earning our way back to God. It’s about waking up to the truth that we’ve always been included—always been loved.

So, what is the gospel?

As my friend Baxter Kruger says, “The gospel is not what Jesus does or what He’s done; it’s who He is and where He is.”

It’s not a courtroom verdict or a transactional escape from wrath. It’s the beautiful, mind-blowing, heart-expanding news that God is with us, for us, and in us. Always has been. Always will be.