Christianity
Father, Son, and Holy Spirit

The Bible has four gospels. Why?

by John Abraham

I would like to unfold this by using an example to illustrate it. A car accident involving four automobiles took place at an intersection. There were four eyewitnesses--one on each corner. The first car went out of control and hit the second. It in turn was pushed into the third and the third into the fourth. Now, the four witnesses did not give identical accident reports because they all observed it from different locations. All four of them had their attention fixed on different vehicles, and they all saw what happened on different sides.

This accident had four different observations, just as we see in the four gospels. Each man saw a different dimension of Christ in the gospel.

The four gospels speak about the Lord Jesus Christ and His work. Four men who were with the Lord Jesus Christ throughout His entire ministry wrote the four gospels. They each had their own observations because they saw Him in four separate dimensions. With the report of four men on the gospel of Jesus Christ, we have a much richer view because they each saw a different central theme of the ministry of Christ.

Concerning the Sermon on the Mount, apparently Luke was not as affected by it as Matthew was because Luke only wrote twenty-nine verses about it. Matthew wrote three full chapters on the Sermon on the Mount. A different central theme caught each of their attention. All four gospels speak about the Lord Jesus Christ and His ministry, but they each have their own theme.

In the Gospel of Matthew, the theme is the Lord Jesus Christ as King. In the Gospel of Mark, the theme is the Lord Jesus Christ as the lowly servant of the Father. Luke’s gospel shows the Lord Jesus Christ as the Son of Man, and the Gospel of John shows Jesus as the Son of God. All four gospels speak about the Lord Jesus Christ and His ministry, but they each have their own theme. With the four gospels, we see a much richer gospel than just by looking at one. What one of the disciples didn’t see, another one did.

This teaches us another lesson. No man who has ever walked the face of the earth, except the Lord Jesus Christ, has seen the full dimension of His ministry. This is important to understand.

The world has so many churches and different denominations. What is the result? The result is a wrong philosophy of: "They don’t see what I see, so therefore they are wrong." The Lord has not given us identical understandings. Our brother may have preached a God-sent sermon, but in a different dimension than I have seen. I may have an unbalanced gospel. I might not preach the full counsel of God! I might preach gospel that is heavy on the Law, and someone else might preach one that is light on the Law. When the Lord Jesus Christ preached His gospel, He had a perfect balance of the Spirit of the Law in His gospel. This is clearly demonstrated throughout the Sermon on the Mount.

We must be most careful about condemning a man who has been sent by Christ to preach the gospel. We cannot condemn him because he doesn’t see what we see. We must be very careful of this. Only one place must be common ground. That is that Lord Jesus Christ and the authority of the Word of God must be the absolute authority.

Amen.

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