preface
Introduction: The Old Testament and Its Political Words

Part 1: The Gospel and Its Essence as Read in the Old Testament
1.
Image of God 1
2.
Image of God 2
3.
The tree of the knowledge of good and evil, sin, and death
4.
Fork in the Road
5.
Go to the land I will show you.
6.
Called to the Exodus Community

Part 2: The Communal and Public Gospel and Its Concrete Realization
1.
Abraham and the stranger, Sodom and Gomorrah
2.
As if there is no God
3.
Holy life
4.
The Jubilee Law and Spirit in the Old Testament
5.
Adullam community

Part 3: The Proclamation of the Prophets
1.
idolatry
2.
Naboth's Vineyard and the Prophet
3.
The Prophets' Proclamation of Repentance

Part 4: The Response of the Post-Captivity Community
1.
Nehemiah and the Reformation
2.
The word spoken through the prophets of old

Part 5_ Conclusion: Love Your Weak Neighbor
1.
The Hope of the Prophets
2.
The Gospel, the Kingdom of God Coming to This Earth
3.
Love your neighbor as yourself.

Note

Is Christian faith limited to the personal, private realm?

The reason the title of this book, “The Publicness of the Gospel,” sounds unfamiliar to most Christians is probably because, regardless of the period in their lives when they became Christians, the Korean church itself grew up in an atmosphere where emphasizing individual devotional life was taken for granted and their religious life was lived.
While such personal piety is certainly necessary, the lack of serious reflection and introspection on whether becoming such a pious person is truly all that God wants from us, and whether that is truly the purpose for which He has called us to be His people, is perhaps the reason why so many negative comments are heard about the Korean church today.
In the past, mothers would wake up before others to fetch purified water and offer it to their families, but the object of their prayers has changed to God. Aren't we still offering all kinds of offerings to God for personal blessings, personal well-being, and personal gain?


Have we not, up until now, understood the gospel in terms of a personal and private dimension, ignoring what it actually says?
The problem is that this understanding leaves out the content of God's rule and the kingdom of God.
Ultimately, the absence of awareness of the kingdom of God and its rule leads to the privatization of God's word as an extremely personal word.
The confession and belief that God is with us allows us to regard God only as the One who comforts our sorrows and guides our future.

This book asserts that this internalization and personalization of the gospel is a gross distortion of the gospel, a perversion of the gospel into a form that will please the kings of this generation.
In that vein, this book questions the interpretation of the Bible we have been using so far.
Is the Old Testament truly the ancient law, and the New Testament the gospel? Is the gospel limited to personal restoration, blessings, and promises for the future? This book concludes, "No."
This book states that the words of Jesus and the gospel preached by the apostles in the New Testament era are interpretations of the Old Testament, and that, therefore, when the Old Testament is correctly interpreted, we can experience the richness of the gospel that flows throughout the Old Testament.
Furthermore, since we are called as citizens of the kingdom of God and as kings who rule over the kingdom of God, we should not live in this world and practice faith to fulfill our personal desires. Instead, we should live a public life that blesses all people according to the principle of “love your neighbor as yourself,” which the Old Testament speaks of through the lives of many people and the proclamations of the prophets and which Jesus summarized.


In this book, the author reveals the communal and public nature of the gospel that runs through the Old Testament through diligent annotation of various Old Testament texts and their connection to today's realities.

Part 1 examines the meaning of God's image by covering the creation of man in Genesis.
Because humans were created in the image of God, they should exist within relationships and communities. However, because they clung to their own desires to the end and tried to become like God, relationships were destroyed and toil, labor, and death became their daily routine.
Now God calls Abraham to do justice and righteousness.
When Abraham lives such a life, all nations are blessed.
In other words, Abraham was called to a public life, and this book follows in Abraham's footsteps of justice and righteousness as he rescues his nephew Lot in distress, welcomes strangers, and takes care to ensure that no one is unjustly sacrificed in Sodom.

In Part 2, while commenting on Leviticus 19, he states that the holiness that God demands is not only expressed through religious acts such as prayer and worship, but must be manifested in all areas of life.
Leave corners when you harvest, give fair wages at the proper time, judge justly, buy and sell with fair weights and measures, and treat the foreigner as your own compatriot.
When Jesus summarized the Old Testament and said, “Do to others as you would have them do to you,” I believe he was talking about the holiness that is revealed in this kind of life.
Also, examining David's community shows that it is not a group that maximizes personal desires, but a community of people who are used together in the fight that God is with and leading.

Part 3 deals with idolatry, the Naboth's vineyard incident, and the prophets' proclamation of repentance.
Since idolatry is essentially a religion for personal gain, in a society where idolatry is rampant, there is no sign of people trying to live together with others, especially with the weak.
The incident of Naboth's vineyard shows that keeping God's word leads to persecution and eventual death, and that keeping God's word until death is the true blessing.
The prophets also denounced a life that had turned away from God and called for a return to God. They saw returning to God as specifically pursuing justice and showing compassion to the weak in society, such as orphans, widows, strangers, and the poor.

In Part 4, we will look at how Nehemiah, in the community that returned from captivity, resolved economic problems within the community based on the fundamental spirit of the Pentateuch, rather than being confined to the words of the Pentateuch.
He also says that the message Zechariah proclaimed to the post-exilic rebuilt community was not focused on what to do for God, but on how to live with the people we live with.

Part 5, the book's conclusion, emphasizes that our task is to return to the gospel.
That is, we must return to the fundamental content of the gospel, which calls us to exist in relationships in God's image and to live as kings.
And he says that love for one's neighbor, the love of "treating others as we would like to be treated," is embodied in a life of caring for our vulnerable neighbors around us, and that this is the essential element of public faith.