"It may be said that the teaching of Jesus concerning the Kingdom of God represents his whole teaching. It is the main, determinative subject of all his discourse. His ethics were ethics of the Kingdom; his theology was theology of the Kingdom; his teaching regarding himself cannot be understood apart from his interpretation of the Kingdom of God" (Dr. F. C. Grant, from "The Gospel of the Kingdom," Biblical World, 50, pp. 121-191).
"This is our first basic thesis about Jesus: He did not preach about Himself, or simply about God, but about the Kingdom of God" (Dr. John Sobrino, Christology at the Crossroads, p. 60).
According to the records of Jesus’ ministry, the pioneer of the Christian faith, Jesus, gave a definite label to the Christian Gospel. He called it, quite specifically, "the Gospel (Good News) about the Kingdom of God." In Luke 16:16 Jesus remarked that since the time of John the Baptist (Matt. 3:2) "the Gospel of the Kingdom of God has been proclaimed." The Gospel of the Kingdom of God is another way of describing Christianity or the Christian religion. "Kingdom of God" is the term in which the genius of the Christian faith is concentrated.
But you could easily miss this central and fundamental point, if you listened to contemporary versions of the Gospel. The vocabulary of modern proponents of Christianity and the Gospel avoids this basic vocabulary of Jesus. When is the last time you heard on radio, television or from the pulpit, the words "Gospel of (or about) the Kingdom"? Certainly the word Gospel is not in short supply, and the word Kingdom is heard, if fairly rarely. But the biblical description, in Matthew, Mark and Luke, of Jesus’ saving Gospel — the Gospel about the Kingdom of God/Kingdom of Heaven — is almost extinct. (Kingdom of God and Kingdom of Heaven are exactly equivalent, with no difference in meaning. Only Matthew uses the title Kingdom of Heaven.)
This should put us on the alert. When words are changed or suppressed, ideas are changed or lost. The words of Jesus, however, are the most precious of all words and their loss means the loss of the Christian faith itself. This does not mean that people will cease to talk about Christianity, but it does mean that when they do they risk defining it in a way different from Jesus. At that point, the name remains, but the substance of the faith is distorted or perverted.
Paul knew how important it was to maintain the ideas and words of Jesus: Writing to his young delegate Timothy, Paul said: "If anyone teaches otherwise and does not agree with the health-giving words — the words of our Lord Jesus Christ — and teaching which is in accordance with true religion, he is blind…." (1 Tim. 6:3).
The most obvious way in which Christians could guard against losing the words of Jesus and thus abandoning the mind and spirit of Jesus would be to adopt quite consciously and deliberately as a constant habit of speech: "The Gospel of the Kingdom."
In our second issue of "Focus on the Kingdom," we listed all the various phrases describing the Christian Gospel and traced them all back to the "parent text" which originated with Jesus himself. No less than 18 times in Matthew, Mark and Luke and Acts (both before and after the cross) the full and definitive expression "Gospel about the Kingdom of God" appears. It will be useful to remind ourselves of these basic verses. They bring before us the main topic around which Christianity revolves (note that in the original Greek "proclaiming" and "preaching" imply the Gospel): "THE GOSPEL ABOUT THE KINGDOM OF GOD" (Matt. 3:2; 4:17, 23; 24:14; 9:35; Luke 4:43; 8:1; 9:2, 6, 11, 60; 10:9; 16:16; Acts 8:12; 19:8; 20:25; 28:23, 31)
A leading contemporary evangelist made an extraordinarily interesting observation at a conference of world evangelists in 1974. He said, "How much have you heard here at the conference about the Kingdom of God? Not much. But it was Jesus’ prime concern." Ponder the meaning of this amazing statement. "Here we are," Michael Green said in effect, "as leaders in the field of Christian evangelism, and we do not sound like Jesus. He always talked about the Kingdom as the Gospel, but we do not."
Words are the expression of the heart and mind. A person is, in a sense, his mind. Is it not rather disconcerting that leading exponents of the Christian faith admit that their concerns in regard to the saving Gospel are strangely different from those of Jesus? The situation suggests that all is not well. I have a tape in which another leading evangelical scholar dedicated two hours to defining the Gospel. The Kingdom of God received hardly a mention in the discussion. And when the speaker appealed to Paul’s wonderful farewell statement about his ministry in Acts 20, he skipped from verse 24 to 26, omitting verse 25 where Paul defined the "Gospel of the grace of God" (no one avoids that phrase!) as the "proclamation of the KINGDOM." An intelligent analysis of these facts will suggest that something has gone awry with modern attempts to present Jesus and his saving Gospel.
Some of our readers may know that there is a theory which has been very popular in America in some circles, which tries to justify the clear absence of Jesus’ "Kingdom-Gospel" language in contemporary preaching, by saying that Jesus’ Gospel of the Kingdom is not the saving Gospel for us now.(See, for example, the notes in the Scofield reference Bible on Rev. 14:6. According to the extraordinary comment the Gospel of the Kingdom is a thing of the past and the future but not of the present! The theory interferes with the Great Commission in which Jesus knew of only one Gospel to be preached continuously until he returns.) We would like to urge our readers to examine this most carefully. We suggest that such a theory, which would separate Jesus from his own Gospel, is without a shred of supporting evidence in the New Testament. It is a man-made device which confuses and complicates the consistent "One-Gospel" of the New Testament (beautifully defined, for example, in Acts 8:12).
If Jesus spoke of the Gospel of the Kingdom of God and made this the key for an intelligent reception of himself and his message, what is the Kingdom of God/Kingdom of Heaven? The Kingdom of God was a phrase well known to Jesus and his audience. The Kingdom of God was the national hope of Israel. It had been described in detail in the books of the Hebrew prophets (the Old Testament — actually "the Hebrew Bible"). Jesus did not play verbal games with his audience. He did not come into Galilee calling for repentance and belief in the Gospel about the Kingdom (Mark 1:14, 15) intending his audience to misunderstand his words! Common sense and honesty dictate that Jesus expected the audience to know what the Kingdom of God was. Jesus did not define the Kingdom. There was no need to do this. The Kingdom of God meant "God’s revolutionary Government" to be inaugurated by the promised Messiah on a renewed earth. (The Kingdom of God/Kingdom of Heaven certainly did not mean a realm of disembodied post-mortem spirits in Heaven.) The Kingdom of God was a coming event, and a very spectacular one. It spelled destruction for the wicked and joy and endless life for the true followers of the Messiah.
The New Testament lays out this basic definition of the Kingdom for us in Matthew chapter 3. John the Baptist commands repentance in view of the approach of the Kingdom ("The Kingdom of Heaven is at hand, repent!" 3:2). What this means is clarified when John goes on to announce the two possible destinies for mankind: either to be welcomed as "wheat" into the "barn" of the Kingdom, or, alternatively, to be burned up like chaff in the consuming fire of judgment at the Messiah’s arrival. The Message is more than clear — either the Barn or the Bonfire. Choose! The choice is laid before us in this Gospel about the Kingdom. Jesus came with the same fundamental Gospel Message of the Kingdom. Matthew makes this clear to us by describing the Christian faith/Gospel with the same terminology for Jesus as for his forerunner cousin John: "From that time on Jesus began to make a public proclamation, The Kingdom of Heaven is at hand" (Matt. 4:17; 9:35; cp. 3:2).
It is essential not to lose sight of this ABC teaching about the Christian Gospel. There are misleading forces around trying to wrench Jesus’ Gospel message from its New Testament, Jewish environment and dissolve it into something else, a vague exhortation to "be good and go to heaven when you die." This is foreign to Jesus and the New Testament. What Jesus required was a response to his message about the Kingdom. Response requires an intelligent understanding of what is put before the potential convert. How can one "Repent and believe in the Gospel of the Kingdom" (Mark 1:14, 15) if one has a very hazy, or perhaps mistaken idea of what Jesus meant by the Kingdom?
"In the New Testament the Kingdom of God is conceived, first of all, as something in the future" (Dr. E Schweizer, The Good News According to Mark, p. 45).
Commitment to Jesus, receiving Jesus, coming to Christ is defined in the New Testament as intelligently and repentantly receiving the Message/Gospel of Jesus — the word(s) of Jesus. It is possible to miss this point if one speaks only of "coming to Christ," "receiving Christ," "believing in Christ." Receiving Christ means receiving his words. Now the New Testament uses both types of language: "receiving Christ" and "receiving the words of Christ." The one defines the other. "Receiving Christ" is not possible apart from the reception of his words/teaching/Gospel. Jesus, in other words, is defined by his words (aren’t we all?).
A Jesus without his defining Gospel easily becomes a vague symbol of salvation, a non-descript, loving personality who is not clearly the Messiah-Savior, Kingdom-Gospel preacher of the New Testament documents. We should never forget that Satan’s great trick is to present "other Jesuses." Satan is very happy to have the word "Jesus" in circulation, but very unhappy with the actual, historical Jesus who came armed with the saving weapon — the Gospel of the Kingdom, plus of course (later) the vital facts about his death and resurrection.
Jesus spelled out the "mechanics" of conversion, the entrance upon the journey to salvation, in his famous parable of the seed (or the sower). According to Jesus, the Master evangelist, the essential seed (seed is necessary for rebirth) which must take root and germinate in the heart of the believer is this: "The WORD/GOSPEL of the Kingdom." Here are Jesus’ critically important words:
Describing evangelism "Jesus-style," Matthew records the Messiah: "Whenever someone hears the WORD about the KINGDOM…the Devil comes and snatches away the seed which has been sown in his heart" (Matt. 13:19). So the key to salvation is the reception of the word of the Kingdom, Jesus’ favorite topic. (And no wonder, because he says that the destiny of man is wrapped up in his reception or non-reception of the Gospel of the Kingdom.) The Devil understands Jesus’ program and system of evangelism/salvation, and he mounts his massive (and clever) counter-program, to ensure to the maximum that the Gospel of the Kingdom, the vital seed which sparks the new birth, does not remain in the heart of the potential convert. Better still, the Devil would like to see the Message suppressed altogether and some sort of counterfeit put in its place. Jesus provided a brilliant, "consumer activist" intelligence report when he made this fascinating observation: "When anyone hears the Message/Gospel, the Devil snatches away the Message which has been sown in his heart, so that he may not believe it AND BE SAVED" (Luke 8:12).
Can anyone deny that the key to salvation is revealed here? No wonder that Jesus in this context (Luke 8:8) would "raise his voice" and urge, "those who have ears to hear, let them hear." Immortality in the Kingdom of God was at stake, and Jesus strained every nerve in his body to get the vital saving information across. He was involved, as are all evangelists, in a cosmic struggle with the Ruler of this Age, the God of this Age, whose power of deception should never be underestimated. (Paul understood, and passionately preached that "loving the Truth" was essential for successful Christianity, II Thess. 2:10.)
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