The Gospel and the Future Kingdom

"Let the dead bury their dead, but you go and proclaim everywhere the Kingdom of God" — Jesus in Luke 9:60

"It may be said that during Jesus’ ministry the Kingdom of God is spoken of always as a future event. It is expected, prayed for and hoped for. But it is never said explicitly to have arrived, not even at the Last Supper. What is present is the agent of God, Jesus. But because the agent of the Kingdom is present and active through his teaching and mighty works, the Kingdom of God may also be said to be potentially present…Its arrival in its own right is depicted as a future event" (Dictionary of Jesus and the Gospels [A Compendium of Contemporary Biblical Scholarship], IVP, 1992, "Kingdom of God," p. 425).
Since the Good News/Gospel offered by Jesus for our belief has to do with the Kingdom of God, it follows that the term Kingdom of God must be defined. Without a definition, how can one "repent and believe the Gospel of the Kingdom" (Mark 1:14, 15)? You cannot believe in a Gospel about a Kingdom which remains a vague concept.

A widespread confusion exists in the churchgoing community about what Jesus meant by the Kingdom.

The quotation above from the Dictionary of Jesus and the Gospels is immensely helpful as establishing the fact attested by Matthew, Mark and Luke that Jesus thought of the Kingdom as the great event of the future. He urges his disciples to keep praying "Thy Kingdom come!" This does not mean "Thy Kingdom spread"! You do not pray for the Kingdom to come, if it has already come. Note, too, that Joseph of Arimathea, who was a Christian disciple, was still waiting for the Kingdom of God after the death of Jesus (Mark 15:43). The Kingdom of God is the great hope for the future to be realized only by the return of Jesus to reign on earth.

In our next issue we will go text by text through the Gospel of Matthew to establish as a fact the futurity of the Kingdom of God (a very tiny minority of Kingdom texts may support a potential or actual presence of the Kingdom in a different sense). The vast majority of the Kingdom texts in Jesus’ teaching unmistakably point to the future intervention of God at the future coming of Jesus. The Kingdom of God is the objective of the Christian faith. Loss of this simple fact is responsible for a great deal of confusion amongst Bible readers.

Here are two key verses: "When the Son of Man comes in his glory and all the angels with him, then he will sit on his throne of glory…In the regeneration, [when the world is reborn] when the Son of man sits on the throne of his glory, you too will sit on twelve thrones to administer the twelve tribes of Israel" (Matt. 25:31; 19:28).

These sayings combine to give us a clear vision of the second coming of Jesus and his subsequent session on his throne, ruling in company with the apostles. Jesus foresaw a reconstitution of the tribes of Israel. This "concrete" expectation of divine government coming to the earth — the Kingdom of God/Heaven — is fundamental to any understanding of the Bible. Replacing the constant Kingdom language of Jesus with "heaven" (which Jesus never offered as the Christian goal) confuses the New Testament and suppresses the words of Jesus.


"If anyone does not remain in the teaching of Jesus…"

The definition of the Gospel is the key to a sound understanding of Jesus and the New Testament. Unconsciously, many Bible readers mount a fierce opposition to Jesus, because evangelicals have been systematically taught NOT to think of the Gospel teaching/preaching of the historical Jesus as of very much importance in salvation! (Last month we printed a revealing quotation from Luther showing that this tendency goes back to his own reduced gospel.) Any down-playing of the teaching/Gospel of Jesus — the Gospel as he himself preached it — is really an amazing mistake in view of II John 7-9: "If anyone goes too far and does not remain in the teaching of the Messiah, he does not have Father or Son."

The teaching of Jesus began in Matthew 4:17 with a ringing command: "Repent in view of the coming Kingdom." Mark (1:14, 15) summarizes the Christian faith by recording Jesus’ opening salvo: "The Kingdom of God is at hand: Repent and believe in the Gospel [of the Kingdom]." The whole Christian faith rests on that foundation.

Certainly the cross and the resurrection are essential to the Gospel, but they are not the first element in the Gospel. (Paul spoke of the death and resurrection of Jesus as "among matters of first importance" — I Cor. 15:1-3.) The death and resurrection of Jesus follow from the first (Kingdom) element, because no one can gain the Kingdom without the cross and the resurrection. But the Kingdom remains the heart of the One Gospel throughout the NT. The Kingdom provides the content of Christian HOPE, and hope is the second cardinal virtue after love.

There is no reason for doubt on this subject. The Gospel teaching of Jesus about the Kingdom takes up the space of over 40 chapters in the Gospels before a word is mentioned about his death and resurrection. John’s Gospel is a plea for belief in the Gospel/teaching/word/words of Jesus as the basis of salvation: "He who hears my word and believes Him who sent me has the life of the Age to Come [‘eternal life’]" (John 5:24). How can you believe "if you don’t believe in my words?" (John 5:47). That word is defined as the "word about the Kingdom" (Matt. 13:19). Jesus obviously considered an intelligent belief in the Kingdom as the sine qua non — the indispensable factor — of successful faith: He referred to the counter-activity of the Devil: "The Devil comes and snatches away the word of the Kingdom [Matt. 13:19] from their heart so that they cannot believe it and be saved" (Luke 8:12). This is amazingly clear teaching. Salvation, in this central parable, is directly related to an understanding of and commitment to the Kingdom Gospel as Jesus preached it.

When in my 260 radio programs I point this out, I regularly receive comments from long-time Bible students and teachers who say, "We never realized that the Gospel had to do with the Kingdom!" Such is the power of anti-Kingdom propaganda.

Matthew has five blocks of teaching (possibly a deliberate parallel with the five books of Moses), each ending with "When Jesus had finished all these sayings..." The section which begins in Matthew 4:17 ("From that time Jesus began to proclaim…") ends at the end of the Sermon on the Mount (7:28). In that section Jesus spoke of the only foundation for salvation: adherence to his teaching. That teaching is based on the command to repent and believe in the Coming Kingdom (Mark 1:14, 15) and in view of that Kingdom to develop "the righteousness which must surpass that of the scribes and Pharisees" (Matt. 5:20) — otherwise we will not be fit to enter the Kingdom.

The whole Kingdom program is the gracious act of God who offers us salvation through Jesus and his words and work. Paul, faithfully following in Jesus’ steps, looked back over his entire ministry and described it as "proclaiming the Kingdom" (Acts 20:25). Paul followed Jesus faithfully and continued to preach the Kingdom everywhere.

What a wonderful model for contemporary evangelism.


Understanding Jesus in His Own Messianic, Jewish Background

"It is a serious error to hold that the Kingdom of God plays no important role in apostolic Christianity. Such a view both lacks historical perspective and is at variance with the entire thought of the literature of apostolic Christianity. The very name of the new movement, Christianity, would suggest the contrary opinion. So far from the eschatological [future] Kingdom of God being a secondary element in the early church, it is its great conditioning belief. The preaching of the first evangelists was not a call to ethical ideals or an argument as to certain truths. Rather it was the proclamation of a Message…As regards the Person of the Messiah, there is, of course, no question that the early church believed that Jesus was the Christ who had returned to heaven, whence he would come to introduce the new age and the new kingdom. This was the very core of the entire Christian movement" (Shailer Mathews, The Messianic Hope in the New Testament, University of Chicago Press, 1905, pp. 144, 145).

These words of the distinguished professor of Systematic Theology at Chicago Seminary register an important protest against the persistent tendency of commentators to rid the New Testament of its concentration on the future coming of Messiah to inaugurate a new era of history by introducing the Kingdom of God.

In the New Testament the eschatological (future) Kingdom is indeed the "great conditioning belief." Both John the Baptist (Matt. 3:2) and Jesus announce a Gospel which commands belief in the coming Kingdom of God. Jesus commanded prayer for the advent of the future Kingdom (Matt. 6:10) and urged us pursue the Kingdom as our first priority (Matt. 6:33). Faith is directed not only to a Savior who dies and rises, but to the divine intention to bring present human governments to an end and replace them with the Kingdom of the Messiah, to be introduced by a spectacular intervention — the future coming of Jesus to rule on earth.

It is characteristic of much Bible exposition that the future apocalyptic element in the teaching of Christ is reduced or eliminated. Some have argued that this element of the New Testament faith cannot go back to Jesus himself, but is the result of a misunderstanding on the part of those who heard Jesus preach. This theory, of course, would involve us all in a guessing game about what Jesus actually taught. If it were true that Jesus’ own teaching has been obscured by the misleading reports of his followers, then the genuine faith of Jesus must remain forever irrecoverable.

If, however, God has ensured a faithful account of the ministry of the chosen Messiah, then it is obvious that Jesus operated within a well-defined Messianic, apocalyptic framework in which the Kingdom of God was none other than the promised Day of the Lord at which a remnant of Israel would be saved, and the faithful of all the ages would be resurrected from the sleep of death to take up their assigned role as sovereigns with the Messiah in the divine government on a renewed earth.

Read in this light the New Testament is a coherent document with a two-fold underlying purpose — to announce that Jesus is the Messiah and that the Kingdom of God is coming with the return of Jesus to complete his Messianic work.

Traditional orthodoxy has been unable to face Jesus’ "Jewish" system without collapsing its strong, eschatological emphasis. Paul, with hope for the future Kingdom burning in his heart, comforts the believers in Thessalonica with the promise that at the Messiah’s arrival, the Christians who have died will be brought to life and with their surviving brothers in Christ they will ascend to meet Christ in the air. Following that stupendous event they will escort the distinguished Messiah to the earth for the inauguration of his reign in the New Age of the Kingdom. According to Paul, it is by this process that believers may expect to come into the personal presence of the Lord: "Thus [by means of rapture and resurrection] we shall be always with the Lord" (I Thess. 4:17).

Paul’s firm grasp of the future uniting of believers with their Lord has proven too difficult for unmessianic versions of the faith. They have insisted that one can be "with the Lord" by an entirely different process — simply by dying and going immediately and individually into the presence of the Lord in heaven. Paul’s "thus we shall come to be always with the Lord because of his future arrival" has been deformed into "thus we shall come into his presence without the need for the future resurrection of the faithful and the spectacular arrival of Jesus in power." Funeral services which promise that the deceased has gone to be with Jesus in heaven provide an unfortunate counter-propaganda to the New Testament teaching about how and when life after death will be achieved.

The two systems are quite different. Commentators are left in a muddle. On the one hand the sacred documents to be explained place their entire emphasis on the future resurrection as the only means by which a believer can meet Christ personally. On the other hand popular tradition demands that believers not have to wait until the Parousia (the Second Coming) in order to come face to face with the Lord. The two systems are irreconcilable. John Stott, as a leading evangelical, leaves us with an unresolved problem: how to reconcile the 1162 Church of England Burial Service with the teaching of Paul. "For one of the most popular gravestone inscriptions is [Paul’s] text ‘with Christ, which is far better’…Almighty God, went the collect of the old 1662 Burial Service, ‘with whom do live the spirits of them that depart hence in the Lord and with whom the souls of the faithful…are in joy and felicity.’ A popular hymn confirms the traditional teaching: ‘By death I shall escape from death and life eternal gain’" (Understanding Christ, Zondervan, 1979, p. 85).

But this popular teaching has abandoned Paul. Missing from the collect and the hymn is the ringing clarity of Paul’s faith in the eschatological (future) resurrection of the dead which will happen, not at death, but when Jesus comes back. Orthodoxy successfully contradicts Paul by making the believer’s arrival "with Christ" a matter of his going (individually) to him, rather than Christ’s coming back to us. "Let not your hearts be troubled… I go to prepare a place for you… I will come again [the Parousia] and will take you to myself" (John 14:1-3).

In complete harmony with Jesus I Thessalonians 4:13-17 announces the uniting of the believers with Christ only by the event of the second coming of Christ: "Thus we shall be with the Lord forever." It is to throw the New Testament and Paul into confusion if we then read Philippians 1:23, "My desire is to depart and be with Christ," to mean that individually at the instant of death the believer can enter the presence of Christ. Equally unsatisfactory is the assumption that Jesus’ promise to the thief guaranteed an immediate presence with Christ on the day of the crucifixion. What Jesus in fact offered harmonizes perfectly with Paul in I Thessalonians 4:17, a reuniting with Jesus in the future day of the Kingdom-Paradise: "Truly I tell you today, you will be with me in Paradise" (Luke 23:43). It is a promise for the future.

The loss of a clear vision of the future Kingdom and the resurrection plagues attempts to explain the Bible. The biblical Christian hope is to be "with the Lord." Paul was faithfully following his master when he asserted that this coming into Messiah’s presence forever depends on the future arrival of Jesus to raise the dead. "Thus we shall always be with the Lord" (I Thess. 4:17), and by no other means. "Father, I desire that they also…may be with me… I go to prepare a place for you and I will come again and will take you to myself, that where I am you may be also" (John 14:1-3).

"Why would you want to go to heaven?" it is appropriate to ask the traditional believer. Jesus will not be there, following the future resurrection and the second coming. He is coming back to the earth so that we can be "with him." To be "with Jesus" will mean inheriting the earth (Matt. 5:5) and ruling on earth with him (Rev. 5:10).

None of this would appear controversial, had the church not lost sight of the Messianic Kingdom, the heart of Jesus’ Gospel.