A systematic mistake plagues contemporary attempts to bring the saving Gospel to the public. It is all a question of which Bible texts are placed before the potential convert. You can make the Bible say almost anything if you select your verses in a way which produces only some of the evidence — particularly if you omit entirely the primary evidence.
Here is how it works. Pick a few verses from Romans (written not to unconverted people but to those who had already heard the Gospel) and you can give the impression that being saved means believing that Jesus died for your sins and rose from the dead. "Jesus came to do three days work: to die, be buried and rise again" declares a very widely circulated tract offering salvation.
But why would you begin with Paul and Romans? What about Jesus? Was he not the prototype preacher and teacher of salvation and how to obtain it? According to Hebrews 2:3 the "Gospel began to be preached by the Lord Jesus." It did not begin to be preached by Paul or Peter. Rule number one in our quest for the faith is to begin with Jesus. How did he preach salvation? The answer is very clear. He did not come into Galilee and say "Repent and believe that I died for your sins and am going to rise from the dead." Jesus did say: "Repent and believe the Gospel" (Mark 1:14, 15), but the Gospel in question was positively not at that stage information about his sacrificial death or his resurrection. It was about believing in the Good News (Gospel) pertaining to the Kingdom of God.
"Kingdom of God" does not mean the death of a savior on a cross. Kingdom of God does not mean resurrection from the dead. Kingdom of God and resurrection are connected, certainly, in the New Testament’s theological system, but they are never synonyms. "Repent and believe in the Gospel of the Kingdom" (Mark 1:14, 15) is the first recorded imperative, the first commandment of the Lord and Savior. Yet curiously it never gets a mention in tracts offering salvation and almost never in today’s evangelistic campaigns.
Curiously and sadly the Gospel has been truncated, actually deprived of its principal element. Jesus laid the foundation of the Gospel, went about offering salvation, seeking sinners and urging them to be reconciled to God. And his saving tool, during his ministry on earth, was the Gospel/Word/Message about the Kingdom of God (Matt. 13:19).
Three independent and corroborative accounts of Jesus’ evangelistic technique are offered us by Matthew, Mark and Luke. Yet these are ignored. Have you ever read a tract which begins by asking "What did Jesus say you have to do to be saved? How did he conduct his mission? What did he say about conversion?"
It may be that there is one exception. Jesus’ encounter with Nicodemus in John 3 gets some mention. From this we gather that we must be "born again." No one, Jesus asserted, can see or enter the Kingdom of God unless he is first "born again," or "born from above." Even this text suffers from popular mishandling when Kingdom of God is given a non-biblical meaning as "heaven." Jesus did not offer "heaven" to anyone. He offered inheritance of the earth as the reward of the faithful (Matt. 5:5), and promised his followers that they would one day function as royal rulers "upon the earth" (Rev. 5:10). "Heaven" language ("when I get to heaven," "he has gone home to heaven," etc.) has a jamming effect on these precious and clear texts. The brain is confused when confronted with the contradictory propositions: "the meek will inherit the earth and rule on the earth" (Matt. 5:5 and Rev. 5:10) and "so and so is going/has gone to heaven."
"Heaven in the Bible is nowhere the destination of the dying." So said the learned professor at Cambridge within recent years (Dr. J.A.T. Robinson, in In the End God). But has the church taken up the challenge to see if perhaps he was right? "If you meet some who deny the resurrection and say that when they die their souls go to heaven, do not consider them Christians." Such was the protest of a Christian spokesman and martyr of the second century (Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho, ch. 80).
In those days, it was abundantly clear that the Bible said nothing at all about souls enjoying a post-mortem existence in heaven at the moment of death. Rather it was known, because the Bible had been so clear on the subject, that all the dead went to the realm of death, Sheol/Hades, from which only the future collective resurrection of all the faithful dead of all the ages would rescue them and return them to life. It was from the sleep of the dead in the tomb that Jesus rescued Lazarus (John 11:11, 14 — "Lazarus is asleep, Lazarus is dead: I am going to wake him up out of his sleep"). Jesus was nourished on the words of Daniel 12:2 (and 12:13) where the dead are said to be sleeping in the dust of the ground. That tells you what the dead are doing and where they are doing it. Jesus was instructed in the wise words of Ecclesiastes 9:5: "The dead do not know anything."
The dead, according to Jesus, are still in the nether world of the dead awaiting their summons to life when the seventh trumpet, the resurrection trumpet at the return of Jesus, sounds its earth-shattering call for the return of dead persons to full-blooded life (I Cor. 15:23, 50-55; Rev. 11:15-18; Matt. 24:31; I Thess. 4:16). That is biblical resurrection. Biblical resurrection is positively not the re-attaching of departed "immortal souls" to a new body. That is not resurrection as the Bible knows it. Biblical resurrection means the return of the whole man who has died to life as a whole, recreated person, equipped at his resurrection with the spiritual body described by Paul in I Corinthians 15:50-55. No one in the Bible ever received an incorruptible, immortal body at the moment of his death. Immortalization of human beings will happen only at the return of Jesus to resurrect the dead. Until then the faithful are dead, as are also the unfaithful. Paul expected to gain his crown "at that day," the day of Christ’s reappearance on earth (II Tim. 4:8).
Following that resurrection destined to happen at the future reappearance of Jesus (I Cor 15:23) the Kingdom of God will be reestablished in Jerusalem and the world will be under new management. Jesus will be the first successful world-governor (Messiah means exactly that — king of the world under God’s authority). In those wonderful days, the world will indeed be one people under One God (Zech. 14:9), though still differentiated by national groups (Isa. 19:18-25), and they will be truly "under God." To say that any nation is now "under God" is a considerable hyperbole, not supported by actual fact. But the Gospel of the Kingdom, the first item on the agenda of Jesus’ and apostolic evangelism, sets before the convert a glorious future as immortal assistant in the sound management of world affairs in company with the returned Jesus. Being a Christian is an invitation to training under test conditions in the "present evil age" (Gal. 1:4) with a view to administrative office with Jesus in the "future inhabited earth about which we speak" (Heb. 2:5).
The germ of the Christian’s glorious future is the seed sown in the heart. And the seed is defined by Jesus as "the Gospel/Word about the Kingdom of God" (Matt. 13:19; see also I Pet. 1:23-25; James 1:18; I John 3:9; Gal. 4:28, 29). Satan works hard and long to prevent that seed Message from taking root in your heart. He well knows that it contains the spark of life forever! (Luke 8:12). God’s creative Gospel through Jesus initiates the saving process which will be complete in the future. We are now "nearer to salvation than when we first believed" (Rom. 13:11).
The Gospel about the Kingdom sets before the believer a summons to wholehearted action, (including baptism for the remission of sins, Acts 8:12), a reorientation to the bright new future of the Kingdom of God coming from heaven when Jesus returns. Repentance means turning back to the Covenant by embracing God’s grand scheme for the immortalization of mortal man and the rescue of the world from Satan’s present domination.
by Anthony Buzzard
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