kingdomready.org

This message called What Good is Jesus without his Gospel by Anthony Buzzard cogently describes the gospel that Jesus preached about the coming kingdom. For those of you who have never encountered the kingdom gospel before this audio teaching is a fantastic starting place to understand what the real Jesus really preached as opposed to the “cross only” gospel commonly preached from the church today. For those of us who have a deep faith in the kingdom, this sermon is encouraging well presented and thoroughly inspiring. Enjoy!

click here to listen [56:41]

For more audio files regarding the glorious Christian destiny of the kingdom of God (as opposed to going to heaven at death), check out our Kingdom of God Resource web page.

I recently listened to this teaching by N.T. Wright, the Bishop of Durham in England. I find it incredible how much he emphasizes that the biblical destiny is not going to heaven at death but rather resurrection when Jesus comes to establish the kingdom (or in his words, “put the world to rights”). Often, those of us who believe in the kingdom of God focus mostly on the Old Testament and the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) and tend to shy away from the Pauline epistles. However, NT Wright, rightly points out that Paul is not preaching a different message than Jesus, his lord. The following verses are primary in this talk.

Last weekend 44 of us went to Camp Pinnacle to enjoy a few days of together away from the world. The theme of the weekend was “What We’re Living For” and the teachings centered around the Kingdom of God. We had a wonderful time focusing on this vital subject in Scripture and seeing how it effects even how we live our daily lives. Thankfully, John Smajda recorded the teachings for us and they are now available.

1. Restoration: Back to Paradise by Vince Finnegan [43:30]
2. Kingdom Covenants to Abraham and David by Vince Finnegan [41:45]
3. Justice and the Kingdom of God by Sean Finnegan [47:17]
4. Jesus, the Self-Sacrificial King of the Kingdom by Victor Gluckin [51:12]
5. Kingdom Lifestyle by Sean Finnegan [47:00]

One of the most deceptive beliefs of modern Christianity is that people go to heaven at the moment of death. The Bible simply does not teach this doctrine, rather the goal is always the kingdom of God which one enters (on earth) through resurrection on the last day (when Jesus comes back). The problem with the heaven-at-death idea is that it stands out in front of the kingdom idea, effectively eclipsing it. One might say, “yeah, that sounds interesting that we will eventually be on earth, but what really matters to me is that I go to heaven when I die.” The heaven hope shifts our focus from this world to another place. Rather than yearning for the day when God sets this world right, we instead fall into an “escapist” mentality, believing that we’ll get taken out of here. After all, “This world is not my home, I’m just a-passing through.” Jesus simply did not talk like this at all. He was concerned about the poor, the outcasts, the lame, the lepers, the afflicted, marginalized, the lost sheep of the house of Israel. He did not promise them that at death they would enter “heavenly glory.” No! Jesus promised that they would inherit the earth, they would possess the very kingdom of God, they would finally gain mercy, comfort, and would be called the children of God. The gospel is good news because God is going to act through Christ on the last day to make everything wrong with the world right. I found the following quote about heaven to be quite encouraging:

I came across this fantastic quote in “A Community Called Atonement” by Scot McKnight of jesuscreed.org

The Beattitudes are normally misunderstood as a list of virtues. The Beattitudes, however, are not a virtue list: they are a list of the kinds of people in the society Jesus maps for his listeners. Those who are responding to his kingdom vision are the poor and hungry, those who weep and those who are despised by the powerful - and those who are not responding are the rich, the well fed, the party-prone, and those are who approved by such powerful folks. No, this is not a virtue list but a sociopolitical statement: the work of God in Jesus and through the kingdom is to include the marginalized, to render judgment on the powerful, and to create around the marginalized (with Jesus at the center) an alternative society where things are (finally, by God) put to rights. Here we come into a vision of the kingdom of God on the part of Jesus that is an extension of the Magnificat and the Benedictus and Jesus’ inaugural address. pg 12

John 18:36
Jesus answered, “My kingdom is not of this world. If My kingdom were of this world, then My servants would be fighting so that I would not be handed over to the Jews; but as it is, My kingdom is not of this realm.”

This text is commonly used to teach that the kingdom of God is not going to be on earth but instead in heaven. Perhaps the gnosticism of the early centuries of Christianity was never successfully avoided by the church. It seems that the old idea that matter is evil and that disembodied “spiritual” existence is to be preferred. Unfortunately, this way of thinking is totally at variance with the Bible, which speaks of a good earth that was designed by God to be inhabited by resurrected people. Here are Albert Nolan’s comments on this verse.

Luke 17.21-22
20 Now having been questioned by the Pharisees as to when the kingdom of God was coming, He answered them and said, “The kingdom of God is not coming with signs to be observed; 21 nor will they say, ‘Look, here it is!’ or, ‘There it is!’ For behold, the kingdom of God is in your midst.”

This verse has been used to demonstrate that the kingdom of which Jesus spoke constantly was not actually a political kingdom but rather something spiritual inside the Christian (i.e. Jesus reigns in my heart). We have addressed this verse before on this blog (click here). Here is another explanation of this verse that I find quite compelling.

Jesus Before Christianity
by Albert Nolan, pages 58-59, 1992

Jesus was an itinerant prophet who traveled from town to town proclaiming that the kingdom of God was near. Furthermore, he commanded that people within reach of his voice repent because of this nearness. In the past it has been hard for me to make sense of this because I understand the kingdom to be paradise. Just imagine someone coming up to you saying, “repent because the earth is about to be regenerated to paradise.” This would more likely inspire expectation on par with a child who just finds out that her parents are going to take her to Disney Land in a few days. If the kingdom means joy and eternal life then it will likely not inspire repentance but expectation and curiosity. Yet, it has become increasingly clear as I have mulled over Jesus’ gospel proclamation that his message was more like a double edged sword than a wispy promise of eternal happiness.

I came across the following quote in a book called Jesus’ Proclamation of the Kingdom of God (originally written in German in 1892) by Johannes Weiss. This book was credited (along with Albert Schweitzer’s Quest for the Historical Jesus) as the critical work that changed the tide of Jesus scholarship in Germany (and eventually the United States). In fact, by the late 19th century nearly everyone in scholarship believed that the kingdom was either the church or something in your heart. In a mere 76 pages, Weiss changed that conception to such a degree that today the majority of Jesus scholars still believe that Jesus’ proclamation of the kingdom was something intimately related with the end of the world, the time when the final judgment would occur followed by paradise on earth (where the wolf will dwell with the lamb, etc.).

Taken from IIIM Magazine Online. Dr. Richard L. Pratt, Jr. is an American Reformed theologian and author. He is the president and founder of Third Millennium Ministries and formerly chaired the Old Testament department at Reformed Theological Seminary in Orlando, Florida. He is best known for his approach to Biblical hermeneutics, which places a heavy emphasis on the Kingdom of God. He has a Th. D. in OT Studies from Harvard.