True and False Narratives
God has a Kingdom of God or Restoration movement under way as His Project for man, Plan for Man. This is God’s response to the failure and disobedience of the first Adam. This Gospel (Good News) of the Kingdom project (God’s logos) is an invitation to all who choose to participate. The narrative goes like this. Each participant must embrace the challenge by first believing in the project; then he must be forgiven for his past. He must then embark on the journey that ends in immortalization and co-rulership of the new world order which will be the world inaugurated at the last trumpet to be blown as in Revelation 11:15-18. This is the future return of the Messiah to the earth.
For the narrative to be true, the characters in the narrative must be identified correctly. The man Messiah Jesus is the pioneer participant in the Kingdom project. He is also the announcer of the Project, the Gospel preacher. The God who plans and directs the entire project is the God of Israel, of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, the God of Jesus. Candidates to participate in the Kingdom Project are men and women of all nations, not just Jews (cp. the international Church which is God’s Israel, Gal. 6:16; Phil. 3:3).
False narratives are those which do not match the only true narrative, the Biblical one. False narratives fail because they miss the biblical climax by diverting the narrative, taking a wrong turn, by offering the participants a false hope of disembodied existence in heaven at death.
This destroys the actual objective of the Kingdom project, which is to govern and administer the world with the Messiah Jesus, when he comes back. Jesus and his associate administrators will be empowered and authorized to subdue the world, that is, the Messiah’s enemies, led by a final antichrist.
The book of Revelation is a concentrated account of that future encounter of Messiah with hostile, resistant man. This is the climax of the whole Kingdom movement, the object and conclusion of the True Narrative and Project. Psalm 2, in 12 verses, reveals in advance the endpoint of the Kingdom project. The hostile world is bidden to submit to the Messiah whom God will have then placed (at the second coming of Jesus) on Mount Zion. Verse 10 bids the hostile world submit to the authority of the arriving Messiah, and not to resist him, lest they be destroyed by the overwhelming authority of God’s agent the Messiah.
Appropriately then verse 9, “The Messiah will break them with a rod of iron and shatter them like earthenware,” is recalled 3 times in the book of Revelation (2:26-27; 12:5; 19:15). These passages declare the goal and reward of the Kingdom project, and they remind the reader of the need for human subjection to the great Kingdom project of the one God of Israel. They also describe the authority conferred on Jesus and the saints, recalling Daniel 7:14, 18, 22, 27 (“obey them”) and Daniel 2:44-45, the Kingdom world empire which replaces all rivals.
The biblical true narrative is falsified when it is never allowed its climax. The project is falsified when it is reduced, shrunk, to a “dying and rising” Messiah project, which allows for no denouement of the grand project — which is the subjection of rebellious man and governments to the risen and exalted, and returning Messiah and his saints. Thus Psalm 2 finds its fulfillment as the vision of the returning Messiah who takes control of chaotic human societies and turns them (at the future 7th trumpet, Rev. 11:15-18) into the Kingdom of God, which is the end-game of the entire Kingdom project. This is the Gospel as announced by Jesus (Heb. 2:3) and all the NT Christians.
Briefly, any attempt to describe the Biblical narrative without its climax at the future return of Jesus and the resurrection of all the saints (1 Cor. 15:23) is a failed and inadequate narrative, not fully true to the Bible.
This article was taken from
Focus On The Kingdom
