The Vital Question of Defining the Saving Gospel

There is an urgent need for disciples of Jesus to ensure that they have grasped the meaning of the Gospel as Jesus preached it. This [blog] is devoted to the task of helping to “sort out” the vast amount of confusion which seems to surround this most basic question of all, “What is the Gospel?” 

There are two principal questions which must be addressed if we are to respond with honesty and intelligence to the summons issued by Jesus when he inaugurated his Gospel-preaching ministry:
1. What was the content of the Gospel announced as the saving Message by Jesus, the pioneer of the Christian faith?
2. How far has traditional preaching represented Jesus accurately in this matter of defining the Gospel? 

To the first question we answer unequivocally because the evidence provided by the Christian documents is utterly clear. The Gospel is a Gospel about the Kingdom of God. This is obvious to anyone who reads the accounts of the ministry of Jesus. With this fact established we move to the question of what the Kingdom of God means in Jesus’ fundamental command: “Repent [do a U-turn in thinking and conduct, return to the Covenant] and believe the Gospel of the Kingdom of God” (see Mark 1:14, 15). It is clear that there can be no intelligent response to Jesus if “Kingdom of God” carries no definite meaning for us! The Kingdom of God, say numerous good commentators, was not the nebulous phrase for Jesus’ audience which it often is today. Ask your friends the critical question “What is the Gospel and what is the Kingdom of God?” You may be surprised by a bewildering variety of answers, many of them probably vague. 

The Kingdom of God announced as the content of the Gospel was not, however, a “catch-all” phrase for “religion” or a call for people to “be good.” On the contrary it had a definite and very concrete meaning in first-century Palestine. Here from the International Standard Bible Encyclopedia (article “Salvation”) is a sound, common-sense and historically-sensitive answer to the question about the nature of the Kingdom: 

“It was in the full heat of John the Baptist’s eschatological [pointing to the future] revival that Christ began to teach, and he also began with the eschatological [concerned with the future] phrase, ‘The Kingdom of God is at hand.’” 

Matthew 3:2; 4:17; 9:35; and 24:14 inform us that the Gospel Message of John and the Gospel Message of Jesus were founded on a common basis: the Kingdom of God. It is a serious error to try to separate Jesus from his forerunner. According to our New Testament reports both John and Jesus announced the Kingdom of God as the Gospel. 

Our source in the ISBE continues: “Jesus’ teaching must have been understood at once in an eschatological sense.” The Kingdom, in other words, meant the Kingdom of the future. It was not a reference to a present “kingdom in the heart” or “God’s rule in our lives.” ISBE goes on: “‘The Kingdom of God is at hand’ had the inseparable connotation ‘Judgment is at hand,’ and in this context (Mark 1:15) means ‘Repent lest you be judged.’ Hence our Lord’s teaching had primarily a future content: positively, admission into the Kingdom of God [at its future coming] and negatively deliverance from the preceding judgment.” 

We trust that this comment from a standard dictionary will dispel some of the fog of confusion which surrounds current understanding (or misunderstanding) of the Kingdom and thus of the Gospel. The Kingdom of God did indeed mean the coming day of intervention when God would punish the wicked and establish through the agency of His Messiah a new world order on earth. There is absolutely no doubt that “Kingdom of God” carried this connotation in the minds of Jesus and his audience. Jesus does not define the Kingdom of God. He did not have to. What was new, however, was the fact that the promised new world order did not materialize during the ministry of Jesus and has not since that time. Thus in his parables of the Kingdom Jesus explained to his followers how the Gospel announcement of the future Kingdom operated in the present time prior to the advent of the Kingdom itself. 

The Gospel of the Kingdom, therefore, is to the Kingdom as an invitation to a banquet is to the banquet itself. The Gospel invites everyone to prepare for the Great Day Coming. To speak of the Kingdom as though it is has arrived is to contradict Jesus’ statement that it was “at hand,” “near,” but not yet here. The Kingdom of God is the Great Event of the future, meaning the end of earth’s rebel governments. It does not mean the end of life on this planet! 

Hence Jesus commands prayer for the coming of the Kingdom, and Mark and Luke report that after the Gospel preaching of Jesus was over, and he had been crucified and resurrected, the disciples were still “waiting for” the Kingdom of God. It would be wrong, therefore, to say that the Kingdom of God as constantly referred to by Jesus had already come. Certainly we might add that the preaching of the Kingdom is an anticipation of the Kingdom. But the preaching of the Kingdom is not the arrival of the Kingdom. An invitation precedes the actual event to which we are invited. 

97% of the Kingdom statements of Jesus in the Gospels will fit beautifully into this scheme. Re-read the gospels with the future Kingdom notion firmly in mind (as introduced by Matthew 3:2) and the Kingdom will become clear as the New Organized World Government — Kingdom — to be openly manifested upon the return of Jesus in the future. 

Confirmation of the basic Gospel fact is found in the Book of Daniel. Daniel’s vision of the future of world history is an absolutely indispensable guide to the understanding of New Testament Christianity. 

In Daniel 2 we are presented with an extraordinary vision of four world-empires destined to be destroyed and superseded by a fifth World Empire — the Kingdom of God set up “under the whole heaven” (7:27) by the God of Heaven. In the vision the Kingdom appears as a “stone cut out without hands” which strikes the image at its base and then “fills the whole earth.” We must emphasize that this Kingdom of God is nothing whatsoever to do with a “realm beyond the skies.” Its origin certainly is from Heaven (God) but its location is territorial and linked to the earth. 

Daniel 7 is a central key to the whole book of Daniel and should be considered also a kind of “blueprint” for the whole Bible story which culminates in the arrival of the Kingdom, the principal topic in Jesus’ Gospel. 

Students of Scripture will have no difficulty recognizing that Daniel 7 describes the career, present and future, of the Saints. And the Saints, so the New Testament interprets the word, are the faithful followers of Jesus. The principal Saint, the Holy One, takes center stage in Daniel 7’s vision. It is the Son of Man to whom the future Kingdom is given (7:13, 14) and that Kingdom is then shared with “the people of the Saints of the Most High” (the Christians as the true remnant of the people of God). Daniel 7:18 forecasts that the “time came for the saints to possess the Kingdom” (nothing to do with psychological kingdoms of the heart). Again, “judgment is passed in favor of the saints” (v. 22). They are vindicated and promoted to positions of power as a corporate Son of Man (Son of Man referring first to Jesus and then also his accompanying followers). In Daniel 7:27 the climax of this amazing revelation announces that the “Kingdom under the whole heaven will be given to the people of the Saints of the Most High. All nations will serve and obey them.” For this translation, see RSV, GNB and note the important comment of Driver in Cambridge Bible for Schools: “It is the people of the saints who receive the Kingdom and they operate as its executives.” 

These two sections of Scripture, Daniel 2:35, 44 and Daniel 7:13, 14, 18, 22, 27, are vital keys to the meaning of the term “Kingdom of God.” The Kingdom of God is not a term invented by Jesus. It has its roots deep in the Hebrew Bible, which Jesus and the New Testament treat as a divine repository of essential saving information. The Gospel itself is founded on the Old Testament (Romans 1:16; Galatians 3:8). 

In commanding repentance and belief in the Gospel of the Kingdom (Mark 1:14, 15) Jesus urges everyone everywhere to grasp the meaning of God’s saving Plan both for the individual and the world. Repentance means turning from our violations of God’s ways, our misconceptions of His revelation and embracing God’s Gospel (Mark 1:14) which lays out the goal of history unfolding through Jesus and culminating in the Kingdom of God destined to replace present nation-states (Revelation 11:15-18) on this planet renewed.

The above post was taken from here.

Defining the Gospel of the Kingdom from Matthew

Part 1

It is an unarguable fact that Jesus was the bearer of the Gospel or Good News about the Kingdom of God/Heaven (the two phrases are identical in meaning). “Kingdom of God” is the master-term in Jesus’ presentation of the Christian faith. It is his constant slogan, the concept around which all of his discourse revolves. “Kingdom of God” is the phrase in which the genius of the faith is concentrated. Jesus bared his mind and the fundamental intention of his whole career as prophet, rabbi and Son of God with these precious words, which should be indelibly written on the hearts of his followers: 

“I am bound to preach the Gospel about the Kingdom of God to the other cities also: That is the reason why God sent me” (Luke 4:43). Logically, then, the same driving purpose should animate all Christian evangelism. 

Yet, strangely, the phrase “Gospel of the Kingdom of God” is absent from the lips of nearly all contemporary attempts to “preach salvation.” Something is seriously amiss. This discrepancy was noted also by a leading church planter: “I cannot help wondering why I have not heard more about the Kingdom of God in the thirty years I have been a Christian. I certainly have read about it enough in the Bible…. But I honestly cannot remember any pastor whose ministry I have been under actually preaching a sermon on the Kingdom of God. As I rummage through my own sermon barrel, I now realize that I myself have never preached a sermon on it. Where has the Kingdom been?”[1]

No one, therefore, should be faulted for calling attention to this amazing phenomenon: Jesus’ central concern in evangelism is blatantly absent from the vocabulary of those whose job it is to represent him. 

Our language as exponents and teachers of the Christian faith had better be the language of Jesus. Language reflects mind. And Christians claim to have, by virtue of the holy spirit, “the mind of Christ” (I Cor. 2:16). 

If we grant then that the Kingdom of God is the heart of the saving Message (Mark 1:14, 15; cp. Matthew 13:19; Luke 8:12), the reasonable and necessary question is: “What is the Kingdom?” 

A good place to examine the question is at the beginning of the New Testament, though an approach from the Old Testament would be equally valid and valuable. For the moment, let us start with Matthew. When, what and where is the Kingdom? A cloud of fog and confusion has settled over many Bible students in regard to defining the Kingdom. But this need not be: In the Lord’s prayer, we are invited to approach God with the words “May Your Kingdom come.” This point of reference is familiar to the least instructed, and its force should not be missed. You do not pray for something to come, if it has already come! The petition is positively not, “May Your Kingdom grow,” nor “May Your Kingdom spread.” The request is for the future arrival of the Kingdom, meaning of course, that in the sense indicated by Jesus in the “Lord’s prayer,” the Kingdom had not yet come. 

An excellent Old Testament base for just such a future coming of the Kingdom is found in Micah 4:7, 8. In that passage the prophet announces that the Kingdom will yet come to Mount Zion, and it will be a return to a former, lost condition, a restoration of dominion which has been taken away from Jerusalem: “The Lord will reign over them in Mount Zion and henceforth forever. And you, tower of the flock, the stronghold of the daughter of Zion, to you it is going to come, namely the former dominion: the KINGDOM will come to the daughter of Jerusalem.” 

A clear basis indeed for the request: “Thy Kingdom come”! And the Kingdom is a concrete empire based on a geographical location — Jerusalem, which Jesus called “the city of the Great King”
(Matthew 5:35). 

Again, in Matthew, the Kingdom is the great and decisive event of the future: “Not everyone who says to me, ‘lord, lord’ will enter the Kingdom of Heaven/God; but only he who does my Heavenly Father’s will. Many will say to me in that day…” (Matthew 7:21, 22). The linkage is clear. Jesus’ words rivet together the concept of Kingdom and “in that (future) day.” The Kingdom belongs in the mind of Christ to the day of God’s future intervention and judgment on the world. The Kingdom is the magnificent, decisive and (for the wicked) catastrophic interposition of divine authority to right the wrongs of our present rebel world. The Kingdom comes (in this passage) with the future coming of Jesus and not before. 

Now for a third testimony: Matthew 8:11, 12: “Many will come [note the verb in the future tense] from the East and West and will sit down with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob in the Kingdom of Heaven/God, but the children of the Kingdom will be cast out into outer darkness: there will be weeping and grinding of teeth.” 

Once again the setting and the timing of the Kingdom are unmistakable. The Kingdom belongs to the future as an event which will divide the good from the bad, and their destinies will be fixed. “The children of the Kingdom” are here those who by virtue of their privileged position as members of the Israelite race should have been candidates for successful entry into the Kingdom when it comes. But tragically, they will not have accepted the Messiah and his Gospel-of-the-Kingdom Message. They will not have believed the Gospel of the Kingdom from the lips of the Messiah, nor spread the fire of its saving message to others. And they will be barred entrance into the Kingdom “in that day.” 

These three passages found early in the Gospel of Matthew are sufficient to set the pattern of Kingdom teaching which pervades Jesus’ preaching career. The Kingdom is yet to come. It will be the momentous event of the future for which all are invited to prepare now with utmost urgency — in terms equally of proper, Bible-informed, belief system and proper conduct. 

The Gospel of salvation, as it fell from the lips of Jesus, is to the Kingdom as an invitation is to a banquet. The Gospel is to the Kingdom as the sowing of seed is to the harvest. And it leads only to confusion, if we muddle these simple facts. An invitation is not the banquet itself, and the sowing of seed is not the harvest. The primary and dominant meaning of the Kingdom in the Gospel teaching of Jesus is the Kingdom of God to be manifested in the future when Jesus returns to administer it on earth in company with the saints of all the ages. These will function with him as under-sovereigns in a world reborn, restored and reconstituted. Present conditions tell of our world plight and the desperate need for a better human society. This will eventually materialize as the Kingdom of God to be inaugurated on earth as all the prophets foresaw. The Gospel of the Kingdom invites all to become caught up in this thrilling, divine scheme, to share the passion of God Himself and His unique agent the Lord Jesus Messiah (Luke 4:43; cp. 2:49, “God’s agenda”).

The Bible from cover to cover looks forward to the time when God’s people will be in God’s place, with God’s Prince established in the Kingdom which is his by divine Promise. Blessed indeed are the meek, because they will inherit the earth/the Kingdom/the Life of the Age to come (immortality gained in the resurrection) (see Matthew 5:5; 25:34; 19:29; I Corinthians 15:23).

[1] Peter Wagner, in Church Growth and the Whole Gospel, p. 2.

The above was taken from here.

Part 2

The Gospel as Jesus preached it — the Gospel of the Kingdom — requires a grasp of Jesus’ famous phrase “Kingdom of God.” The Messiah opened his public ministry with a dual command: 

“Repent [undergo a complete reorientation in thinking and in conduct] and believe in the Gospel about the Kingdom of God” (Mark 1:14, 15). The Greek may also be rendered “Believe the Gospel [about the Kingdom]”. 

This is where the Christian faith, according to its pioneer exponent, Jesus, begins. Mark gives us, as do the other gospel writers, a summary, programmatic statement of the essence of what Jesus was about. His entire career was devoted to the propagation of the Gospel Message about the Kingdom. The Gospel of Kingdom of God is the quintessential saving Message, authored by the Savior himself. 

It would be reasonable to expect Christian ministries today to give clear evidence of their genuineness. A certain proof that they are following in the footsteps of Jesus would be their clarion call for “repentance and belief in the Gospel of the Kingdom.” 

The facts, however are alarmingly different. The phrase “Gospel of the Kingdom” has been almost entirely removed from circulation. Listen carefully to gospel preaching as it bombards the American public. Jesus’ famous phrase “Gospel about the Kingdom of God” is strangely absent. This fact calls for an urgent investigation among those who are keen to have the Savior’s words both in the public forum and as the driving force of their lives (I Thessalonians 2:13). 

Matthew wrote his Gospel to document the work of the historical Jesus and thus to set the standard of Christian preaching. He presents these fundamental facts: John the Baptist came announcing the Kingdom of Heaven (=Kingdom of God) (Matthew 3:2). What did John mean by the Kingdom? The answer is given in Matthew 3:7-10. Repentance, John said, is in view of the coming Kingdom. The Kingdom is both threat and promise. It brings the threat of the “wrath to come” (v. 7), of being “cast into the fire,” “burned up life chaff in unquenchable fire” (vv. 10, 12), or the promise of being gathered like “wheat into the barn” (v. 12). The coming of the Kingdom, which is near, not yet here, means the coming of judgment and reward. 

The Kingdom of God is thus established in our thinking as the objective of Christian faith. It is positively not, in these passages, a “rule in human hearts.” Nor is it a synonym for the church. It is the great cataclysmic event of the future: The Kingdom is parallel to the wrath to come (v. 7). None of this, of course, was in any way unclear to a first-century student of the Scriptures, since the Kingdom was the hoped-for liberation of Israel from foreign domination as well as the hope of peace for all nations under Messiah’s worldwide empire (the Kingdom of God). The Kingdom of God was already known as the empire of Israel. Solomon had indeed sat on the throne of the Kingdom of God over Israel (I Chronicles 28:5). The faithful in Israel, following the teaching of their prophets, were unitedly looking forward to that restored throne in Israel (cp. Luke 24:21; Acts 1:6) and the presence there of the Messiah as the legitimate royal ruler for God on earth. It is repentance and commitment to that great fact of the divine Plan which John urged in the Gospel of the Kingdom. 

Matthew gives Jesus’ message an identical label. Nothing could be clearer than the fundamental thrust of Jesus’ Gospel described by Matthew 4:17, 23: “From that time Jesus began to proclaim his Message and say: ‘The Kingdom of Heaven [equivalent to the Kingdom of God] is at hand.’… And Jesus went all over Galilee proclaiming as a herald the Gospel about the Kingdom and healing all kinds of sickness.” 

With the Kingdom defined as the future intervention of God to establish peace on earth and punish the wicked, the heart of the Gospel is clear. Jesus offers the promise of reward and life in the Kingdom, and threatens extinction, like chaff in the fire, to those who fail to pay attention to his Gospel. 

The entire New Testament provides a commentary on this basic, simple thesis. As we saw in our last issue the Kingdom is a main priority in prayer. We are to pray “May your [God’s] Kingdom come!” (echoed exactly in “May our Lord come” and “Lord Jesus, come! — I Corinthians16:22, Revelation 22:20. Note that the last text makes the coming Kingdom the subject of the final biblical request). 

The well-known petition of the Lord’s prayer marks the Kingdom as the desired event of the future. One does not pray for the Kingdom to come, if it has already come. The Kingdom is therefore the object of Christian hope. This fact is demonstrably true of other famous sayings of Jesus: “Enter by the narrow gate…Few find the way to life…Beware of false religious teachers…It is not everyone who says ‘lord, lord’ to me, who will enter the Kingdom of Heaven, but the one who carries out the will of my Father…Many will say to me in that day…” (Matthew 7:13-15, 21, 22). “That day” will be the great occasion for rejection from or acceptance into the Kingdom of God. Once again the Kingdom is the event of the future for which we should prepare with urgency. It will be at that future time that “many will come from the East and the West and will recline with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob in the Kingdom of Heaven” (Matthew 8:11). 

At the same time the “children of the Kingdom” (those who by being privileged Israelites ought to have qualified for entry into the Kingdom, yet they tragically refused their own Messiah) will be rejected from the bright lights of the banquet hall and hurled into outer darkness where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth — a picture of awful remorse and despair. 

The career of Jesus was wholly devoted to the proclamation of the Father’s Gospel of the Kingdom. Matthew 9:35 repeats 4:23: “Jesus went to all the cities and villages, teaching in their synagogues and heralding (preaching, KJV) the Gospel of the Kingdom.” All biblical “preaching” refers to preaching the Gospel of the Kingdom of God. 

Christian discipleship means learning the Gospel as Jesus preached it and taking it to the public: “As you go, preach [herald], saying, ‘The Kingdom of Heaven is at hand’” (Matt. 10:7). We have here the obvious fact that Christianity entails following Jesus by preaching his Gospel, the germ of what was later given by the risen Jesus as the Great Commission (Matthew 28:19, 20). The proclamation of the Kingdom will continue right up until the day of the arrival of Jesus in his Kingdom, as Jesus made clear in a fascinating observation in Matthew 10:23: “You will not have gone over the cities of Israel until the Son of Man comes.” The Messiah here foresees an end-time ministry on behalf of the Gospel of the Kingdom in the land of Israel. But the Great Commission mandates the preaching of the same Christian Gospel of the Kingdom to all the nations of the world (Matthew 24:14; 28:19, 20). Those who receive such proponents of the Kingdom Gospel receive Jesus himself (Matt. 10:40) who commissions them. “Accepting Jesus,” then, must be rooted in its biblical context. It means accepting Jesus’ proclamation about the Kingdom of God. The Gospel, therefore, is an eschatological matter. This is to say that it puts before us the great fact of the future and demands that we believe it. God speaks to the present from the future, laying before us His ultimate Plan and inviting us for our own good and our psychological and spiritual well-being to attune ourselves to God’s world-scheme being worked out through Jesus. 

Even the well-known petition “Hallowed be Your Name” is a cry for the future revelation of the Kingdom. Ezekiel had written of the time coming when God will be vindicated among the nations worldwide: “I will vindicate the holiness of My great Name, which has been profaned among the nations, and which you [Israelites] have profaned among them; and the nations will know that I am the Lord, says the Lord God, when through you I vindicate my holiness before their eyes” (Ezekiel 36:23).

Throughout the ministry of Jesus members of the public approached him seeking information about how they could “inherit the Kingdom of God” (no one asked Jesus about how they could “go to heaven when they die”). Common to Jesus and his audience was the notion that the Kingdom of God was the objective of the Christian life. Entry into it or exclusion from it were the two options to be faced by those who heard Jesus preach. The decision to permit or refuse entry would be made at the Second Coming of Jesus (the Parousia). This is the constant scheme underlying the teaching of Jesus. That this is unclear to many churchgoers is due to our persistent use of a contradictory scheme. Our unbiblical tradition interferes with and muddles the teaching of Jesus in two ways. 

Firstly, it substitutes “Heaven” for “Kingdom of God” as the objective of the faithful. Deeply ingrained in churchgoers language is the conviction that “heaven” is the Christian goal. Jesus said otherwise. He promised “the earth” and the Kingdom of God to his followers (Matthew 5:5; cp. Revelation 5:10). 

Secondly the time at which the promised reward is reached has been altered by popular language. It is ingrained in the minds of churchgoers that immediately upon his or her death the goal of faith will be reached. Such an idea, cherished as it is, produces a very considerable confusion when it is imposed on the Bible. The Bible knows only of the future resurrection at the Coming of Jesus as the “point of arrival” for Christians. According to the testimony of Scripture, there is no way out of death except by resurrection of the whole man, an event which will involve all the faithful of all the ages in one community resurrection destined to occur, not at the individual’s death, but only when Jesus returns visibly to inaugurate his Kingdom on the earth (I Corinthians 15:23; Revelation 11:15-18; Daniel 12:2). 

Reception of the Gospel of the Kingdom in the New Testament involves also a joyful response to the function which is offered to believers who will enter the Kingdom when it comes. The function of the believers is nothing less than the ultimate point of God’s covenant with man. Man was instructed from the beginning to take charge of the earth as God’s vice-regent. That purpose, hitherto frustrated by sin and the Devil, will come to fulfillment when the world is under the supervision of Jesus and the saints. The point of the whole Christian struggle for the Kingdom of God is beautifully laid out by Jesus at the last supper. Here, once again, Jesus confirms that the Kingdom will arrive with the future arrival of himself in glory. It will be then that “those who have followed me, will be promoted to take their seats on twelve thrones, to administer the [regathered] twelve tribes of Israel…Just as my Father has covenanted with me to give me the Kingdom, so I now covenant with you to give you the Kingdom.”(Luke 22:28-30). “Don’t be timid, little flock, it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the Kingdom” (Luke 12:32). 

This promise of kingship in the Kingdom is an essential part of what it means to receive the Gospel of the Kingdom. Paul treated this information about the future function of Christians as basic information about the faith. He was not a little disturbed that the Corinthians had forgotten the purpose for which God had called them to salvation, which was more than the forgiveness of past sin: “Don’t you know that the saints are going to manage the world? And if the world is to come under your jurisdiction, are you incompetent to settle trifling matters in the church?” (see I Corinthians 6:2, Moffatt). 

Vague promises of a disembodied life (without a brain, or eyes or ears, which are part of the body?) in “heaven” are an exceedingly poor substitute for the hope which beat in the heart of Jesus, and which drove his mission — that of forming around him a team of co-workers and co-rulers for his Father’s coming Kingdom on earth (Revelation 5:10; Matthew 5:5).

The above was taken from here.

The Kingdom of God as Password

The greatest question of all “How can I be saved?” receives a distinct answer in the teaching of Jesus. Jesus was on a mission to save the world. But what are the conditions for entry into the realm of salvation? The public has been trapped into a false way of thinking when it is told that the key to salvation is “Believe that you are a sinner; believe that Jesus died for your sins, and trust in Jesus for forgiveness.” Based on a few verses taken from Romans this approach may seem plausible. The problem is that the words of Jesus himself about how to be saved are bypassed. Lesson number one in the salvation process is to listen first to Jesus. In Mark 4:11 Jesus revealed the secret: “To you the secret of the Kingdom of God has been given, but to those who are on the outside everything comes by way of parables, so that seeing they may see nothing and hearing they may understand nothing; otherwise they might turn to God and be forgiven.” 

Matthew records the same teaching: “Satan comes and carries off the word which has been sown in them for fear that they should believe and be saved.” The knowledge of the secret of the Kingdom of God is the passport into salvation. Forgiveness according to Jesus is conditioned on an understanding of the “secret of the Kingdom of God.” “To you [disciples] the secret of the Kingdom of God has been given,” but not to those outside the Christian circle: “Otherwise they might turn to God and be forgiven” (Mark 4:12, NEB). 

Preaching, therefore, in the New Testament constantly lays before the audience, not just the facts about the death and resurrection of Jesus, but the indispensable Gospel which tells of the Kingdom of God. Reception of the Gospel of the Kingdom, the heart of Jesus’ saving agenda, is the condition of salvation, according to Jesus. Without this information, the “password” which leads us out of death into life, there is no turning to God and consequently no forgiveness (Mark 4:11, 12). Jesus made this fundamental point constantly: “He who hears my WORD and believes Him who sent me has the Life of the Age to Come, and does not come into judgment, but has passed out of death into life” (John 5:24).

The above post was taken from here.

The Gospel as Defined by the Oxford English Dictionary(1971-79)

“Gospel”
“1. The Glad Tidings of the Kingdom of God announced by Jesus Christ to the world. The body of religious doctrine taught by Jesus Christ and his Apostles. The Christian religion, the Christian revelation.
2. Identified by Protestants with their own system of belief as opposed to the perverted system of belief imputed by them to their adversaries; also applied by Puritans and modern evangelicals as the doctrine of salvation solely through trust in the merit of Christ’s sacrifice.” 

The first definition represents the clear language of Jesus as reported in Matthew, Mark and Luke. The second definition is a drastic reduction of the Gospel to one of its components, the death of Jesus. The foundation of the Gospel as well as its all-encompassing scope is defined by Jesus as “the Gospel about the Kingdom of God” (Luke 4:43). Jesus presents the propagation of this Gospel as the reason for his whole saving mission: “I am under divine compulsion to preach the Gospel about Kingdom of God…That is the reason why I was commissioned” (Luke 4:43). 

There are 13 chapters of Matthew (3-15), 7 chapters of Mark (1-7), 5 chapters of Luke (4-8), totaling 25 chapters, recording the Gospel preaching as Jesus carried it out, in which there is not a single mention of the sacrificial death or resurrection of Jesus. Jesus “preached the Gospel” and sent others to preach it, with no inclusion of facts about his death and resurrection (which were added later). This must prove that the Christian Gospel of salvation is not a message solely about trusting the merit of Christ’s sacrifice. There is a more fundamental element in the Gospel, and it is called by Jesus (and the gospel-writers) “the Gospel about the Kingdom of God.” Jesus opened his ministry by commanding belief in and commitment to that Gospel of the Kingdom as the basis of saving faith (Mark 1:14, 15). 

In the parable of the sower he makes repentance and belief in the Gospel of the Kingdom the essential requisite for true discipleship: “When anyone hears the word [Gospel] about the Kingdom [Matthew 13:19] the Devil comes and snatches away the word which has been sown in his heart, so that he cannot believe it and be saved” (Luke 8:12; see Mark 4:11, 12). The linkage between believing the Gospel of the Kingdom and salvation is unmistakable. This is merely a confirmation of the basis of saving faith taught from the start by Jesus when he commanded: “The Kingdom of God is at hand: Repent and believe the Gospel [of the Kingdom]” (Mark 1:14, 15). “Believe the Gospel of the Kingdom” is Jesus’ first and most fundamental command (along with his insistence on belief in the One God of his Jewish heritage — Mark 12:29ff.). 

Even when Jesus did introduce the facts about his sacrificial death for sin and his resurrection to his disciples, who had already been preaching the Gospel (about the Kingdom), the disciples did not grasp those facts. As late as Luke 18:31-34, when Jesus made a third declaration of his impending death and resurrection, the apostles did not understand what was meant. The facts before us show that there are no less than 17 chapters in Matthew (3-19), 9 chapters of Mark (1-9), 14 chapters of Luke (4-17) — a total of 40 chapters — reporting the Gospel preaching of Jesus and his disciples, in which there is at first no announcement of Jesus’ death and resurrection and later no comprehension of it. This data must demonstrate to the open-minded that defining the Gospel as “trust in the meritorious death of Jesus” (definition 2, above) is inadequate as a reflection of the Bible. 

The biblical facts demand a definition of the Gospel which contains as its most fundamental, permanent element the “news about the Kingdom of God,” and secondly the companion facts about the death and resurrection of Jesus. The definitions given above therefore describe perfectly the biblical and unbiblical definition of the Gospel.
The first (1, above) describes the facts of the gospels exactly: The Gospel demands an intelligent understanding and belief in the Good News (Gospel) about the Kingdom of God (including the information about Jesus’ saving death and resurrection).
The second definition (2, above) is true of the reduced version of the Gospel presented by evangelicals: Their Gospel has been shrunk to the matter of Jesus’ death and resurrection alone, without inclusion of the full content of the Gospel as it firstly and originally came from Jesus as the arch-evangelist. 

Since the Gospel is synonymous with the Christian faith, with Christianity itself, any loss of the content of the Gospel implies an attack on Jesus and his saving work. The loss of the Kingdom of God as the first element in the Gospel as Jesus preached it is a matter for urgent attention amongst all Bible lovers. The absence of the primary Kingdom of God component in the Gospel as currently preached is demonstrated by the total absence in current preaching and evangelical writing of the phrase “Gospel of the Kingdom” to describe the content of the essential facts to be put to the potential convert. Other ambiguous or vague phrases have been substituted, such as “Gospel of Christ” (Is this “the Gospel about Christ” or “the Gospel which Jesus preached”?), “Gospel of the grace of God,” and so on. These other phrases are actually alternative biblical titles for the Gospel and in a context in which the audience already knew that the Gospel was about the Kingdom of God, they lose their ambiguity. However, since the Gospel of the Kingdom has been so long out of circulation, the alternative phrases become confusing, since they tend to confirm the audience in the erroneous belief that the Gospel is about the death and resurrection of Jesus only. 

If someone should complain that Paul reduced the Gospel to facts about the death and resurrection of Jesus only, our reply would be this: 

1) If Paul did not preach the Gospel of the Kingdom, he was in violation of the Great Commission by which Jesus had mandated the preaching to all nations of the exact teachings which he himself had given (Matthew 28:19, 20). 

2) According to Luke’s careful reporting, Paul did in fact always preach “the Gospel about the Kingdom of God” (Acts 19:8; 20:25; 28:23, 31) and did not therefore limit his Gospel to the facts about Jesus’ death and resurrection only. 

3) Paul in I Corinthians 15:1-3 declared that Jesus’ death and resurrection were “amongst matters of first importance” in the Gospel. He did not say they constituted the entire Gospel. In the same chapter he assumes that his audience understands the term Kingdom of God, and he uses the term characteristically as the Kingdom which cannot be inherited by a human person in his present constitution (“flesh and blood”) but can be entered/inherited only at the future resurrection when Jesus returns to establish the Kingdom of God on earth (I Corinthians 15:50- 52). 

4) Paul identifies the Gospel as the tradition which he had received from others (I Corinthians 15:3) and as “the word of faith which we are preaching” (Romans 10:8). It is a Gospel held in common by the apostles and evangelists. 

As a corroboration of this Gospel, we find in Acts 8:12 that Philip urged belief in the “Gospel concerning the Kingdom of God and the Name of Jesus Christ.” Right to the end of his career, which he summarized in Miletus as the “proclaiming of the Gospel of the Kingdom” (Acts 20:25), Paul doggedly preached the same Gospel of the Kingdom modeled by Jesus’ evangelism: To become a Christian meant being “persuaded about the Kingdom of God and Jesus” (Acts 28:23, 24; cp. Acts 8:12). And Paul is last seen in Acts carrying out a protracted ministry in Rome as evangelist for the cause of the Kingdom of God, the heart of the Gospel as Jesus had preached it (Acts 28:30, 31). So keen is Luke to show that Paul perfectly followed the master in his public declaration of the Gospel that he reports Paul’s characteristic activity as follows: “Paul welcomed all who came to him, proclaiming the Gospel of the Kingdom of God and teaching concerning the Lord Jesus Messiah, with all openness, unhindered” (Acts 28:30, 31). Of Jesus Luke reports: “Jesus welcomed the multitudes and began speaking to them about the Kingdom of God” (Luke 9:11). Luke had the unique privilege of writing more of the New Testament than any other writer, and he alone reports the progress of the Christian faith both before and after the cross. Luke documents the work of the historical Jesus as preacher of the Gospel about the Kingdom and the continued work of the Risen Jesus as he continued, through the Apostles, to proclaim the same Gospel of the Kingdom.

The above post was taken from here.

Death, Resurrection and Rewards: The Biblical Timetable

The Bible and its study, a daily investigation (Acts 17:11), presents us with a challenge. It provides numerous statements which bear on the question of our future: what happens at death and when Jesus returns. The biblical teaching on this important subject must be collected from across the pages of Scripture and synthesized to give a harmonious picture. 

Fatal to this process are three factors:
1) We prefer to believe what we have always believed, or perhaps what is popular, despite the clear evidence of the Bible against us.
2) We choose to examine the subject selectively, relying on a small portion of the relevant evidence and ignoring the rest. (You can prove almost anything from the Bible, provided you use tunnel vision and confine yourself to a tiny handful of verses.)
3) We prefer not to examine the subject at all and rely on a trusted instructor or tradition. 

As Christians we are being trained to weigh evidence fairly, dispassionately, objectively and to arrive at Truth, even if such Truth disturbs our comfortable “status quo,” or perhaps puts us at odds with others. 

In order to examine what Scripture teaches us, we start with the Hebrew Bible. It is a fundamental methodological error to ignore the clear teaching of the Old Testament (the Hebrew Bible) in regard to the nature of man and his destiny. Someone might object to this principle by saying that in other matters, such as the observance of some laws, the Old Testament has been superseded by the New Testament. In that case, however, there is extensive New Testament teaching about our Christian relationship to Old Testament Law. But no New Testament teaching suggests that the Old Testament prophecies concerning the future of man and especially his resurrection from death are canceled by the New Testament. 

According to Scripture in the Hebrew Bible, man at death descends to Sheol/Hades, the world of all the deceased (Psalm 86:13; Proverbs 15:24; Ezekiel 26:20). All the dead go downwards at death. No one ascends to the throne of God in heaven as a disembodied, immortal soul. 

Secondly, Sheol/Hades is a place of complete inactivity. Conscious fellowship with God has been severed. “Existence” in Sheol is really not life at all: “One fate befalls both wise and fool” (Ecclesiastes 2:14). “The fate of men and the fate of beasts is the same. As one dies, so dies the other. There is no advantage for man over beast. All go to the same place. All come from the dust and all return to the dust” (Ecclesiastes 3:19, 20). (The writer then poses a question about where the breath or life force of a man or beast may go. But he does not answer the question. His point is that everyone at death returns to dust.) 

The condition of the dead is then described with crystal clarity: “The living know that they are going to die: the dead do not know anything, nor any longer do they have any reward, for their memory is forgotten” (Ecclesiastes 9:5). So the wise policy for the living is this: “Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with all your might, for there is no activity, nor planning or wisdom in Sheol/Hades where you are going” (Ecclesiastes 9:10). “Mortal man’s spirit departs, he returns to the earth. In that very day his thoughts perish” (Psalm 146:4). “Enlighten my eyes lest I sleep the sleep of death” (Psalm 13:3). “Sheol/Hades cannot praise You. Those who go down to the pit cannot hope for Your faithfulness” (Isaiah 38:18).

What hope then does the Hebrew Bible offer for the dead? “The Lord kills and makes alive. He brings down to Sheol/Hades and raises up (resurrects)” (I Samuel 2:6). “God will ransom me [literally, ‘my soul’] from the power of Sheol/Hades” (Psalm 49:15). And now the classic passages in the Old Testament (from the 6th and 8th centuries BC) which promise us rescue from Sheol/Hades by resurrection from death: “Many of those who are sleeping in the dust of the ground will awake, some to everlasting life [literally, the life of the age to come]” (Daniel 12:2). “Your dead will live; their corpses will rise. You who lie in the dust of the ground, awake and shout for joy” (Isaiah 26:19). 

This consistent teaching about the afterlife from the Hebrew Bible, the Bible in which Jesus was thoroughly trained, as was Paul (Luke 24:44; II Timothy 3:15), tells us:
1) At death everyone goes down to Sheol/Hades, a place of inactivity and silence.
2) Only by a future resurrection of the whole person from death/Sheol/Hades can the sleeping dead be awakened to “everlasting life.” 

New Testament Christianity, not surprisingly, confirms this clear teaching unmistakably. Jesus echoes Daniel 12:2 and sees the dead in the same location until their rescue via resurrection: “Do not marvel at this; for an hour is coming in which all who are in their tombs will hear the voice of the Son of man and will come forth to a resurrection of life; others to a resurrection of judgment” (John 5:28, 29). The pattern is utterly clear. There is no recovery from death apart from a future collective resurrection. Resurrection means coming out of the tomb. And this will not happen until Jesus returns to effect that rescue at the last trumpet. 

A large number of New Testament passages fit hand-in-glove with what we have seen so far. The essential point to be grasped is that future rewards are not gained at the moment of death, but only at the future resurrection, an event which cannot occur until Jesus’ return to the earth: “The Son of man is going to come in the glory of his Father with the angels and then he will reward every person according to his deeds” (Matt. 16:27). 

“You will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous” (Luke 14:14). “Those who are considered worthy to attain to that [future] age and the resurrection of the dead…will be sons of the resurrection” (Luke 20:35, 36). Christians will receive eternal life in the Age to Come (Luke 18:30). The faithful will be resurrected at Jesus’ coming again (I Corinthians 15:23). “In the future there is laid up for me a crown of glory which the Lord will award me on that day, not only to me but to all who have loved his appearing” (II Timothy 4:8). The Bible concludes with an impressive statement declaring that it is only at Christ’s return that rewards are to be granted: “Behold, I am coming quickly and my reward is with me, to render to everyone according to what he has done” (Rev. 22:12). 

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The above post was taken from here.