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Focus on the Kingdom
Volume 1 No. 6, March 1999
In This Issue:
1. The Vital Question of Defining the Saving Gospel
2. "Gospel" as Defined by the Dictionary
3. The Kingdom of God as Password
4. Richard Hiers: Jesus and the Future
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 magazine 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 Matt. 3:2) and the Kingdom will become clear as the New Organized Word 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 (Rom. 1:16; Gal. 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 (Rev. 11:15-18) on this planet renewed.
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 [Matt. 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 (Matt. 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 Cor. 15:50-52).
4) Paul identifies the Gospel as the tradition which he had received from others (I Cor.15:3) and as "the word of faith which we are preaching" (Rom. 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 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).
Richard Hiers: Jesus and the Future
This is an extraordinarily interesting commentary on the fundamental problem of modern systems of Bible interpretation making the claim to be following Jesus.
Professor Hiers was trained at Yale University and taught there after receiving his doctorate. He has been since 1960 professor of religion at the University of Florida. His point of view is that the Jewish aspects of Jesus’ gospel have been constantly suppressed by theologians and churches and thus often hidden from the public. Jesus was in fact a Jewish preacher of the coming Kingdom of God. The Kingdom of God is positively not in Scripture the "rule of God in our hearts now." (It is certainly true that God must rule through Jesus in the heart of the Christian, but this is not the meaning of "Kingdom of God.") The Bible has other language to describe that feature of the faith. The Kingdom of God is a kind of code word to describe the hoped-for national liberation of the land of Israel and the beginning of a brand new era of history, including worldwide peace. This is to occur, according to Jesus’ Good News (Gospel) about the Kingdom, when Jesus comes back.
When he returns it will not be the "end of the world" but, as the New Testament says, the end of this age. A new age or era will follow, and this will be the Kingdom of God reestablished on earth. Jesus will be the first successful world president and the saints will be co-heirs with him of the throne of David (Dan. 2:44; 7:27; Luke 22:28-30; I Cor. 6:2, II Tim. 2:12; Rev. 3:21; 2:26). This will be the fulfillment of the covenant God promised from the beginning, that His people would eventually be in power in the land of Israel with benefits extending to the whole world. It is for this great reversal of human affairs which we pray when we say "May your Kingdom come," and "Come, Lord Jesus."
The following observations of Professor Hiers from his Jesus and the Future (John Knox Press, 1981) underline the way in which this fundamental truth about the Gospel of the Kingdom has been distorted, eclipsed or suppressed by established religion:
"Interpreters of Christian persuasion have ordinarily not been especially interested in what Jesus intended and did in his own time" (1).
"Christian interpreters tend to suppose that Jesus set out to establish the kind of Christianity they experience as familiar and meaningful" (1).
"It has been less than a century since a few biblical scholars first began to realize that the historical Jesus proclaimed as of first importance something quite unfamiliar either to modern Christianity or to modern thought: the Kingdom of God." "The Kingdom Jesus proclaimed was entirely future. By responding to his message, his hearers were not building the Kingdom on earth but preparing themselves for admission to it when it comes." "When it came all would be transformed into a new and splendid promised land, indeed a new heaven and new earth in place of the old" (2).
"Weiss’s little book completely undermined the prevailing liberal conception of Jesus as founder and teacher of the Kingdom as God’s rule in the hearts of men or the structures of society" (2).
"These authors [said Schweitzer in his Quest for the Historical Jesus] persistently ignored or interpreted away the main features of Jesus’s eschatological orientation evidenced in the gospels. Most of the writers wished to claim Jesus’s support for their particular conceptions of Christianity" (vii). "Modern portrayals of Jesus have been influenced to a great extent by the interest or perspective of the writer" (vii).
"The eschatological Jesus depicted in the historical tradition is not the Jesus of any modern church or school of theology" (ix).
"Interpreters ignore or reinterpret the eschatological traditions and they leave the way clear to ‘discover’ in Jesus whatever figure is most congenial to their particular doctrine, ideologies or programs" (x). "The result is a Jesus who is intelligible neither in his own time nor to modern understanding" (x). "Interpreters have already decided what Jesus should have believed" (xi). "Our studies confirm the central place of Jesus’s futuristic and apocalyptic orientation in the synoptic representation of his beliefs and message" (xii). "The eschatological aspects of Jesus’s preaching and teaching are not merely incidental or peripheral, but form the substance or core of his message" (xii). "We are particularly disinclined to credit the common wisdom which insists that Jesus's perspective was necessarily distinct from that of either the early Christian community or apocalyptic Judaism."
"In every case these authors [argues Schweitzer in Quest] finally reveal a desire to de-emphasize Jesus’s futuristic beliefs. The writers then seize upon any texts that might possibly be read to show that somehow Jesus understood the Kingdom as a present reality, and assure their readers that this present Kingdom was what mattered most to him and should matter most to ‘us’ today" (9).
"Nearly all schools agreed that Jesus’s futuristic expectations, if permitted to stand, would be an embarrassment, if not a disaster, for contemporary faith. Consequently, critics evidently are willing to read into Jesus’s mind all sorts of modernizing reinterpretations" (10).
"Another procedure frequently used by interpreters who wish to disentangle Jesus from the complications of his eschatological perspective is to redefine ‘apocalypticism’" (10).
"Interpreters in the ‘mainstream’ of Christianity and academe are disposed, therefore, to believe a priori that Jesus could not have shared such a bizarre worldview, and to discount all evidence to the contrary" (11).
"It is a fact that the Jesus depicted in the sources is and remains the Jewish, eschatological, apocalyptic Jesus. As Schweitzer observed some eighty years ago, the historical Jesus is a stranger and an enigma to modern thought. Despite the best efforts of ‘the new Quest,’ ‘the new historiography' and ‘the new hermeneutic,’ the historical, eschatological Jesus was not the founder of any school of modern theology" (113).
"Writers candidly acknowledge and review synoptic traditions indicating Jesus’s futuristic eschatological beliefs, but then turn to the few passages that can be construed to mean that he thought the Kingdom somehow present and finally conclude by suggesting that only this latter belief is important for modern faith" (15).
"They ‘disengage’ the meaning of Jesus and his message from the unfortunate concepts which — it would otherwise appear — he shared with apocalyptic Judaism" (17).
"Many interpreters evidently assume that in order to salvage Jesus’s ethics they must deny his eschatology" (59). "Jesus’s entire ministry or public activity was directed to the preparation of his people to the coming Kingdom" (77).
"As Christianity became more at home in the world of Greek thought, the hope for reunion at table in the Kingdom of God became less intelligible, for the fulfilled life of salvation was conceptualized primarily as a nonmaterial realm or mode of existence. Understandably, the NT passages that gave promise to the hope for eating and drinking in the Kingdom of God were increasingly passed over in silence, or else subjected to allegorical or ‘spiritual’ reinterpretations" (88).
"Since Jesus — in the view of traditional theology — was a Christian, not a Jew, it seems natural to suppose that he would have discarded such Jewish ideas as a physical or worldly kingdom in favor of spiritual or otherworldly meanings" (16).
"Both schools have proceeded as if it were necessary to dispense with the eschatological Jesus in order to preserve the Christianity each knows. Yet both schools wished to enjoy the sense of security inherent in the assumption that their respective theological positions corresponded more or less precisely to what Jesus had in mind. Understandably, neither school has been quick to recognize that the only Jesus portrayed in the synoptic gospels is the strange, eschatological Jesus" (99).
"Jesus expected that in the coming Kingdom of God he and his followers, together with other righteous persons, would sit at table eating and drinking. This expectation is not shared by many Christians in the 20th century. It has not been a significant part of the Christian world-view for several centuries. On the whole, NT scholars obligingly have restrained from emphasizing this aspect of Jesus’s message and outlook. In general the synoptic passages where this expectation is in evidence are simply ignored. Occasionally an interpreter acknowledges the existence of certain passages, but then suggests that such ideas should be treated as vestiges of Jewish belief or as later glosses by transmitters or editors of the tradition. That such ideas might actually have been part of Jesus’s understanding and proclamation to his contemporaries is seldom considered. Interpreters sometimes concede that Jesus may have made such statements, but then go on to explain that he did so intending to symbolize something other than the literal and materialistic ideas seemingly represented" (72).