Proclaiming The Gospel, Part V: The Mystery Of The Gospel That Most Christians Still Don’t Get

Posted on August 3, 2011 by Pastor Foley

As we talked about in our previous post, as you’ve read the New Testament you may have thought of Jesus as just traveling from place to place doing random acts of kindness. But in reality Jesus was carefully following a meticulously laid out plan to embody each of the eighteen dimensions of the coming of the kingdom of God identified by the prophets.

You can see this in Luke 4:16-21, Jesus’ formal public announcement of his ministry:

16And he came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up. And as was his custom, he went to the synagogue on the Sabbath day, and he stood up to read. 17And the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to him. He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written,

18“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he has anointed me
to proclaim good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives
and recovering of sight to the blind,
to set at liberty those who are oppressed,
19to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

20And he rolled up the scroll and gave it back to the attendant and sat down. And the eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him. 21And he began to say to them, “Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”

So the crowds flocked to him and hoped. The disciples sat at his feet and learned. The religious leaders debated so fiercely about what to do with him…and then finally hatched a plot to have him executed.

That’s why there’s such a major focus in the story of Jesus of his heading to and entering into Jerusalem. What would happen when he arrived there? Would the day of the Lord come? Or would he be revealed as a false prophet?

Well, I don’t think I’m ruining the story for you when I tell you that Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem ended with him on a cross and the disciples disillusioned and hopeless. The day of the Lord, it seems, did not come.

Albert Schweitzer, the illustrious medical missionary to Africa who was also a Lutheran, wrote a book about what he called “the historical Jesus” in which he summarized Jesus’ efforts to inaugurate the day of the Lord by saying that Jesus threw himself on the wheel of history and got crushed by it. 

And that’s certainly the perspective that the disciples had. Remember the story about the resurrected Jesus on the road to Emmaus, joining up with the two depressed disciples who didn’t realize that he had been resurrected from the dead?

When Jesus asked them what they were talking about as they were moping along the road, they said to him in Luke 24:21, “We had hoped he was the one to redeem Israel.”

Jesus’ response to the two disciples is fascinating.

  • He did not respond to them by saying what Schweitzer believed. He didn’t say, “Well, the wheel of history crushed me, but I got it rolling. From here on, the rest is up to you!”
  • And he didn’t say what evangelists today and for the last two hundred years have believed. He didn’t say, “No, no, no—you had it all wrong. I didn’t come to free you from the Romans. I was only interested in one of those eighteen dimensions of the kingdom of God: the forgiveness of your sins. Accept me into your heart so you can come live in heaven with me when you die.”

Listen carefully to what he did say, in Luke 24:25-27:

25And he said to them, “O foolish ones, and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken!” [Editor’s note: Did you catch that—all that the prophets have spoken? Not just the one part about forgiveness of sins, but all eighteen dimensions of the kingdom! Anyway, back to Jesus…]  26Was it not necessary that the Christ should suffer these things and enter into his glory?” 27And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself.

It turns out that Jesus did inaugurate the kingdom of God—all eighteen dimensions! But he did it in a way that nobody—not even the Old Testament prophets themselves, nor any of Jesus contemporaries—ever expected. In fact, he did it in a way that most Christians today don’t even understand. 

And that’s because we omit from our understanding what may prove to be the most important phrase in the gospel–one so important that it has the unusual distinction of being the only phrase that appears twice in the gospel.

We’ll talk about that phrase–and why it’s so crucial to understanding how Jesus inaugurates every dimension of the kingdom–in our next post on “Mysteries of the Kingdom: Part VI of the Work of Mercy of Proclaiming the Gospel!”

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Proclaiming The Gospel, Part IV: The Eighteen Dimensions Of The Kingdom Of God, Each More Exciting Than Random Acts Of Kindness

Posted on August 1, 2011 by Pastor Foley

At www.livingintheoverlap.com, Steve Schaefer has a great free downloadable chart of the eighteen dimensions of what the Old Testaments prophesied that the coming of the Kingdom of God would mean. His book, Living in the Overlap, goes into helpful detail on each dimension. It’s worth summarizing Steve’s work here just to get a taste of the electricity that coursed through the room each time Jesus proclaimed, “The Kingdom of God is at hand!”

  • The Kingdom means the Messiah will rule (p. 5), and he’ll do so with justice, righteousness, and love (p. 6). Check out Isaiah 16:5: “In love a throne will be established. In faithfulness a man will sit on it—one from the house of David—one who in judging seeks justice and speeds the cause of righteousness.”
  • The Kingdom means the wicked—the enemies of God who bring suffering to his people—will be destroyed (p. 6), and those who have been hurt will be healed by God himself. Malachi 4:1-3 says, “1For behold, the day is coming, burning like an oven, when all the arrogant and all evildoers will be stubble. The day that is coming shall set them ablaze, says the LORD of hosts, so that it will leave them neither root nor branch. 2But for you who fear my name, the sun of righteousness shall rise with healing in its wings. You shall go out leaping like calves from the stall. 3And you shall tread down the wicked, for they will be ashes under the soles of your feet, on the day when I act, says the LORD of hosts.”
  • The Kingdom means a new covenant and intimacy with God (p. 8). It won’t be about us and our sinful hearts trying to “be good” and “do the right thing,” trying our hardest to obey external rules that God sets up for us…and still falling short. Instead, God will place a new heart within us—his own, in fact—a heart that does good by nature. And he will guide us personally and gently in every decision we face. Jeremiah 31:33b-34 says, “I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts. And I will be their God, and they shall be my people. 34And no longer shall each one teach his neighbor and each his brother, saying, ‘Know the LORD, ‘for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, declares the LORD.”
  • The Kingdom means forgiveness of sins and newness (p. 9). In Jeremiah 31:34, God says, “I will remember their sin no more.” Schaefer quotes theologian William J. Dumbrell on what that really means and why it’s so important:

God thus “remembered” Noah and caused the waters to abate (Genesis 8:1). God also “remembered” Hannah (1 Samuel 1:19), and the promise of a son became an actuality….In Jeremiah 31:34, for God not to remember means that no action in the new age will need to be taken against sin. The forgiveness of which this verse speaks is so comprehensive that sin has finally been dealt with in the experience of the nation and the individual believer.

  • Dealing with sin so that it would be remembered no more meant the creation of a new heavens and a new earth. The old ones would be rolled up like a scroll and thrown away.
  • The Kingdom means God’s Spirit would be poured out “on all kinds of people regardless of gender, age, or station in life” (p. 10). Schaefer quotes biblical studies professor James M. Hamilton, Jr. in saying, “The Old Testament teaches that God was with his people by dwelling among them in the temple rather than in them as under the new covenant” (p. 10).
  • The Kingdom means that “all nations would stream to the mountain of the Lord and the temple would be a house of prayer for all nations”; “God would be present with his people forever in this temple, and God’s glory would be revealed to all humankind” (p. 11).
  • The Kingdom means peace, physical wholeness, and safety and security (p. 12). As Isaiah 35:5-7 shares, we’re talking here not only about people being healed, but nature as well:

5 Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened,
and the ears of the deaf unstopped;
6 then shall the lame man leap like a deer,
and the tongue of the mute sing for joy.
For waters break forth in the wilderness,
and streams in the desert;
7 the burning sand shall become a pool,
and the thirsty ground springs of water;
in the haunt of jackals, where they lie down,
the grass shall become reeds and rushes.

  • The Kingdom means abundant provision and joy (p. 13). Isaiah 25:6 says, “On this mountain the LORD of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wine, of rich food full of marrow, of aged wine well refined.” If God cooks for you, you can be sure it will be a meal worth rejoicing over!
  • Finally, the Kingdom means death would be destroyed. “He will swallow up death forever,” says Isaiah 25:8.

Now perhaps as you’ve read the New Testament you may have thought of Jesus as just traveling from place to place doing random acts of kindness. Getting kittens down from trees, helping old ladies cross the street, not cursing when he hits his thumb with his carpenter’s hammer. But now that you’ve heard about the eighteen ways in which the Kingdom of God would rock the world off its hinges…do you see that in his ministry Jesus was carefully following a meticulously laid out plan to embody every one of these eighteen ways?

This is why people watched him and wondered. And you couldn’t help but wonder when through his actions—his healings, his miraculous meals, his forgiveness of sins, his pronouncing of woes on the enemies of God—he enacted one by one each of the eighteen dimensions which the prophets said would be unleashed on the “great and terrible day of the Lord.”

In fact, before his death and after his resurrection, he even said that this is exactly what he was doing.

And this leads to what may be the most crucial insight of all related to the Work of Mercy of proclaiming the gospel:

When we proclaim the gospel, we often focus only on the personal forgiveness of sins and individual destiny after death of our hearer because we ourselves are slow to believe all that the prophets have spoken.

Jesus’ words, not mine, by the way. We’ll take a closer look at this in our next post.

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Proclaiming the Gospel, Part III: The Gospel’s Full Name Is “The Gospel Of The Kingdom”

Posted on July 29, 2011 by Pastor Foley

Time and time again, when the Scriptures talk about Jesus proclaiming “the gospel,” the actual phrase that is used is that Jesus proclaims the gospel of the kingdom of God. Consider these representative verses from Matthew:

  • Matthew 4:23: “And he went throughout all Galilee, teaching in their synagogues and proclaiming the gospel of the kingdom and healing every disease and every affliction among the people.”
  • Matthew 9:35: “And Jesus went throughout all the cities and villages, teaching in their synagogues and proclaiming the gospel of the kingdom and healing every disease and every affliction.”
  • Matthew 24:14: “And this gospel of the kingdom will be proclaimed throughout the whole world as a testimony to all nations, and then the end will come.”

The subject, then, of Jesus’ proclamation was the kingdom of God. He told parables about the kingdom. He said to the disciples, “To you it has been given to know the secrets of the kingdom” (Matthew 13:11). He said that in his appearing the kingdom was near (Luke 10:9; 10:11; 21:31) and, in fact, at hand (Matthew 3:2; 4:17; 10:7). In Mark 1:15, he said, tantalizingly, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the gospel.”

And here’s the key realization we need to have:

Though this idea of the kingdom of God is unfamiliar to us, it would have been familiar in large part to those who heard Jesus.

They understood, in other words, the kind of thing he was proclaiming. That is because all of the Old Testament points toward the establishment of just such a kingdom.

Sometimes Christians today will say, “Jesus’ hearers misunderstood what Jesus meant when he talked about the kingdom of God. They thought he meant that he was there to overthrow the Romans militarily and establish a kingdom here on earth. But what Jesus was talking about was a kingdom in which he would reign in people’s hearts.”

Er, no. That’s not correct.

When we think things like that, we misunderstand both Jesus and the people who heard him.

Careful study of the Old Testament shows that it is all about the hope of God’s kingdom coming on earth. All about that. Of course, the only way we’d know that is if we read the Old Testament regularly and carefully. If we read the Old Testament regularly and carefully we’d know that Israel was hoping for more than a messiah who would crush Israel’s enemies militarily. Prophets prophesied that the messiah would usher in God’s reign on a day they referred to as “the day of the Lord.” That phrase, “the day of the Lord,” is used over and over again in the Old Testament prophets. For example:

  • Isaiah 13:9: “Behold, the day of the LORD comes, cruel, with wrath and fierce anger, to make the land a desolation and to destroy its sinners from it.”
  • Ezekiel 30:3: “For the day is near, the day of the LORD is near;it will be a day of clouds, a time of doom for the nations.”
  • Joel 1:15: “Alas for the day! For the day of the LORD is near, and as destruction from the Almighty it comes.”

Doesn’t sound like cheery stuff, this day of the Lord. But what we need to not miss is that it is cosmic. It marks the end of the world as we know it.

But the good news is that it marks the end of the evil age—the age of sin and death and the dominion of evil—but the beginning of the age of the ages, when God himself would personally rule the world and all the peoples in it. And far from being a one dimensional hope like “God will overthrow the Romans and we will be free” or “God will forgive our sins so we can go to heaven when we die,” God’s reign would impact every aspect of every human life. It was an eighteen-dimensional hope, to be precise—and Israel knew that it was a hope not just for their nation, but for all of the nations of the world.

At www.livingintheoverlap.com, Steve Schaefer has a great free downloadable chart of the eighteen dimensions of what the Old Testaments prophesied that the Kingdom of God would mean. Buy Steve’s book. Download his chart. And return next time as we review those eighteen dimensions and discuss how they can and should form the basis of our undertaking the Work of Mercy of proclaiming the gospel.

You can catch my whole message on Proclaiming the Gospel via the free .W weekly podcast.  Or, see a video clip from this series at DOTW.TV.

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