What is the good news of the kingdom of God?
[Points 12-16]
Twelfth, the good news of the kingdom of God is that Jesus wants for himself a people keen for what he is keen for: righteousness.
[Points 12-16]
Twelfth, the good news of the kingdom of God is that Jesus wants for himself a people keen for what he is keen for: righteousness.
Paul wrote to Titus (2:11-14), his disciple in Crete:
For the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation to all men, instructing us to deny ungodliness and worldly desires and to live sensibly, righteously and godly in the present age, looking for the blessed hope and the appearing of the glory or our great God and Saviour, Christ Jesus; who gave himself for us, that he might redeem us from every lawless deed and purify for himself a people for his own possession, zealous for good deeds.
Isn’t this the heart-cry of so many? We want to live a life of denying ungodliness and worldly desires; we want to live sensibly, righteously and godly, looking forward to the hope – not of ‘heaven’ but of the fullness of the kingdom of God and of the appearing of the glory of our God and Saviour Jesus Christ.
How is it achieved? The grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation to us all. We stand in Him, we stand in His grace, we stand in His salvation, we stand in His redemption, we stand in His justification, we stand in His righteousness and we stand in the Spirit. In other words, we descend upon this mountain peak from above, we don’t try to climb it from below, half expecting we will never make it to the top.
Some years, on Australia Day, we get up early and travel about 90 minutes to our favourite headland on the east coast to watch the sunrise. It’s southern hemisphere January, so the sun rises around 4:30am. We set ourselves up for breakfast to come a little later, then we settle in to wait and watch for the glory of this new day to appear over the eastern horizon. No two days are ever the same, so every time we do it, the expectation is fresh. The weather, the clouds, the wind, all conspire to make every sunrise different. And then we celebrate what God has given us this day in this country and enter into the fullness of the new day and the new year.
Thirteenth, the good news of the kingdom of God is that, by the mercy of God, we are declared not guilty and therefore share in the hope of eternal life.
Again, Paul to Titus (3:4-7)
But when the kindness of God our Saviour and His love for mankind appeared, He saved us, not on the basis of righteous deeds which we have done, but according to His mercy, by the washing of regeneration and renewing by the Holy Spirit, whom He poured out upon us richly through Jesus Christ our Saviour – that being justified by His grace we might be made heirs according to the hope of eternal life.
This sounds a bit like a birth to me. When a baby is born, its vitals are checked and it is washed clean and encouraged to cry to get its lungs full of oxygen to kick-start its life outside the womb. In my country, years ago, most babies were given a small slap on the buttocks to make them cry to initiate the oxygen supply.
Our second and spiritual birth – the birth from above – is also the birth from water and the Spirit. Our initiation into the family of God is entirely an act of God and His mercy, whereby we receive the washing of regeneration (literally, born again) and the renewing of the Holy Spirit poured out upon us in copious amounts like cleansing, soothing oil. And His grace gives us the justification we so need. Together, the grace and mercy of God combine to solidify us as children of God and heirs to the kingdom of God.
When I was young, I learned the basics of grace and mercy like this: grace is getting the good things you don’t deserve; mercy is not getting the bad things you do deserve. While it is a bit simplistic, it serves to highlight the profound kindness of God towards us. Left to our own, we would die like a baby abandoned by its mother. But in Jesus, we find, as Paul said, “the kindness of God our Saviour and His love for mankind.” So God, in His mercy, steps into the role of mother and midwife, saving our life. Not content with that, His grace follows, pouring His own life – the life of eternity – into our lives, regenerating us, renewing us, redeeming us and justifying us, thereby turning us from abandoned orphan to son of the living God.
How good is that good news?!
Fourteenth, the good news of the kingdom of God is that everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.
Paul again – this time to the Romans (10:8-13):
[The righteousness that is based on faith, not law, speaks thus…] What does it say?‘The word (rhema) is near you, in your mouth and in your heart’ – that is, the word (rhema) of faith which we proclaim, that if you confess with your mouth Jesus is Lord, and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you shall be saved; for with the heart man believes, resulting in righteousness, and with the mouth he confesses resulting in salvation. For the scripture says, ‘Whoever believes in him will not be disappointed.’ For there is no distinction between Jew and Greek; for the same One is Lord of all, abounding in riches for all who call upon Him, so ‘Whoever will call upon the name of the Lord will be saved.’
The apparent simplicity of these verses is staggering. On the surface, neither repentance nor faith seem to be mentioned. How is it possible that one can be saved simply by ‘calling on the name of the Lord’? Is it simply a matter of calling out something to the effect of “Lord, help me!”? Maybe it is. Look at this:
Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee stood up and prayed about himself: ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other men – robbers, evildoers, adulterers – or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week and give a tenth of all I get.’ But the tax collector stood at a distance. He would not even look up to heaven, but beat his breast and said, ‘God, have mercy on me, a sinner.’ I tell you that this man, rather than the other, went home justified before God. Luke 18:10-14
When Paul said in Romans 10:9 ‘confess with your mouth Jesus is Lord’, does that mean anyone who simply says ‘Jesus is Lord’ is saved? No it doesn’t. In the Western world of today, one’s word is no longer one’s bond: people lie; people give false testimony; people say what they know is the right thing to say to get what they want, without any thought of its being an honest statement.
Confess is a Latin word meaning to agree with and its use here rules out the possibility mentioned in the above paragraph. Beforeit comes out of the mouth, the thing in question has to be agreed with, assented to, really believed. In other words, what comes out of the mouth has to be a spoken expression of what is truly in the heart. As Paul said, “with the heart man believes, resulting in righteousness.”
To confess that Jesus is Lord implies that he is in fact Lord in one’s life: boss, numero uno, the main man. If he is not, to say he is a lie. And Paul himself makes this point to the Corinthians: “…and no-one can say ‘Jesus is Lord’ except by the Holy Spirit (1 Corinthians 12:3).
To be saved necessitates the true confession ‘Jesus is Lord’. But for the words to have meaning, they must be reflecting the about-face in the heart of the person making the confession – an about-face that removes self, sin, the world, the flesh, the devil or whatever from the command centre of one’s life and gives Jesus all rights to rule. And that’s a definition of repentance.
The second part of the salvation plan here is“believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead.” Faith would actually be the better word to use here, but faith is not a verb in the English language – unfortunately. Faith is a much stronger word than believe. Unlike the original language of the New Testament which uses the same word for faith and believe, modern English has to add an extra something to the word believe to make it the equivalent of faith. In today’s English, to believe is to ‘give mental assent to’, whereas faith means to ‘stake your life upon’.
And what does “call on the name of the Lord”mean? Something like this: 1) believe in the complete adequacy of the life and work of Jesus; 2) trust in him enough to agree in your heart that he is now the boss; 3) stand up and be counted among those who will publicly declare their full allegiance to Jesus.
The tax collector knew well that he was a sinner; and he knew only too well that he was at the mercy of God, but he prayed anyway, demonstrating both repentance and faith. Not surprisingly, Jesus said he went home justified before God.
Apostle James, quoting the prophet Isaiah, wrote,“God resists the proud, but gives grace to the humble.” That’s probably what’s in play here in the story of the Pharisee and the tax collector.
Fifteenth, the good news of the kingdom of God is that most famous of verses, John 3:16 – “For God so loved the world that He gave His one-of-a-kind son, that whoever trusts in him should not perish but have eternal life.”
And that is followed by this: “For God did not send the son into the world to judge the world but that the world should be saved through him.”
Probably not necessary, but let me again say,‘eternal life’ is not – NOT – heaven-when-you-die but the life of eternity where God lives and moves and has His being, which we call the kingdom of God. It is life of another order, on another plane.
Jesus is God’s unique first-born and once-born son. And it is because of that fact that he was able to successfully enter our humanity and, in his death and resurrection, successfully lead us out of humanity’s bondage to death and into humanity’s true freedom: life as God intended; righteousness; ‘abundant’ life; life with a capital L.
Sixteenth, the good news of the kingdom of God is that, while mankind languishes in the pigswill and leftovers of hundreds of years of church and theology, God’s mercy and grace are no less available today than while Jesus walked the earth and Paul served him as a bond-slave.
By standing in Christ – by our faith and confession– we are birthed into the eternal family and have a full share in His salvation, redemption, righteousness and justification beginning now and climaxing when time is no more and we no longer live with the restrictions of our time-space-matter existence.
The good news within that is that Jesus is to us the salvation, the redemption, the righteousness and the justification we humans stand in need of. Our salvation is that Jesus tasted death for everyone and his death is sufficient for us all. Our redemption is that Jesus was the price God paid to release us from the grip of the evil one. Our righteousness is that Jesus stands perfectly right before the Father and shares that righteousness with all who fully trust in him. Our justification is that Jesus has borne the punishment for our sin and we are legally pronounced‘not guilty’ – therefore, as Paul said, “there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus”.
I want to conclude this section with a quote from one of ecclesia’s prophets of last century, T. Austin-Sparks. This excerpt comes from Refiner’s Fire Journal in “The Supremacy of Christ”, page 35-36.
You get a different kind of convert altogether when you carry the work of Christ to its full issue; when it is not only preached that your sins will be forgiven and you will go to heaven and not hell – perhaps a little more than that. But it is infinitely more than that, and if only we preached the fullness of Christ’s work, we would have converts that went ahead apace and reached maturity much sooner than the majority are doing. And we should find that most of our conventions are quite unnecessary, for they are mostly to get us to the place we ought to have come when we were converted.
It is necessary for the believer; may I just say that it is necessary for the worker, the preacher of the gospel, the one who has to do with souls. You will not be a popular preacher of course, if you preach this. You will find, more than ever, that hell will be out against you, and many of the Lord’s people will turn against you, but it is necessary.
If only we could bring to them in the power of the Holy Ghost, right at the beginning, the proclamation of Him “who delivered us out of the power(literally – authority) of darkness, and translated us into the kingdom of the son of His love”, and get that in, we should see different results. Take that to them.
Under sixteen points I have answered the question‘what is the good news of the kingdom of God?’ Let there be no doubt that this good news is a profound story and an outrageously generous offer; an offer way too scandalous for those who live by the creeds of the Old Testament. The Pharisee sect in Acts 15 found it too scandalous and insisted that religious ceremony and duty be added to the message and to the expectation placed on converts. And it is no different today, the Pharisee sect is still with us as strong as ever and always ready to place burdens on people contrary to Jesus and Paul – and contrary to the very scripture we say we revere.
It’s time now to turn to other questions. My next question is, What is Proclaiming?
Cheers,
Kevin.
Cheers,
Kevin.
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