The power of God's kingdom and ministry

In his book The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity, Philip Jenkins, a distinguished professor of history at Penn State, notes that the most significant changes in the world during the last portion of the twentieth century were not secular trends like fascism, communism, feminism, or environmentalism. According to Jenkins, "it is precisely religious changes that are the most significant, and even the most revolutionary, in the contemporary world. . . . We are currently living through one of the transforming movements in the history of religion worldwide." According to Jenkins, the church is exploding at unprecedented rates in the so-called Third World.

J. P. Moreland, PhD, is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, Talbot School of Theology, Biola University, La Mirada, California, United States.

In his book The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity, Philip Jenkins, a distinguished professor of history at Penn State, notes that the most significant changes in the world during the last portion of the twentieth century were not secular trends like fascism, communism, feminism, or environmentalism.1 According to Jenkins, “it is precisely religious changes that are the most significant, and even the most revolutionary, in the contemporary world. . . . We are currently living through one of the transforming movements in the history of religion worldwide.”2 According to Jenkins, the church is exploding at unprecedented rates in the so-called Third World.

In the last 50 years or so, and especially since 1980, revivals are breaking out all over; one of the best-kept secrets of the era is the explosion of the kingdom of God and a harvest of converts and disciples greater than anything the world has ever seen. In fact, the single most explosive movement of any kind—political, military, whatever—is the spread of the gospel and the advance of the kingdom.

Consider the following: some estimate that in 1970, there were around 71 million born-again Christians with a vision to reach out to the entire world for Christ. By the year 2000, there were 707 million, roughly 11 percent of the earth’s population. Up until 1960, Western evangelicals outnumbered non-Western evangelicals two-to one, but by 2000, non-Westerners (mostly Latinos, Blacks, and Asians) led Westerners four-to-one, and the figure will be seven-to-one by 2010. Today, more missionaries are sent from non-Western nations than from Western nations. At a church planting congress in 1998, representatives from Latin American countries set a staggering goal of planting 500,000 new churches by 2010, and it appears that the target will be reached. In fact, five nations have already reached their target goals and have set new ones. 3

Kingdom power and the ministry of Jesus

At the core of this explosion has been an outbreak of “signs and wonders” as expressions of the power of the kingdom of God. With rare exceptions, the Western church has lagged behind in seeing such power compared to the church in the Third World. Part of the reason includes the admittedly fraudulent, inappropriate weirdness, and anti-intellectualism often linked to American evangelicals who associate themselves with signs and wonders. Another aspect is the naturalist worldview in the West, a worldview that has affected us all and is more distant from a biblical worldview than the more supernaturalist perspective of those in the Third World.

Another reason that the Western churches have not seen such power is the association of signs and wonders with certain views of spiritual gifts. While I am not a cessationist, I believe the importance of a healing ministry, a deliverance ministry, and an openness to the various ways that God speaks to His children (impressions, dreams, words of knowledge, and so forth) cannot be primarily a matter of one’s views of gifts. Theologically speaking, it is a matter of the reality of the kingdom of God now, however much it still has a future form, along with the recognition that the kingdom becomes manifested by an outbreak of power in the ways just mentioned. It is also a matter of following almost universal New Testament scholarship in recognizing that Jesus performed His ministry from His human nature, full of the Spirit, and being led by His Father. We are to do “greater works” than He did; that is, we have to continue Jesus’ ministry with power in dependence on the Spirit. This is not a charismatic or noncharismatic issue but a kingdom and ministry-of-Jesus issue.

Living within the kingdom and experiencing its power was a central aspect of Jesus’ gospel. To see this, let us probe His teaching more fully.

Jesus and the gospel of justification

Even a cursory reading of the Gospels reveals that Jesus understood that His mission required Him to engage in the war of ideas. Thus, while He was much more than this, at His core, Jesus was a Teacher and a Prophet. To be sure, He was deeply involved in action: healing, delivering, performing other sorts of miracles, and confronting various forms of evil and injustice. But even here, His actions were done to reveal, reinforce, reflect, and validate His teachings. So when Jesus saw thousands of needy people, His compassion moved Him (among other things) to teach (Mark 6:34). Matthew’s statement is typical of the Gospel writers’ summaries of Jesus’ activities and intentions: He departed from there to teach and preach in their cities (Matt. 11:1).

What, exactly, was Jesus’ central message? Clearly, it was the announcement of the good news, the gospel. But what was the essence of that gospel? The answer may be different than what you think. Since the Protestant Reformation, the gospel has been identified with justification by faith, the announcement that through the death and resurrection of the God-man, Jesus, God’s wrath has been propitiated, we have been ransomed, and we are declared righteous through our trust in the accomplished work of Jesus. Justification is surely an absolutely central message in the New Testament and intimately related to the gospel. The Reformers are to be forever thanked for recovering this biblical teaching. And Jesus clearly taught this notion. On one occasion, He announced that He had come to give His life as a ransom for many (Mark 10:45). We are all familiar with Jesus’ penetrating interaction with Nicodemus, recorded in John 3, an interaction that the Master summarized in language that can be properly understood only in terms of justification by faith: He, the Son of Man, must be crucified to remove judgment and provide a way of forgiveness and salvation.

Is it appropriate to call the doctrine of justification by faith “the gospel”? The answer is Yes and No in different senses. In one of the classic texts on the gospel in the New Testament (1 Corinthians 15:1–8), Paul explicitly uses “the gospel” to describe the truth that Jesus died for our sins and was raised. For the first 20 years of my Christian life, this was the gospel I shared with unbelievers. Converted in 1968, I served with Campus Crusade for Christ for ten years and shared this gospel with literally thousands of people.

However, there was a problem. In fact, I had three problems with this understanding of the gospel. First, I found it difficult to connect sanctification and spiritual maturity and growth to this gospel. About all I could say was, “If Jesus is now your Lord, you should obey Him. And you should seek to grow because of your gratitude for what He did for you on the cross.” This was true as far as it went, but it did not go far enough in my mind. There was no deep, inner connection with justification and sanctification that followed from the very nature of the gospel, at least not one that was natural enough for me.

Second, some people tried to fill in this gap by insisting that Jesus has to be Lord to be Savior. Others responded by insisting that, while one must take Jesus to be the Lord in order to recognize Him as qualified to sacrifice for our justification, the requirement that Jesus be the Lord of one’s life comes perilously close to a works gospel. Besides, they argued, being justified happens at a point in time, regardless of whether or not one can identify that moment, but Lordship is a lifelong process. In my view, this entire debate was based on a mistake, but I could not say what it was.

Third, justification by faith required people to trust in something Jesus did, but it was unclear that it called people to trust in Jesus Himself (besides trusting that He was qualified to make the sacrifice for our justification). The role of Jesus as our daily Teacher in the school of life and of us as His apprentices was not clearly attached to the gospel, at least not in a way I found intellectually satisfying.

A broader gospel

But since the 1980s, especially in the writing of Dallas Willard, the evangelical church has recovered a broader gospel that, in my opinion, retains justification by faith and resolves the three problems mentioned above: it is found in the idea of “the gospel of the kingdom of God.”

Jesus announced this gospel at the very beginning of His public ministry (Matt. 4:17, 23) and said it would be taken to the entire world (cf. Matt. 24:14). It is the gospel identified as the apostolic message throughout and up to the very end of Acts (cf. 19:8; 20:25; 28:23; 28:31). What is this gospel, and how does it relate to justification by faith?

To answer the first question, we need to be clear on the nature of the kingdom of God. Primarily, the kingdom of God is the range of God’s effective will, that is, the range over and within which His perfect will has say and also the realm in which the rule of God is effective. This includes the laws governing the natural world and the hearts and activities of those who are willingly submitted to His rule. Of course, a sense exists in which everything is within God’s rule, but Scripture limits the kingdom to the two arenas just mentioned and reserves “kingdom of darkness” for the collective hearts and activities of those resisting God’s reign. Secondarily, the kingdom of God represents the realm of reality in which God’s rule is effective—the twofold realm just mentioned.

Expanding on Jesus’ words to fill out, in summary form, what He meant in announcing the gospel of the kingdom of God (“Repent: for the kingdom of heaven [= God] is at hand,” [Matthew 4:17, KJV]), Jesus was saying, “Change the way you think about and approach life in light of this new fact: the direct rule of God is now available to everyone immediately (e.g., one no longer needs to go through the Old Testament ceremonial system).” Beginning with forgiveness and justification through faith in Jesus’ death and resurrection, and by repeated repentance and trust in Jesus as my daily Teacher and Guide, I can choose, moment by moment, to live within the power and protection of God’s kingdom. I can also live according to its nature, rules, and structure (e.g., to have God as one’s King and to be His servant ready to do His bidding, to relate to other members as part of my family), to seek to be its ambassador, to get my core identity from it and its Triune King, and to experience intimacy with the Triune God and my brothers and sisters within its provision and boundaries.

Application

I recognize—this is a mouthful, yet so pregnant with meaning. I encourage you: First, find biblical texts that undergird the different components of the gospel of the kingdom as I have stated it. Second, take it phrase by phrase and talk over its implications and applications with other believers.

Let me apply this broader gospel to the queries and quandaries I mentioned above. First, the gospel of the kingdom of God is to justification by faith as the whole is to the part, or as the beginning of a journey is to the rest of the journey. The gospel of the kingdom includes justification as an essential ingredient. And it specifies the purpose of justification, namely, to be the entry into a continuing journey, or, perhaps more appropriately, to be the start of a continuing journey. The point of becoming justified? Justification is the way one begins a life of sanctification. The gospel invites us to an entirely new, rich life lived from the resources of and according to the nature of another realm. I become justified so I can learn this new life, a life that will be mine forever.

Second, the debate about Lordship salvation makes as much sense as the debate about whether one can begin a journey without taking the journey. While starting a journey is different from the day by day carrying out of that journey, the reason one starts is to take the journey. Similarly, one accepts the free grace of God in justification in order to enter a life of progressively having Jesus as my Lord in this life and the next.

Finally, the gospel of the kingdom bids me to start by trusting something Jesus did for me (died and rose), and to continue that trust by enlisting daily as Jesus’ pupil so that He can teach me regarding living my life as He would if He were me, that is, living out the kingdom in my own setting.

My evangelism has been transformed by recovering this broader gospel. When I speak evangelistically, I now spend most of my time painting a picture of what life in the kingdom is like. I contrast it to life outside the kingdom. I offer an invitation for listeners to rethink their life in light of the invitation to live from within the kingdom of God. And, finally, I proclaim the need for justification by faith as the essential first step into kingdom life. By connecting justification by faith with this broader gospel, I have good news to offer people. And I have come to recognize that the gospel of the kingdom and kingdom life, generally, should be accompanied with manifestations of God’s power and presence as we see in His ministry and in the book of Acts. And Jesus’ own ministry is to be understood as an example of how to live in and from God’s kingdom in dependence on God’s Spirit. This is our invitation and what an honor it is.4

1 Philip Jenkins, The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 1–3.

2 Ibid., 1.

3 See James Rutz, MegaShift (Colorado Springs, CO: Empowerment Press, 2005), 1–55. For up-to-date statistics on this subject, check out www.worldchristiandatabase.org.

4 For more on the gospel of the kingdom of God and its relationship to worldview thinking, inner transformation, spiritual formation, and the supernatural power of the Spirit manifest in signs and wonders, see my book Kingdom Triangle (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2007).

 

 


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J. P. Moreland, PhD, is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, Talbot School of Theology, Biola University, La Mirada, California, United States.

May 2009

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