Teaching | What is the Gospel? | Preaching the Gospel E01

Welcome to the John Mark Comer Teachings Podcast by Practicing the Way. This teaching was originally given at Bridgetown Church in Portland, Oregon, as a part of the Preaching the Gospel series. book on racial justice that you are not likely to find on any New York Times bestseller list, but it is hands down one of my all-time favorites. It's called Huia Come Home by Jay Rucka from New Zealand. who is both a follower of Jesus and a Maori writer.

In it, he tells the tragic, complex, and at the same time, beautiful story of the interplay between the indigenous people of Ataroa, or as we would say, New Zealand, the missionary movement of the 19th and 20th centuries, and the... multi-generational trauma of colonialism. He opens with a story from a few years before the infamous James Kirk, who was most definitely not a follower of Jesus. Did I say Kirk? Cook. See Star Trek right in there.

Rusty goodness, but you see the nod there in Star Trek, right? Before he discovered New Zealand in 1769, there was a famous Maori tribal prophet or oracle who had a vision. of a strange people with white skin coming on large ships. It was so vivid that he went around from tribe to tribe in the North and the South Islands to act out the coming Europeans. He made a basket.

and he put it on his head to mimic a hat. He cut apart a cloak and he put it around his legs to mimic pants. He fastened a rock to the end of a stick and put it in his mouth to mimic a pipe. And he brought this prophecy to the tribes, quote, The name of their God will be Tom a Rokotia, forgive me if you're a Kiwi, son who was killed. A good God, however, the people will still be oppressed.

James Cook made landfall and then left, but 48 years later, the first missionary arrived in New Zealand. The people had been waiting for decades to hear the message about this new good God who was the son who was killed. And the tribal chiefs therefore gathered a large crowd on the beach to hear it in person. And on Christmas Day, 1814, the first missionary...

stood up on that soil to preach the gospel of Jesus, the son who was killed. The gospel alone set off a cascade effect in Maori culture. They renamed that beach the gateway for the good news in the indigenous language. The missionaries first translated the Gospel of Luke and then later the New Testament as a whole into the Maori language, the first indigenous translation in the Southern Hemisphere. And the Gospel of Luke spread like wildfire throughout the tribes.

Prior to the gospel, they were a warring culture. built around this idea, blood vengeance, you kill one of us, we kill one of you, tit for tat, back and forth, century after century, with no idea when the next raiding party would strike. They were indiscriminate to women and children, and they were cannibals for the most part. part. But the good news of the Prince of Peace changed their culture from the inside out forever.

Almost everywhere the European missionaries arrived to preach, the indigenous people had already gone with this Gospel of Luke translation and established new churches. The missionaries were out of a job. In just a few short years, over half the population was following Jesus. They immediately, this is interesting, the impulse of the Spirit was they formed new Christian villages that combined the best technology and farming techniques they were learning from the European.

missionaries as well as the secular settlers, and then also intentional Christian community that was based on the teachings of Jesus but contextualized to Maori culture. Tragically, as you can imagine, that is not the end of the story. Rucker goes on to tell the story of colonialism's devastating effect on the islands and the people.

Like all true stories, it is complex and it does not fit a simple good versus evil binary as most of the very unsophisticated generalizations about colonialism today do. The secular settlers began to oppress. of the indigenous people. William Wilberforce and the Clapton sect got involved in England to advocate for human rights, but in the end, long story short, the missionaries were forced to choose between loyalty to England and European culture.

or the gospel of Jesus and Maori culture, and many of them chose the former, and it sabotaged one of the greatest moves of God in recent history. I tell you that story

Because for our generation, I mean that in the broadest sense, preaching the gospel, unlike previous practices such as Sabbath or silence and solitude or simplicity, is an emotionally loaded idea, not for all of you, but for a lot of you. On one hand, we came of age in a secular culture where postmodern moral relativism has penetrated deep into the nervous system in the West.

with ideas like speak your truth, which doesn't even pass, by the way, first grade grammar. But okay, speak your truth, or you do you, or who am I to judge, have all become cliche. the assumptions that our Western culture is now built on. In such a cultural kind of worldview, it feels, and that's not rational, but at an emotional level, it feels immoral.

to preach the gospel to a pluralistic culture where one of the highest moral values is tolerance. Never mind that all around us, people are preaching other gospels constantly. The gospel of upward mobility or materialism or careerism or science or sexuality or identity politics or the left or the right or postmodern gender theory or whatever. Not just preaching, but working hard to legislate and say...

and in D.C. and shoved down the throat of any who dare to push back with a lethal mix of shame, fear, and legal fiat. There are all sorts of other gospels on display right now. On the other hand, we also came of age in a global reckoning over racial injustice.

As a church, we do not identify as evangelical. That word, in my opinion, has lost all positive meaning in our culture. And it's not a word used by Jesus or the New Testament writers or really through the great tradition of the church for thousands of years.

And so our loyalty is not to a label that's not even in the Bible. It's to Jesus as Lord. But we come... out of the evangelical tradition as a church, and most church historians argue that evangelicalism's great contribution to church history is its emphasis on evangelism, hence the name evangelical. missionary movement of the 18th and 19th centuries but that move of God and it was a move of God was so tarnished by its connections with colonialism

that it's become, at least for our era, almost a pariah. Then on top of that, you have the kind of post-World War II version of the gospel in America as kind of, and this is in layman's terms, a kind of ticket to heaven. what Bonhoeffer called cheap grace. This is the like, you know, knock, knock, knock. Hello, if you were to die tonight, just... Maybe not the best way to welcome a new neighbor to the hood, you know, like start with apple pie or something, you know.

Or it's the end of the sermon, put your head down, raise your hand if you want to say yes to Jesus. What does that even mean? And then you look around and like there's one person and it's like, I see that hand and that hand and that hand and that hand. I see that hand.

Wait, there's one hand, and we never see this person ever again. Or I remember when I was a kid walking down the sidewalk, and there was a $100 bill. I'm like, this is when you're eight. I mean, that's like, even now, that's like pretty good. That's like half a dinner in Portland now. But when you're eight, that was a lot, right? And I remember, oh my gosh, $100 bill and picking it up. And actually it was fake and you open it and it was a four spiritual laws track. Like who's on the...

Who's on the throne of your heart, money or Jesus? And you're like, ah, darn you, right? So that's our practice for week three, by the way. We have a handout of a fake hundred dollar bill. I want you to just put it all over your neighborhood. And no, I'm kidding. But this is a gospel, so to speak. It's a distortion of the gospel. More on that next week.

But that made it possible to become, in our culture, a Christian, but not become a disciple of Jesus. Add to that the kind of natural byproduct that is the rise of the megachurch movement. which is not all bad, but in a self-helpy kind of shallow spirituality. And for a lot of us, the idea of preaching the gospel, or God forbid we ever call it evangelism, is in West Coast language, a trigger.

Of course, on the West Coast, everything is now a trigger, but you know what I'm saying. Last year, I was having significant trouble breathing, and it freaked me out. I thought, am I having a panic attack? Like, what is this? And I went to the doctor, and I was really scared about it. And it turned out I'm allergic to cedar and alder trees. I'm allergic to organ, basically. Like, not basically. I am.

And I remember thinking, like, how can I be allergic to something so good and beautiful? But a lot of us are emotionally kind of allergic. to preaching the gospel of Jesus for all sorts of reasons. And so we prefer to just kind of put our head down and follow Jesus in public and not in private and maybe post something on Instagram, but not say something to anybody in person or maybe mow our neighbor's lawn and just hope they figure out that Jesus is Lord.

how well you edged the side or something, you know? I don't know. And I get that. No judgment. And guess what?

You're not alone. Not only are there people all around you that feel that way, not only do I feel that way on a regular basis, but Jesus felt that way at some level, or at least he's no stranger to that feeling. He too came from tradition with a checkered past of, quote, in the name of a religiously conservative culture. Listen to his stinging rebuke in Matthew 23 of the Pharisees, the religious conservative leaders of the day. Quote,

when a single convert, there's that word we all hate, and when you have succeeded, you make them twice as much a child of hell as you are. Jesus said that. Not an angsty-like millennial Instagrammer who is deconstructing their faith while garnering likes and getting a following. Jesus said that. And yet, all four Gospels... end with a call from Jesus to his disciples to preach the gospel. We read Matthew last week. Or here's Mark.

go into all the world and preach the gospel to all creation. St. Francis of Assisi took that literally and was found preaching the gospel to the birds in that famous story. Or listen to Luke's two-volume Gospels ending. You will receive power. when the Holy Spirit comes on you and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria and to the ends of the earth.

Then we have John's version. As the Father has sent me, I am sending you. Four different ways of saying the exact same thing. Go, preach the gospel. to all spread the message of Jesus. And all around us are people who are just as lost as the Maori were. Or even more so, because we're not pre-Christian, we're post-Christian, we're not a blank slate. A lot of us have an emotional baggage that is a U-Haul size to the distortions of the gospel in Western culture.

Now, let me back up a minute. I'm guessing that a bunch of you just cringed at my audacity and use of the word lost for secular people. But listen to the novelist and social critic David Foster Wallace. In an interview right before his tragic suicide, he said this, there is something particularly sad about it. Something that doesn't have very much to do with physical circumstances or the economy or any of the stuff that gets talked about in the news. It's more like a stomach level sadness.

I see it in myself and my friends in different ways. It manifests itself as a kind of lostness. The sadness. is a real American type of sadness. I was white, upper middle class, obscenely well-educated, had way more career success than I could have legitimately hoped for, and was sort of adrift.

A lot of my friends were the same way. Some of them were deeply into drugs. Others were unbelievable workaholics. Some were going to singles bars every night. You could see it played out in 20 different ways, but it's the same thing. I get the feeling that a lot of us privileged Americans, as we enter our early 30s, have to find a way to put away childish things and confront stuff about spirituality. Notice his word choice.

A kind of lostness. That's the word used by Jesus for people who are far from God. And it's a dignifying word. Lost people are not necessarily stupid or unintelligent. They aren't even by definition bad or immoral. They are just lost.

I got lost recently. I was on vacation. I went on a trip to San Francisco to visit my best friend. I've been there a thousand times. I grew up down there, but you know, that city is hard to navigate. There's no grid system. There's the 49 hills. And I was without my phone because, you know, ruthlessly eliminate, hurry, all that stuff.

And I was without my phone on a morning prayer walk. And guess what? I got hopelessly lost and had no idea where I was. Now, I'd like to think that's not because I'm stupid or bad. Maybe both are true. I don't know. I just got lost. I got turned around. I lost my bearings. Wallace was saying you can be successful by Western standards and still be lost. That sounds very similar to Jesus, who said to a wealthy...

Roman elite named Zacchaeus that he, quote, came to seek and to save the lost. But here's the kicker. How does Jesus do that today? Through you. Through me, his body in the language of the New Testament, his hands and his feet, through us preaching the gospel of Jesus. You are here. Just think about the basic math. You are here.

Because somebody was courageous enough to preach the gospel to you. Your mom or your dad or a family member or a friend in high school or college or a pastor from a church or a... Christian intellectual or writer or artist or a Christian celebrity on Instagram, you are here because a disciple of Jesus' obedience to preach the gospel to you.

I'm here for the most part because of my mom and dad who are here because one day this guy named Craig that I've never met in my life, who was my dad's buddy from college, came over to his door, knocked on it and said he'd just gone to a Billy Graham crusade. He'd had his life. transformed by Jesus. And he said, can I talk to you? And my dad said, sure. And that's why I'm here today because of one man named Craig that I have never met in my life because of his courage.

After all, anyone who has good news about anything, a new TV show or movie or a life-saving vaccine or something good, is there anything ever good out of Washington, D.C., whatever, we can't help but share it. How many of you, the moment you found out that season two of Ted Lasso is coming out, immediately picked up your phone and were like, hey, guess what? Did you hear Ted Lasso? Do you know? Do you not know? Okay, now you know. Bless you. Bless you.

I said to my wife a few days ago, we are saving that for sabbatical, week one. That's what we're doing every night, you know? In fact, we can't help but share whatever it is that we're excited about, whatever it is that is good news. Jesus in Luke 4 said, I must preach the gospel of the kingdom of God. I must.

You can interpret that as like a duty base, like I must, it's the right thing to do. Or you can interpret it that like Jesus, like I must, I can't help but spread the good news of the kingdom. As the Bolivian scholar Mortimer Arias put it, every generation has to be evangelized. That is, confronted with the good news of the kingdom in Jesus Christ. And every generation of Christians has the unique and non-transferable responsibility of sharing the good news with its own generation. You.

And I, if you are a follower of Jesus in the room, have the, quote, unique and non-transferable responsibility of sharing the good news with our own generation, with our family, our friends, our neighbors, our coworkers, our city. The church of Jesus is never more than one generation deep, never more than one generation from extinction. It doesn't matter how healthy our church is right now.

whatever that even means in a post-COVID world, but it doesn't matter how many of us are in the room, we will do nothing but age and die if we do not reproduce at a spiritual level. The global missions movement. defines an unreached people group. Gerald said something about that last week. As a group that is less than 2% Christian, not to be cheeky, but by that definition, Portlanders are an unreached people group.

And there is an opening right now for the gospel in our city. As the myriad of secular gospels are fractured and failing, as the bankruptcy of secularism is being exposed, individual human rights, freedom, money, and the ability to have sex with whoever you want, it turns out is not enough to live a deeply meaningful life. And it's just, secularism does not have.

the moral and spiritual and communal resources to draw on in times of hardship. It is just bankrupt soil. You cannot thrive in it over a lifetime. Not all, but some. of our secular neighbors who were closed off in previous moments are at least more open right now to another gospel than that of the various secular ideologies on the left and on the right that right now are more

obviously bankrupt than ever before. There's another gospel. There's another narrative about what's good and beautiful and true. There's another hope for salvation. There's another dream for the future.

that is somehow the best of all of our collective dreams for the future, somehow transcends them and subverts them at the same time. Now to start, we need to ask a very simple question with the rest of our time together at this morning. And that is, what is the gospel? Now, you may think, like, who signed your paycheck? That is so... Goodness, you went to seminary for that? That is a stupid question. Of course we know what the gospel is.

But if I were to go around the room with a kind of mic and ask 10 of you at random, hey, articulate the gospel for me, summarize it for me in 30 seconds, go. Most, don't worry, I won't do that. Some of you are starting to, I won't. But if I were to do that in a hypothetical world, we would likely hear a ton of common denominators.

But we would likely hear 10 semi-different definitions of the gospel based on your previous church experience, who you follow on Instagram, what books you've read or not read, whether you've read the scripture or not, how long you've been around Bridgetown.

And it would have a lot of similarities, but also a lot of differences. It's my opinion, and this is my entire teaching next week, that much of what people call the gospel in the American church is not necessarily all wrong or heresy, but it's not really the gospel of Jesus. So where do we start to form a working definition of the gospel? Well, that's an easy answer, with Jesus himself. We ask the simple question, what was the gospel that Jesus himself preached? After all, he was a...

preacher. And if we do not start with the gospel that Jesus preached, it is very likely that we will end up with a gospel that Jesus did not preach, which is what I think exactly we have in much of the American church. You have Mark chapter 1 in theory still open. your lap. Before we reread our text, take a look at the title of the book at the top of the page, depending on your translation of the Bible or how it's printed for you. It says, the gospel of Mark.

Greek, it is euangelion katamarkos, which can be translated the gospel of Mark or the gospel according to Mark. And all four Gospels start that way. The Gospel according to Matthew, to Mark, to Luke, and to John. New Testament scholar Scott McKnight in his excellent book, The King Jesus Gospel, makes a very simple point. You ready for this? The gospels are the gospel. This is why you go to seminary, people, right here. Okay, but just think about that for a moment. The gospels...

are the gospel. Meaning this entire biography open in front of you, Mark, from chapter 1, verse 1, to chapter 16, verse, I forget, all of that. is the gospel. Not one little part in the middle or three quarters of the way through or at the end. All of it is the gospel. This is simple, but it is revolutionary. It means that the gospel is likely much bigger and deeper and longer than many of us were led to believe.

And if you search for some of the most popular summaries of the gospel in the American church, such as what Dr. Gary Breshears calls the John 3.16 gospel, which is what I grew up with. Basically, here's the simplification. You're a sinner going to hell, but Jesus died. on the cross for your sins so that you can go to heaven when you die. If you search for that gospel in the biography, in the gospel in front of you, you are hard pressed to find anything remotely close to it.

In Matthew or in Mark or in Luke or in John. On a regular basis, I have people criticize me and ask me, why don't you, John Mark, preach the gospel? Now, I... I'm happy to admit that is, in all honesty, a weakness in my preaching. Absolutely. As I look back over the last number of years here, that's a weakness. But when I press people for more information, what...

Nine times out of ten, what they're actually saying is, why don't you teach a reformed theory of the atonement? Or why don't you end your sermons with a call for people to put their hand up and go to heaven when they die? That's what they mean by preaching the gospel. What I mean, in my mind, I preach the gospel.

Anytime, and hopefully most Sundays, I stand up here, whoever is up here, and we announce anything about Jesus of Nazareth from chapter 1 to chapter 16, his death, his burial, his resurrection, his incarnation, his birth, his teachings, his parents.

his miracles, his love, his subverting of the religion of his day, his ascension to the right hand of the father, the coming of his kingdom, the pouring out of the spirit, the discipleship of Jesus down to the new Testament at 2000 years of the best of the Jesus tradition. When we announce that, we announce or we preach the gospel of Jesus. Because, and here's where I'm getting this idea, on the opening page, this is the other thing you need to note, Mark summarizes the gospel that Jesus himself

preached, and it's a very different summary than what some of us grew up hearing. Again, take a look at verse 14 and verse 15. After John, that's the baptizer, was put in prison, And Jesus went into Galilee, it's up in the north of Israel, where he was from, proclaiming, or that can be translated preaching, the good news of God or the gospel of God. Here it is in one sentence. Here's the summary.

The time has come, the kingdom of God has come near. That's the one sentence summary of the gospel according to Jesus. Repent and believe the good news.

Now, let's piece this one-line summary apart word by word in the next few minutes. First, the phrase good news is one word in Greek. It's euangelion. Can you say that? It's a very nice... Greek word just kind of rolls off your tongue there, euangelion. It's where we get the English words like evangelism and evangelical. Contrary to what you might think, a euangelion wasn't a religious word in the first century. It was a political word.

To evangelize wasn't something that a religious person like myself did. It was something that a government employee did it. to preach the gospel was to bring the good news to the Roman Empire about some kind of a momentous event, such as the enthronement of a new emperor or victory in war or a new era of peace. For example, give you a quick 11th grade history refresher.

In 44 BC, a few decades before Jesus, the most famous Roman of all time, Julius Caesar, was assassinated. His death threw the empire into civil war between those who killed Caesar, Brutus and Cassius, and Caesar's best friend, Mark Antiochus. and his adopted nephew, Octavian. They defeated Brutus and Cassius and the insurgency, but then they turned on each other to wrestle ultimate power of the empire. The decisive battle, if you remember, was fought at sea in 31 BC.

just off the coast of Greece. Octavian won in this sea battle. Mark Antony and Cleopatra ran off to England and ended in, of course, you know the story. after 13 long years of chaos and civil war, Octavian brought peace. Then through a long series of events, it was said that Octavian, who renamed himself Augustus or Caesar Augustus, was actually deus filius in Latin or son of God. He was half divine, they said. He was called...

Lord and Savior and Prince of Peace. For example, one ancient inscription discovered by archaeologists reads, the birthday of the God, Caesar Augustus, was the beginning for the world of the... the glad tidings that have come to men through him. If you want, just look back a few paragraphs at verse 1 of Mark chapter 1, and it is almost the exact same line. Mark is...

a political subversive at some level. Inscriptions like this have been found all over the ancient Mediterranean as examples of kind of imperial propaganda to the masses. The emperor then Octavian sent out preachers. or evangelists to the farthest reaches of the empire to spread his euangelion. And it was basically Octavian defeated the rebels. He ended the civil war. He's the son of God. He's more than just a man. He's Lord.

He's Savior here to rescue and deliver us and usher in a worldwide era of peace and justice. Does that sound familiar at all? It was several more years before Augustus returned home due to kind of the way the ancient world worked. And in those in-between years of waiting... The Romans, especially those who had been on the wrong side in the Civil War, had to decide what they would do, whether or not they would repent and believe the gospel.

My point is a euangelion in the ancient world was a royal announcement about a king and about a kingdom. Whatever the gospel is, it's not about you or me at all. It's about Jesus first and foremost. Hence the next line, the summary.

The time has come. The kingdom of God has come near. First, the time has come. Meaning what? Meaning a story, a promise, and prophecy is reaching its climax in Jesus himself. Jesus is here referring to the story of Israel, or what we call the Old Testament. Next, the kingdom. The word is... basile in Greek. It's actually an active word. It's a bit closer to a verb than a noun. Most scholars translate it the reign of God. Many theologians define the kingdom of God or the reign of God as

quote, the range of God's effective will. It is the sphere where God's will is done, in Jesus' language, on earth as it is in heaven. Think of history. When you read of the reign of Henry VIII or Alexander the Great or Pharaoh, what they mean is not just a people and a place. England or ancient Greece or, you know, Egypt or whatever. That, sure. But what they mean is the order imposed on people in a place by a monarch, whether it's good or evil, whether it's peace or war, whether it's just.

or unjust. And the people in that place can either joyfully participate in the monarch's rule and reign, or they can rebel and resist. The kingdom of God is the reign of God. It's the range of his effective will. It's this new... so to speak, that is people in a place who are living under the active rule of God, living the way he intended and designed. And that last line has come near.

In Greek, it's engezo. It's very hard to translate into English. It can be translated either has arrived or is available. So, Mark's summary. You still with me? Still awake? Well done. is that Israel's story has reached its long-awaited climax.

That all of God's promises and prophecies, stretching all the way back to Abraham, I will make you into a great nation. Through you, all people will be blessed. And even before him, back to Adam and Eve, that all of these promises and prophecies are coming to pass.

that God's long-awaited reign, this new covenant order, this new covenant people who are no longer bound to a written Torah, but have the Torah written on their hearts, who have some presence of God in them, this new covenant people, not just Jewish, but now Jew and Gentile. who live in this new world order under the rule of God, a new order of love and of justice and of peace and of prosperity, that this long-awaited moment has arrived in Jesus.

And it is available to any and all who repent and believe. This is the gospel. And if it doesn't sound like the gospel to you, it's not just me. Listen to a few leading scholars and pastors definition. of the gospel of Jesus. Small sampling. Daryl Bach, who's from a conservative Dallas Theological Seminary, quote, if we ask what message Jesus brought, the short answer is simply this. He brought the good news that God's promised rule of deliverance had to happen.

arrived. John Ortberg, mentor to me, Jesus' good news, his gospel is simply this. The kingdom of God has now, through Jesus, become available for ordinary human beings to live in. Or here's my favorite from my friend Rich Viotis in New York. The gospel is the good news that God's kingdom has come near through Jesus and through his life. death, resurrection, and enthronement, the powers of Satan, sin, and death no longer have the last word.

Now, if this does not sound like the gospel that you're familiar with or you grew up with, come back next week. More on that. For today, our central idea is very simple. Jesus' primary message was that the kingdom of God... has arrived. The word kingdom is used 122 times in the four gospels alone, 90 of which come from Jesus' own mouth. And yet in entire church traditions in the modern West, such as the one I grew up in, it's almost entirely absent. And then even in churches like ours,

When we do our best to focus on the kingdom of God, think of like our tagline in Portland as it is in heaven, like that's kingdom language from the Lord's Prayer. Still, we're often confused by what exactly... It is. It sounds like kind of weird and esoteric because we don't live in an ancient monarchy. We live in a modern Western democracy. The Crown for us is like a just beautiful show on Netflix.

With Claire Foy playing an Enneagram one and just stealing my heart, her ability to just express like... repressed emotions of resentment and torn moral loyalties without saying anything, just with a twitch of her mouth. Oh, Claire, how do you do it? I'm not in love with her. I'm in love with you. I promise. I mean... She's just like me. I would never want to be married to me. Poor girl. Oh, my goodness. But for us, The Crown, it's like it's a show on Netflix.

It's Prince Harry with his cool scruffy red hair on Oprah. It's entertainment. It's a novel. It's an idea. It's not our reality. And so when we hear about the kingdom of God, we're like, okay.

So Jesus' gospel was the kingdom has arrived. What does that even mean? Well, so before we end, just give me a few more minutes of your attention and thank you for your patience to give you a very brief biblical theology of the kingdom of God. This is so important that you... wrap your head and whip it your heart around Jesus' central message.

The idea of the kingdom of God starts on page one of the Bible, where human beings are created in God's image to rule, or that can be translated to reign or to have dominion in the old King James. royalty language. That's king and queen language. In fact,

Sidebar, in the ancient Near East, the king in Mesopotamia and Egypt and Babylon was called the image of God. And this was all part of an ancient kind of cosmology and worldview where the king was the divine representative, and that meant everybody else was not. Not the image of God. Everybody else was, by fact, de facto, other than the oligarchy, cheap slave labor to do Pharaoh's bidding. Genesis 1 is one of the most radical, subversive, world-altering documents to ever enter human circulation.

because it declares that all human beings are made in the image of God. Male, female, every ethnicity, every generation is a divine fiat against any form of racism or oppression. anywhere.

And humans, these rulers, these kings and queens, are put into the Garden of Eden to co-rule with God over the earth, to spread the boundaries of Eden out to the edges of the known world. It's the first example of what... we call the kingdom of god but in the story the humans are manipulated by this serpent this ancient

Near Eastern personification of demonic evil, to launch a coup against God, and they rebel with the serpent against God's reign. They attempt to seize the kingdom of God for themselves, to rule in God's place, and instead they... trade the loving reign of God for the unloving reign of the snake.

As a result, they are exiled from the garden, east of Eden, as Steinbeck put it, and they are shut out of God's reign, and they are now oppressed by either their own reign or a demonic reign or some brutal mix of the two. The Old Testament then tells the story of how God is a community of love.

How he doesn't follow through on his warning to kill Adam and Eve. Instead, what's the first thing he does? He makes a sacrifice and he clothes them and he cares for them. And even as their descendants spread out across the earth and with them violence and injustice, God... calls Abraham to become the father of a new people group that he would use to rescue and save humanity from its fractured soul and fragmented society. They become the kingdom of Israel instead of a palace.

what do they have? A temple. Because even though they had kings, they were well aware that God, the creator, was the one true king. And tragically, if you know the story, every Hebrew king's attempt to co-rule with God

in a life-giving way, to do what Adam and Eve were supposed to do, but failed to do in the garden. Every single attempt ended in failure. David came the closest, but even he ended in shame. By the end of the old... testament you come to the tragic realization that israel who is supposed to save the world herself needs to be saved

Whatever has gone wrong in the human condition, it's deeper than we thought. We can't fix it with the right person and political power or the right political system or the right education or technology or medicine or killer app. It's like a cancer that is too... deep for surgery. We can't self-save. We need to be healed and saved and set free from the outside in.

By the end of the Old Testament, Israel is in exile, waiting for the kingdom of God to appear, waiting for God to save them, to rescue them, to bring them back to the land, to bring his presence back to Jerusalem, waiting for God to, in Old Testament, Then there's a prophecy from Isaiah a few hundred years before Jesus where he uses the word euangelion, this political word from the ancient day. And his euangelion is that there is coming an anointed king.

who would be God in person who would literally bring God's presence back to Jerusalem, back to Israel. He would inaugurate the new covenant. He'd set them free from enslavement. He would open Israel up to a new Jew. plus Gentile family, a kingdom that is open and available to all, a kingdom of peace and of justice and of love. Jews in the first century were literally waiting every single day for this prophesied Messiah.

or king to come and the kingdom of God to come with him. Can you imagine hearing Jesus, this upstart rabbi from the north, stand up and say, the time is fulfilled. The kingdom of God has arrived. Note, not will arrive, not is about to arrive, has arrived. Now, if you are confused by that,

they were just as confused as you are right now. How could that possibly be true, Jesus? We're still under the boot of Rome. Oppression and injustice are the norm. Death is the rampant. It's how pretty much all of us end. for us today. Jesus, how could the kingdom of God have arrived 2,000 years ago? What about the riots in South Africa over Zuma or the violence in Syria or the political intrigue in our own country? What about the kingdom of God has arrived?

The answer that Jesus gave to that conundrum and the New Testament writers after him was basically threefold. One, the kingdom is here in the present, but it's also coming in the future. Or in the language of theologians, it's now and not yet. Sometimes Jesus would talk about the kingdom as if it was a present reality. It's here. Other times he'd talk about it as if it's a future reality. It's yet to come upon his return. Which was it? Both.

Theologians call this inaugurated eschatology, which is a pretentious way of saying that Jesus inaugurated, he started the eschaton, this end goal that human history has been moving toward the kingdom of God. But most of it is still to come upon. Jesus returned to rule as king. Second, the kingdom of Jesus is utterly unlike the kingdoms of this world. Jesus just wasn't anything like a typical king.

He wasn't born in a palace to royalty, but in a cave to peasants. He didn't lead an army. In fact, he taught enemy love. He didn't defeat his enemies. In fact, he died for them. which is why the vast majority of Jesus' parables are about not only the kingdom and how it's arrived, but how it's totally different than most people are expecting.

To quote Jesus himself, this is a great summary. It's where the last are first and the first are last. Where all of the calculus of the world is turned on its head. where all of our assumptions about what will lead to the good life are called into question, and yet at the same time, our deepest desires come true. It is a kingdom where the powerful serve the weak.

where the wealthy give to the poor, where the lonely are set in families, where the tax collector is invited to an open table, where the leper is embraced, where those who are sick are healed, where the demonized are set free, where those... entrenched in sin and addiction are made whole, where weapons of war are turned into farming tools. It is a kingdom where agape, or love as defined by Jesus, is the ultimate value and the most important reality.

And agape is expressed as peace and justice and generosity and compassion. Jesus doesn't look anything like Julius Caesar or President Trump or President Biden or you fill in the blank. And the kingdom doesn't look like anything like the Roman Empire or the United States of America, or you fill in the blank.

And yet, the claim that all four gospel writers make is that this upside-down kingdom has arrived in Jesus, and even more provocatively, that somehow on the cross, God himself became king of the world. That on the cross, the king drew all of the sin and death of the world onto his shoulders, and he died for the very people who rebelled against and rejected his reign.

And somehow that broke the grip of what theologians call the powers, Satan, sin, and death upon you and me and begun a revolution that was the turning point. in human history. And as much as our secular culture would love to have you believe that the turning point in history was the Enlightenment or the invention of modern science or Wikipedia, it's not.

The turning point by which we literally measure, or at least we used to before it was politically incorrect, time itself from was the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. Don't take my word for it. Go read right now this incredible book that's out. People are talking about Tom Holland. secular, agnostic.

world-respected historian, Dominion. Subtitle is How the Christian Revolution Remade the World. He's basically, not a Christian, basically arguing that almost every single thing that you consider normal and good in your Western worldview is the byproduct. of Jesus' teachings, death, and resurrection from the dead. Jesus inaugurated a revolution that changed the world forever. And three, why is that revolution still very much now but not yet?

because the kingdom of God expands and grows, not through coercive force, but through suffering love. This revolution is nothing like the American Revolution or the French Revolution or the Red Revolution or the social media revolution. It is a revolution of love. And love, as a general rule, takes a lot longer and it's a lot more painful, but it works.

better. Through apprenticeship to Jesus, we are learning to live in the kingdom of God and being formed into people of agape. And this new possibility that's made available to us through Jesus and apprenticeship to him. to live in the kingdom, or what Jesus later called eternal life, it is available to any and all who, quote, repent and believe. What does that phrase mean? I used to think it meant stop sinning and agree in your mind that Jesus is God.

The word repent, though, literally means a change of mind or of worldview or values. Here's my lame attempt to be Eugene Peterson and translate that into American. rethink everything you think you know about who God is, who you are, and what the good life you crave actually is. And put your trust and confidence in me, Jesus, to heal you, save you, free you, and lead you to the life you ache for. Now let me end with a very practical example of what this would mean for you and me to...

repent and believe in the gospel of the kingdom. Here's a way to think about it that's very simple. We all have a kingdom or a queendom. We all have a range of our effective will. Or in Genesis language, we all have a dominion, even if for most of us, it's a lot smaller than Great Britain or the Roman Empire. We still have a kingdom. Our kingdom is the range of our effective will. As children,

We learn early on about the boundaries of our kingdom or our effective will. We don't like to be told what we can and cannot do. Some of the first words that all of us learn are me and mine. As we age, this becomes more sophisticated. My kids right now are entering the teenage years, and I shouldn't say, they're not here, so I can say this. This is great.

But there's this moment right now when we sit down for dinner at the dinner table, they all have a seat. Where does this come from? And if one of them takes the other's seat, it's like instant war. It's like, that's my seat. I'm like. where does this even come that like that chair at 6 p.m. every night, that's all of a sudden your chair. By the way, I paid for that chair, not you, but whatever. But what...

That's actually, it's not a mature example, but what are they doing? They're testing the boundaries of their kingdom. They're at that key age where they're trying to differentiate from mom, from dad, from their family of origin. They're trying to take responsibility at some level for their life. Just point it at homework, Jude, not at the chair. but okay, whatever.

But there's a healthy part of us. We want to know what's my kingdom, what's my dominion. As we age, this becomes apparent in adult life as well. Here's a simple example. Your home or your apartment. We arrange our furniture and decorating. or don't clean. And it's more than just a home. It is an external sign of our internal will, of what we want done and what we have the capacity to get done. Other examples would be our sense of fashion, how we dress or appear to the world.

world, our schedule, how we spend our time, our budget, how we spend our money, and above all, our character. This is our kingdom. This is the range of our effective will. When you put all of our kingdoms together and filter them through the hierarchy of oppression, you have what the New Testament calls the kingdom of this world, as opposed to the kingdom of God. And just compare and contrast the two. Jesus' kingdom.

and your kingdom or the kingdom of this world that we read about in the news every day? How's our attempt at self-governance going? Our kingdom, whatever it is, is not one. There's some good stuff in it, but it's not one of shalom. One thing that all luminaries agree on, from Jesus to Plato to Nietzsche to Marx, is that something has gone deeply wrong in the human heart.

This is where Jesus' teaching was radical in his day, and it still is in ours. He internalized sin. For him, sin was far more than the breaking of moral laws, as religious conservatives like to focus on. or the hierarchy of oppression, as secular progressives like to focus on. It's far more cancerous. It goes to the core of the human person. Something deep inside us has been bent out of shape. We are both sinned against and sinner.

wounded and wicked, victim and perpetrator. St. Augustine called us homo invictus, or man turned in on himself. From global atrocities like the Rwandan or Bosnian genocide or in previous eras, the colonialization of indigenous people to family feuds at Christmas and catfights and nasty comments on social media or office gossip where this moment somebody's name comes up.

can't help but say something negative. All of it is rooted in this vain human attempt to rebel against God's rule, to make ourselves the center of the universe, not him, to make ourselves the reference point for good and evil, not him, to do our own.

will and not his, to live alone and not in union with the God we were made for. We were made. We need to be saved, especially from ourselves. not just have the legal books cleared in heaven or politics sorted out in D.C. We need to be healed at the deepest part of us. Ancient Christians were more likely to talk about the atonement as the victory of Jesus over demonic powers and of the healing of the soul through coming back into union with God.

It's popular right now to summarize the gospel as you are more sinful than you could possibly know and more loved than you could possibly imagine. It's true. I believe that. And it's nice. As long as you basically have your life together. But how is that good news for an addict living on the street that many of us pass every single day and a part of our heart is just torn?

His body ravished by drugs. His life, marriage, relationship with his children ruined. He needs more than an emotional sense of love. He needs to be saved and healed at the deepest part of his being. All of us need this. whether we are living in a literal gutter or in a mansion in the West Hills, all of us need, we all have this sense of lostness.

We need it if we ever hope to see peace and justice come to our nation and our world. Because all too often, our best attempts to make a better society or a better city or a better marriage or family or life are dashed on the rocks. Because to every attempt at justice, we bring our bent heart, our pride, our anger, our self-righteousness, our own ignorance, which sabotages our best attempts to make the world a better place.

we first need to let Jesus make us into better people, people of agape. As Ortberg writes, salvation isn't primarily about going to a good place, but becoming good people. as defined by becoming people of love, willing the good of others at all times and all situations with compassion, wisdom, courage, and resolute fidelity. We need to be saved, not just from what will happen to us, but what could happen in us from who we could become.

This is why discipleship is central to the gospel. In fact, Willard used to say that if your preaching of the gospel does not naturally lead people to apprentice under Jesus as the logical next step, then you are not preaching the gospel of Jesus. you're preaching another gospel. You can define discipleship as a lifelong process of deepening your surrender to Jesus as Lord, as coming into the kingdom.

With each surrender of our self-love and our self-will to God's love and God's will, we become more human, more ourselves, more whole, and more free to love. We begin to participate in what the ancient Christians called the divine dance. between the three members of the Trinity, the community of love that we call God. We come deeper into and share in their love and their joy and their peace. And then we can't help but naturally share like we share all goodness.

news about love and joy and peace with the world. To end, one last word from N.T. Wright. Here it is. The good news. is that the one true God has now taken charge of the world in and through Jesus and his death and resurrection. The ancient hopes have indeed been fulfilled, but in a way nobody imagined. God's plan to put the world right has finally been launched. The ancient sickness that had crippled the whole world and humans with it.

has been cured at last so that new life can rise up in its place. Life has come to life and is pouring out like a mighty river into the world in the form of a new power, the power of love. The good news was and is that all this has happened in and through Jesus, that one day it will happen completely and utterly to all creation, and that we humans, every single one of us, can be caught up in that transformation.

here and now. This is the Christian gospel. Do not allow yourself to be fobbed off with anything else. Let's stand together and pray. Thanks for listening. This podcast is a production of practicing the way a simple, beautiful way to integrate formation into your church or group. All our resources are completely free, thanks to the generosity of The Circle, a community of monthly givers who partner with us to see spiritual formation integrated into the church at large.

Special thanks for today's episode goes to Zach from Cleveland, Tennessee, Allison from Dallas, Texas, Reggie from Arcadia, California, Jen from Rome, Georgia and Eric from Cincinnati, Ohio. Thank you all so much. To join the circle or learn more about running a practice in your church or community, visit practicingtheway.org.