About this sermon
A Morning Instruction class on Geerhardus Vos’s chapter on misconceptions of the kingdom. Some overemphasize the future, holding that Jesus taught only an end-time kingdom; others overemphasize the present, as nineteenth-century liberalism reduced the kingdom to an ethical program of being good. A future millennial reign of Christ on earth as a political ruler is another way of misreading the kingdom’s nature. Scripture teaches a kingdom already present in Christ and still to come, when he hands it over to the Father.
Sermon transcript
First Corinthians 15, I’m going to read verses 20 through 28. But in fact, Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have fallen asleep. For as by a man came death, by a man has come also the resurrection of the dead. For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive. But each in his own order, Christ the first fruits, then at his coming those who belong to Christ.
Then comes the end when he delivers the kingdom to God the Father after destroying every rule and every authority and power. For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. The last enemy to be destroyed is death. For God has put all things in subjection under his feet. But when it says all things are put in subjection, it is plain that he is accepted who put all things in subjection under him. When all things are subjected to him, then the son himself will also be subjected to him who put all things in subjection under him. That God may be all in all.
Let’s pray. Our gracious Heavenly Father, help us as we look into your word this morning, that we may really understand it, and that in understanding it, we may embrace it and practice it in our lives. Help us as we study the nature of your kingdom, that we may enter into that kingdom, and that we may enjoy all of its blessings through our Lord Jesus Christ, in whose name we pray, amen.
All right, this morning our task is to cover chapter five in Voss’s book, The Kingdom of God and the Church. And the title of that chapter is Current Misconceptions Regarding the Present and Future Kingdom. Two connections to make as you look and listen to that title. One, the previous chapter, four, also had to do with the present and future kingdom. So this is going to be an elaboration or continuation of what you just covered in chapter four. The other connection to make is what does he mean by current?
Well, he’s writing the book around 1905. So the current misconceptions he’s talking about were existent about 100 years ago. Does that mean this is out of date? By no means. Those current misconceptions are still with us, and I’ll try to point that out in some ways as we go along. All right, well, quickly, a review of Chapter 4 that we covered last week. What does Jesus teach regarding the present and future aspects of the kingdom?
What Voss presents, he describes as the older view on the subject, and I think what he means there is the orthodox view, the Bible-believing view that had been current for a long time at the time that he was writing. And in that older or orthodox view, the kingdom has both a present and a future aspect in Jesus’ teaching. Now, by virtue of Jesus’ own coming, the kingdom of God became present. When you think about the way Jesus began his preaching, for example, in the beginning of Mark, repent for the kingdom of heaven is at hand, or the kingdom of God is at hand. The coming of Jesus brings about the coming of the kingdom.
So we have a present kingdom. Let’s see if my pens work now. We have a present aspect to the kingdom. And Voss points out a number of characteristics of the present kingdom, but I think He may point out more than three, but I identified at least three, and they are helpful to understanding the nature of the kingdom. So we’ll ask for some volunteers to read here, and Carl, I know you’re always ready to help here, so would you read us Luke 16, verse 16?
Just hold that, and I’ll pick out a couple more here. Doris, you have scriptures there with you, okay? Would you look up Matthew 13, verses 31 through 33? And Bruce, if you could look up Matthew 13, verses 24 to 30. We’ll read those parables in reverse order. Yes, you want those again? Doris, Matthew 13. 31 through 33. And Bruce, you back up to Matthew 13, verses 24 to 30. All right, and let’s go back to you then, Carl. You have Luke 16, verse 16.
The law and the prophets were proclaimed until John. Since then, the gospel of the kingdom of God is preached, and everyone is forcing his way into it. One of the points of Luke 16-16 is simply that the kingdom must be present because Jesus speaks of it as present and is on a day. The time of the prophets, the time of John the Baptist are passing away, but now it’s the time of the kingdom.
But another I hope you can see this anyway. Maybe it’s better than a blank sheet. Okay. One of the implications of Luke 16, 16 is that the kingdom is spiritual and therefore invisible. This is simply the result of the context of when and how Jesus makes the statement. He says that people are forcing their way into this kingdom. Can you see it at the time? No. Jesus is not a secular ruler. He doesn’t have a territory with boundaries that people are, you know, signing up as citizens and becoming naturalized citizens of this kingdom. It’s clearly something that is spiritual and invisible. So that’s one of our first characteristics of the Present kingdom, spiritual and invisible.
Next, Matthew 13, 31 to 33. He presented another parable to them, saying, the kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed which man took and sowed in his field. And this is smaller than other seeds, all other seeds. But when it is full grown, it is larger than the garden plant and becomes a tree so that the birds of the air come and nest in its branches. He spoke another parable to them. The kingdom of heaven is like leaven, which a woman took and hid in three packs of meal until it was all leaven.” Okay, we have the two parables in this text, the parable of the mustard seed and the parable of the leaven.
Both of them are images of gradual growth. The mustard seed is a little seed, but then it grows, and then it grows into a large bush. And the leaven is hidden in the dough and gradually works its way into leavening the whole lump. So this gives us a second characteristic of the present kingdom, that it is gradual in its growth for its timing. And the next one, backing up to the previous parable in 1913, and another parable to them saying, the kingdom of heaven may be compared to a man who sowed good seed in his field.
But while men were sleeping, his enemy came and sowed tares also among the wheat and went away. But when the wheat sprang up and bore grain, then the tares became evident also. And the slaves of the landowner came and said to him, sir, did you not sow good seed You want us then to go and gather them up? But he said, no, lest while you are gathering up the tares, you may root up the wheat with them. Allow both to grow together until the harvest, and in the time of the harvest, I will say to the reapers, first gather up the tares and bind them into bundles to burn them up, but gather the wheat into my vine.
The third characteristic of the present kingdom One way to state it is that it is imperfect. And one of the helpful things about the parable of the wheat and the tares is that it tells us not only about the present kingdom, but also about the future nature of the kingdom. The imperfection of the kingdom is present in that the wheat and the tares are there simultaneously. There’s something that has yet to be done to this field in order to bring it to its proper state.
It has to come to the harvest. And it is at the harvest time that the weeds and the wheat are going to be separated. So the parable gives you both the present state of the kingdom, its imperfection in which the weeds and the wheat are mingled together, but also that there’s coming a future state of the kingdom when the wheat and the tares or wheat and the weeds will be separated at the time of the harvest, which was clearly speaking of the final judgment.
Now that also connects with the text that I read at the beginning of class, 1 Corinthians 15, which says that Jesus must reign until all his enemies are put under his feet. It doesn’t say that Jesus must reign when or someday in the future when all the enemies are under his feet. It says that Jesus is reigning now so that there is a present reign in which Jesus’ enemies are still being subdued. And then there’s a future aspect to the kingdom, a future reign when they are all under his feet and he will deliver the kingdom over to his father.
All right, so we have these three main characteristics of the present kingdom. There are three corresponding characteristics to the future kingdom. Okay, so the present, and boy, this is gonna be, it’s no help, this green one. All right, if we think about the future kingdom, of the present kingdom, you will get what the future kingdom will be like.
Not opposite of spiritual, but the invisible. Instead of invisible, we’re going to have a visible kingdom. Okay, so in contrast to the present, we’re going to have a visible kingdom. We’re going to have a kingdom that is sudden or instantaneously revealed at the Day of Judgment. And we’re going to have a kingdom that is completely perfect or faultless. I want another way of expressing it. Just a little bit of explanation on these things and then we’ll move into chapter five.
The visibility of the kingdom will manifest itself in things like the general resurrection when all will be raised from the dead and that will be visible, will be manifested in the judgment when the The weeds or the tares are gathered together and burned, and the wheat is gathered together into God’s kingdom, which we understand to be the same thing as what Jesus is speaking about in Matthew 25 and separating between the sheep and the goats, and all of that will be visible. The instantaneous or sudden appearance of that kingdom is clear from the nature of the actions that occur, the resurrection, the final judgment. And then the perfection of that kingdom, God will remove out of his kingdom every fault, everything that causes stumbling, and it will be an eternal state of blessedness.
All right, what Voss explains in chapter four, which we’re reviewing here, is that Both of these conceptions are part of the teaching of Jesus regarding the kingdom of God. And one of the reasons that the kingdom of God is a difficult concept is that there really is no single place in which all of these features of the kingdom are brought together in one passage. And so if you’re not paying attention to the whole counsel of God, to the whole revelation of the scriptures regarding the kingdom of God, then it’s easy to fall into a one-sided viewpoint of the kingdom. Because if you were to focus merely, for example, if you focus merely on the parable of the mustard seed and the parable of the leaven, you would focus on this idea of the kingdom being something that comes gradually. And if you were not to read this in this context that it occurs with the parable of the wheat and the tares, which shows the other aspect of the kingdom as well as the gradual nature of it, that there will be a final sudden consummation. If you take one of those parables by itself, you end up with a one-sided a picture of what the kingdom is.
And what the older orthodox view that Voss was explaining attempts to do is to take into account all of the data of the scriptures about the kingdom of God and to arrange them in a biblical way. And that arrangement is the result that Voss gives you in chapter four. that there is both a present and a future aspect to the kingdom. And those two aspects are aspects of one kingdom. It’s not two different kingdoms, but one kingdom of God. And yet that one kingdom of God manifests itself quite differently in the present versus the future.
All right, now we’re ready to move on to chapter five. Voss deals with several misconceptions in Chapter 5, but they fall into two main classes, and the roughly half of the chapter deals with one class of misconceptions, and then the other half of the chapter with the other kind of misconception. We have misconceptions about the kingdom which overemphasize the future phase of the kingdom. And we have misconceptions that overemphasize the present phase of the kingdom. So the organization of chapter five is quite simple.
He takes it in good eschatological fashion. He begins with the future. He begins with those misconceptions that relate to overemphasizing the future of the kingdom And then the second half of the chapter deals with misconceptions that overemphasize the present. All right, so beginning then with those features or those views that overemphasize the future.
On page 41, you find this statement. Some writers, he’s speaking about some writers, especially of the class who insist that Jesus had no other than the eschatological conception of the kingdom. What does he mean by that? You know that eschatological means pertaining to the end. In this context, we could also say pertaining to the future.
He’s talking then about some writers who insist that the only view that Jesus had of the kingdom was one that was future-oriented or eschatological. Now, one of the things that Voss does not do in this book is to mention the names of the people whom he’s writing against.
So you have to make some inferences here, but it’s virtually certain that the principal writer that he’s referring to in this case is Albert Schweitzer. It might be a little helpful to you if you have a little background on Schweitzer’s view of Jesus and Jesus’ teaching of the kingdom. He presents this view in his famous book, The Quest of the Historical Jesus, What Schweitzer does in that book is that he reviews the work of theologians over the previous century. The book appeared around 1905, 1903 in German, and I believe it was first translated into English about 1910. So Voss is writing just about the time when Schweitzer’s book is on the shelves in theological bookstores. And it’s not that Schweitzer is the only one espousing these views, but he became perhaps the most famous, and certainly this book, The Quest of the Historical Jesus, was very famous.
Well, back to what was he doing. He was reviewing the efforts of about 100 years of theologians attempting to get behind the text of the scripture, because they had become skeptical of the authority of the scripture. Theologians attempted to get behind the text of the scripture to the, quote, real Jesus, unquote. If we can’t trust the descriptions and accounts of Jesus in the Gospels, then what was the real Jesus like? And of course we end up then with people spending enormous amounts of effort trying to sift through the gospel accounts and trying to reject what they regard to be inauthentic and retain what they regard to be the authentic message that has somehow survived all the myths that were laid on top of it, presumably, by the evangelists.
So Schweitzer is writing in that theological world, in a world of theological skepticism, in which the gospels are not taken at face value, or certainly not taken as the word of God, but the attempt is made to separate between what Jesus himself did and said, and what the gospel authors said that he did and said, but really were in some sense mythological. And what happens throughout the 19th century as this process is going on is that people reinvent Jesus in their own image.
And one of the wonderful things about Schweitzer’s book, it does have a positive value in a negative way. One of the wonderful things about Schweitzer’s book is he points out with devastating accuracy that all of these writers were simply reading back into Jesus their own 19th century liberal ideas. their own 19th century concepts of what righteousness and goodness and so forth was. They thought, well, if I know already what righteousness and goodness are, and I believe that Jesus, for my religious reasons, I believe that Jesus must have been the most righteous and best person that ever lived, then clearly Jesus must have been the best exponent of my views of goodness and righteousness that ever lived. And Schweitzer pointed out that that’s all they were doing. They had no sense that Jesus might have a different agenda than they did. And so they created or invented their own mythology and they called it the historical Jesus.
So Schweitzer devastatingly critiques all of those views. But then when you get to the end of the book, he finally puts forward his own view in which he says that Jesus taught that the kingdom was entirely future. In fact, Schweitzer thought that Jesus expected the end of the world to come in his own lifetime. And therefore, of course, Jesus was mistaken. So after debunking all of the other attempts that had been made prior to his time to reconstruct the historical Jesus, Schweitzer falls into his own pit. He falls into it on a slightly different side, but he falls into the pit nevertheless.
He says, Jesus expected that the end of the world would come in his own lifetime. and that the coming of the kingdom would coincide with the judgment and the end of the world. And so from the point of view of Jesus’ present ministry, the kingdom is future, according to Schweitzer. Late in his ministry, Schweitzer makes this further, misconception of Jesus’ ministry. He says Jesus started out thinking that that kingdom would come merely by the Israel hearing his message and repenting and becoming more righteous.
But he became disillusioned by this and that towards the end of his ministry he believed that he would have to die, he would have to offer his life in sacrifice in order to usher in that kingdom, that his own death would become the crisis that would bring about the end of the world and the final judgment and the coming of the kingdom. All of this sounds rather fantastic, doesn’t it? In effect, what Schweitzer says is that Jesus was a religious madman, a religious fanatic, who believed in something that failed, believed in something that never came to pass.
And it is a matter of amazement to me how Schweitzer could be regarded then as some kind of hero of the faith in the 20th century. a man who portrays his own Lord, his Savior and Lord Jesus, as a mistaken, deluded, religious, fanatic, a man who was essentially insane.
This is the view that Voss is very gently, in a way, very gently, and in a very civilized way, criticizing. He’s showing an enormous amount of restraint in the way that he criticizes Schweitzer’s view. There’s one aspect of Schweitzer’s view that Ross focuses on, and that is, well, two aspects.
The aspect that the Schweitzer thought that Jesus was thinking only of a future kingdom, but also Ross picks up on the fact that Schweitzer’s view involves a particular nature of the kingdom as well. It’s not merely that the kingdom that was coming was future, but that the coming kingdom had a particular nature. To be specific, Voss brings you around to the point that according to these writers, of whom Schweitzer was the chief, Jesus’ view of the kingdom was exactly the same as what the contemporary Jews expected. That is, the Jews of the first century. And Voss brings out three characteristics of this viewpoint that the contemporary Jews had. Oh, boy.
Not only is it not readable, it’s indelible. because all the things you’ve been saying, I can think of passages that entirely contradict in the Bible what he’s saying. So, was he really right? He was a victim of the same disease as those whom he was criticizing. He did not believe that the Gospels as we had them were authentic, and so he felt free to reject anything that didn’t fit his hypothesis.
This is the problem with this whole process. own procedure is that you can make any image of Christ that you want simply by saying, well, these texts that don’t agree with my image are not authentic. They were added later by the church tradition. And the real Jesus is contained in these statements that I’ve identified, and I put together this portrait that I make up. Well, let me see if I can do this without writing it on the board. Sorry, we’re having technical difficulties today.
The aspects, or the way he, what Voss criticizes then is not only the view that Jesus taught that the kingdom was purely future, because of course we’ve seen many passages in which Jesus teaches that the kingdom is already present, But he also criticizes the view that the nature of the kingdom was what the first century Jews expected it to be. And there are three characteristics of this, which I was going to put on the board, but I think you can keep them in mind if I just say them verbally.
The Jews thought that the kingdom of God was a political thing, a national thing, and a sensual thing. So keep those three adjectives in mind, political, national, and sensual. They’re all there in the chapter that we’re reading, chapter five. All right, first, political. What the Jews were expecting was that when the Messiah came, then the Jewish nation would become the political rulers of the world. The Messiah himself, of course, would be at the pinnacle of that. But the idea is therefore inherently political. The Messiah is going to be like Caesar.
He’s going to be the emperor over the known world. In this context, Ross uses the word kiliastic. And I think I will have to erase this. I’m going to get a little water. That did it. All right. Achilleism is one of these scholarly words. It’s simpler than it may sound. It’s just a foreign looking word. It comes from the word kilia in Greek, which simply means a thousand.
Kiliasm is very close to what we would call today premillennialism. The idea that there would be a thousand-year reign of Christ on the earth before the end of the world, before the final judgment and the final resurrection. Now when we think about premillennialism as one of the views of eschatology, often we focus on the timing of it. That’s why we have a pre and we have other people who are postmillennials and amillennials.
But an interesting other way of looking at this is to think about the nature of the kingdom that is being portrayed. When you say that what we’re hoping for is a future 1,000 year reign of Christ on earth, then what we’re saying is we have, if we take that view, we have an inherently political view of the kingdom, that Christ is gonna rule like an emperor on earth, like a Caesar, like the head of the United Nations, or whatever you wanna call it, that there’s gonna be a political rule of Christ on earth.
This is what Schweitzer thinks that Jesus was expecting. The second aspect of this is the nationalistic part that it’s not merely political. It’s not merely that Jesus would be a political ruler, but that the Jews, the nation of the Jews would be right up there with him. Okay.
So, This expectation of first century Jews is that the end of the world is going to mean that we, our nation, will be the rulers of the world along with the Messiah. And then finally, the sensual side of this, by using the word sensual, Voss is not suggesting that there’s anything immoral about this view. But what he means is that this view focuses on things that can be sensed, material things, such as prosperity, rule, authority in this world, and so on. All right, so in contrast to this, what Voss does is he points out several passages in the New Testament which contradict each of these features of the kingdom that supposedly Jesus expected and which historically it can be shown the Jews of the first century did expect.
As to whether the kingdom is political or national, all you need to do is turn to Mark chapter 12. We’re running a little short on time here, so I won’t have those verses read in their entirety. But in Mark chapter 12, verses 13 through 17, Jesus has the controversy about whether you should pay the tax to Caesar. And he ends that by saying, render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and unto God the things that are God’s. In other words, the kingdom of God is so utterly different from the kingdom of Caesar that you can simultaneously render unto Caesar the things that are his and render unto God the things that are God’s.
And perhaps even more pointedly, in John 18, 36, where Jesus is being interrogated by Pontius Pilate, he says, my kingdom is not of this world. Again, the reason that Jesus doesn’t fight Pilate He goes on to say, if my kingdom was of this world, then we would have a battle. I would be fighting you with all of my forces, but my kingdom is not of this world. The reason that Jesus does not fight is because the nature of his kingdom is different from the nature of Caesar’s kingdom. Voss points out that the Jesus view of the kingdom is not nationalistic either.
It does not focus merely on the Jews. Jesus in various places prophesized that Israel will reject him and that the Gentiles will be brought in. The kingdom will be taken away from the Jews and given to a nation that is more worthy of it. And we understand through the later teaching of the New Testament that it is not a nation in the ordinary sense.
What is meant is that the kingdom of God will be given to the Gentiles in general. The kingdom of God will not be a nation like the other nations of the world, but will be like the leaven in the parable of the leaven, that leavens the whole lump, that we are not a separate lump or a piece of the lump. The kingdom of God, the church, leavens the whole lump, leavens the whole world, and is not of that nationalistic nature. And finally, the kingdom of God is not something that focuses on material things.
Voss points to Mark 12, 25, where Jesus is arguing with the Sadducees about the nature of the resurrection. And he says that in the resurrection, they shall neither marry nor be given in marriage, but will be like the angels in heaven. There’s something different about the future kingdom that will not involve things that are perfectly right and proper in this world. You see, by sensual, Boss is not talking about something that is immoral.
He’s simply saying there’s a lower level of this world that is concerned primarily with temporal and material things, but the kingdom of God is concerned with higher things. Now he also, warns us that there is a danger here of going too far, of what we could call over-spiritualizing the future kingdom. He points out that heaven and hell are physical realities.
And further, that the resurrection of the body, which is part of our hope for the future, the resurrection of the body means that there is a physical aspect to the future kingdom. but that the physical aspect of the future kingdom will not look like what we are experiencing now.
It will be raised to a higher plane. It will be something different. But it will not be something disembodied, which would be to fall into the ancient Greek error that the body was the prison house of the soul, and that the most wonderful thing to look forward to would be to get rid of this body, get rid of the physical aspect of our nature, which is not the case in biblical revelation. We’re looking forward to the resurrection of our bodies, the transformation of our bodies into what Paul calls a spiritual body.
Seemingly a contradiction in terms, but to convey to us that there’s something physical about the future world but that it is at a higher plane and a different form than what we experience now. All right, well to sum up here and then move on quickly to the last half of chapter five. What we are seeing in Schweitzer’s view that Voss criticizes is strikingly similar in a different way, in a different form to what we see in much of evangelical eschatology today.
Most evangelicals have adopted some form of dispensationalism. And dispensationalism looks forward to exactly this kind of earthly rule of Christ, a thousand year reign of Christ on earth, ruling over the whole world from Jerusalem as a political ruler with the nation of the Jews in charge. Strikingly similar to what the Jews expected in the first century. It’s what the dispensationalists say is the nature of the coming kingdom. The only difference is that the dispensationalists believe the scriptures are authoritative, and they believe they can derive these things from the Bible itself, whereas Schweitzer did not accept the authority of the scriptures.
All right, in the second half of the chapter, Voss deals with what he believes is the greater need of his hour, which is to guard against overemphasis on the present phase of the kingdom. In 1905, that was exactly correct. The prevailing liberal theology of 1905 had no use for a future kingdom. They were all about the here and now. Today, I would suggest that we have to deal with both misconceptions about equally.
On the right, as it were, we have the dispensationalists overemphasizing the future kingdom and misinterpreting it in this political, national, and sensual way. And on the left, we have the liberals denying that there’s any supernatural aspect to the kingdom, and therefore thinking of it as something that is purely imminent in this world, something that belongs to this world and simply is a matter of human righteousness. Now Vassa’s discussion in the second half of chapter five is aimed at this second view, the liberalism of the latter part of the 19th century. Now today we tend to give the label liberal in theology to every variety of false teaching that denies the authority of the scriptures. And that is a convenient label, but keep in mind that is all that it is. It’s simply a label, and like any other label, it can be misused and it can be insulting to the person to whom you apply it. So just a brief caution here on how we use labels.
For our purposes, it’s important to recognize that when Voss was writing, he was talking about a specific type of liberalism. And in church history, the word liberal is used to refer to this specific type of teaching that came out of the second half of the 19th century. To be very brief here, this kind of liberalism conceived of Christianity as a system of ethics One way I’ve heard this described by Larry Wilson, the pastor that you may know, has been in our presbytery a long time and has recently taken a call out to Canada.
But Larry says that when he was growing up in the Methodist church, the message he heard was, it’s good to be good, and it’s bad to be bad. More eloquently and elaborately stated, but when you boil it down, What he was being taught was purely ethics. Do the right thing, don’t do the wrong thing.
That’s the nature of the gospel, isn’t it? No. But that’s what the 19th century liberal theologians eventually came to. That the whole point of the gospel was simply ethics. And the kingdom of God, as far as they conceived it, was simply the progress of society. especially of modern Western culture.
A large part of what we regard as cultural imperialism today comes from that viewpoint. What we have to offer the third world, according to this kind of theology, is not the gospel of the saving grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the forgiveness of sins and everlasting life. What we have to offer these third world countries is our culture, our advanced civilization that has progressed farther than theirs. And you see how arrogant this is in approaching the other nations of the world that way. This theology was wedded to the idea of progress.
And just another little footnote here, it might be helpful for you to think about this. The origin of Darwinism, it comes about in the same time period, in the same intellectual atmosphere. When Darwin wrote The Origin of Species, published in 1859, it may have been that, and scholars have taught about this, that the theory was acceptable to people, more acceptable than it might have been a century earlier, because it seemed to fit the idea of progress. Biological evolution appeared to be the idea of progress working itself out in the natural world. This would come as a great support to these theologians who are saying the whole idea of the kingdom of God is progress, and you see it’s based on the way God created the world. You see the natural world has had a progress, and so our idea of the kingdom is connected to the best of modern science, they might say. So that’s merely to say how powerful the idea of progress was in the latter part of the 19th century.
Now Voss critiques this by pointing out that it rests on a spirit of anti-supernaturalism. People who deny that there is any such thing as the supernatural gravitate towards this kind of view. If there’s no such thing as the supernatural, then there’s no such thing as a miracle, and there’s no such thing as a coming judgment, and there’s no such thing as a resurrection, and there’s no such thing as a resurrection of Jesus, and there’s no such thing as a resurrection of the people of God at the end of the ages, when you’ve given up all of those things and deny them vehemently, what are you left with? If you’re left with any religion at all, it has to be a religion of humanity, a religion that is purely ethical, purely based on natural forces and the ethical abilities of human beings. And when you take that view and theologians that took that view would have to deny the future orientation of the kingdom that Jesus taught.
And as I said earlier, they’re using the same kind of sieve that Schweitzer used. I’m going to sieve out of the scriptures what I think I can accept. I’m going to deny everything else as inauthentic. And after I’ve used that horrible sieve to sieve out the gospel, what am I left with? I’m left with a kingdom of gradual progress of human ethics, of human capacities. and ability to improve ourselves.
Well, to draw the lesson to a close, Voss points out that this is the result of that first wrong step, that fundamental and major error of denying the supernatural, which is in effect to deny that God exists. People still talk about God who would deny the supernatural, but what they are doing is essentially denying who God is and denying that God exists.
But the scriptures are a book that is full of the supernatural, from Genesis to Revelation. And if we are to believe the scriptures, then we have to recognize that the nature of the kingdom in itself is supernatural. Now Voss makes a very important point here that’s helpful to us at the end of the chapter. It is not the case that the present kingdom is a matter of natural abilities and human ethical progress, and that only the future aspect of the kingdom is supernatural. Rather, he says, both the present and the future of the kingdom are both supernatural, The only difference is the way that God is working in the present and in the future.
In the present, God is working invisibly in the regeneration of human souls. That is supernatural. Do not forget that as the gospel is preached and as we hope to make an impact through evangelism and missions. That is not a human activity. It is not simply that we’re persuading people with human arguments to embrace the gospel. They will not embrace it. They cannot embrace it unless God does something supernatural in their hearts, regenerates them, brings them from death to life.
This present kingdom, as invisible and as gradual as it is, is just as supernatural as the last judgment and the resurrection of the body. It is operating in a different way, in a different sphere, or to put it more exactly, God himself is acting differently and in a different sphere presently, but it is still God who is acting.
All right, then what are we to make of the kingdom and the view of the kingdom as both present and future? The kingdom is a kingdom that involves much more than what these misconceptions would allow to it. Because it has these many aspects to it. It has these many facets to it. It’s not merely future. It’s not merely present. It’s not merely inward. It’s not merely outward.
And the kingdom of God embraces all of these things in its different aspects. And some of those things will be taken up in the next few weeks in the chapters involving the kingdom of God as the sphere of saving power, the kingdom of God as the sphere of righteousness, and so on. Those are the many facets or some of the many facets of the kingdom that the scriptures and Jesus reveal to us. All right, that’s all we have time for today, so you’re dismissed.
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