The Gospel - your invitation to the Kingdom of God

492 invitation to the kingdom of god

Everyone has an idea of ​​right and wrong, and everyone has done wrong even by their own imagination. "To err is human," says a well-known proverb. Everyone has disappointed a friend, broken a promise, hurt someone's feelings at some point. Everyone knows feelings of guilt.

So people don't want to have anything to do with God. They don't want a judgment day because they know they can't stand before God with a clear conscience. They know they should obey him, but they also know they didn't. They are ashamed and feel guilty. How can their debt be redeemed? How to purify consciousness? "Forgiveness is divine," concludes the keyword. It is God Himself who forgives.

Many people know this saying, but they do not believe that God is divine enough to forgive their sins. You still feel guilty. They still fear the appearance of God and the day of judgment.

But God has appeared before - in the person of Jesus Christ. He came not to condemn, but to save. He brought a message of forgiveness and he died on a cross to guarantee that we can be forgiven.

The message of Jesus, the message of the Cross, is good news for those who feel guilty. Jesus, God and man in one, has taken our punishment. All people who are humble enough to believe the gospel of Jesus Christ will be forgiven. We need this good news. Christ's gospel brings peace of mind, happiness and a personal victory.

The real gospel, the good news, is the gospel that Christ preached. The apostles also preached the same gospel: Jesus Christ crucified (1. Corinthians 2,2), Jesus Christ in Christians, the hope of glory (Colossians 1,27), the resurrection from the dead, the message of hope and redemption for humanity. This is the gospel of the kingdom of God that Jesus preached.

The good news for all people

“After John was taken prisoner, Jesus came to Galilee and preached the gospel of God, saying, The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand. Repent and believe in the gospel” (Mark 1,14”15). This gospel that Jesus brought is the "good news" - a "powerful" message that changes and transforms lives. The gospel not only convicts and converts, but will in the end upset all who oppose it. The gospel is “the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes” (Romans 1,16). The gospel is God's invitation to us to live on a whole different level. The good news is that we have an inheritance that will be fully ours when Christ returns. It is also an invitation to an invigorating spiritual reality that can be ours now. Paul calls the gospel "Gospel" gelium of Christ" (1. Corinthians 9,12).

"Gospel of God" (Romans 1 Cor5,16) and “gospel of peace” (Ephesians 6,15). Starting with Jesus, he begins to redefine the Jewish view of the kingdom of God, focusing on the universal meaning of Christ's first coming. Paul teaches that the Jesus who wandered the dusty roads of Judea and Galilee is now the risen Christ, who sits at the right hand of God and is “the head of all powers and authorities” (Colossians 2,10). According to Paul, the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ come "first" in the gospel; they are the key events in God's plan (1. Corinthians 15,1-11). The gospel is the good news for the poor and oppressed. History has a purpose. In the end, law will triumph, not power.

The pierced hand has triumphed over the armored fist. The kingdom of evil gives way to the kingdom of Jesus Christ, an order of things that Christians are already experiencing in part.

Paul underscored this aspect of the gospel to the Colossians: “Give thanks with gladness to the Father, who qualified you for the inheritance of the saints in the light. He delivered us from the power of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of his beloved Son, where we have redemption, which is the forgiveness of sins" (Colossians 1,12 and 14).

For all Christians, the gospel is and was present reality and future hope. The risen Christ, the Lord is over time, space and everything that happens down here is the champion for the Christians. He who has been lifted up to heaven is the omnipresent source of power (Eph3,20-21).

The good news is that Jesus Christ overcame every obstacle in His mortal life. The way of the cross is a hard but victorious way into the kingdom of God. That is why Paul can summarize the gospel in a nutshell, "For I thought fit to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ alone, and Him crucified" (1. Corinthians 2,2).

The big reversal

When Jesus appeared in Galilee and preached the gospel with earnestness, he expected an answer. He also expects an answer from us today. But Jesus' invitation to enter the kingdom was not held in a vacuum. Jesus' call for the kingdom of God was accompanied by impressive signs and wonders that made a country suffering under Roman rule sit up and take notice. That's one reason why Jesus needed to clarify what he meant by the kingdom of God. The Jews of Jesus' day were waiting for a leader who would bring their nation back to the glory of the days of David and Solomon. But Jesus' message was "doubly revolutionary," writes Oxford scholar NT Wright. First, he took the common expectation that a Jewish superstate would throw off the Roman yoke and turned it into something entirely different. He turned the popular hope for political liberation into a message of spiritual salvation: the gospel!

"The kingdom of God is at hand, he seemed to say, but it is not as you imagined." Jesus shocked people with the consequences of his good news. “But many who are first will be last, and the last will be first” (Matthew 19,30).

"There will be weeping and gnashing of teeth," he said to his fellow Jews, "when you see Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and all the prophets in the kingdom of God, but you are cast out" (Luke 13,28).

The great supper was for everyone (Luke 14,16-24). The Gentiles were also invited into the kingdom of God. And a second was no less revolutionary.

This Nazareth prophet seemed to have plenty of time for the lawless - from the lepers and cripples to greedy tax collectors - and sometimes even the hated Roman oppressors. The good news that Jesus brought contradicted all expectations, even those of his faithful disciples (Luke 9,51-56). Again and again Jesus said that the kingdom that awaited them in the future was already dynamically present in action. After a particularly dramatic episode he said: "But if I cast out evil spirits by the fingers of God, then the kingdom of God has come upon you" (Luke 11,20). In other words, the people who saw the ministry of Jesus saw the present of the future. In at least three ways, Jesus turned current expectations upside down:

  • Jesus taught the good news that the kingdom of God is a gift—the rule of God that already brought healing. So Jesus instituted the “year of favor of the Lord” (Luke 4,19; Isaiah 61,1-2). But "admitted" to the empire were the weary and burdened, the poor and beggars, delinquent children and penitent tax collectors, penitent whores and social misfits. For black sheep and spiritually lost sheep, he declared himself their shepherd.
  • The good news of Jesus was also there for those who were willing to turn to God through sincere repentance. These sincerely repentant sinners would find in God a generous Father, scanning the horizon for his wandering sons and daughters and seeing them when they are "far away" (Luke 1 Cor5,20). The good news of the gospel meant that anyone who says from the heart, "God be merciful to me a sinner" (Luke 1 Cor8,13) and sincerely means it, would find compassionate hearing with God. Always. “Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you” (Luke 11,9). For those who believed and turned from the ways of the world, this was the best news they could hear.
  • The gospel of Jesus also meant that nothing could stop the victory of the kingdom that Jesus had brought, even if it looked the opposite. This empire would face bitter, merciless resistance, but ultimately it would triumph in supernatural power and glory.

Christ said to his disciples: “When the Son of man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit on his glorious throne, and all the nations will be gathered before him. And he will separate them one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats” (Matthew 25,31-32).

Thus the good news of Jesus possessed a dynamic tension between the "already" and the "not yet". The gospel of the kingdom referred to the reign of God that was now in place—“the blind see, and the lame walk, lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have the gospel preached” (Matthew 11,5).

But the kingdom was "not yet" in the sense that its full fulfillment was yet to come. To understand the Gospel means to grasp this twofold aspect: on the one hand the promised presence of the King who already lives among his people and on the other hand his dramatic second coming.

The good news of your salvation

The missionary Paul helped start the second great movement of the gospel—its spread from tiny Judea to the highly cultured Greco-Roman world of the mid-first century. Paul, the converted persecutor of Christians, channels the blinding light of the gospel through the prism of everyday life. While praising the glorified Christ, he is also concerned with the practical implications of the gospel. Despite fanatical opposition, Paul conveyed to other Christians the breathtaking significance of Jesus' life, death and resurrection: "Even you, who were once strangers and enemies in evil works, he has now reconciled through the death of his mortal body, so that he present yourselves holy and blameless and spotless before his face; if only you persevere in the faith, established and steadfast, and not turning away from the hope of the gospel which you have heard and which is preached to every creature under heaven. I, Paul, became his servant” (Colossians 1,21and 23). Reconciled. Flawless. Grace. Salvation. Forgiveness. And not just in the future, but here and now. That is the gospel of Paul.

The resurrection, the climax to which the Synoptics and John led their readers (John 20,31), sets the inner power of the gospel free for the Christian's daily life. The resurrection of Christ confirms the gospel.

Therefore, Paul teaches, those events in distant Judea give hope to all men: “I am not ashamed of the gospel; for it is the power of God that saves everyone who believes in it, the Jews first and also the Greeks. For in it is revealed the righteousness of God, which is from faith to faith. (Romans 1,16-17).

A call to live the future here and now

The apostle John adds another dimension to the gospel. It depicts Jesus as the "disciple whom he loved" (John 19,26), remembered him, a man with a shepherd's heart, a church leader with a deep love for people with their worries and fears.

“Jesus did many other signs before his disciples that are not written in this book. But these are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name” (John 20,30:31).

The essence of John's presentation of the gospel is the remarkable statement: "that by faith you may have life". John beautifully conveys another aspect of the gospel: Jesus Christ in moments of greatest personal closeness. John gives a vivid account of the personal, ministering presence of the Messiah.

In John's Gospel we encounter a Christ who was a powerful public preacher (John 7,37-46). We see Jesus warm and hospitable. From his inviting invitation, "Come and see!" (John 1,39) up to the challenge to the doubting Thomas to put his finger in the wounds on his hands (John 20,27), the person who became flesh and lived among us is portrayed in an unforgettable way (John 1,14).

People felt so welcome and comfortable with Jesus that they had a lively exchange with him (John 6,58th). They lay next to him while they ate and ate from the same plate3,23-26). They loved him so dearly that as soon as they saw him they swam to the shore to eat fish together that he had fried himself1,7-14).

The Gospel of John reminds us how much the gospel revolves around Jesus Christ, his example and the eternal life we ​​receive through him (John 10,10).

It reminds us that it is not enough to preach the gospel. We have to live it too. The apostle Johan nes encourages us: others could be won over by our example to share with us the good news of the kingdom of God. This happened to the Samaritan woman who met Jesus Christ at the well (John 4,27-30), and Mary of Magdala (John 20,10: 18).

The one who wept at the tomb of Lazarus, the humble servant who washed his disciples' feet, lives today. He gives us his presence through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit:

“Whoever loves me will keep my word; and my father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him... Do not be troubled or afraid" (John 14,23 and 27).

Jesus is actively leading His people today through the Holy Spirit. His invitation is as personal and encouraging as ever: "Come and see!" (John 1,39).

by Neil Earle


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