It is basic to historic Christian teaching and confession that Jesus is reigning and ruling now. In the sixth article of the Apostles’ Creed all Christians confess, “He ascended into heaven, and sits at the right hand of God the Father Almighty.” . . . Continue reading →
The end of the semester is followed by the holidays so I just saw this post (HT: Aquila Report) discussing the declining fortunes of McDonalds restaurantsamong Millennials and comparing them to the church. The author notes “More people are wanting a customized, . . . Continue reading →
Difficult as it may be for those who live within “the Beltway” (as if there is only one city in the world with a beltway) to imagine, many Americans have never visited the American capitol. For many Americans the capitol is distant . . . Continue reading →
One further problem with this approach is that virtually any activity can become “kingdom work.” McKnight commends a Chicago, Ill. congregation that opened and operated a laundromat, “health facilities,” a gym, and a “pizza joint” for the wider community. He sees these . . . Continue reading →
Like Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834) before him, Rauschenbusch’s Pietism had not equipped him to address the challenges before him. Like Schleiermacher, Rauschenbusch turned to the liberals for answers. He synthesized his Pietist theology with Albrecht Ritschl’s theology of the Kingdom of God. The Social Gospel movement wanted to bring about the Kingdom of God on earth. Their optimistic eschatology (doctrine of last things) told them that they could do it. They were inspired by the Modern idea of the universal brotherhood of humanity and the universal fatherhood of God. As many others before them had done the Social Gospel movement harassed the Christian faith to their social agenda. Continue reading →
This imagery is a challenge to our late-modern assumptions. We might assume that, of course, God must be happy to have us, that the kingdom of God must be inclusive. Such an assumption, however pervasive it has become in the modern age, is foreign to Scripture. In Scriptural teaching we are by nature rebels, at odds with God and excluded from his kingdom. Apart from Christ our righteous substitute and our king, we have no status before God except as condemned before the king. Therefore we very much need the gates to the Kingdom of Heaven to be opened for us. Continue reading →
In our late-modern (liquid), nominalist, it is widely regarded that truth claims and official acts are nothing but the exercise of power for personal gain. In other words, we live in a time of great suspicion. Whereas the dominant question of the . . . Continue reading →
The Kingdom of God is primarily an eschatological concept. The fundamental idea of the Kingdom in Scripture is not that of a restored theocratic kingdom of God in Christ—which is essentially a kingdom of Israel—, as the Premillenarians claim; neither is it . . . Continue reading →
In response to a post comparing the Bible to the Qur’an Gloria asks: How does one explain the passage in Mathew….”Jesus did not come to bring peace but to bring the sword…” Seems that is a “jihad” That passage in Matthew has . . . Continue reading →
Right at its beginning the Gospel of Mark characterizes the gospel as a message of good news about the Kingdom of God (Mark 1:15). According to Scripture, Jesus’ gospel maybe summarized this way: “The time is fulfilled and the and the Kingdom . . . Continue reading →
48 Q. Since, then, you say that the additional name “Christ” or “Anointed” implies that He came with the command of the Father to establish a royal priesthood, explain first what the kingdom of Christ is. A. A kingdom is a kind . . . Continue reading →
Judging by what one sees in the media, Americans seem to be at war with one another. Political violence seems to be a rising problem. We are not yet witnessing the sorts of bombings and mass protests that marked the late 1960s . . . Continue reading →
Now sanitized for your listening safety, the Heidelcast is back with episode 149 in which we take questions from Lancaster, PA, Houston, TX, Cork, Ireland, and Belfast, UK. The Heidelcast is a global podcast. As always we had some good and challenging . . . Continue reading →
“Yahweh saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually…But Noah found favor in the eyes of Yahweh. Now the earth was corrupt in God’s sight, . . . Continue reading →
The first time I remember reading Psalm 2 it was in my hometown newspaper, now known as the Lincoln Journal Star. If memory serves, it appeared every week, probably in the Sunday edition, which, as every paper carrier knows, is the largest . . . Continue reading →
In our time, however, the tendency is to view the church as means of therapy, merely as a place of fellowship and encouragement, but not as the divinely instituted embassy in which the keys of the Kingdom of God are administered. Viewed . . . Continue reading →
In the Gospel of Mark, the first words we hear from Jesus are about the Kingdom of God: “Now after John was arrested, Jesus came into Galilee, proclaiming the gospel of God, and saying, ‘The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of . . . Continue reading →
The need is great, the mission is great but our God is greater and his grace is greater than all our sin and weakness. Pray for the harvest. Organize for the mission (to plant churches) and ask yourself where your congregation falls in the seeker — franchise — reforming continuum: is there a passion for the whole mission? Continue reading →
In this episode we answer a Heideltext and an email. The first is a question about how it is that the Baptists (from a Reformed perspective) confuse the divine decree with the external administration of the covenant of grace. The second is . . . Continue reading →