| Jesus and the End-Time The Kingdom and the End-Time The Winning of the Kingdom |
"Now is the judgment of this world, now shall the ruler of this world be cast out; and I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all men to myself." He said this to show by what death he was to die. John 12:31-33The winning of the Kingdom is not a future event. It belongs to the past. It has already taken place. By remembering this we will not divide the Christian message into two gospels, one having to do with the past (the events of Jesus' life, death, and resurrection) and the other with the future (the events of the close of the age). The Kingdom ties past and future into one Gospel-the winning of the Kingdom is in the past, and that victory gives meaning to the present and the future. Concern for the end-time must not separate us from the one Gospel. At the heart of it is an historical event. Paul summarized it for us: For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received, that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures, and then he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve.Of first importance in the Gospel are the death and resurrection of Christ. It is of first importance also to our understanding of the Kingdom and of the end-time, for the meaning of all end-time events derives from these past events. The decisive act by which the Kingdom is won is the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. The return of Christ at the close of the age is the consequence of that victory; he comes to claim the Kingdom he has already won. The terms "winning" and "victory" fill our heads with militaristic images-we inevitably think of the massing and movement of soldiers and the clash of arms. The terms are military, but obviously they are figurative; the act of Jesus in surrendering himself to the cross was the very opposite of a military action. So, in order to understand his victory, we must do what the first-century Jewish Christians had to do: disabuse ourselves of militaristic notions. Prior to their conversion, at least, these people had looked faithfully for a military Messiah who would reestablish the kingdom of David by conquering the enemies of their land. There is nothing shocking or strange about their expectation, since nearly all relations between nations at that time (and it is not so different now) were based on conquest or the threat of it. They shared the attitudes of the history of their time. "For that history shows," wrote T.W. Manson, "that the Jews of Palestine were only too ready to welcome any promising champion of the cause of Israel and to take up arms in a holy war for the Kingdom of God."1 So the Jews expected one kind of Messiah and got another. This is reflected in the difference between the Testaments: the Old Testament is largely a history of wars and conquests, while the New Testament records but one war-and that is a spiritual war revealed to John in a vision and recorded in the book of Revelation. This difference must be taken very seriously. The concern of the New Testament is not with war as such, but with victory over a special type of enemy. This enemy does not yield to swords and spears, nor for that matter to nuclear bombs. The militaristic images and battle scenes depicted in Revelation were not predictions of earthly wars any more than Peter's vision of unclean beasts was concerned with diet. In the discussion of the conquest of Satan I will point to an interpretative clue in the book that shows this. For now, it is sufficient to say that John really saw in his vision all the battles and blood he wrote about; God really showed it to him, God also told him what it really meant, and some of those interpretive clues are still understandable in the twentieth century. To get this wrong-to miss this vital transition from the earthly victories of the Old Testament to an entirely different experience of victory in the New Testament-is to detract from the centrality of the cross. If victory still must be won on the battlefield, how complete was the victory of the cross? The answer is that we are beyond battlefield victories. The victory of the cross is complete. Word-pictures of wars and battles are helpful as long as we remember that they are given us in Scripture to help us understand the real struggle, which is spiritual, and the real victory, which is the very opposite of military. The first disciples, as Jews reared in the militaristic messianic tradition, had great difficulty in making this transition. Whenever Jesus prophesied his death, they did not know what he was talking about. Finally-shortly before his crucifixion, perhaps even the day before-Jesus became explicit about the meaning of his death. Contrary to all ordinary ways of thinking, his suffering and death meant victory. "Now is the judgment of this world, now shall the ruler of this world be cast out; and I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all men to myself." Here, from the lips of Jesus himself, is his own declaration of the winning of the Kingdom. The key word in it is now. He did not push the events of which he spoke into an indefinite future; they were part of his present, part of our past. In the winning of the Kingdom Jesus did three things, each of which happened through his death, as he explained in verse 33: "He said this to show what death he would die." First, the world is judged. This judgment is not imposed upon the world by force from outside; the judgment of the world is exposed from within, in the person of Jesus as he hangs on the cross. His presence there bears witness to the wickedness of a world that crucifies the love of God as it was made flesh in his own Son. In the words of Isaac Watts: When I survey the wondrous crossAt the cross all mankind is judged. It is the place of every man's decision. He must there identify himself either with the crucified or with the crucifiers. There is no neutral ground at the cross. In the crucifixion of Christ mankind is judged not by an eternal decree but by his own action. So the gospel hymns are biblically right in making the cross of Christ the place of judgment and decision. "I am coming to the cross, I am poor, and weak, and blind…" "At the cross, at the cross, where I first saw the light." Before the Kingdom could be won, the world needed to be exposed for what it was; its enmity with the Kingdom needed to be identified. The end of earthly life for Jesus then became the possibility of new life in the Kingdom for all men. But the question may be legitimately raised that if the Kingdom is already God's and always has bee, as earlier claimed, why must it be won at all? To go into great detail would get us into another subject entirely, but a brief answer is this: man in his freedom departed from God, losing thereby his freedom and his fellowship with God. "Men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil" (John 3:19). God respects man as a free person and does not require us to return to him against our will. The world is not a machine that needs repair, it is a society of persons who need to be redeemed and won. In winning the Kingdom, God gave back to us the freedom to choose him and to enter the Kingdom. So, in brief, God needed (if we can ever say that God needs to do anything) to win the Kingdom out of the respect he had for his own creation. The second thing that happened when Jesus won the Kingdom was that the ruler of the world was cast out. The ruler of the world is he who got control of the world by default when "men loved darkness rather than light." He has been called various names-the Devil and Satan are two-and there will be more to say about him in chapter 5. But with the Kingdom we focus on now. "Now is the ruler of the world cast out." The Kingdom has been won because Satan met his match at the cross and was defeated. In relation to the end-time this means that God is in control now; he does not have to do something more later on. The world is not contested territory. SO we look backward to the cross of Christ for victory, not forward to a battle of Armageddon. Satan is still active; we know that from personal experience as well as from Scripture. For we are not contending against flesh and blood but against the principalities, against the powers, against the world rulers of this present darkness, against the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places (Ephesians 5:12).As long as history continues, Satan will continue to work. But he can no longer claim dominion. That belongs to Christ. Satan is still, along with his demonic host, a "world ruler of this present darkness" only because there are people in the world who love darkness rather than light and let him get away with it. But he is already defeated, and the Kingdom is not his. The third thing that happened when Christ won the Kingdom was that he drew all men to himself. He draws us today to the cross: "And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all men to myself." This statement, in the context of the Gospel of John, does not imply the salvation of all men, but the opportunity of all men to be saved. We are drawn to the cross as the place of judgment and decision. We must get used to the way God does things. The cross on which Jesus died was not an attractive throne. The Gospel of the Kingdom is not an account of how God's Messiah came riding on a white horse to sound of trumpets to conquer the world by force. Rather, it is the story of how he came to suffer and die in our midst and there, on a cross of wood, transfixed with nails of iron, he hung to draw all men to himself. Thus the Kingdom was won, not by force, but by absolute and unquitting love. So anything Jesus claims, whether in earth or heaven, he claims as the crucified. In the book of Revelation he is shown to us as "a Lamb standing, as though it had been slain" (revelation 5:6). Even when he appears at the triumphant conclusion of the book, his robe is dipped in blood (19:13), and the feast he shares with his people is called the marriage supper of the Lamb (19:9). Why a lamb? Because in the Bible the lamb was sacrificed for others. The Gospel of the Kingdom, therefore, is a message of hope primarily because it is a message from history. Our hope is based not on what might be or will be but on what is. The winning of the Kingdom is the central fact of the Gospel: Jesus lifted on a cross drawing all men to himself. When he returns to earth, it will be on the basis of that victory. 1 T.W. Manson, The Servant Messiah, Cambridge University Press, 1961, p. 35. » Next Page — The Delay of the Kingdom » Table of Contents » Home |