For the last several weeks we have been looking at the topic of eschatology – the study of last things. This has required us to delve into the meaning of the Kingdom of God – the inbreaking of God’s sovereign rule into human history in the person of Jesus. We have seen that Jesus came to inaugurate, to begin the Kingdom or rule of God. He came to break the power of the Evil One, to bind him so as to plunder his property, to plunder the nations of the earth. In Christ the Kingdom of God has come.
Further, we saw that the work begun by Christ in His 1st coming will be completed in the consummation of all things following His 2nd Coming. The principalities & powers, sin & death, and the curse on the earth – all will be completely overcome.
Today we branch out and begin to look at the continuation of the Kingdom, that branch of eschatological discussion where there is more disagreement among professing Christians than perhaps any other portion of Christian theology. Between the inauguration of the Kingdom under Christ and its consummation at the Second Coming, what happens, what are we to expect?
We find ourselves in a strange time. Many Christians are extremely confused about the nature of the biblical hope for the future – both individually and globally. What is it, on the individual level, that will happen to believers at death? And, on a more global level, what is the ultimate future of the world in which we live? Many are lacking clear answers to these questions.
Because Christians are confused, the world is as well. Many think that Christianity teaches that our ultimate destiny as individuals is to die and go to heaven there to dwell on puffy clouds for eternity. At the end of history the world will be destroyed and we’ll all live on in some type of ethereal, angelic state for eternity. Far Side cartoons and other caricatures regularly capture this notion with men in togas carrying harps amid the clouds. But this vision is – at important points – seriously out of step with the biblical hope. And so we have a need to explore what the Word of God has to say in these areas.
When the NT talks about the rule or reign of Christ it does not say that we are waiting for Him to rule but that He rules now. He is seated at the right hand of God Almighty; He has taken His seat on the throne of His father David and rules as the King of Kings and Lord of Lords; He is the Son of God. As Peter says in explaining the significance of Pentecost, “God has made this Jesus to be both Lord and Christ.” Jesus is the King.
But Jesus’ Kingdom, we learned, doesn’t immediately transform the nations of the earth. It works like leaven; it operates like a farmer’s crop; it grows like a mustard seed. And so we spoke of the Kingdom coming in phases: the Kingdom is inaugurated or begun through the death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus; it continues to come throughout history as Jesus reigns from God’s right hand; and it shall be consummated when Jesus returns in glory and brings about the regeneration or resurrection of all things.
But today I want us to ask in more detail, “What does it mean that the Kingdom has been inaugurated, that Jesus has taken his seat at the right hand of God as King of Kings and Lord of Lords? What is the significance of this?” So this week we meditate a bit more on the inauguration of the Kingdom.
Last week I said that I was going to start a new series on eschatology – eschatology is our doctrine of last things. Last week we learned that the first thing we must understand as we consider our understanding of the future is that Jesus is already King – He is the Son of Man who has received power, dominion, and authority; He is the Son of God, the heir of David’s throne, seated at God’s right hand in power and authority. Today we discover the meaning of this in terms of the general contour of Kingdom history. Jesus came and was installed as King – His Kingdom was inaugurated. He continues to this day to reign as King – His Kingdom continues. And one day His Kingdom shall be consummated at the end of history – He shall come in judgment and the resurrection of all things shall take place. So where are we in the history of the Kingdom? We are under the reign of the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. He is spreading His Kingdom throughout the earth.
This morning, on the 1st Sunday of January in the year of our Lord 2010, I felt it would be fitting to preach a sermon that simultaneously looks back and looks forward. We will look back to the Gospel of Mark; back to Person of Christ; back to what Christ accomplished during His incarnation. But we will also look forward – forward to a new series of sermons on the future of the Gospel; forward to the future work of Christ; forward to the expectations we as the people of God should have for the world’s future.
This sermon, therefore, serves both as the conclusion of our series on the Person of Christ and as the inauguration of our series on the future of the Kingdom of God. What are we to think about the vexing “millennial issues”? What are we to think of premillennialism, amillennialism, postmillennialism? What are these things in the first place? Hopefully the sermon today will wrap up our short discussion of the Person of Christ and prepare us to think about the future.
Whenever we meet someone new there are a number of questions that we begin to ask to help us determine their identity, that help us to answer the question, “Who are you?” Some of these questions concern a person’s personal history. “Where are you from?” Who are your parents? What part of the country do you come from? The answers to these questions can frequently give us a better sense of who this person actually is, of the environment that shaped him and made him who he is. And these are the questions we have been asking of our Lord Jesus in the last four weeks – “Where are you from?”
But asking “Where are you from?” is not the only question we ask others when we are endeavoring to get to know them. We also ask them about their vocation, their calling, “What do you do?” For just as the place from which someone has come tells us a bit about him, a person’s calling tells us something as well. For the next two weeks I want to ask this question of our Lord Jesus. “What do you do? What is your calling?”
As we ask that question, we are immediately confronted with the title that Jesus uses most frequently to identify Himself, his favorite self-identifier. Jesus routinely calls Himself “the Son of Man.” Why is this and how does it help us to understand Jesus’ calling, His vocation?
For the last several weeks we have been asking the questions, “Who was this child that was born? Who is this One whose birth we celebrate at Christmas? Who is this One whom we worship? Who is this Jesus?”
Already we have seen that the answer of Scripture, reinforced at Nicea, is that Jesus was and is both God and man. In the creed we confess that Jesus was “begotten of His Father before all worlds” and that He was “begotten by the power of the Holy Ghost in the womb of the Virgin Mary.” This One was both God and man.
But this didn’t resolve all the issues and two basic strains of thought emerged among Christians which, when pressed to their extremes, ended in heresy. There were those who pressed the deity so far that they eradicated his humanity. There were others who pressed Jesus’ humanity so far that they separated His person. It was to combat both these errors that our fathers composed the Definition of Chalcedon. And it is to this that we look today to understand what the Word of God has to teach us about Jesus.
In the last two weeks, we have seen that Mark presents Jesus to us not as a mere man, nor as some magnificent creature, but as the very Creator Himself, the Lord of all. But the denial of Jesus’ deity was not the only, nor indeed the most prevalent, error perpetuated in the early church. For there were some willing to grant that God Himself had been present in Jesus – but they were unwilling to grant that Jesus had been fully human. In various ways they denied not the deity of Jesus but his humanity. The Christ was not really a man, had not really assumed human flesh.
What was it that prompted these men to deny the humanity of Christ? Was there lack of evidence that Jesus was human? You may know, for instance, that one of the tactics of atheists like Richard Dawkins is to deny that Jesus ever existed. Frank Zindler, for example, concluded in The American Atheist in 1998, “I now feel it is more reasonable to suppose [Jesus] never existed.” There is, he maintains, a lack of evidence for the existence of Jesus. Is this what was motivating the early denial of Jesus’ humanity as well? Today we’ll find out as we explore the significance of Jesus’ humanity.
Last week we saw that Mark presents to us Jesus not simply as a man, nor even as one greater than a man but less than god. Rather Mark highlights that Jesus was and is the Lord Himself, God manifest in human flesh come to rescue humanity. Jesus is God.
But even when we know this, not all questions are answered. We are still left with the question – what exactly does it mean that Jesus is God, that Jesus is divine? How are we to understand that assertion? In particular, how are we to relate Jesus’ divinity to the God revealed throughout the OT? In the history of the church various heretical, pseudo-Christian answers to these questions were given and it is these questions that we answer this morning. What does it mean that Jesus is divine? That in Him, as Paul tells us, all the fullness of the Godhead dwells in bodily form? That He is God with us?
