Good morning. It is a beautiful day we've got out here today. We're so fortunate to live in this place. Before we get started this morning, I'll say a prayer. But before that, I want us to take advantage of 1 John 1 9. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness. So if that's necessary in your spiritual life this morning, I'll give you a minute moment to do that. And then I'll open us up with prayer and we'll get started today. Father, we do thank you that we can come before the throne of grace and confess our sins and be restored to fellowship with you, because we know that in Christ, we have a relationship with you that can never end, but that we can break fellowship with you upon committing personal sins, but you are gracious and just to restore us from those things upon confession. We thank you so much for that truth. We thank you for what Jesus did for us on that cross 2,000 years ago. And we recognize the fact that we stand before you today positionally at least in terms of righteousness. We stand before you with his righteousness. We have none to commend ourselves to you, but in him we have everything that could possibly be granted us. And we thank you for all those blessings in the heavenly places that you give us in Jesus's name. Father, I do pray for your blessing on everyone that's here today. I pray that you bless them and keep them in the coming week and help us to meet life's challenges that this sinful world can throw at us. But nevertheless, in the midst of all those things, I pray that you help us to remember that we have an eternity in your presence that is amazing and wonderful and far surpasses anything that we can possibly imagine at this moment in our lives. So help us to be faithful to study and to use what we study to order our lives and to help other people come to faith if we come across those opportunities to preach the gospel to people. Help us remember that this is temporary and we are to be training for serving you in eternity at this time. So help us keep our eyes and our lives focused on that truth and maybe that will help us meet these problems we have from day to day a little bit easier. But I thank you for your presence with us here in this house today. I thank you that we're able to come here and stand here and teach the word of God in peace and safety, and we pray that it would ever be so in this nation. But at the same time, we recognize there are dangers in this world, and we pray that Jesus Christ would come back soon and take us to be with him forever. So once again, we thank you for your presence with us here in this house this morning. In Jesus' name, amen. Okay, don't let the word prolegomena scare you. It just means first things. So what I'm gonna do this morning is I'm going to do an introductory lesson on the kingdom. The kingdom is an extremely important doctrinal concept in Christianity. and very few people know what it means. So this morning's not gonna be so much scripture, it's gonna be introducing the kingdom and talking about what it is and what it is not, so you can recognize that. And then the next time I'm up here filling in, we'll do a more exegetical, scriptural examination of what the kingdom is. But as a concept, kingdom is really quite simple. Kings and their kingdoms have been the predominant method of governance since the beginning of history and they still exist today. Our Western representative forms of government are relatively recent innovations in terms of government among the nations of the world. But what makes the kingdom of God different is of course the divine identity of the king and the spiritual as well as the material and physical nature of the kingdom, God's kingdom program is unlike any kingdom that has ever existed. And certainly there have been kingdoms that have attempted to impose spiritual characteristics upon their kingdoms, but they've all been ruled by sinful, unrighteous human kings. For example, the Holy Roman Empire comes to mind, as well as Islamic nations today, and at this time, even the Hindu nation of India is moving in that direction. Nations that are trying to impose some sort of religious identity onto their people, and they enforce that through governmental might. But God who is holy, righteous, and just cannot do anything other than rule a perfectly righteous kingdom. So we haven't seen that in the history of the world and we won't see it until this kingdom comes about. In Hebrew, the word Memlechah means a kingdom, sovereignty, dominion, and reign. It refers to a kingdom or a nation with a king as the head of state. And in Greek, the word is Basileia, meaning a kingdom, dominion, or reign, and it refers to not only the king and his reign, but to the geographic boundaries of a particular piece of land and the population living there over which that king has authority. Now the church is not the kingdom, although many people think it is, and this concept was first developed by Augustine, or Augustine, in his book City of God, in which he claimed the church was God's kingdom on earth, just as an aside here, Augustine is considered to be one of the greatest theologians in the history of the church, and in my opinion, he is responsible for doing the single most amount of harm and damage to the church, to the Bible-based church at least, in history. No man can surpass him in the damage he has done. to Bible-based Christianity. If you ever like to find out what I mean by that, please get a hold of me and I'll be glad to talk to you about it. But that was the reasoning behind. the Holy Roman Empire that came into existence, Augustine's book, City of God, gave the Catholic Church the idea that they are the kingdom of God on earth. And that resulted in the absolute dictatorial Roman Catholic Church rule over kings and nations. And that rule included the use of violence, torture, murder, and the threat of hell to maintain absolute control over people's lives. Now the Reformation put an end to that to some extent, mostly, at least from the Catholic Church's point of view, but it did not end aberrant views of the kingdom. The reformers never departed from the Catholic Church's eschatology, which prevented the development of a biblically sound doctrine of the kingdom. Now during the Lord's ministry, the church was still an entity that would come into existence in the future. In Matthew 16, 18, he said, I will build my church. It was not in existence during Christ's earthly ministry. And of course that happened on Pentecost after the resurrection. That's the day the church began. And that means all the Old Testament revelation concerning the kingdom was in relation to Israel and not to the church. The church is the body and the bride of Christ and the connection it has with the kingdom is to rule and reign over it with Christ Jesus after it is established. Now kingdom is one of the predominant doctrinal themes revealed in the Bible. It's first identified in Genesis 1, 26 to 28, which is why I had that read this morning. The first chapter in the Bible, and it's the final consummation of it is described in Revelation 22, which is why I had that scripture read this morning. And that's the last chapter in the Bible. And then verse five there was specifically referring to an eternal reign. Now a synopsis of the kingdom is as follows. I just put this together real quick to give a little sort of a timeline. God the king created everything with the purpose of installing man as his agent to rule over his created world. Man failed by rebelling against God and forfeited that rule to an evil person we know as Satan. God, foreseeing that situation, already had a plan in place to redeem and restore both man and creation to their original purpose, that is to have a man rule over his creation in his stead. And once that plan is consummated, then the restoration will be complete. So the Bible is the story of kingdom creation, kingdom fall, kingdom promise through the seed of the woman, kingdom redemption through the God-man, and kingdom restored under the reign of that God-man. Now the theological systems that believe the purpose of God in history is restricted to the redemption of mankind are far too biblically short-sighted concerning God's plan for history. That's not nearly all-encompassing enough to reveal God's plan for kingdom life in the universe. But the kingdom is a much talked about subject in today's professing church. but just what is the church talking about when the kingdom is the subject? Is it the biblical kingdom or is it something else? Now everyone can agree based on the biblical text that there is an overarching kingdom that is ruled by God from eternity past and on into eternity future, which includes not only the entire created order, but it includes everything about God that is outside the created order, such as the third heaven where his throne room and temple are located. but that all-encompassing kingdom may be referred to as the universal kingdom of God. It includes time and creation, but it existed before them, and it is eternal apart from time and creation. You'll see verses like this throughout the Bible. Here's one example, 1 Chronicles 29, 11. Yours, O Lord, is the greatness and the power and the glory and the victory and the majesty, indeed everything that is in the heavens and the earth. Yours is the dominion, O Lord, and you exalt yourself as head over all. But the Bible highlights the differences then between the universal kingdom of God and the temporal, theocratic, or mediatorial kingdom of God. The universal kingdom of God is eternal and therefore always in existence. And that necessarily encompasses the entire created order. The theocratic kingdom or the mediatorial kingdom that was originally established with Adam, while created to exist forever, is now future because it was postponed due to the fall. It is over the earth, it has a human being as a king, and it was conditioned based on obedience. So it's an error to merge these two kingdom facets, that is the universal and the theocratic or mediatorial into one. I've gone back and forth where I want to call it theocratic or mediatorial. I think mediatorial is a better name because that's what God originally established for Adam to be the mediator. on earth between God and the created order. But the Bible does identify differences between them and context determines which is which. So as always, we have to be aware of context. Dr. McLean had five differences between them that he came up with. Certain passages present the kingdom as something which has always existed, the universal kingdom. Yet in other places, it seems to have a definite historical beginning among men, the mediatorial kingdom. The next one he came up with is the kingdom is set forth in scripture as universal in its scope, outside of which there is no created thing. Yet again, the kingdom is revealed as a local rule established on earth. So we have universal mediatorial. The kingdom sometimes appears as the rule of God directly with no intermediary standing between God and man, yet is also pictured as the rule of God through a mediator who serves as a channel between God and man, hence the moniker mediatorial kingdom. It's been noted that often the Bible describes the kingdom as something holy future, whereas in other texts the kingdom is said to be a present reality. And then finally the fifth one, he identifies that the kingdom of God is set forth as an unconditional rule arising out of the sovereign nature of deity himself. Yet on the other hand, it sometimes appears as a kingdom based on a covenant made by God with man. Now then there's another aspect of kingdom here that can kind of make fuzzy how we understand kingdom. There's a spiritual kingdom that consists of believers. Paul wrote that believers in this dispensation have been transformed, transferred rather out of darkness and into the kingdom of the sun in Colossians 1.13. For he rescued us from the domain of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of his beloved son. Now, Fruchtenbaum considers this kingdom to include all believers in all dispensations beginning with Adam and not just Christians in this age. And I think that's likely based on the fact that Jesus told Nicodemus that he had to be born again to enter the kingdom of God. But when Jesus told him that, the church did not exist yet at that time, did it? So he was going to be a believer, but it was going to be in a spiritual kingdom, at least until the day of Pentecost. In the present age from Acts 2 until the rapture, the spiritual kingdom and the church are synonymous. However, the spiritual kingdom was in existence before the church began and will continue to exist after the church is removed in the rapture. Now when people speak of building the kingdom today though, and this is why it's important for us to understand what the kingdom is, When you hear somebody today talking about, we need to be about building the kingdom, they might be talking about the universal kingdom, they might be talking about the spiritual kingdom, but almost inevitably, they're talking about the kingdom that Christ Jesus offered to the Jewish people at the first advent, which may be identified by several names. I've already mentioned theocratic and mediatorial, and then we now refer to it as a messianic or millennial kingdom. So I think in terms of these names, the kingdom as originally proposed is probably best identified as a theocratic or mediatorial kingdom. And as I mentioned, I'm settling on mediatorial being the best term. But since the fall, and since that kingdom was done away with and postponed, and the rejection of the kingdom offered by Christ and its subsequent postponement, the identifying titles messianic or millennial may be considered to be more accurate right now. Because that's what we're looking forward to now is the messianic kingdom that's coming. But then once that happens, that will then be the mediatorial kingdom with the God-man being the mediator between God the Father and the creation. But if Adam then had not rebelled and lost dominion over the created order, the titles theocratic or mediatorial would have remained viable names. Once the kingdom is reestablished, the titles theocratic or mediatorial will once again be more descriptive. Now there's a cautionary note here concerning the various names because there can be some confusion here too. Fruchtenbaum refers to the mediatorial kingdom as that period of time from Moses, the judges, and Samuel when God ruled Israel through them as mediators. And he refers to the theocratic kingdom as that period of time when God ruled through kings from Saul to Zedekiah and which ended with the Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem and the temple. I'm not thinking that's correct, so I'm not using his nomenclature. When I refer to the mediatorial kingdom, I'm referring to what God originally set up in the garden and what will be set up again when Jesus comes back and establishes the kingdom. George Peters referred to the kingdom in question as the theocratic kingdom, and as I mentioned, Alvin McLean refers to it as the mediatorial kingdom. Now the primary relevant question for us today in this dispensation is, did that kingdom begin with the first advent or was it postponed by the fall and subsequently rejected by the Jews at the first advent, rendering it inoperative until a later time? If it began during the Lord's ministry in Israel, and that's what the hang up is, so many people want to believe that Jesus started the kingdom, inaugurated it, that the kingdom of God is here now, the kingdom of God that he offered to Israel at the first advent is here now. It's not, but that's the thinking, and that's what we're trying to straighten out here. But if it began during the Lord's ministry in Israel and continues from that point on in history, then building it is an appropriate church response. But if not, then thinking one is building the kingdom, which is not present, is an exercise in wasting time and energy to accomplish something the Bible reveals only the Lord can do, which is to inaugurate the kingdom. And certainly once it begins, Holy Spirit empowered people will be used to bring about its development and growth, but as yet to begin, and only the Lord can do that. So the Lord's offer of the kingdom was rejected, and that kingdom's inauguration awaits his return at the second advent. And the Lord himself made the postponement perfectly clear, and he also made it clear that it would be granted to a future generation of Jews who would accept him as the Messiah. The Lord said in Matthew 21, 43, therefore I say to you, the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people producing the fruit of it. He's talking about your future generations of Jews. He's not talking about the church. And most people today that aren't dispensationalists want to claim this as pertaining to the church. And while I'm here talking about Matthew, If you did not hear Pastor Thomas teach the book of Matthew here just in the last couple years, you really need to take the time and listen to that. That is the best exposition of the book of Matthew you will ever hear, I promise. And you will learn so much about Israel, God's plan for history with Israel and the church in relation to that a little bit, but mostly it's about the kingdom offer, the kingdom rejection and so forth. Matthew is a book dealing largely and basically with Israel and only the church as he prepares the disciples for the church after they rejected it in chapter 12. So I'd really urge you if you didn't listen to that series, listen to it. You will learn a great deal about what the Bible is all about. So what's the harm though of operating as though the theocratic or mediatorial kingdom is operative at this time? Kingdom Now Theology has a number of harmful consequences for understanding God's plan for history, Israel, and the church. So a brief history of the various views of Kingdom Now Theology is helpful for understanding the basis for establishing a biblical view of kingdom doctrine. Now the first problem is that Kingdom Now doctrine does real harm to understanding the plan of God for history. Most Kingdom Now theologians are replacement theologians which requires reapplying scriptures meant for Israel to the church. And since God still has plans for Israel and the church as distinct entities, removing Israel from that plan alters the entire plan, then which obviously contradicts the scriptures. And it should be apparent that changing the scriptures, either by adding to them or by removing them, violates various biblical commands to refrain from changing them or adding to them, and it leads people astray. Now kingdom now theology necessarily involves a change to utilizing less than literal hermeneutics. It requires a hermeneutical process other than literally understanding the text. And what that involves is is imposing one's theology onto the text and reinterpreting the Bible according to the theological scheme rather than according to what the spirit inspired scriptures actually reveal. And this doctrine forces theologians into the now very common but faulty hermeneutical procedure of reinterpreting the Old Testament with the New Testament. And in fact, the proper procedure for interpreting the Bible is exactly the opposite. It is only by understanding the Old Testament first that the New Testament can be properly interpreted and theologically understood. And that's why I'm suggesting if you didn't listen to that series on Matthew that Pastor Thomas did, you really need to do that because that will get your thinking oriented into getting the Bible in the proper order and how things unfold from beginning to end. And understanding the kingdom is more than just a theological exercise. In relation to Israel and replacement theology, misunderstanding the kingdom can set the stage for serious, deadly consequences in terms of emboldening Israel's enemies and turning people within professing Christianity against Israel in order to harm the nation's economy. The current iteration of that situation is the boycott, divest, and sanction movement aimed at politically and economically isolating Israel and causing economic hardship for the Jewish people. A guy named Chapman is a replacement theologian who, to be charitable, I would say he doesn't like Israel. He's a theologian who's been one of the leading voices of anti-Israel sentiment in the church, and he condemns literal hermeneutics in the process. So what I'm showing you here is how changing your mind about how the kingdom works, you then use the kingdom to attack Israel, which you'll see here is what this Chapman character does. He says the basic weakness of this approach, meaning literal hermeneutics, is that the New Testament writers do not seem to be bound to this kind of literal interpretation of the Old Testament. In the teaching of Jesus, the coming of the kingdom of God is the real, the substantial, the essential fulfillment of the promises given to Abraham about the land and the visions of the prophets about the land. In the teaching of the apostles, the life, death, resurrection of Jesus are the real, the substantial, the essential fulfillment of what God promised in the Old Testament. When Jesus speaks about the future, he speaks of the judgment that is to fall on the city of Jerusalem, but says nothing at all about the future established of a Jewish kingdom in the land. Now we know that's not true. And if you listen to Pastor Thomas' Matthew series, you know that's not true based on what he had to teach in there. So contrary to this man's assertions, literal hermeneutics is the only way that people are enabled to understand the Bible. And it can only be properly understood in light of Old Testament revelation first, then New Testament revelation. What he did here was he spiritualized the New Testament to arrive at the conclusion he wanted. And in the end here, it's simply untrue that Jesus never talked about establishing the kingdom. Matthew is saturated with that very subject. The first 12 chapters are all about that. And of course, the parallel passages in the other gospels are as well. Now at this point in time in history, many of the pastors involved in social justice theology within the professing church are using the concept of the kingdom to support the imposition of what basically amounts to cultural Marxism in our society. In this view, Christianity and the kingdom are all about temporal life now rather than life in the future. as the period of life now as the period of service and spiritual preparation for eternal life and for glorifying God. In other words, people who are trying to impose a Christianized society and social justice society, they're using the kingdom of God because the kingdom of God is gonna be a period of righteousness and justice, right? So they're taking that concept and trying to force it into taking that round peg, so to speak, and forcing it into the square hole of this age, and it doesn't fit. But here's an example of how that works. This is a quote by a guy named Jim Wallace, he's on the news all the time, he's an extremely leftist, socialist, communistic type of theologian. And he is using the kingdom of God as the vehicle through which he thinks we should impose social justice on the world. He says it this way, we need to offer unexpected hope to the world. The Christian mission is to proclaim and live the kingdom of God. Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven, quoting Matthew 6.10. That's the way we pray. But while the kingdom of God was the central message of Jesus and the New Testament, that's not true by the way, It's faded as ours. Finding salvation in heaven is part of the message. Getting closer to God is part of the message. But the heart of the message of Jesus was a new order breaking into history, changing everything about the world, including us. That's why we can offer such hope to the world. The Church is supposed to be saying, and the Church is supposed to be showing, that our life together can be better. In our shallow, superficial, and selfish age, Jesus is indeed calling us to a completely different way of life that people are supposed to be able to see. He called it the Kingdom of God. And it's a very clear alternative to the selfish kingdoms of this world. As we said at the very beginning, the better way of living was meant to benefit not just Christians, but everybody else too. That's what makes it transformational. When people see that kingdom of God actually being lived out, they are first surprised by it and then attracted to it. So you see, he's taking this concept of the wonderful time that the kingdom of God is really gonna be, and trying to say that's the church's mission now. Because he says Jesus brought the kingdom at the first coming, and it's not postponed, it's here now. That's how he's using the kingdom of God to support his theological position. So the hope Wallace is talking about in the kingdom of God is the improvement of temporal circumstances in this life now. He applied the Sermon on the Mount to the church, but that sermon dealt with three things, the original purpose of the Mosaic law, the perversion of the Mosaic law by the Pharisaical system of Judaism, and with kingdom righteousness as it will look when the kingdom comes into existence, but it's not here yet. So while the kingdom of God was a message of Jesus during the time he was offering the kingdom to Israel, The kingdom of God was not the entire message or the central message of the entire New Testament. Paul said, the form of this world is passing away. And John wrote, the world is passing away. That doesn't sound like the kind of kingdom that is going to be in our presence during the millennial reign of Christ. The emphasis on kingdom now theology is the betterment of the temporal world at the expense of preparing for eternal life. And in some ways, this mindset is similar to the word of faith prosperity gospel and to Marxist liberation theology. And Wallace also hinted, and this is real disturbing, at approving the false gospel of universalism. That is, everyone will be saved and in fact, In their thinking, the gospel of grace is minimized by theologically liberal kingdom now proponents. They generally hold a low view of scripture and the inspired inerrant nature of the word of God is denied. And here is his attitude towards the Bible. As much as we love the Bible, in the congregation my parents helped found, we somehow missed the central message of the New Testament, the message that Jesus called the kingdom of God. Jesus' gospel of the kingdom is much more than the gospel I was raised with, which I will call the atonement only gospel, a message that was mostly about how I could get to heaven and not about a new order that had come to change the world and be with it. While the kingdom of God is central to the New Testament, it was never central in the churches that many of us grew up in. Instead, in our conservative churches, the gospel of the kingdom was replaced by an atonement-only gospel. You see, he's abandoned the gospel of grace for what he calls the gospel of the kingdom, which in his mind is a gospel of social justice, which is no gospel at all. And while it sounds nice to say the purpose of the church is to change the world through socioeconomic means, the charge to the church is to go and make disciples, which presupposes preaching the gospel. In reality, we know that Christianity did and does in fact change the world, but it did it by means of the gospel, which changed the hearts and minds of lost people as they grew in their knowledge and application of the word of God. That's how Western civilization came about. Christianity became the greatest change agent in the history of the world for improving the lives of the average person, and it was built on Judeo-Christian values. But it is not the kingdom, and in terms of changing the world into the kingdom, it's destined to fail. Modern social justice warriors rarely preach the gospel of grace, nor do they teach the Bible. They simply try to make lives better through what are nothing more than secular humanist means. Now, some of them are universalist in mindset and their gospel is based on making temporal lives better through what they consider to be socioeconomic justice. Now, let me be clear, there is nothing wrong about improving people's lives, but it has to be based on the gospel and put into practice by means of sanctification salvation on the part of those who come to faith. Otherwise, we're making lives better in a materialistic sense while leaving them lost in a spiritual sense. And that concept gets lost in the theologically liberal kingdom now mindset. Now to be fair, some Christian-based charitable organizations do preach the gospel to people as they help them, but many do not. They believe that modeling a Christ-like life is sufficient to cause people to believe in Jesus. But the problem with that is, Romans 10, 17 says that faith comes from hearing, and hearing by the word of Christ. Now another thing, I put my notes here that I thought of this morning, another aberration in terms of kingdom now theology is attached to Pentecostal and charismatic things that we see going on today. Their thinking is that Jesus came to bring in the kingdom, and exercised it through signs, miracles, and wonders at the first advent. Therefore, since the kingdom is here now, signs, miracles, and wonders should still be going on. And what that fails to realize is that the purpose for signs, miracles, and wonders at the first advent was to authenticate the Messiah to the Jewish people. He did things that they should have seen and known were identifying him as the Messiah. But instead of accepting him and his kingdom offer, They rejected him and his kingdom offer, and therefore it's withdrawn. There is no need for signs, miracles, and wonders today in terms of what Jesus was doing in the first century by authenticating himself and his ministry as a Messiah and his kingdom offer. Now those who think it's their job to bring about social change that will only be realized in the messianic kingdom fail to realize that establishing the kingdom will be God's exclusive work and it will be preceded by a catastrophic worldwide upheaval in the created order. This is a quotation from a 19th century German theologian. He's right on here. He said, the kingdom was not going to come as a result of a gradual evolutionary process, but it would come as a complete break in history, utterly different from what had gone before. The kingdom of God, when it comes, will be the breaking out of an overpowering divine storm which erupts into history to destroy and renew. The kingdom is therefore not the task of man, nor can it be furthered by the work of man. It is wholly the work of God." That's exactly right, and if you know your eschatology and you know what the tribulation is all about, that's exactly what he's talking about here, this serious reordering of the world's attitude, so to speak, during the tribulation, only after which will the kingdom be set up. Now, the previous quotes here I did by Wallace are examples of the extreme liberal view of Kingdom Now theology, but what about more conservative elements of professing Christianity? A guy named John Frame is a Reformed theologian who represents some of their thinking in the area of Kingdom Now. He says, the kingdom of God long awaited has come in Christ. So you see, these guys believe the kingdom was brought in by Jesus at the first advent, it was not postponed, it was started and it's still going on. He says, the gospel is the gospel of the kingdom, the sermon on the mouth, the ethic of the kingdom, the Lord's prayer, the prayer of the kingdom, the church has the keys of the kingdom and the kingdom has come. Christ the King has been raised to God's right hand where he has authority over all things. Now this represents the theology that the kingdom is all about the church and it relates to Israel only as individual Jewish people place their faith in the Messiah. The frame is factually incorrect that the church has the keys to the kingdom. Peter was given those keys, not the church. And this reformed position misrepresents the nature of the book of Matthew, which emphasizes the Old Testament revelation of the kingdom and its relationship to and with Israel. The church is not in the first 12 chapters of Matthew's gospel. That's not to say there isn't some application when you draw from those scriptures, but it was about Israel's kingdom righteousness. Now, Frame is post-millennial, which means he thinks the world will get better and better as it becomes largely Christian, and only after that program is accomplished will the Lord return to judge the world and consummate the eternal state. This means he does not believe there will be a literal 1,000 year theocratic or mediatorial kingdom. That's a position that lends itself to kingdom now theology. So this position is similar to the liberal position in terms of its emphasis on good works, but these theologians do not completely ignore the gospel and they have a higher regard for the scriptures. In this system, Christ is thought to be ruling as a Davidic king from the throne at the right hand of God the Father right now. Frame acknowledged that the kingdom was long awaited. The question is, who was waiting for it? Well, the answer is the nation of Israel was waiting for it. Now, postmillennial kingdom now theologians destroy the biblical revelation of the kingdom of God. Dr. Botner wrote this about post-millennialism. He says, we have defined post-millennialism as that view of the last things, which holds that the kingdom of God is now being extended in the world through the preaching of the gospel and the saving work of the Holy Spirit in the hearts of individuals, that the world eventually is to be Christianized, the return of Christ is to occur at the close of a long period of righteousness and peace, commonly called the millennium. And besides that being just biblically unfactual, You know, the question seems to come to mind, how's that working out for you? Is the world getting better and more Christian? It should be added that on post-millennial principles, the second coming of Christ will be followed immediately by the general resurrection, the general judgment, and the introduction of heaven and hell in their fullness. Now the Kingdom Now theologians who realize, who are a bit more biblical, realize they have a problem with their Kingdom Now doctrinal position because the Bible clearly indicates the kingdom is future. So in response to that, they've developed a theological paradigm they call the already not yet. They're saying that Jesus did in fact inaugurate the kingdom at his first advent but the full realization of the kingdom awaits his second advent. In other words, they develop this theological doctrine to cover their kingdom now error and make it appear to conform to biblical revelation. Frame explains what he means by already not yet. He said, as the Amals, Postmals, and Preterists emphasize, there is a sense in which the kingdom of God has come. It was established by Christ's atonement, and we have all entered it. Yet in another sense, the kingdom remains future as we pray the Lord's prayer, thy kingdom come. So the kingdom is here, but yet to come. The last days are here, but yet to come. The fulfillment of history has occurred already in Christ, but is also not yet, for there is more to come. This is the tension that theologians refer to as the already and the not yet. I'm going to suggest there's no tension at all. There's no already, not yet. The kingdom was postponed. It's not here right now. But concerning some issues, this already not yet concept is not totally invalid, but as dispensational practitioners of theology, we would express it in terms of positional and experiential truth. For example, we know that we are positionally with Christ as he's seated at the right hand of God the Father in the heavens because we are in him and he in us, John 17, 21. But we also know that experientially we are still existing in sinful bodies on earth awaiting glorification when we will both positionally and experientially be with the Lord and that for eternity. But this concept's not applicable to the theocratic or mediatorial kingdom because that kingdom is not present at this time. Now, most distressing to me is the fact that some professed dispensationalists now calling themselves progressive dispensationalists, have embraced kingdom now theology and the already not yet paradigm, which in my mind removes them from the realm of being dispensationalists and places them more in the reformed theology sphere of theologians. But these theologians have moved away from normative dispensational theology and towards a reformed Calvinist position. And very briefly, they claim the Lord is now ruling from the Davidic throne, which they locate at the right hand of the father, through believers on earth over the kingdom, which has begun in a spiritual fashion, the already and awaits the physical return of the Lord to establish the Davidic kingdom on earth, the not yet. So that's how some dispensationalists are now departing from our brand of theology which we believe is entirely biblical and based on literal hermeneutics and moving into reform theology which is not based on literal hermeneutics. And to do that, they've actually invented a new hermeneutic, like we mentioned Chapman earlier, they call complementary hermeneutics, they call this new hermeneutic complementary hermeneutics, which allows the New Testament to expand the meaning of the Old Testament, supposedly without changing it. But I don't know how you expand the meaning of it without changing it. But this position is very much like the position held by Jordan Ladd, who was a mid-20th century anti-dispensationalist professor at Fuller Theological Seminary. and he denies that the kingdom was even offered to Israel, that future earthly realm was not what Jesus offered to Israel. Before the kingdom is to be thus realized on the earth or in the age to come, it must come to men as a present spiritual reality to be realized here and now in the sphere of their own lives. God may now reign within them as was never before possible. Only those who submit themselves to this new manifestation of God's kingdom and who render a decision for Christ and the kingdom will enter the future kingdom when it comes. The present spiritual kingdom prepares men for the future glorious kingdom, but it's one and the same kingdom, the rule of the one sovereign of God. So I hope that just by what we've gone over already this morning, you can see the errors that Ladd has in this, but this is a very popular position for people who don't understand the kingdom or want to impose it now. This represents spiritualizing the text and it does so by allowing New Testament revelation to reinterpret Old Testament revelation which changes the meaning of the Old Testament to conform to the theological presuppositions the interpreter brings to the text. When this is the means of reinterpreting the Old Testament kingdom text, the result is that God's plan for history cannot be properly understood and in fact it introduces error into the interpretive process. The Old Testament clearly indicates the messianic kingdom is going to involve material, geographical elements, and those cannot be spiritualized away by denying that Israel is the inheritor of the covenant promises. Frutenbaum addressed the issue of literal hermeneutics concerning the interpretation of the old by the new, and I thought he did a really good job with it. He said it's incorrect to say that the Old Testament should be interpreted by the New Testament because if that is the case, the Old Testament had no meaning and seemed to be irrelevant to the ones to whom it was spoken. On the contrary, the validity of the New Testament is seen by how it conforms to what was already revealed in the Old Testament. The Book of Mormon and other books by cultic groups fail to stand because they contradict the New Testament. By the same token, if the New Testament contradicts the Old Testament, it cannot stand. It's one thing to see fulfillment in the New Testament, but it's quite another to see the New Testament so totally reinterpret the Old Testament that what the Old Testament says carries no meaning at all. And that's precisely what's happened. So here's what this type of hermeneutic looks like. So I'm going to show you now how people actually really abuse the Bible by introducing new hermeneutical systems. The complementary hermeneutic of the progressive dispensationalist is fairly tame compared to what we're going to see here. There's an Episcopal priest of Arab descent in Jerusalem named Naim Stephan Atik, who it is very fair to say despises Israel. But because he knows what the Old Testament says about Israel and the kingdom, he devised a new hermeneutic to reinterpret the Old Testament with the New Testament, and even further, to use his own subjective, personal, and extra-biblical thoughts about Christ Jesus to change the meaning of the scriptures, which affects one's understanding of the kingdom and Israel's role. Now this was a little bit involved, but I tried to summarize it here. It's not my word summarizing it, I just tried to pick out so you could get the gist of how he changes the Bible here, changes hermeneutic. He said, for the Christian to talk about the kingdom of God is to talk about knowing God through Christ. Jesus the Christ thus becomes in himself and his teaching the true hermeneutic. The key to understanding of the Bible, the word of God incarnate in Jesus the Christ interprets for us the word of God in the Bible. To understand God, therefore, the Palestinian Christian, like every other Christian, begins with Christ and goes backward to the Old Testament and forward to the New Testament and beyond them. It, meaning the use of this new hermeneutic, requires, however, a knowledge of the biblical records and demands the use of human reason, a reason that is enlightened by the revelation of God in Christ. The revelation of God, God's nature, purpose, and will as revealed in Christ becomes a criterion by which Christians can measure the validity and authority of the biblical message for their life. When confronted with a difficult passage, this is the key paragraph. When confronted with a difficult passage in the Bible or with a perplexing contemporary event, one needs to ask such simple questions as, is the way I am hearing this, the way I have come to know God in Christ. Does this fit the picture I have of God that Jesus has revealed to me? Does it match the character of the God whom I have come to know through Christ? If it does, if it meets all of my criteria, then that passage is valid and authoritative. If it is not meeting my criteria, then I cannot accept its validity or authority. That is blasphemous. But that's how this guy gets around God's clear promises to Israel. He knows these things, he lives in Israel, he has his whole life, but he doesn't want to accept it. So for those of us who believe the only way to correctly understand the Bible is by means of literal, grammatical, historical, contextual hermeneutics, this is pretty shocking stuff. But it has to be done this way if your desire to deny God's kingdom program as it relates to Israel, because the scriptures themselves do not account. for this man's interpretive conclusions. He had to create his own subjective system in order to get his results to conform to his thoughts and desires. Faulty human reasoning is the last place, including for us, where we want to go to interpret the scriptures. That's why we use literal hermeneutics. It's not about what we want the Bible to say, It's about what the Bible has to say, and are we making a diligent effort to get that out of the Bible? We only can do that through literal hermeneutics. Now at the heart of most of these misunderstandings of the kingdom is the failure to biblically comprehend God's plan for history involving both Israel and the church. When Israel is replaced by the church and God's plan for history, properly understanding the kingdom becomes impossible. The kingdom the Bible primarily refers to is a kingdom referred to as the theocratic or the mediatorial kingdom within that universal kingdom of God that is located on planet earth and ruled by a human being as God's representative. And it should be obvious that no such mediatorial kingdom exists today. And the only way to maintain that doctrine is to suggest that Christ is ruling on a supposed Davidic throne right now from heaven while sitting at the right hand of the Father. And that is, in fact, a progressive dispensationalist position and most of Reformed theology as well. But the Davidic throne is located in Jerusalem, in Israel, on earth and nowhere else. Jesus is returning to that throne. He's not on that throne at this time. Now I mentioned when we began in the scriptures that I had read that God's kingdom program is revealed in the scriptures from beginning to end and I want to mention those scriptural bookends again now and in the next lesson we're going to examine the scriptures in depth to enlighten us concerning the theocratic or mediatorial kingdom. God's plan for history from the beginning was the establishment of a kingdom on earth populated by human beings considered to be God's children and ruled by a man serving as God's rulership agent. So I'm going to read Genesis 1, 26 to 28 again. Then God said, let us make man in our image according to our likeness and let them rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over the cattle and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth. God created man in his own image. In the image of God he created him, male and female he created them. God blessed them and God said to them, be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth and subdue it, and rule over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the sky, and over every living thing that moves on the earth. The word rule here is radah. It means to rule over, to exercise authority over, to have dominion over, and so to dominate, direct, lead, control, and subjugate or subdue. It refers to managing or governing an entity, people, or government with considerable or forceful authority. This was the position God created man to hold as his representative in relationship to the rest of the created order. Now many translations use the word dominion here rather than rule and that is perfectly acceptable. Now this word is used in relation to man's rule over something and it's not used, this word is not used to refer to God's rule over his creation or any other aspect thereof. It's only used in relationship to man. Now man failed to properly carry out his assigned duties and not only lost his right to rule, but he gave it to a malevolent being who holds that right to this day. And God's plan involves giving that right to rule back to his originally intended representative, a man, and that plan is underway to this day as well. The word subdue is kavash. It means to subdue, to overcome, to enslave, It refers to conquering and controlling an environment or a people, making it or them subordinate, subservient, and dependent. It assumes that the party being subdued is hostile to the subduer, necessitating some sort of coercion if the subduing is to take place. Subdue in Genesis 128 implies that creation will not do man's bidding gladly or easily, and that man must now bring creation into submission by main strength. It is not to rule man. Man is to rule creation. Creation is not to rule man. So in the original mandate to subdue the garden, Adam was told to cultivate it and keep it in Genesis 2.15. Now that implies that it would get out of control if it was not properly cared for by cultivating it and keeping it. It's not a bad thing to have to cultivate the garden, in other words. It was perfectly good, whatever it was, and yet man had this responsible labor in that garden to tend it and keep it in the proper order. In the context of Genesis 128, the violent, destructive, and ruinous implications of the word are absent because everything was originally created good, resulting in a very good creation when it was finished. But subduing the creation was God's mandate to Adam to care for the garden according to its needs and to keep it operating at peak efficiency. And the problem is that Adam, God's appointed vice regent rebelled against God and lost the right to rule over God's creation, which destroyed the theocratic or mediatorial kingdom for some time. And in fact, we're going on 6,000 years now and that kingdom has not been reestablished yet. And that's one reason why we know the kingdom is not now present. Adam abdicated his right to rule. and gave Satan the right to rule over the creation and whose rule is still ongoing at this time. We see that in the temptation of Christ. When Satan offered the kingdoms to Christ, Jesus didn't say those aren't yours to give me. He just said, don't tempt God. Those are Satan's kingdoms to give. All the kingdoms of the world, all the nations of the world are part of Satan's domain right now, including our nation, unfortunately, but we're just, we're another nation in the world. Now the fall changed everything and it necessitated the development of a plan for getting the kingdom program back on track. And that plan calls for the reestablishment of the theocratic kingdom under the rule of the last Adam, who will be Christ Jesus, of course. Now God knew all that and his plan was prepared beforehand, but it's playing out over the course of history and it's yet to be consummated. Now the final revelation of the kingdom could be termed paradise restored when the eternal state begins and man finally rules over God's very good creation, just as he created to do in the beginning. which we read earlier in Revelation 22, three to five, there will no longer be any curse, and the throne of God and of the Lamb will be in it, and his bondservants will serve him, they will see his face and his name will be on their foreheads, and there will no longer be any night, and they will not have need of the light of a lamp nor the light of the sun, but because the Lord God will illumine them, they will reign forever and ever. So the messianic kingdom now will not be quite the perfect paradise God created the world to be, but eventually restored perfection will take place. And Dr. Thomas wrote this in his commentary on Revelation. The climaxing privilege of God's slaves is that of joining in the eternal reign of God. This is an extension of the promise of a thousand year reign given earlier. Their eternal reign coincides with the eternal reign of Christ. This is the eventual fulfillment of God's command for man to rule over all creatures. Okay, now that's background in history. So the next time that I'm up here, will go into the scriptures that identify the kingdom. And I won't be going back into all of these other things that are aberrant views, but hopefully you will be able to see as we go through the scriptures on these things why they're aberrant and why they are incorrect and how they destroy the real meaning of God's plan for history. And we'll get that directly from the scriptures next time I'm in this sanctuary. Okay, let's have a word of prayer and we'll close. Father, we thank you for your word. We thank you for the amazing truths that are in it. We thank you that you have a plan for restoring the kingdom. and restoring planet earth and restoring the human beings who believe in you to a state of kingdom righteousness where we can live according to the way that you originally created the world to be ordered and to conduct itself. The millennium will not be the perfect time. Eternity will be the perfect time, but it'll be very close. And it won't start though until Jesus comes back. And we look forward to that day. And in fact, we pray that he comes back soon. So Father, once again, I want to pray for your blessing over all the people here today and are listening to this lesson that you would bless them and keep them in the coming week and help us to serve you and glorify your name in all that we do today, tomorrow, and forever. In Jesus' name, amen.