Gospel or kingdom? What’s our message?

Jesus’ main message was the kingdom. Paul’s main message was the gospel. What’s our message: gospel, or kingdom?

Should we follow Jesus or Paul? Or are they connected?

Here’s a simple proposition: The gospel establishes the kingdom.

For Jesus, it wasn’t gospel or kingdom. He proclaimed the gospel of the kingdom. That’s Matthew’s summary of his message in 4:23, 9:35 and 24:13.

But the noun gospel is mostly found in Paul’s letters. Did Paul also proclaim the gospel of God’s kingship arriving in Christ?

How far would you need to read in Romans to find something that sounds like the gospel of the kingdom?

Romans 1:1-5 (my translation, compare NIV)
From Paul, slave of King Jesus, his appointee assigned to announce God’s gospel, the message he promised through his prophets in the Old Testament about his Son, the physical descendant of David who was named “Son of the divine ruler with power” by the cleansing Spirit when he raised up King Jesus from the dead. Jesus is therefore our Lord, and we’ve received his favour — appointing us to call all the nations into trusting obedience under his authority.

Paul’s gospel is that God has raised up his anointed (the Christ) as ruler (Lord) over all nations. Paul’s gospel is that Jesus Christ is Lord. He calls it God’s gospel because it’s the good news God has promised all along. That good news that became living reality for the world when the breath of God entered Jesus’ crucified body, raising him from the dead, giving him the throne of David just as God had promised, installing God’s Messiah as Lord not only over Israel but over all the nations of the world.

That’s why Paul understood his commission as an apostle to the nations. The resurrected Messiah has commissioned Paul to announce the gospel of the Messiah’s kingship to all the nations of the world. They must hear about it if they are to place their trusting allegiance in him, so that’s Paul’s gospel: announcing that God has placed his Messiah Jesus in charge of all nations, calling everyone to give him their loyalty (faith).

The response Paul expects to God’s gospel (his Messiah as our Lord) is this: If you declare with your mouth, “Jesus is Lord,” and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved (Romans 10:9). That’s the gospel Paul keeps proclaiming to the very last verse of Romans (16:25-27).

Of course, Paul has other phrases to explain this gospel too. The metaphor of justification by faith recognizes God’s sovereign responsibility to sort out the injustice in his earthly realm. God evaluates who are his people and who are not based on one crucial criterion: those who place their trusting allegiance in his Son as our Lord are declared to be in the right (justified by faith), while those who do not rely on the one whom God appointed to lead us are judged as aligned with the rebellion against God’s sovereignty (under the power of sin).

A bunch of disputes in church history have disconnected the gospel Paul preached from the gospel Jesus announced. Scot McKnight provides this example:

At an airport, I bumped into a pastor I recognized, and he offered a more extreme version of what we saw in Exhibit B. He asked me what I was writing, and I replied, “A book about the meaning of gospel.”

“That’s easy,” he said, “justification by faith.” After hearing that quick-and-easy answer, I decided to push further, so I asked him Piper’s question: “Did Jesus preach the gospel?”

His answer made me gulp. “Nope,” he said, “Jesus couldn’t have. No one understood the gospel until Paul. No one could understand the gospel until after the cross and resurrection and Pentecost.”

“Not even Jesus?” I asked.

“Nope. Not possible,” he affirmed. I wanted to add an old cheeky line I’ve often used: “Poor Jesus, born on the wrong side of the cross, didn’t get to preach the gospel.” My satire, if not sarcasm, would not have helped, so I held back. But I’ve heard others make similar claims about Jesus, Paul, and the gospel, and this book will offer a thorough rebuttal of this conviction.

Answer C: For this pastor, the word gospel means “justification by faith,” and since Jesus really didn’t talk in those terms, he flat out didn’t preach the gospel. Few will admit this as bluntly as that preacher did, but I’m glad some do. This view is wrong and wrongheaded.

— Scot McKnight, The King Jesus Gospel: The Original Good News Revisited, (Zondervan, 2016), 25–26.

So what?

We have some work to do to clarify the gospel. I cannot think of a more important topic.

This blog post can’t resolve it all, but can I offer this starting point:

1. God’s gospel is his proclamation that Jesus (his Messiah) is the heaven-anointed king over all creation — that his Christ is our Lord.
2. God’s gospel calls us to turn to our God-appointed ruler, trusting him to lead us, recognizing him with our allegiance. As we do, God transforms us into the community that exists in King Jesus, restoring earth as a kingdom of heaven.
3. God’s gospel bring into existence the community that exists in Christ, the kingdom that exists under his leadership to echo and embody God’s gospel in his world.

In short, the gospel establishes the kingdom. God’s gospel proclamation (that his Christ is our Lord) establishes all nations as one kingdom under heaven’s governance in the Messiah, just as God always intended.

Worth pursuing?

What do you think? Is it worth pursuing this understanding of the gospel?

For a decade, I’ve been seeking the kingdom, pursuing what Jesus meant by the kingdom, why he made it the centre of everything he did and said, and how he wants us to seek the kingdom. Now I’m ready to pursue the question of the gospel, how to integrate what the founder of our faith proclaimed with what his apostles proclaimed.

Any suggestions to help with that?

What others are saying

Michael F. Bird, Evangelical Theology: A Biblical and Systematic Introduction (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2013), 705–707:

That is why we should think of the church as “the community of the gospelized”! When you magnetize a piece of metal, the metal becomes magnetic. When you sterilize a surgical tool, the tool becomes sterile. When you tenderize a piece of meat, the meat becomes tender. When a person or a church is gospelized, they ooze gospel, they bleed Jesus, they overflow with Spirit, they radiate the Father’s glory. That is the goal of a gospelized community. …

We are the community of the gospelized: the company of the gospel, the public face of the gospel, the hermeneutic of the gospel. The worship, mission, ethics, symbols, testimony, and spirituality of the church are shaped by what it thinks of and what it does with the gospel of Jesus Christ. The gospel is the mark and mission of the authentic church of Christ.

Joshua W. Jipp, The Messianic Theology of the New Testament (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2020), 214–215:

Paul’s understanding of Jesus as a messianic and kingly figure, predicated upon Jesus’s Davidic messiahship, provides the logic for Paul’s participatory soteriology. The messianic king is uniquely situated as the one who can mediate God’s salvation to the people. The abundance of messianic royal discourse that is used to conceptualize Paul’s grammar of union with Christ confirms, in my opinion, the likelihood that Jesus’s identity as Israel’s Davidic Messiah, as seen in relation to his particular narrative as one who suffered and died in obedience to God, was raised to life, and enthroned at God’s right hand by the Spirit, contributed to Paul’s creative conceptualizing of Christ’s people inhabiting and sharing in the identity and narrative of Jesus the Messiah.

N. T. Wright, Paul and the Faithfulness of God, (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2013), 915–916:

When Paul spoke of ‘gospel’ he thereby denoted a message which, in fulfilment of the scriptural prophecies and in implicit confrontation with the newer imperial realities, declared the ‘good news’ of God’s kingdom in and through the life, messianic achievement and supremely the death and resurrection of Jesus. This gospel message far transcended the individualistic message of ‘how to be saved’ which the word ‘gospel’ has come to denote in much contemporary western Christian expression. It remained intensely personal in its radical application, but only because it was first cosmic and global in scope: the world had a new lord, the Jewish Messiah, raised from the dead. That is why, as we saw, for Paul ‘the gospel’ even included the news of the just divine judgment against all human wickedness. In a world of moral and social chaos, ‘judgment’ is good news, as the Psalms insisted repeatedly. Now, for Paul, the ‘good news’ of Jesus told a story which (a) stretched backwards to Abraham and the prophets, (b) looked on to an eschaton in which the creator God would be all in all, (c) focused on the crucial events to do with Jesus as Messiah and (d) challenged its hearers to respond with hypakoē pisteōs, ‘faithful obedience.’

Scot McKnight, The King Jesus Gospel: The Original Good News Revisited, (Zondervan, 2016), 149:

But anyone who takes Scripture seriously needs to pause now and again to compare what he or she thinks with what the apostles taught, and when it comes to gospeling we have more than a little to learn. In fact, we need a grassroots commitment to transform our gospeling to get in line with the apostolic gospel.

Related posts

• What’s the good news in the New Testament?
• The apostles’ gospel (Acts)
• The gospel in Romans
• God’s gospel
• The gospel: a summary
• What is the kingdom of God?
• Short Video: Gospel of the Kingdom (from The Bible Project)