The Good News That You Might Not Have Heard

By Colin Larose

A wholly original presentation of Jesus' good news message, logically laid out in everyday language, from the point of view of an engineer who is all too aware that in today's faith debates, opponents wield the stick of logic with devastating effectiveness. While showing evidence for clashes between popular biblical understanding and the biblical texts themselves, the author proposes that taking the texts at face value yields a coherent picture that should earn the intellectual assent (if not the belief) of the most hardened of skeptics.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Jul 14, 2017
• ISBN: 9781387096442

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The Good News That You Might Not Have Heard

The Good News That You Might Not Have Heard

Copyright

Copyright © 2017 by Colin Larose

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review or scholarly journal.

Second Printing: 2017

ISBN 978-1-387-09644-2

Preface

As challenging as it was to aim for the right balance of themes and tone in the body of this work, writing a suitable preface seemed the most delicate task of all, and yet an indispensable one. Readers who hesitate to approach the disputed and time-worn topic of biblical eschatology (the study of things future) will insist on knowing what prompted this particular initiative, and what it seeks to accomplish. The most common barrier I have encountered has to do with my lack of official credentials, and the presumed height of arrogance to pretend that I have anything novel and helpful to contribute to the discipline. I have found that I can hardly score any win on this terrain: if I start defending my belief that history and politics have inextricably buried essential biblical themes under layers of church tradition, I am soon brought back to order for trying to avoid a discussion of the sacred texts themselves; and if I change course and delve into the texts, I am asked how I can pretend to know better than what centuries of scholarship have managed to ascertain. And on it goes in circles. Here I have tried to avoid this vortex by sticking in the main to a straightforward discussion of biblical themes. A treatment of the implications of my conclusions on church history will be found lacking, but I suspect that such a need only diminishes as society moves resolutely into the post-Christian era.

My first target audience is the mainstream Christians that I have been privileged to call brethren over the past twenty-odd years of my Christian pilgrimage. I do expect, however, the wider population of Judeo-Christian heritage to be able to relate to most of what I wrote about. Even wholly un-churched people are eventually exposed, via popular western culture, to the traditional Christian ideas of going to live in heaven upon death, or in hell (apparently children under five are exempt—or is it ten?), and how God is now desperately trying to win over every human being but will have to count his staggering losses when he decides that the time is up.

Here are a few things that I believe this work has in its favor. It is written by a customer support engineer who, perhaps as a result of job conditioning, has become mostly incapable of 1) writing at an inaccessibly scholarly level, 2) writing ambiguous sentences that sound good but don’t actually say anything, and 3) making obvious leaps of logic or avoiding issues. On point 1), I understand the need for the mighty to communicate their gains in biblical theology to colleagues in the scholarly community, but their jargon will not benefit my equals who are in a different line of work (unless we admit that the whole thing was a purely intellectual exercise?). On point 2), since I do seek to persuade, I have stayed clear from studiously ambiguous statements designed to be equally well received by readers of diverse persuasions. Finally, on point 3), I hope that my training has helped me to bring out effectively (and gently enough) the fact that traditional Christian eschatology is a logical train wreck (so much for gentleness). No amount of rationalization (even the great C.S. Lewis gave it a go) will ever put a favourable spin on the notion that the omnipotent God created humanity in the full knowledge that most would go to a hopeless eternity of physical and emotional misery. In this I side with my atheist friends, whose intellectual honesty goes wholly unappreciated by my Christian peers. I also sympathize with the latter for wishing to avoid the elephants in the room, sensing there a threat to a system of beliefs that in many respects passes the test of logic and provides real meaning and comfort in trying times. I encourage them to consider the possibility that popular biblical understanding has yet to recover from a battering sustained centuries ago at the hands of medieval forces serving very worldly masters, and that once we allow ourselves to take biblical texts at face value, a new picture emerges that should be able to earn the intellectual assent (if not belief) of the most hardened of sceptics.

Colin Larose

Montreal, Canada

14 July 2017

Introduction

The churches of the so-called evangelical movement agree, I think, on the need to preach the Gospel, or Good News. The agreement seems to go no further. I saw an issue of Christianity Today in which several Christian leaders were asked what the Good News was. There were many Ers, I thinks, and in the end, as many answers as people questioned!

Jesus proclaimed a certain Good News for the full duration of his ministry. When he left the apostles with the words Go into all the world and preach the gospel to all creation (Mark 16:15), did he mean a gospel other than the one he had himself preached? And when Paul told the Galatians, even if we or an angel from heaven should preach a gospel other than the one we preached to you, let them be under God's curse! (Galatians 1:8), was he defending a gospel other than the one he had himself received?

Can we agree on the contents of the Good News that Jesus preached? Wasn’t Jesus clear? Might our churches and our modern doctors of law be the ones who are muddling things up?

The four evangelists, to be sure, have no difficulty agreeing among themselves. I own a Harmony of the Gospels that features a list of Jesus’ ministry tours. Here are his tours during his Great Galilean Ministry, with the verses summarizing his message (unless otherwise stated, I will quote from the New International Version of the Bible, or NIV, 2011 revision):

General account of his teaching in Galilee

Matthew 4:17

From that time on Jesus began to preach, Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.

Mark 1:14-15

After John was put in prison, Jesus went into Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God. The time has come, he said. The kingdom of God has come near. Repent and believe the good news!

1. First tour of Galilee with the fishermen Peter, John, James, and Andrew

Matthew 4:23

Jesus went throughout Galilee, teaching in their synagogues, proclaiming the good news of the kingdom, and healing every disease and sickness among the people.

Luke 4:43

But he said, I must proclaim the good news of the kingdom of God to the other towns also, because that is why I was sent.

2. Second tour of Galilee with the twelve apostles

Luke 8:1

After this, Jesus traveled about from one town and village to another, proclaiming the good news of the kingdom of God.

3. Third tour of Galilee

Matthew 9:35

Jesus went through all the towns and villages, teaching in their synagogues, proclaiming the good news of the kingdom and healing every disease and sickness.

During this third tour, Jesus told his disciples: The harvest is plentiful but the workers are few. Ask the Lord of the harvest, therefore, to send out workers into his harvest field (Matthew 9:37-38). This is what followed:

Luke 9:1-2

When Jesus had called the Twelve together, (…) he sent them out to proclaim the kingdom of God and to heal the sick.

Matthew 10:7

As you go, proclaim this message: The kingdom of heaven has come near.

Later, during his Judean ministry:

Luke 10:1-2, 8-9

The Lord appointed seventy-two others and sent them two by two ahead of him to every town and place where he was about to go. He told them, The harvest is plentiful, but the workers are few. Ask the Lord of the harvest, therefore, to send out workers into his harvest field. (…) When you enter a town and are welcomed, (…) heal the sick who are there and tell them, ‘The kingdom of God has come near to you.’

Many insights emerge immediately from these verses, even before looking elsewhere. Here they are:

1.  Jesus’ Good News Concerned the Kingdom of God

We must conclude that the kingdom of God is a vitally important subject for Christians. And yet, there are many who cannot explain in clear terms what the kingdom is, and there are a great many opinions—no wonder the Good News is so mysterious! This state of affairs gives the lie to the idea that all Christians agree on essential matters, and maintain differences only in non-essential matters.

The kingdom of God is not a peripheral topic! It is the heart of the Gospel. I cannot preach the Good News if I do not understand the kingdom of God.

2.  The Kingdom of God Is the Reign of God

Here are some translations of the key verse Matthew 4:17:

…the kingdom of heaven has come near (NIV – New International Version);

…the Kingdom of Heaven is near (NLT – New Living Translation);

…the kingdom of heaven is at hand (NKJV – New King James Version);

…the kingdom of heaven is at hand (RSV – Revised Standard Version);

…come nigh hath the reign of the heavens (YLT – Young’s Literal Translation).

Likewise, Mark 1:15:

The kingdom of God has come near (NIV);

The Kingdom of God is near! (NLT);

…the kingdom of God is at hand (NKJV);

…the kingdom of God is at hand (RSV);

…the reign of God hath come nigh (YLT).

All sorts of ideas, some very complicated, come to people’s minds when they hear the magical expression kingdom of God. Part of the problem is that today the word kingdom means a state governed by a king. This could refer to the government, the territory, or the people governed, depending on the context. Did the original Hebrew and Greek words correspond to the modern uses of the word kingdom? We will return to this in more detail, but it will suffice here to say that the YLT Bible version, known for its attempts to preserve the tense and word usage as found in the original Greek and Hebrew writings, concluded that it was more accurate to translate as reign of God. Two French translations known for their accuracy, La Nouvelle Bible Segond (NBS) and Traduction Œcuménique de la Bible (TOB), also translate as reign of God. This expression has such a crystal clear meaning that it can take one off guard! It is simply the discharge of God’s sovereignty.

I will often favor the expression reign of God in the following presentation. The expression kingdom of God has suffered so much abuse that it harms more than it helps the debate, in my opinion!

3.  The Kingdom of God Is Not Heaven!

One problem with the expression kingdom of God is that it allows a territorial interpretation, which causes confusion. I have a somewhat dated dictionary that defines the kingdom of God as paradise, which people commonly understand as heaven. Another more recent dictionary more accurately associates it with a community or a reign, but persists with the idea that the reign in question is in heaven. The expression reign of God, equivalent to government of God, does away with the territorial aspect and focuses squarely on the idea of governance.

I myself had the vague notion, during childhood, that when Jesus spoke of the kingdom, he spoke of this place that we call heaven, where God is found and where he intends us to spend eternity. However, the expression reign of God does not specify the place where the reign is exerted, but indeed the origin of the reign in question (God)!

In Point 2, we saw that Matthew used the expression reign of the heavens—is this not an allusion to a kind of territory? Granted, but Matthew uses the expression in exactly the same way that the other evangelists use reign of God. We must therefore conclude that both expressions have the same meaning, and that Matthew is simply indicating that the reign spoken of by Jesus originates from the heavens, not from here below. But how to explain Matthew’s preference? As it turns out, Matthew was writing to Jews who, as we know, had extraordinary respect for the unpronounceable name of God. He was therefore like the one who, wishing to avoid saying God, says heaven helps those who help themselves, instead of God helps those who help themselves. The expressions of God and of the heavens must be seen as simply synonymous.

Hear Jesus himself explain that his reign did not originate from here on Earth, but from above:

John 18:36

Jesus said, My kingdom is not of this world. If it were, my servants would fight to prevent my arrest by the Jewish leaders. But now my kingdom is from another place.

Matthew 26:52-53

Put your sword back in its place (…). Do you think I cannot call on my Father, and he will at once put at my disposal more than twelve legions of angels?

It is no wonder that a reign coming from above should be protected by celestial forces rather than by men. That is in fact the fundamental distinction between the kingdom of God and other kingdoms. The other kingdoms come from men (here on Earth), but the kingdom of God comes from our Father who is in heaven! We will soon discuss the Lord’s Prayer; meanwhile, see this prophecy of Daniel about a kingdom set up by God