The Gospel of the Kingdom of God

By Austin R. Dayal

Jesus preached the gospel of the kingdom of God and taught about its values throughout his ministry. All four gospels endorse this fact. The disciples continued to preach the gospel of the kingdom for two generations but during the second century things began to change and by the fourth century when Christianity became a state religion, the gospel of the kingdom of God was changed to the gospel of personal salvation. This error had a catastrophic effect on the life of the church. The early church followed the values of the kingdom Jesus outlined in the Sermon on the Mount. Whereas today, we are mainly concerned with the salvation of the soul and the importance of God’s kingdom, and its values are lost. The church must reclaim the gospel of the kingdom and follow its values, to demonstrate the beauty of the kingdom that the world may believe in Jesus.

• Language: English
• Publisher: WestBow Press
• Release date: Dec 28, 2021
• ISBN: 9781664249752

Austin R. Dayal

Austin Robinson Dayal lives in Adelaide, Australia. He is married and has two grownup children. Austin has been associated with the ministries of Operation Mobilisation and Student’s Evangelical Union in Australia and overseas. He has published A Life Worthy of the Call through Authentic Books. He currently worships at the Corner Uniting Church, Adelaide. He has a Ph. D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Sydney, and he has worked for CSIRO as a research scientist.

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Copyright © 2022 Austin R. Dayal.

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Scripture quotations taken from The Holy Bible, New International Version® NIV® Copyright © 1973 1978 1984 2011 by Biblica, Inc. TM. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

Scripture is taken from GOD’S WORD®, © 1995 God’s Word to the Nations. Used by permission of Baker Publishing Group.

Scripture taken from the New King James Version® Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Some of the quotes that are not listed in the Endnotes have been taken from the Commonprayer.net. Used by permission of Zondervan Publishing, part of the HarperCollins Christian Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-6642-4974-5 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-6642-4976-9 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-6642-4975-2 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021923181

WestBow Press rev. date: 12/28/2021

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

Preface

Introduction

Chapter 1 The gospel Jesus proclaimed

The mission of Jesus

Example of the first century church

Chapter 2 The kingdom of God

The Kingdom of God and the history

Kingdom of God and the church

Mystery kingdom and its purpose

Parables of the mystery kingdom

Chapter 3 Values of the kingdom

Values of the kingdom in Matthew’s gospel

Sermon on the Mount – the beatitudes (Matt. 5:1–16)

Sermon on the Mount – the Law (Matt. 5:17–7:29)

Kingdom of God and its values in other gospels

Kingdom values in the life and works of Jesus (Matt. 8:1–28:20)

God’s kingdom and its values in letters written to the churches

Values of the kingdom for us today

Chapter 4 The morphed gospel

The early church

Moral values of early Christians

Love and unity among believers

Likely issues behind the change

Ethnic and racial divide

The Mammon

Cultural supremacy

Preoccupation with nonessential issues

Chapter 5 Reclaiming the gospel of the kingdom

Awakening the DNA of divine love in our lives

Humility

Leaving the worldly riches to live an abundant life

Other issues

Spiritual modesty

Chapter 6 People of the kingdom

Repentance

Born of the Spirit

Leaving the world and its things

Be like children

Trust in God

Obedience and true righteousness

Chapter 7 Life of the kingdom people

Leaving the world for God’s kingdom

Following the values of God’s kingdom

Christian community

A way forward for the kingdom people

Christian communities around the world

Bruderhof community

Koinonia Farm

Taizé community

Reba Place Fellowship

Church of the Sojourners

The Simple Way

Rutba Place

Future possibilities

Author’s Note

Endnotes

Dedicated to all the Christian communities that follow the values of

the kingdom of God, Jesus outlined in the Sermon on the Mount.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am thankful to God for helping me write this book. He has been the source of my inspiration and strength, during the course of this project. I am grateful to my beloved wife Shobha for editing the manuscript and making useful suggestions that have been a great help in expressing the contents of this book in a better and more interesting manner. I want to thank our son Jason and our daughter Mahima who are a source of great joy and blessing to us.

PREFACE

The teachings contained in the four gospels are about the kingdom of God. Jesus proclaimed that the kingdom of God had come near and taught its values throughout his ministry. But today we preach the gospel of personal salvation. This change has affected the teaching of the gospel. We talk about the Sermon on the Mount and the parables of the kingdom, but they are interpreted from a wrong perspective. The Sermon on the Mount is seen as an ideal that is impossible to achieve, and the parables of the kingdom are interpreted without any reference to the kingdom of God. The kingdom is mostly seen as something that Christ will establish when he returns. But Jesus would not have spent most of his time teaching about the kingdom if it was thousands of years away. And he certainly would not have proclaimed that the kingdom of God had come near, right at the start of his ministry.

Despite what people think today, the first church in Jerusalem was a demonstration of God’s kingdom on this earth. It was a fulfilment of Jesus’s declaration that the kingdom of God had come near. Jesus came to invite people into God’s kingdom. The only requirement was that they should repent of their sins. That is why he said, Repent, for the kingdom of God is at hand. He explained the reason to Nicodemus and said that flesh and blood can’t inherit the kingdom of God, and therefore he must be born of the Spirit. The kingdom of God stands in a different league, compared to the kingdom of this world. It is a real kingdom but of uniquely different values. Instead of pride, hate and greed it is based on humility, love and sacrifice. The salvation from sins has relevance only in the context of the kingdom of God. If salvation is just a means to get us to heaven, then it is an extremely limited view of the gospel.

Jesus came to deliver us from the wretched life of sin and to give us an abundant life here on this earth. But the abundant life Jesus offered to his followers was different to what most people thought. Imagine their surprise, when he told his followers that to gain this life, they must leave everything that belongs to this world, including money. Even his closest disciples were struggling to understand this. To them an abundant life meant a life of plenty, but Jesus was asking them to leave everything! This was not only their dilemma, but we also find it hard to reconcile these two things. Because we fail to realise that greed is the major cause of human suffering. Wars have been fought and people massacred and dispossessed of their land, all because of greed. Those who have one thousand want to have ten thousand and those with ten thousand want one hundred thousand. There is no end to our greed.

The earth has finite resources and if everyone wants more, then some people will be left with nothing. That is why Jesus taught us the important principles of God’s kingdom in the Sermon on the Mount. The tenet of the kingdom of God is to live for the common good of all.

This book explores the New Testament, the writings of the early church fathers and other documents written by Christian philosophers and Christian leaders of the first three centuries, to determine how this change came about and what can be done to recover the gospel that Jesus preached. It talks about a few Christian communities that practice the values of God’s kingdom that Jesus taught in the Sermon on the Mount.

Dr Austin Robinson Dayal

Adelaide, South Australia

August, 2021

INTRODUCTION

Jesus came to invite everyone to His Father’s kingdom. He came to inaugurate a golden age that the Israelites had been waiting for centuries. Jesus declared, The kingdom of God has come near right at the start of his ministry and all three synoptic gospels record this proclamation.

It was going to be a kingdom of love, peace, justice, and mercy. A longing for such an age is found in many religions. In Judaism, the Old Testament prophets had foretold the Israelites, about a time, when God would rule over this earth. He was going to repeal the effect of sin from this world, and cleanse it from corruption and decay. Jesus demonstrated this when he healed the sick, cleansed the lepers, fed the hungry and cast out demons from the land of Israel. These were the signs of the coming kingdom when all the ills of sin would be removed from this earth. The kingdom Jesus announced was going to be of unique values, quite different from what the world had ever seen. By its very nature the kingdom of God is devoid of sin and therefore, it was necessary for the people to prepare themselves and leave their old sinful ways. That is why, the announcement of the kingdom was appended with a call to repent. The forgiveness of sins is a prerequisite for every human being, who wants to be a part of God’s kingdom. This is the only way a sinful human being can enter the kingdom of God.

There are three things that we must understand very clearly. First, the gospel is about the arrival of the kingdom of God on this earth. Second, the sin must be dealt with comprehensively in human life because a sinful human being can’t enter the kingdom of God. Third, the repentance and forgiveness of sins, though crucial, are simply the prerequisite conditions for entry into the kingdom of God.

The good news or the gospel was that the rule of God was about to begin on this earth, and people were asked to prepare themselves by repenting from their sins. Sadly, the church has failed to convey this message to the world by abridging the gospel message to personal salvation. All through the centuries, the church has neglected to uphold the gospel of the kingdom of God. First, by not living according to the values of God’s kingdom and second, by conforming to the values of the kingdom of this world where Mammon rules. This has harmed the church immensely and brought great dishonour to God’s Holy name.

God sent John the Baptist to proclaim the message of repentance for the forgiveness of sins (Mark 1:4). He asked the Jews to receive the baptism of repentance. When Jesus came, he announced that the kingdom of God had come near; and reiterated what John the Baptist had asked them earlier, to repent and prepare themselves for the kingdom of God. By limiting the gospel only to the forgiveness of sins we have effectively gone back to the message of John the Baptist about the repentance and have neglected what Jesus proclaimed about the arrival of God’s kingdom. John also said that Jesus will baptise his followers with the Holy Spirit and not just with water (Mark 1:8). But these days, we receive the water baptism for the forgiveness of sins, which is similar to the baptism of John the Baptist. We do not receive the baptism of the Holy Spirit that John said Jesus will give to his followers. The baptism of the Holy Spirit was essential for the believers that empowered them to live a radical life of the kingdom people. This is how the kingdom of God was inaugurated on this earth in the first century. The abridgement of the gospel message is a very serious error that can only be rectified if we reclaim the gospel of the kingdom of God that Jesus preached and follow its values.

When Jesus came and announced that the kingdom of God had come and asked the Jews to repent, the religious leaders like the Sadducees, Pharisees, teachers of the Law and the rich Herodians, found it very difficult to accept that they needed repentance like everybody else. Therefore, Jesus moved away from the self-righteous religious leaders and the rich Herodians, who ruled over Israel as Caesar’s proxy, and offered the kingdom to the poor working class who were delighted to hear Jesus’s proclamation. But the reaction of the rich was understandably dismissive; they rejected Jesus and his offer of God’s kingdom.

Most of the Jews of Jesus’s time could not grasp the fact that the presence of Christ among them meant removal of sin from their lives. He was their Messiah who was sent by God for this very mission. The animal sacrifices were not enough to accomplish this task, and deep down they knew it; but they were not sure what else could be done. There were a few prophesies about a Servant of God who would suffer greatly for the sins of his people, but these prophesies were scant and hard to interpret. The self-righteous Jewish religious leaders who were corrupt and arrogant certainly could never imagine that God would call upon his Servant, who they presumed would be one of them, to humble himself to such a degree as prophesied in Isaiah 53. All that mattered to them was money, power, and control over Am Ha’aretz or the people of the land whom they called ignorant sinners. Ironically, Jesus was one of them. They did not want to listen to such a man who was not from the elite hierarchy to which they belonged, and therefore, they rejected Jesus and his declaration of the imminence of God’s kingdom and killed him. But the power of God raised Jesus from the dead and he became the means of salvation not only for the Jews but also for the Gentiles. God in his wisdom turned an apparent disaster into a great blessing for the whole world.

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God called people and forgave them so that they may

reflect the glory of his kingdom by living a life that

was new in its substance and unique in its values.

God called people to himself and forgave them, so that they may reflect the glory of his kingdom by living a life that was new in its substance, and unique in its values. The disciples were commanded by Jesus, to leave the kingdom of this world and come to live in his kingdom; characterised by love, peace, justice, and mercy. The early disciples obeyed his command and left the world and its things; and began to live a new life, as a community of God’s people.

Sadly though, in the later centuries, the church neglected the kingdom of God and continued to live in the kingdom of this world where Mammon ruled; despite Jesus’s warning, You can’t serve two masters – money and God. Today we think that God has chosen us because we are worthy of it and this thinking is not new. In the second century Melito, the bishop of Sardis, was the first to create a framework whereby the Gentiles almost deserved to take the place of the Jews as God’s people.¹ How the sinful Gentiles, who have rebelled against God since the beginning of times, can deserve to take the place of the Jews, is beyond comprehension? Didn’t Jesus say that after doing everything that they had been commanded to do say that they were his unworthy servants? How can one adjudge himself to be worthy, knowing that he has been saved by the unmerited favour of God? No one is worthy, not even the Law-abiding Jews and least of all the rebellious sinful Gentiles. But arrogance borne out of racial and cultural superiority made inroads into people’s thinking; and put them on a road that carried them away from the path of humility and love that God desired his people to follow.

In the second century, it was somehow instilled in the minds of the Greek believers that they were superior to the Jewish believers because of their race, culture, and philosophy.