Had a question at the end of the last little time at the end of the break that I would like to make a part of my comments to all of you. When you think about temptation, it is worthwhile to distinguish between being tempted and actually sinning. To be tempted is to have the thought, the idea, the opportunity to do something that's evil. If you reject it rapidly and decisively, you resisted temptation. To have the thought occur to you is to be tempted. To act on it is to fall to the temptation. To think about acting on it, plan on acting on it, but chicken out because you're afraid to get caught is also falling to it. If you entertain it for six months and then finally say no, you probably sinned. If you entertain it for six minutes, you probably didn't sin, but I can't be sure. So back to Eve here just for a moment. I don't want to say that the minute Satan appealed to her and she thought about it she sinned, but the minute she said, I have to decide. The minute she said, now it's up to me to tell who's telling the truth. That would be taking on God's prerogatives, and that would be indeed certainly a sin. I did want to say one other thing about the temptation before we leave that topic. And that is that in the temptation, first of all, Jesus is showing himself to be the true man. He's showing himself to be victor over Satan, he's showing himself to be the one who's willing to go to the cross. He's also showing himself to be the true Israelite. Because if you search through the scriptures, and particularly if you look carefully at Matthew chapter 4, you can see that Matthew is interested in showing that Jesus passed the tests to which Israel fell or succumbed. One thing you've probably all noticed when you look at the temptation accounts is the way Jesus answers. How does Jesus answer Satan when he offers his tests? He answers, it is written. Now one thing I want to urge you all to do if you want to get sharp and interpreting scripture is to get the habit of looking up Old Testament quotations. Because usually an Old Testament quotation is extremely illuminating, not only for the passage at hand, but also usually, or at least very often, it will tell you more than simply what appears in that one line. Often it will quote one line and you'll really get the most out of the passage if you read maybe five or six verses around. So let's do that just for a minute. Jesus is tempted, and the first temptation, of course, is to turn the stones to bread. And Jesus answers, it is written, man does not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God. Now where does that quotation come from? Come to Deuteronomy, where in Deuteronomy? Come to Deuteronomy 8-3. Let's turn back to Deuteronomy 8-3, keeping our finger in Matthew or piece of paper or something in Matthew chapter 4. Turn to Deuteronomy 8-3, what is Deuteronomy 8? Anyway, it is the second giving the law, Deuteronomy 2nd law, is the second giving the law to Israel, and as he gives the law to Israel, he is recounting for them the sins of the wilderness generation. And he is telling the people as they are about to enter Canaan, don't make the same mistakes that your fathers did, they all died in the wilderness. Don't do the same things. Alright, which particular sin does he have in mind here that he is warning them against in chapter 8 verses 1 and following? Well, verse 3, he humbled you, causing you to hunger and then feeding you with manna, which neither you nor your fathers had known, to teach you that man does not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes out of the mouth of God. Now, what were the sins that Israel committed with regard to manna and food? For one thing, they hordered it, for another thing, they grumbled, they said, we wish we could go back and have the flesh pots and leeks and onions of Egypt, and then they got sick of it, and then God said, well, here have quail, till it is coming out of your ears. They committed a variety of sins with bread, didn't they? They were thankless, they were greedy, and so forth. And so God says, the Israelites failed the food test. God brought them out of Egypt, part of the Red Sea, drowned the army of Pharaoh, killed the firstborn, all the plagues, and then they got out of Egypt and they said, we want food, give us some food. And then they got the food and they said, we don't like this food. So Jesus learned that relationship with God takes priority over the food that you eat, so he passed where Israel failed. Maybe even more clearly, the second temptation, it is written, verse 7, when Jesus is asked by Satan, or tempted by Satan to jump off the temple, it is written, do not put the Lord your God to the test. Don't test God, don't demand that God perform. All right, where does that come from? Deuteronomy 616, let's look at Deuteronomy 616. It says, if you're the Lord, God is a jealous God, verses 13 to 15, then verse 16. Do not test the Lord your God as you did at Massa. That doesn't help much, does it? What do we have to do now? We have to find out what Massa is. All right, what's Massa? If you have a good cross reference Bible, let's go tell you where Massa is, it's in Exodus chapter 17. And even if you don't have a good cross reference Bible, if you have a professor that actually plans things, then you have it that way too. Exodus 17, the Israelites have just crossed the red sea, just a couple chapters earlier. They've just been given mana. Now it says, the whole Israelite community set out from the desert of sin, aptly named, traveling from the place to place as the Lord commanded. They camped at refuge, but there was no water there for the people to drink. So they quarreled with Moses and said, give us water to drink. Moses said, why are you quarreling with me? Why do you put the Lord your God to the test? What did Jesus say? Don't test the Lord your God. What exactly did they do? They said, first of all, they grumbled and verse, it goes on to say, why did you bring us up out of Egypt to make us and our children and livestock die with thirst? Now after it's all over, Moses gives in the water and so forth. But at the end of the episode, we read this in verse 7. Moses called the place Massa and Maraba because the Israelites quarreled and because they tested the Lord saying, is the Lord among us or not? What they're saying is, hey, we like the plagues, frogs beneath, blood in an aisle, very impressive, flies all over the land, great. Cross the Red Sea, Pharaoh's army is drowned, mana from heaven, quail from heaven, but what have you done for us lately? Is God among us or not, if you don't give us water now, then Moses God is not with us. They were demanding that God perform at their bidding, give us water. Jesus did not demand that God perform. I mean, that's what he would have done if he jumped off the temple. He would have said, you better deliver me now. I don't want to wait for the resurrection. I don't want to wait to see what may happen, how you provide for me. I want to know now. That was the test. One where another, you'd know, jump off the temple. Maybe Satan was hoping he'd know negatively, but hidden the ground. He'd know. The temptation is the demand that God give him knowledge. Jesus said, I'm not going to play that game. The Israelites did, but I am not going to sin where they failed on the true Israelites. So Jesus in the temptation is shown to be. The true man, resisting temptation. The true Israelite, faithful where Israel was unfaithful. In fact, he's the one true Israelite. He's also the Lamb of God that takes away the sin of the world. He did not take the bloodless path which the temptations would have offered. And finally, he is the one who's victorious over Satan, seeing through his poise, seeing through his gambits, and so he is prepared to begin his ministry.
Question about temptation. Yes. The question is, could Jesus have meant by, don't put the Lord your God to the test? Could he have meant, don't test me because I'm your God? Let me say that's an intriguing question, and the answer might be yes. The problem is we just don't know. Let's remember, let me tell you one thing I do know. Satan is not omniscient. So he may not, don't describe the Satan the qualities of God. He may not have really known with clarity, exactly who Jesus was. He may have, I'm sure he knew by the end. Let me just say there are a couple, there are little clues here and there that Satan was confused on some points. The very fact that he entered Judas who then went on to crucify him, to betray him for crucifixion, implies that Satan wanted Jesus to be crucified, and yet Jesus' crucifixion was Satan's ultimate defeat. So let's not give too much credit to Satan for being so clever. Nonetheless, I'm not saying no to your question. I'm saying it's very intriguing, and I'm just not sure. It may be there, and we're just not quite told. Good question, yes. You know what I'm going to do with your question? I'm going to rephrase it, and I'm also going to use it to start the next subject, because it goes right into it. The question is, is Satan's temptation, I'll give you the kings of the world, a bunch of foolishness, since Jesus owns him anyway, or is Satan really the prince of this world, and did he have some authority to give it the Satan? We might say the Satan probably thought he could do it, and Satan would certainly like to think that he had that kind of authority. And it is true that we might say that Satan was just about at the end of his sway over this world, because, and I'm not fully answering your question, but here's my segue, because what Jesus came pronouncing is the kingdom of God, the reign of God. Now if God is reigning, and somebody is losing their reign, as we've already said, now that somebody, the Jews probably thought Rome, but Jesus was thinking was Satan. So even if it's true that Satan had some sway, which he does have some sway, and he did have some sway before when he kept the nations in darkness, he was just about to lose it. And when Jesus said no to him, we might say it was a further step in that direction. But let's take that as our link to the next subject, and that is the question of the role of the kingdom of God and the proclamation of the kingdom of God and the gospels. When we think about the beginning of Christ's career, we think about his birth, temptation, and so forth, we also must think about his first proclamation. His first proclamation is the kingdom of God is of hand. Now, it's not just the first thing he said, but if you can imagine being a new preacher in a church or starting a new series with a new group of people in a Bible study, you want your first lesson to set the tone, don't you? You want it to establish your themes and what you care about. So Jesus doesn't simply talk first about the kingdom, but it's also central to his proclamation. He says it first, but he also speaks about the kingdom on over 100 separate occasions in the gospels, that is his most common proclamation. Overall, on over 100 occasions, and he uses the word even more times than that, about 125 times. All four gospels, again, stress that he begins by proclaiming the kingdom. Mark 1, 14 to 15, the time has come, the kingdom of God is near, repent and believe the good news. Mark 1, first word from Jesus. Matthew chapter 4, repent for the kingdom of heaven is near. Matthew makes it clear in 423 that he went about through Galilee, teaching the synagogues, preaching the good news of the kingdom, healing all their diseases. And then he says the same thing again in chapter 9 after the first round of Jesus' ministry, to make it clear how important it is. And in Luke chapter 4, Jesus is asked to heal all the people from one town, but he says no, I'm not going to do that because I must preach the good news of the kingdom of God. I didn't come to heal everybody, I did come to announce the kingdom. So the kingdom is central to the ministry of Christ. Now when I say kingdom, I want to just clarify it a little bit. There are three ways in which the kingdom is described. One is simply the kingdom. Another is the kingdom of God, the reign of God. The third is the kingdom of heaven. They all mean the same thing. The kingdom of heaven is a way of referring to the God's reign, so does not to use the name of God, which the Jews found offensive. But they all mean the same thing, there's no point in distinguishing them at all. The word means the reign of God. When we think of kingdom in America, first of all, you know, we don't have any kings or queens that never did, so it sounds sort of like fairy tale land, right? Something far away, there was a kingdom a long time ago, there was a fairy princess, and a leths sort of thing, it seems implausible. Throughout most of history, when the word kingdom would be used, people would think of that territory, the fields and farms and rivers and lakes that a king ruled. They thought of something very concrete. The kingdom does not mean territory. The kingdom means the reign of God, the moral and spiritual reign of God. Let me give you an illustration. Thy kingdom come and the Lord's prayers followed by what? Thy will be done. For God's kingdom to come is for His will to be done. They explain each other. God's reign comes when people do His will, or when Jesus says in the parables of the kingdom, the kingdom of God is like what He's saying is, this is the way God reigns. He doesn't go on to say, it's this big, or to preach the kingdom is to proclaim the God reigns. That's the kingdom. Now, it's a new teaching, it's a new phrase, it's a new way of talking about spiritual realities. The word kingdom of God never appears in the Old Testament. Does that mean the idea isn't in the Old Testament? Is the idea in the Old Testament? Absolutely. It's one of the reasons why there was resistance to Saul as king, because it would obscure the fact that God is king over Israel. But the phrase kingdom of God is something new to Jesus' day, and it's something that Jesus uniquely emphasized. It was open to misunderstanding, and it is open to misunderstanding to this day. It was widely misunderstood by Jesus' first hearers. For example, when Jesus talked about reigning in His kingdom and so forth, His disciples quarreled about seats of honor. They thought of it in material terms, or another one that you probably know very well. When Jesus was about to enter Jerusalem, 1911, Luke 1911 says, the people thought the kingdom was going to appear at once. Maybe the clearest of them all is after the resurrection of Christ before he ascended, you recall. Acts chapter 1, verse 6, when they met together, they said to Jesus, Lord, are you now going to restore the kingdom of Israel or the kingdom to Israel now? Now are you going to kick out the Romans? Yes, there was no. The reign of God is His spiritual reign over all the world, not in a military or political or social sense, not directing. I'm going to come back to that, to get it straight, to understand the Christian life and the proclamation of Christ. Liberals have badly misunderstood the concept of the kingdom of God, and it gets us, gives us an opportunity to look at the way in which liberal Christians or unorthodox Christians think about the ministry of Christ. And I have on your handouts several misunderstandings, and I hope you don't mind the technical terminology and some of it is in your readings as well. The first misunderstanding is what is sometimes called the old liberal school, if you like big words, the non-eschatological school. Do you know what the eschaton is? Eschatology study of last things. So the non-eschatological school says, there is no eschaton. There is no end of all things. Now what does that mean? It means that there are people in this world that believe that the reign of God, the kingdom of God, is the reign of God in the individual soul as the individual is morally transformed. They believe that the kingdom of God can be summarized in phrases like the fatherhood of God, the brotherhood of man, and the infinite value of the human soul. Their favorite verse is Luke 17, verse 2, verses 2021. The kingdom is not here, or there, the kingdom is in your midst. It's right here among you. If you had just realized, if you had just reform yourselves, then you would know. There is not going to be any cataclysm, no signs in the heavens, no melting of the earth, but one by one, if we morally reform, that's the reign of God. No eschaton. Jesus in this view is essentially a wonderful moral teacher. Now not only you and I, but many other people said, you know, that doesn't do justice to the teachings of Scripture. In fact, there was a group of other liberal thinkers, critical thinkers, not Orthodox Christians, who took down the task for us. We didn't even have to do the work. It was about a hundred years ago, so we couldn't have done the work anyway. But they said, as we read the Bible, Jesus is most definitely an eschatological figure. He's talking about the end of the world, the judgment of the world, the renewal of all things. You can't simply remove that from the Scriptures, but then they took another drastic step. The drastic step they took was to say that Jesus believed the kingdom of God was going to come with a powerful cataclysm change in the world very soon. Their favorite verse is Matthew 1628. Some who are standing here will not taste death before they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom. Now, the technical term for this group is the consistent eschatological school, because they are consistent in saying Jesus is an eschatological figure. My term for them is the irreverent school, because can you tell what their view of Jesus is? They just thought he was wrong. They thought he expected world history to come to an end within five or ten or fifteen years, or maybe a couple years. He simply aired. One man put it this way, still often quoted. Jesus was tragically misguided. He knew himself to be the Son of Man. You may have this in your quotation groups. You have part of it at least. Knowing yourself to be the Son of Man lays hold of the wheel of the world to set it moving on that last revolution, which is to bring all ordinary history to a close. It refuses to turn, and he throws himself upon it. Then it does turn and crushes him. Instead of bringing the eschatological conditions, he has destroyed them, the wheel rolls onward. The mangled corpse, this is the language they use. The mangled corpse of the one immeasurably great man, who was strong enough to think of himself as the spiritual ruler of mankind and to bend history to his purpose, is hanging upon it still. That is his victory and his reign. Now, I don't know what you think, so he would be thinking this is blasphemous. I would say it's certainly unbelief, certainly unorthodox Christianity. But I could also ask how many of you have encountered people who have basically this view of Christianity in Christ, fair number of hands, the one immeasurably great man. When this man, his name is Strauss, wrote a book called Life of Christ, when this man says he was the one immeasurably great man and his victory is that he hangs as a bloody corpse on the wheels of history, what he means is Jesus' greatness, and in some sense Strauss would have called himself a Christian. Jesus' greatness lies in his moral courage and his commitment to cause. He was willing to die for what he thought was right, and in that way they would go on to say he's our savior because he shows us that we should be willing to give our life for great cause. There are a lot of people in this world who wouldn't know those words by Strauss, but that would be very close to their conception of who Jesus is. How many of you know people who have a conception like that now? Great reverence for his fearlessness, for his devotional cause, but of course no belief in him as divine God. Some other people said, no that's not right. Jesus' testimony in the pages of scripture, if anything, shows that he believed that the Kingdom of God had broken in. And their favorite verse is, Matthew 12-28, if I drive out demons by the Spirit of God, then the Kingdom of God has come upon you. What they said is, the Kingdom of God is already a present reality. I sometimes call them the old buddy's school. Their view is, it doesn't get any better than this. The God's reign is here, and maybe it doesn't look all that great, but it's about as good as it's going to get. Here we are beside the lake, which has caught some fish, and we're drinking our beer, and it just doesn't get any better than this. We may have BO, and the fish may stink, but it doesn't get any better than this. That's their view. What's the right view? The right view is here on the overhead, summarized for you a little bit, and the idea is that the Kingdom of God is here in some ways, and in some ways it is not here. Explore that a little bit, but I have a little line here for you called the Kingdom of God, which you see. The Kingdom of God, in the Old Testament here, the broken or dotted lines, was a reality, but it was only faintly present in the Old Testament, so dotted lines. Since the fall of mankind, you could hardly see throughout the world the reign of God. What you saw much more readily was the Kingdom of this world, but then, and I simply do it with a cross here, that's a cross of Christ, Jesus coming, and I've used a couple of abbreviations here. With a coming of Christ, His death and resurrection, then the Kingdom of God comes down, that's the arrows, comes down with more power. And then there's a period in the New Testament age, the New Testament era, X and S, from Christians, that's the first name, letter of the name of Christ, if that offend some people, forgive me. Just had to fit it in the box. Christians are, in some ways, in both kingdoms. The Kingdom of God has arrived, and yet we still live in this world, so that we are genuinely really in this world. And yet we are also, because Christ is raining in our lives, and that rain became powerful in the life of Christ, we are also in the Kingdom of God. And then, at the return of Christ, the Kingdom of this world and the Kingdom of God will join. I do not have the eradication of the Kingdom of the world, but rather the two join, so that God purifies and renews His creation, this world is not destroyed, we have resurrection bodies, right? This world is joined with God's world, so the two become one again. Now that's the overview, I'm going to show it to you, I'm going to put it back on if you're still writing. One of my students, a little while ago, decided to do it for me this way. Somebody did this on their computer for me. If any of you want to do things on the computer for me, I'll always be glad to see them. And this is what I use. The Kingdoms of the world, we have the Kingdom of God and the Kingdom of Satan, our feet are in both worlds. And in the world of God's writing, God's rally, we're also in this world, we just look around you. And there's no doubt that we're still in this world or this age. Now that is, I believe, the teaching of the New Testament, the teaching of Christ, what I'd like to do is show you that for a few minutes and then explore the significance of it. First of all, there are a number of teachings that show very clearly that God's Kingdom is here. The Kingdom is a present reality. Luke chapter 11, verse 20, perhaps is the clearest of them all. In Luke 11, verse 20, it says, as Jesus casts out demons, maybe we should turn to it together. Luke chapter 11, verse 20. Jesus has just cast out a demon and he says, if I drive out demons by the finger of God, then the Kingdom of God has come to you. Now that word has come is the Greek word, final, which means arrive. The Kingdom of God has arrived. It's the word you would use for, look, the cousins have arrived. We've been waiting for them from 12 until 2 and they're finally here. They've arrived. Or if you're to airport at the train station, the plane has arrived. It's in. That's the word that Jesus uses. If I cast out demons, if I destroy the power of Satan, then you know that my reign has arrived. We're on time, baby, and Satan is on the retreat. He goes on to say this in verse 21, when a strong man fully armed, who's the strong man? The strong man of Satan. When a strong man fully armed guards his own house, his possessions are safe. But when someone's stronger attacks and overpowers him, who's that? That is Christ. Attacks and overpowers him. He takes away the armor in which the man trusted and divides up his spoils. Satan is strong. But Jesus is now plundering his house. He has stripped him of his armor. He has tied him up and now he can do what he wants. The Kingdom has arrived. Very similar passage, Matthew chapter 12, verse 28, saying something very similar. If I cast out demons by the finger of God, then you know the Kingdom of God has come upon you. But there are lots of other ways of seeing that Jesus brings the Kingdom of God is here. For example, what's the first beatitude? Blessed are the poor four. There's is, not will be, there's is the Kingdom of God. It is a present possession to them. When Jesus sends out his 12 disciples, they're supposed to command the Kingdom, they're supposed to proclaim the Kingdom of Heaven is near a hand. It's right here, not near in a sense of coming in a while, but it's here. In Luke 19, verse 9, today salvation has come to this house. When salvation comes, the reign of God comes. When Jesus performs miracles, we know that he is undoing the power of sin. So his reign has come. He fulfills the Messianic prophecies and performs those miracles so that we know. When the disciples come back from the mission of preaching in Judea and in Galilee, Jesus hears their good report about the demons responding and the proclamation of the gospel and he says, I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven. The Kingdom is here. He's given the gospel to the poor, he's given his life as a ransom for many. Sinners are coming through repentance. The Kingdom of God is in your midst in the presence of Christ, the power of Christ is in your midst. Enough said. The Kingdom of God is here. Do we need to say more? I'll tell you a story. I was going to preach a sermon long time ago when I was a pastor and I was preaching a sermon on the Kingdom of God. I was a pastor of a very small church in the Rust Belt of Maryland. Lots of clothing, steel plants and textile plants. Unemployment was almost 20% at one point and always around 15%. So it wasn't a rich place. Across the street there was a man who lived from me who worked for a tire plant. It closed down after a while too but it was still open. And his car, my car, were parked close to each other. He had enormous, new, gleaming days of chrome, chrome laden, Buick. And next to his Buick was my car. It was a tiny, greenish yellow, rust riddled, Dotson. As even before Dotson was Nissan, it's that old. It's that long ago. You wouldn't want to transport small animals in that car because they could fall through the holes in the floor. Later I was at a college. And I was speaking about the Kingdom of God. And I noticed that this college was a Christian college before I came here, obviously, a few years ago. The lecture hall where the Bible department did a lot of their lecturing had had a water leak, the roof leaked and the water leaked and it made just a mess, paint and plaster was peeling off. And it just couldn't get enough money to repair it. And you know, that's kind of a picture. I'm a preacher about the Kingdom of God but here I am riding around a rust riddled, bedraggled, ugly old Dotson. And the world has the Buicks. And I'm preaching or I'm teaching a class on the Kingdom of God and the reign of God. And you know, the school can't even get the money together to pack the roof so that we don't have water stains and peeling plaster all over the place. That's the way it is. I mean, the glory is not upon us yet, is it? The reign of God is here. We're still long ways are entering into glory. And even the most proud or the most optimistic of us would have to admit to that. If only if experience were not enough, the Bible itself. What does the Lord's prayer say? What do we pray for about the Kingdom? May the Kingdom come. Why? Because it still has to come. There is the Kingdom but we also pray for the Kingdom to come to. We have parables about the Kingdom. What do the parables about the Kingdom say? The Kingdom of God comes like a thief in the night, it comes like a seed, it comes like a little seed, like a little nothing. Just a seed. And it slowly grows. Well, no one's watching. The Kingdom of God is like 11. Just a tiny bit of 11. Slowly, it'll transform the whole loaf. But meanwhile, it's small. It doesn't work in a quiet and in a hidden way. And of course, all the references to the last day and the future coming of Christ the day when Satan will be finally defeated the day when people come from east and west, the day when the weeds will be burned and the righteous will shine like the sun. That's all the future. So the Kingdom of God is here and yet in some ways is not here. The whole Ministry of Christ could be viewed as a Ministry of the Kingdom for claiming the Kingdom. The Sermon of the Mount, all of his moral teaching is living morally under the reign of Christ. The miracles are the power of the Kingdom of God. The missionary teaching is the expansion of the Kingdom of God. It's here. It's not here. That's the paradox. And that's one reason why I like this particular picture that my student drew for me on his computer. It's not just that it's nice and symmetrical and nice color of blue and so forth. But that little picture actually describes our life, doesn't it? We're torn. And to understand the Kingdom of God here and not here, and I'm sure some of you are wondering, why are we going into this? Why do we even care about whether consistent eschatology or all these errors? It's vital to understand that the Kingdom is here and the Kingdom is not here in order to understand our identity as Christians because isn't that our life? It's here and it's not here. God loves us and we're sons and daughters of God and we're remade in his image and we have all these privileges and our sins are forgiven and we're unconditionally loved and yet our eyes are full of tension and full of doubts and full of questions at times. We live between the times. Our citizenship is in heaven, Paul says, but it's also on earth too. It explains what blaze past God, a great Christian for a few centuries ago called the grandeur and the misery of man. It explains the ecstasy, the agony of being a Christian. It explains the dissonance that we feel as Christians as we examine our lives realistically. We feel something of the glory of Christ. We feel like we're being changed, we're forgiven, we're new people. And yet if we're honest with ourselves, we still have petty deceits, petty selfishness. We use people in small ways, don't keep our commitments. How can we do that? Because the Kingdom of God is here, we have an aspiration to more. Because it's here, we have enough courage to be hard on ourselves to aspire to something more. Because it's not here, we are in genuine distress. Absolutely. The question is, not realizing the Kingdom of God doesn't make us feel too weak, not realizing the power that we have. Certainly there are a lot of defeated Christians. I want to say we've got to have that tension. We don't want to be defeated. Nor should we be triumphalistic, name it and claim it. If I just have enough faith, everything will happen for me. No, sorry. The reign of God is not perfectly manifested. Neither defeated nor wildly overconfident. Because we live between the ages, we live in tension. Real confidence, but not overconfidence. That's what we want. Something else needs to be said about the Kingdom. If the Kingdom is here, but it's not fully here, we're moving toward the day when it comes in full indeed. Then that does have to do with our ministry in this world. One of the mistakes the Church can make is to get too narrow. And to think only about the Church, and only about spiritual things, said earlier that the Jews thought a little bit too much about politics and economics and we're hoping for the destruction of Rome. So that was a mistake. But it's not all wrong to think about economic and social transformation and political transformation. Let me tell you another story. Not too long ago. Somebody called me up and asked me to do a retreat. It's fine. What would you like? What if I'm free? Let me see if my schedule makes sense. What would you like me to speak on? Run through those sorts of questions. And they said, well, we'd like you to speak on prayer. And I said, well, I don't really want to speak on prayer because, in my opinion, any group I'd speak to about prayer, especially a retreat group, I mean, after all these are more dedicated people. Probably knows everything they need to know about prayer. The only question is whether they do it or not. And just to go talk about it, some more probably make very little difference. And they said, hmm, well, then do you have any suggestions? I said, well, yeah, I do. In fact, why don't we do a retreat on something really different? Why don't we do something on Christians? We don't know anything about where the problem is the opposite, where we don't know enough. How about a retreat on Christians and food or Christians and humor or Christians and body life, gender and sports and food and all that stuff, or maybe something just really different. You know what they did? They said, you're so funny. That's really funny that you would say that. Now tell us what you really want to speak on. I said, no, that's what I really mean. They could not believe that I wanted to talk about something so unspiritual as food or humor or sports or gender or things like that. They just couldn't imagine that. And see, that's the narrowness that sometimes strikes us. Now, I'll admit, I know why they didn't want to retreat on that because there aren't lots of Bible verses on that. And so it'd be very speculative, you see. And how could you be sure he's telling the truth? And so on. And there really is something to that. The truth is the farther we get away from clear teachings of the Bible, the farther we are from certainty. And if I gave a theology of humor or bodies or sports or food, I'd probably say a lot of things were false. But there's probably something wise, I hope, about moving outside the areas of absolute certainty. If you know that the reign of God has begun to break into this world, then we should speak maybe not from the pulpit, maybe not with full authority if we don't really know everything about the reign of God and economics and social change and bodily life and all the rest. So the kingdom of God, we've walked through some things. We've discussed the fact that there's a lot of debate, a lot of uncertainty. I've tried to point out to you that this is not just a matter of theological debate. A lot of debate, the debate has shown us the kingdom is here and it's not here. And that explains a lot of things about our life as Christians.