Restoration Fellowship Podcast

The theological writings of our time are full of evidence to show how unfairly the teaching of Jesus about the Kingdom has been treated.

In the teaching of Jesus the future is always prominent and the present is meaningful as a preparation for the end of the age when Jesus returns.

The data we have examined reveals a Jesus who is a thoroughly political figure, though he wielded none of his political authority at his first coming and kept himself and his followers strictly apart from the politics of the day.

On another occasion Jesus had thrown further light on the Kingdom of God by comparing himself to a nobleman who was destined to depart and later return to take charge of his father’s kingdom.

A number of critically important sayings of Jesus have not received the attention they deserve.

Traditional versions of Christianity have been curiously reluctant to acknowledge the political dimension of Jesus’ teaching.

Neither of these solutions does justice to the evidence of the biblical documents. In both cases large sections of the available data are simply not being taken into account.

The Messiah is to be a descendant of the house of David, and his purpose is to restore the Kingdom to Israel and extend its influence over the world.

It must be significant that the Kingdom of God is the substance of the very first thing said about Jesus, even before his birth: “The Lord God will give him the throne of his father David and he will reign over the house of Jacob forever; and his Kingdom will have no end” (Luke 1:32, 33).

Our Christian documents point to one undeniable fact: Jesus was concerned above all with the Gospel about the Kingdom of God.

A Solution to the Riddle of the New Testament

The so-called problem of Jesus’ Messianic consciousness can be solved only when scholars abandon their prejudice against the Messianism which pervades the New Testament and indeed the entire Bible.

Scholarship has reached an impasse in its attempt to understand the life and teaching of Jesus. Long established and deeply rooted patterns of thought prevent it from entering fully into the spirit of his mission. The difficulty lies quite simply in a lack of sympathy with the Messianic Kingdom which was the center of all that Jesus taught.