[b]The Radical Kingdom[i]by Art Katz
"It is interesting to see the kind of view held by the apostolic fathers. They believed in a Kingdom view that says God has appointed a time when He will judge all men. “He will judge the world in righteousness through a man whom he has appointed, having first proved to all men by raising him from the dead” (Ac 17:31). I do not have time in the few moments we have together, but I invite you to look at the reference of “the day of the Lord,” the judgment of God. God as Judge is one of the central factors of the consciousness of the apostolic generation that is completely lost from our own consideration, for which reason we are still fornicating like jackrabbits, or at least contemplating the possibility. The easy standards that have prevailed in our charismatic and evangelical age is a testimony to the fact that we, unlike the apostolic Church fathers, do not believe that God is the Judge, and we have not the faith to believe that we are actually being observed. We have not a living conscience that establishes what our conduct is when we are not being observed and determines what kinds of thoughts we allow ourselves to think when we are free to think what we will. We do not really believe in our hearts, with Paul, that God has appointed a day in which He will judge all men for all that they have done in their bodies, both good and bad.
Because the Church has not communicated the sense of God as Judge, this world is on a reckless course of such abandon, of such apostasy, of such total self-indulgence and gratification so as to make the things that God looks upon as abomination the standards of behavior in our own generation, or at least alternate lifestyles. Sodomy has become an alternate lifestyle, because there is no fixed standard, because the world does not believe in a Holy Judge, because it does not believe God has given a law that is common to every generation; it thinks the law has been abolished because grace has come.
The world is in this very condition because we, as the Church, have not lived in a priestly fashion before it, to teach the world the difference between the common and the profane. We have not communicated the sense of the fear of God, because we ourselves do not have it. Paul says, “knowing the terror of God, we persuade men” (II Cor 5:11), but we have been notorious in our failure to persuade men. We may have enticed a few by telling them that God has a plan for their life or by telling them about the benefits they will receive if they make a decision to “accept Jesus,” but we have persuaded very few, because we ourselves do not know the terror of God. We do not understand Him as Judge. We are not living as if we believe that God has appointed a day in which He will judge the world. We do not believe that there is a standard that God requires, not only of the Church, but also of nations and of men. We do not live as though we believe that “righteousness exalts a nation” (Pr 14:34). The coming of God to earth was not just to bring a certain body of truths for a Church, but to bring a revelation of God to the earth. We have not made the message known to the nations.
There is a righteousness that God is going to hold both nations and men responsible, and for which He is going to judge them…………………………………….
…………………………….It is amazing that the rapture theory, which is hardly more than a century old and was never understood by the Church fathers, has become so sacramental today, that even to question it is to put yourself in the place of being suspected of being heretical. The hope of the Church was not escape in times past; the hope of the Church was a Kingdom come, and a King coming to rule and to reign in the earth with His saints. That hope needs to be revived. It needs to be restored as the true hope, which will bring to the Church an electric, dynamic expectancy and an atmosphere that God intended to prevail in our life.
I want to suggest the reason that we take the millennial and theological views that we do; it is not because they are air-tight with reasons given for them in the Scriptures, but I think that we choose the view that is comfortable with our timidity, with our fear, with our cowardice, with our reluctance, and with our desire to avoid confrontation. It is not the love of the truth that determines why we take a millennial view of seeing some future Kingdom age that will take place independent of us. We choose to believe that and to enjoy subscribing to that, because it absolves us of present responsibility now. Our cowardice has more to do with our theology than our love of the truth.
The founding fathers saw an unbroken continuum. They did not see a God of the Old Testament and a God of the New; they saw a God of Law, a God of Justice, a God of Righteousness, a God who has been fulfilling His purposes before the foundations of the earth were laid, and a Lamb that was slain, because sin took place in the heavenlies before it was ever manifest in earth. They saw a cosmic purpose of God, and they saw the purposes of the Church. They had a view that we lack, which needs to be restored. We have cut it up into convenient pieces, into little categories, and the result of doing this has unfitted us to be a Kingdom people, for we have no Kingdom expectations. It is only some future thing, and therefore it never comes.
We have chosen convenience over confrontation, and passivity over proclamation. We have preferred to be the Church invisible rather than the Church triumphant. We have surrendered the world to Satan, so long as our small portion goes unimpaired and the things pertaining to our security and pleasure are not threatened. Just allow our Sunday services to continue, allow our income as ministers to continue, and our lifestyles, just allow those things to continue, are the unspoken norms. We need to see how cowardly we have been and how comfortably we have allowed the world to define our circumstances, so long as our self-interest is not threatened. We have some reasons by which we can justify our conduct, because, after all, we are bringing a Sunday service, and we are bringing a sermon, and we are visiting someone sick in the hospital. The fact is that we have fallen below God’s Kingdom intention. We are not fulfilling our mandate. We have preferred to be invisible rather than triumphant, convenient rather than confrontational, passive rather than proclaiming. We have surrendered the world to Satan.
God expects His glory in the earth to be made visible through men in the practicalities of their daily life in the earth. That is the faith. Therefore, repentance needs to begin in the house of God. God will judge the earth. God will judge the Church, and it is our repentance that brings in the Kingdom of Heaven that is at hand.
We are without a sense of the past or an expectation of the future. Why it is that the Holy Spirit has been relegated to improving our services or renewing our denominations, that we have not seen Him in the context in which He was intended—namely as the enablement of a Kingdom come? Why it is that we have dismissed martyrdom as some historic phenomenon out of the past, completely irrelevant to our life?
In conclusion, I want us to realize that we need God to stir our hearts and break our hearts. He needs to show us how much our theology has been conditioned by our cowardly hearts, rather than a love of truth and a desire to see God’s ultimate intentions fulfilled. Finally, we need to see how quickly we have condescended to theologies of convenience, which have absolved us of responsibilities today to bear the fruit of God’s Kingdom “on earth as it is in heaven.”"