The Cleansing of the Temple and God’s Coming Judgment on Israel

The Cleansing of the Temple and God’s Coming Judgment on Israel

Jun 17, 2026 | Eschatology

I’m currently writing a book about AD 70, which if you’re not familiar with that date, is why I’m writing the book. Every Christian should be taught the theological and redemptive-historical significance of the destruction of Jerusalem, which Jesus predicted in the Olivet Discourse (Matthew 24, Mark 13, Luke 21). I’m working on a chapter which I’ve titled, “Jesus’ War with the Jewish Religious Professionals”; they didn’t get along very well. One story I’m looking at in this contentious relationship is Jesus’ cleansing of the temple, its theological and redemptive-historical significance.

I discovered an interesting connection of the temple cleansing with the Old Testament from a sermon by Doug Wilson about Leviticus 14 where the Lord tells Moses and Aaron how they are to cleanse a house from mold after they enter the Promised Land. It’s fascinating how the Lord prefaces his instructions: “and I put a spreading mold in a house in that land.” Mold just doesn’t show up “naturally,” but God is sovereign even over mold! Sin and sinful human beings are under God’s sovereign control as well, not in any way we could understand or that mitigates personal responsibility, but nothing or no one happens outside of his dominion, that he in some way causes or allows; nothing surprises him.

We read of three significant redemptive-historical events in Matthew 21, Mark 11, and Luke 19: the Triumphal Entry, the cleansing of the temple, and Jesus cursing a fig tree. Jesus was teaching in the temple courts and the chief priests and elders confront him, ““By what authority are you doing these things?” they ask. “And who gave you this authority?” Jesus, as he often did, asked them a question, and he would only answer them if they would answer him:

 25 The baptism of John, from where did it come? From heaven or from man?” 

They don’t answer because they feared the people who consider John a prophet, so Jesus won’t answer them; but in fact he does in two parables targeting the religious leaders. The first is the parable of the two sons, only one who in the end does his father’s will. The other is the parable of the tenants. Jesus is declaring judgment upon the Jewish religious leaders, and by extension Jerusalem itself and the entire Jewish religious context, the Old Covenant, which will be carried out in AD 70.

It’s important to place those parables and the judgment Jesus is declaring through them in context. We are getting to the culmination of Jesus’ three years of ministry, and the case he is bringing against the Jewish religious leaders. Just prior, Jesus had entered Jerusalem for his final Passover week in the Triumphal Entry where the people were proclaiming him Messiah. From a prophetic perspective, Jesus is clearly proclaiming himself king of the Jews, and Matthew to emphasize it quotes Zecheriah 9:9 predicting Israel’s king will be coming riding on a donkey. Then as king he cleanses the temple. In The Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah, the great nineteenth century Jewish Christian convert, historian Alfred Edersheim, compares the first temple cleansing at the beginning of Jesus’ ministry (John 2) with the second one, and calls the latter a “final judicial sentence.” Some scholars think there is only one temple cleansing, and John has a different reason for putting it early in Jesus’ ministry, but I’m inclined to think there are two. John’s gospel was written later, and maybe he sees no need to address something that was already so well known among Christians.

The other reason I think it’s likely two is because a plausible connection can be made between the temple cleansing and the cleansing of a house in Leviticus 14. There was a very specific process If someone sees something like mold in his house, he must go to the priest who will inspect the house and it must be closed for seven days. If the mold spreads the stones must be taken out and discarded, and clean stones put in their place. Then we read:

43 “If the defiling mold reappears in the house after the stones have been torn out and the house scraped and plastered, 44 the priest is to go and examine it and, if the mold has spread in the house, it is a persistent defiling mold; the house is unclean. 45 It must be torn down—its stones, timbers and all the plaster—and taken out of the town to an unclean place.

In the initial cleansing in John 2 Jesus cleaned out the house, but when he came back three years later, the mold had returned so the house is unclean, and now it must be torn down, as indeed it will be, not one stone left on another. Here’s what Jesus says about the temple at the beginning of Matthew 24:

Jesus left the temple and was walking away when his disciples came up to him to call his attention to its buildings. 2 “Do you see all these things?” he asked. “Truly I tell you, not one stone here will be left on another; every one will be thrown down.”

Something unclean had defiled both the house and the temple, and since it is unable to be cleansed, the house, and the temple, must be torn down.

The Perversion of The Temple
The temple was the center of Jewish religious life. From the beginning of their inception as a people, the Hebrews, eventually called Jews during the Babylonian exile, were instructed by God to build a tabernacle where God’s presence would dwell with them. All the god’s of the ancient pagan peoples were visible in idols made by human hands. Nobody had ever heard of an invisible God, a God nobody could see, until the Hebrews were rescued by him from their slavery in Egypt. In Exodus 25-30 they were given very detailed instructions on how to build a portable tabernacle where God would dwell with his people; it would represent the visible presence of the invisible God on earth. Prior he had given them his law. He was building a unique people in the world, a holy people set apart for service to and worship of him.

Initially given the Israelites would spend 40 years wandering in the wilderness, the tabernacle would be torn down and reassembled each time to start the journey again and stopped. Once they crossed the Jordan and finally made it into the promised land it settled in Gilgal for a time near Jericho, and then to Shiloh for three hundred years during the time of the Judges, and after several other moves eventually during the time of David made it to Jerusalem. David wanted to build a temple honoring God so he would not dwell in what was basically a tent, but it was not to be. He was given instructions by God which he passed on to his son Solomon who built what we now know as the first temple. It was destroyed some four hundred years later in 586 BC by the Babylonians, and then when the newly called Jews (people from Judea) returned to Jerusalem they started to rebuild it, what came to be known as the second temple. That was finished later that century, and stood as is until Herod in about 20 BC greatly expanded and renovated it. Herod’s grand temple was one of the wonders of the world and the one standing when Jesus lived.

I provide this very brief history lesson on the temple to give us some sense of how important it was to the identity of the Jewish people as Jews. The tabernacle, where God dwelled among his people, once housed in a tent but now in this magnificent building, defined everything about them. Multitudes of Jewish people would stream to Jerusalem several times a year during the Jewish festivals to worship there, and it was inconceivable that it would not always be a presence among them, as indestructible as they were as a people. This was why the disciples of Jesus were so shocked when he told them it would be utterly destroyed, and why as we’ll see his predication lived on in the New Testament church

By the time of Jesus’ ministry, the holiness of the temple had been compromised, or how else could it be turned into a “den of thieves.” Edersheim says the buying and selling taking up much of the temple precincts during Passover was deeply unpopular with the people. He tells us the reason why:

The whole of this traffic—money-changing, selling of doves, and market for sheep and oxen—was in itself, and from its attendant circumstances, a terrible desecration; it was also liable to gross abuses.

The people were stuck and easily ripped off. There was a lot of business going on that week, and likely a lot of people being taken advantage of.

The temple complex is huge, covering about thirty acres divided into several different courts, or sections, with each court getting more restrictive about who could enter it. The largest part opened to everyone was called “the Court of the Gentiles,” and where the vendors set up shop. This is why Jesus in rebuking the Jewish leaders who have allowed this to happen quotes two Old Testament passages speaking specifically to his “judicial sentence” against the Jews (from Is. 56 and Jer. 7):

17 And as he taught them, he said, “Is it not written: ‘My house will be called a house of prayer for all nations’? But you have made it ‘a den of robbers.’”

Nations in Greek is ethnos, peoples, Gentiles, so non-Jews. They’ve basically shut out the Gentiles from coming close to God in the most holy season on the Jewish calendar, and Jesus is furious. In John as the disciples witness the first cleansing, they remembered what David said in Psalm 69, that “Zeal for your house will consume me.” All the way back to Abram in Genesis 12 the entire purpose of their religion was to bless all peoples on earth. So in addition to Jews being taken advantage of, the traders are keeping Gentiles from coming near to God on the holiest season of the Jewish year.

After he has declared his message to the masses, he’s with his disciples and gives a more symbolic picture of what’s to come in the withering of the fig tree. It was rich with leaves, but without fruit. Edersheim comments:

And the judgment, symbolically spoken in the Parable, must be symbolically executed in this leafy fig-tree, barren when searched for fruit by the Master.

Luke who doesn’t address this event, tells us that even before Jesus got to the city, he declared judgment and wept (Luke 19), predicting exactly what would happen in 40 years: 

41 As he approached Jerusalem and saw the city, he wept over it 42 and said, “If you, even you, had only known on this day what would bring you peace—but now it is hidden from your eyes. 43 The days will come upon you when your enemies will build an embankment against you and encircle you and hem you in on every side. 44 They will dash you to the ground, you and the children within your walls. They will not leave one stone on another, because you did not recognize the time of God’s coming to you.”

Specifically, God coming to the Jewish nation in the person of Jesus of Nazareth.

God’s Judgment is Coming Upon the Jews

The Christian church was born into a temple dominated Jewish culture, and initially built in that environment as we see in Acts. It took the stoning of Stephen to force their vision beyond Jerusalem. As Luke tells us, “On that day a great persecution broke out against the church in Jerusalem, and all except the apostles were scattered throughout Judea and Samaria.” Many Jewish Christians had a difficult time seeing Christianity beyond their Jewish faith, as we also see in Acts. It would take something dramatic to finally break Christianity from Judaism, and Jesus spent his entire ministry warning the Jews, especially the Jewish religious leaders, that judgment was coming upon them. Nobody, until it happened, could fathom it would take the destruction of the temple to accomplish this. The Old Covenant and the old dispensation of relating to God would have to be ripped from them brick by literal brick. We read in Matthew 24 how the disciples were marveling at the grandeur of the temple, and Jesus burst their very substantial bubble:

2 “Do you see all these things?” he asked. “Truly I tell you, not one stone here will be left on another; every one will be thrown down.”

Then he gives a breakdown of how this will come to pass. You have to imagine they were incredulous. Surely, they must have thought, not the temple. But they all knew the first temple had once been torn down by the Babylonians 600 years previously, so it wasn’t a concept completely foreign to them, but still, it had to be shocking.

When we read Matthew 24 and the other passages in Mark and Luke about it, it’s clear Christians took Jesus’ warning seriously. I came across something making this point I hadn’t noticed before. I’ve read it many times over the years, but being like most Christians, AD 70 didn’t hold much theological significance for me as it now does. When Stephen is seized and brought before the Sanhedrin, he is accused of something indicating Jesus’ teaching about the temples’ destruction is something the early church took very seriously.

12 And they stirred up the people and the elders and the scribes, and they came upon him and seized him and brought him before the council, 13 and they set up false witnesses who said, “This man never ceases to speak words against this holy place and the law, 14 for we have heard him say that this Jesus of Nazareth will destroy this place and will change the customs that Moses delivered to us.” 

They meant the temple. So by that time in the earliest days of the church it was common knowledge among the followers of Jesus. His predicting the destruction of the temple was so shocking, that people not only couldn’t forget it, but told other people about it. It would take many years after it happened for Christians to understand the full redemptive-historical significance of the fall of the temple. In Matthew 26 as he stands before the Sanhedrin, Jesus confirms what he’s been warning the Jews of for three years—he will be returning in judgment. The high priest asks Jesus if he is the Messiah, the Son of God, and he answers:

64 “You have said so,” Jesus replied. “But I say to all of you: From now on you will see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of the Mighty One and coming on the clouds of heaven.”

To his interlocutor, Jesus had spoken blasphemy, and he would be right if he wasn’t in fact the Messiah, but he is. They all knew Jesus didn’t mean literal clouds because from their Old Testament framework, and Jesus’s, clouds were symbolic of judgment. Many Christians think Jesus is predicting his second coming, but he is telling the men listening to him that they will see this. And in forty years they will.

God is Doing A Glorious Work in You, and in the World!

God is Doing A Glorious Work in You, and in the World!

Jun 10, 2026 | Eschatology, Parents and Family

Some weeks back our pastor preached on these verses in Colossians 2:

6 Therefore, as you received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk in him, 7 rooted and built up in him and established in the faith, just as you were taught, abounding in thanksgiving.

The sermon was tremendous, especially because it was framed from a Reformed perspective that puts our hope in this walk with Jesus firmly in God’s sovereign power, not our own striving. As I wrote recently, the Christian life is one of pursuit; we must ask, seek, and knock, but it is God himself who roots and builds us up in Christ, who establishes us in the faith. That is a supernatural work of God beyond our abilities, and as the pastor rightly said, “Christ is building something glorious in you!” He is the builder of this new temple by the power of his Holy Spirit. But for me, something in the sermon was lacking, which brings me to a consistent bogey man of mine: Pietism.

As I always have to remind people, I’m not talking about piety, but about a movement started in Lutheran Germany in the 17th century that developed as a response to a cold and overly intellectualized Christian faith. The intentions were good, but in teaching a more passionate faith it turned it into a completely personalized one which ended up turning Christianity into an irrelevant cultural force in the West. What was once a Christian Western civilization out of which flowed innumerable blessings, became a secular West where those blessings disappeared. So, given my perspective when the pastor said Christ is building something glorious in us, in my mind I shouted, and in the world! Unfortunately, for the Pietistic mindset Christian influence in the world, in culture and society in general, is if not irrelevant, because every Christian would love a better more peaceful God-honoring world, but beside the point. And for many, working for Christian cultural influence is a distraction from the only thing that counts, our relationship with God through Christ.

Pietism makes the focus of our faith almost totally on the individual and our personal salvation, justification and sanctification. It completely enervates Christianity’s cultural influence because lay people have no vision whatsoever of cultural transformation, that their faith is supposed to transform the world, thy kingdom come . . . Enervate is the perfect word for the Pietistic effect on the church because it means to deprive of force or strength; to destroy the vigor of; to weaken. Over the last several hundred years the church and Christianity have become completely culturally irrelevant in the West and there has been much suffering because of it. With Christianity comes blessing, as God promised Abram 4,000 years ago, that through his offspring, i.e., Christ, all peoples on earth would be blessed. When Christianity’s influence wanes, suffering follows.

Russian dissident, novelist, and historian, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn knew first-hand the consequences of the waning of Christian cultural influence in his country. In an address accepting the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion in 1983, he identified what happens when God disappears from a society and culture. Speaking to the death and destruction wrought by communism in Russia in the twentieth century “that swallowed up some 60 million of our people,” he said he “could not put it more accurately than to repeat: ‘Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this happened.’” He used phrases like, “deprived of its divine dimensions . . .” and “lacking all divine dimensions . . .” and “our Godless age . . .” and “The entire twentieth century is being sucked into the vortex of atheism and self-destruction.”

A better description of secularism, and its implications, and lack of Christian cultural influence, could not be found: “Men have forgotten God . . .” Speaking of Russian history he said:

Russia felt the first whiff of secularism; its subtle poisons permeated the educated classes in the course of the nineteenth century and opened the path to Marxism. By the time of the Revolution, faith had virtually disappeared in Russian educated circles; and amongst the uneducated, its health was threatened.

Later in the talk, he spoke of “the destructive spirit of secularism.” Destructive indeed.

Which brings me to a phrase that came to my mind as I was leaving church that day.

Where There is No Vision, The People Perish
If you’ve been a Christian any length of time this verse will sound familiar. It comes from Proverbs 29:18. The entire chapter is filled with warnings and reminders of two directions a person and a people can go, one filled with peace and righteousness and justice and blessing, or the opposite. What I quoted is from the King James Version, and is the first half of the verse. Here is the entire verse, and also in several different versions.

KJV
Where there is no vision, the people perish: but he that keepeth the law, happy is he.

NASB
Where there is no vision, the people are unrestrained,
But happy is one who keeps the Law.

ESV
Where there is no prophetic vision the people cast off restraint,
but blessed is he who keeps the law.

NIV
Where there is no revelation, people cast off restraint;
but blessed is the one who heeds wisdom’s instruction.

These four English translations capture well the nuance of the meaning in Hebrew. The word vision comes from a word meaning a mental sight, seeing with the mind. One of the frustrating things I learned very early in my Christian life is how most of the Evangelical church sees the Christian faith solely in personal terms. What counts, what is important, is that the gospel is all about my personal relationship with Jesus and my personal holiness. Of course it is very much about that, but it’s not only about that. The point of the gospel, of Jesus coming to earth, God becoming man to die for the sins of the world, wasn’t just to transform individual people, but to transform the entire world. Yes, I know, that will only happen fully at the Second Coming and Christ returning for the consummation of all things, the final enemy to be defeated being death. And prior to that, Paul tells us what Christ will be doing, is doing since he ascended to the right hand of God (I Cor. 15):

25 For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet.

Paul is confirming what the Lord revealed through the Psalmist in Psalm 110:

1 The Lord says to my lord:

“Sit at my right hand
until I make your enemies
a footstool for your feet.”

Peter further confirms this started happening at Christ’s first coming by quoting this verse in the very first Christian sermon in history in Acts 2. Christ isn’t just reigning in our hearts or in the church, but in the world! The world the Father gave him all authority over, in heaven and on earth. Victory is the vision, not fruitless battle against evil, and the justification for victory is God’s covenant promises to his people.

I am convinced of the centrality of the covenant in God’s dealing with humanity. The Triune God made a promise to himself in eternity that when the fall happened, he himself would redeem his creation, and turn it from the Devil’s playground to the means of his blessing the nations, paradise restored. Because I see the Christian faith through this lens, I always go back to the promises God made upon which we are to stand, to live and proclaim. Our confidence isn’t in us or our abilities, but in God who blesses those to bear fruit for his glory and our good.

These verses should constantly come to our mind as we “contend for the faith once for all delivered to the saints” (Jude 3).

Genesis 3
God to Satan:
15 And I will put enmity
between you and the woman,
and between your offspring and hers;
he will crush your head,
and you will strike his heel.”

Genesis 12
God to Abram:
3 I will bless those who bless you,
and whoever curses you I will curse;
and all peoples on earth
will be blessed through you.”

Genesis 15
God to Abram:
5 And he brought him outside and said, “Look toward heaven, and number the stars, if you are able to number them.” Then he said to him, “So shall your offspring be.”

Genesis 18
17 Then the Lord said, “Shall I hide from Abraham what I am about to do? 18 Abraham will surely become a great and powerful nation, and all nations on earth will be blessed through him.

Genesis 22
The Lord to Abraham after he sacrificed Isaac:
17 I will surely bless you and make your descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky and as the sand on the seashore. Your descendants will take possession of the cities of their enemies, 18 and through your offspring all nations on earth will be blessed, because you have obeyed me.”

Genesis 26
God to Isaac:
4 I will make your descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky and will give them all these lands, and through your offspring all nations on earth will be blessed.

The word bless or it’s variations is used some 65 times in the first book of Scripture, the foundational work upon which our faith is based. And as these verses indicate, it’s not merely blessing to God’s people, to the church in New Testament terms, but to nations. Never was our faith meant to be solely for us. Even Jesus in giving his disciples a charge before he ascended to the right hand of God indicated what he had accomplished was not merely for individuals or the church, but for the nations. We’re all familiar with it:

18 Then Jesus came to them and said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. 19 Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, 20 and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.”

And no, this does not mean to just disciple individuals within nations, but to baptize the nations themselves, to see Christianity permeate every nook and cranny of the society and culture.

A Vision of Victory
We can look at this in any variety of ways. If we want our nation to truly be blessed, then evil must be defeated. And I will qualify this yet again, all evil will not be defeated on this side of the Second Coming, but Christ is even now putting all his enemies under his feet. As Christians, we don’t look at the suffering, dysfunction, and sin in our world as if it’s inevitable, and there is nothing we can do about it. That’s called defeatism. God’s covenant promise is blessing, not the proliferation of evil and it’s horrible effects. Over the last several hundred years because of the rise of Pietism, Christianity has become insular and culturally irrelevant, and our societies have suffered for it. The sexual revolution of the 1960s happened because while Christians were primarily attending to their souls, secularism became the dominant worldview of the West, and our societies went to the proverbial hell in a handbasket. Proverbs 29:18 tells us why.

Let me ask you a question. Do Christians want societies with crime and poverty and broken families, suffering, misery, and premature death? What is the answer to this, so societies are not disarray? The gospel! Christ, God’s law, a Christian worldview, Christians loving and serving others, men leading their families and building things, all men and women fighting for goodness, beauty, and truth, because where they are, so Christ is whether the people in every instance acknowledge him as their author. We must have a vision of all these blessings as fruit of the gospel. We have to learn as I said above how to develop the mental sight, seeing these blessings with our minds as the inevitable fruit of the gospel. We’re not here to lose, to give the devil the default victory because things look a bit challenging at the moment. It’s like your team is down a bunch of runs, and since you’re a time traveler you know the outcome of the game already, and your team wins. Are you going to pout and cop an attitude when everything is going wrong and everyone is thinking defeat is inevitable? No! You know without a shadow of a doubt it’s not, even if at the moment things look bad. So you fight on, work, play, proclaim, create, and be a source of blessing to those in your circle of influence.

Let’s not settle for half a gospel that applies only to the narrow sphere of our personal lives. I read a wonderful book by Ken Gentry called, The Greatness of the Great Commission. He explains how the discipling work of the Great Commission goes beyond just us:

[It] aims at the comprehensive application of Christ’s authority over men through conversion. As the numbers of converts increase, this providentially leads to the subsuming under the authority of Christ whole institutions, cultures, societies, and governments.

The authority of Christ isn’t just for the church! The proclamation that Jesus is King in the New Testament church had political and cultural ramifications.

Because our commission is great, we know God isn’t just doing a glorious work in us, but in the world. The fallen world was never meant to remain the same after Christ came, rose from the dead, ascended to heaven, and sent his Holy Spirit to earth in his people. And it isn’t. The reason is that Christians throughout history never saw their mission as merely personal, and their lives reflected that. In writing his book about the greatness of the Great Commission, Gentry asks some questions hoping his answers would “be hope inducing, vision expanding, and labor encouraging.” As Christians we would should have a theology of great expectations. For me that’s postmillennial eschatology, but regardless of our eschatology, we must see ourselves as part of something as big as it gets, even if our part in the process is tiny, as for most of us it is. The Puritans were world changers because they believed, as Ian Murray writes in The Puritan Hope “that the church, despite all the odds set against her, was yet to be an instrument of blessing on a scale far surpassing all that has been previously seen in history.” The expectation of success drove their missionary efforts. As Murray writes:

With this belief in the church’s future the Puritans gained energy and resolution. Had they adopted the short-term view, the problems of the church in their day might justifiably have seemed hopeless, but they faced them with an unflinching sense of their duty toward posterity.

That says it splendidly, “an unflinching sense of their duty toward posterity.” That is our call as Christians because God is indeed doing a glorious work in us, and in the world.

 

 

 

What is the Gospel? More Than You Might Think

What is the Gospel? More Than You Might Think

May 13, 2026 | Eschatology

That seems like a simple question. Every Christian knows what the gospel is, right? Jesus died for our sins, we believe it and are saved. As Paul says in Romans 10:

9 If you declare with your mouth, “Jesus is Lord,” and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. 10 For it is with your heart that you believe and are justified, and it is with your mouth that you profess your faith and are saved. 

We’re now reconciled to God and we’ll spend eternity with Him instead of separated from Him in hell. We’re no longer enemies of God, hostile to Him and dead in our sins, but reconciled children of God. That is “the good news,” and indeed it is. However, that is not all the news there is.

The modern Evangelical’s view of the gospel is extremely reductionistic, meaning our tendency is to reduce it to something narrow and simple, as if it applied only to our salvation from sin and our own relationship with Jesus. While, we think, it might have an impact on the wider world, our society and culture, that’s a spillover from out transformed personal lives. For most Christians, cultural and societal transformation is not the purpose of the gospel. Any other impact it has on the world is nice and all, but it’s beside the point, and really a distraction from the main thing. I believe God begs to differ.

The gospel in fact was like a spiritual Big Bang. An infinitely dense point of spiritual light and blessing that 2,000 years ago exploded when Jesus rose from the dead, ascended to the right hand of God, and sent his Holy Spirit at Pentecost. The gospel is an entirely new spiritual universe transforming this material world because Jesus’s mission was to transform it, as he himself tells us in John 3:

16 For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. 

The idea of the world is pretty expansive in English, but the Greek word for it, our word cosmos, is more so. According to Strong’s, it is “properly, an “ordered system” (like the universe, creation); the world.” We as modern, individualistic Westerners tend to equate world with whosoever believes, and leave it at that. God loves people, he came to save them from their sin, that’s it. But that’s not all he was saying. The Apostle Paul gives us a picture of the expansive and all-encompassing nature of Christ’s mission, of the influence of the kingdom of God in the world, in 2 Corinthians 5:17, another verse Christians individualize but shouldn’t. The NIV has the best translation:

17 Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here! 

Yes, the new creation refers back to the pronoun anyone, but there is no pronoun directly attached to “new creation,” no “he is a new creation.” Strong’s is again helpful with the adjective attached to creation: “properly, new in quality (innovation), fresh in development or opportunity – because “not found exactly like this before.” Christ accomplished redemption, redeemed not only his people (Matt. 1:21), but when it was applied by the Holy Spirit, the end goal, the telos in Greek or purpose, was the entirety of creation, the cosmos.

An Expansive and Transformational Gospel
There is a reason most Christians miss the world transformational vision of the mission of God in Christ—Pietism. I’ve written about it here many times, and I go into it in great depth in my forthcoming book, so I won’t do that here. Briefly, I’m speaking of a German Lutheran movement that started in the 17th century and eventually came to dominate modern Evangelical Christianity. I always have to clarify what I mean for those who might think I mean Christian piety, as in a committed devotional relationship with God through Christ in daily Bible reading and prayer. Pietism, while it often includes that, is not the same as that kind of piety. It is, rather, an over spiritualized, other worldly orientation of the Christian life. The primarily personal nature of the faith I mentioned above is part of it.

If we’re to challenge this narrow, constricted vision of the Christian life, we must ask ourselves an important question: What makes the Great Commission great? Is it merely that individuals will be saved so when they die they can go to heaven? Or is it more than that? I will argue, as I do in my upcoming book, that what makes the Great Commission great is that it’s a mandate of dominion from King Jesus, as Christians being salt and light was never meant to be limited to us and our personal holiness or just the church.

If you read those parables in Matthew 5, Jesus says we “are the salt of the earth,” and “the light of the world.” By using earth and world Jesus is surely extending the scope and extent of the gospel’s influence through us to everything we do as creatures made in his image, to everything defining us as human beings and the cultures and societies we create. Yet for the last two hundred years the scope and extent of God’s kingdom influence has been a point of contention among Christians, most limiting it in the various ways I’ve mentioned.

Christians tend to see the gospel and soteriology, our salvation from sin, as the end of God’s plan for man, instead of the means to an end. Andrew Sandlin in his book, A Postmillennial Primer: Basics of Optimistic Eschatology, explains the fuller orbed biblical view of God’s redemptive plans:

The actual end is the subordination of all things to God through Christ by means of the earthly dominion of the godly. God’s purpose is not chiefly to save man and fit him for heaven, but to restore him to covenant-keeping submission and his calling as God’s dominion agents in the earth. Heaven on earth in eternity is the blissful culmination of this task faithfully prosecuted by the redeemed.

The gospel restores everything it touches because it is fundamentally a restoration project. The point of the gospel is new creation, in that the old creation, fallen and distorted, becomes paradise restored. David Chilton in his book, Paradise Restored, describes the difference between an eschatology of victory and one of defeat

We must not look upon the world with eyes that see only the Curse; we must look with the eyes of faith, enlightened by God’s word to see the world as the arena of His triumph. History does not end with the Wilderness. World history will be, on a massive scale, that of Sodom: first a Garden, lovely and fruitful; then corrupted into a Wilderness of Death through sin; finally restored by God’s grace to its former Edenic abundance.

 Throughout Isaiah we see intimations of such restoration, as in Isaiah 35:

The desert and the parched land will be glad;
    the wilderness will rejoice and blossom.
Like the rose, 2 it will burst into bloom;
    it will rejoice greatly and shout for joy.
The glory of Lebanon will be given to it,
    the splendor of Carmel and Sharon;
they will see the glory of the Lord,
    the splendor of our God.

For most of my Christian life I saw this restoration as reserved for the new heavens and earth after Christ returned, but postmillennialism turned my gaze earthward.

Per the Lord’s Prayer, we are to pray and work for, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” The entire earth is our mission field. Our eschatological assumptions will determine how we view the impact of God’s kingdom coming on earth. These assumptions will further determine how we interpret history, as well as the present and future, including our own lives. Prior to embracing postmillennialism, I didn’t realize how our theology of “end times” determines how we interpret everything about the times in which we live, whether negatively or positively. In a phrase from the name of the YouTube channel I’m associated with—eschatology matters. This was put well by Greg Bahnsen’s son, David:

The cause of an optimistic eschatology has never been one of enlightening one’s view of the future as much as informing their activity in the present.

He’s speaking specifically of postmillennialism, but the point he makes about eschatology informing a person’s “activity in the present” applies to all eschatological views, even those claiming to be irreligious, like secularists. How we view the end matters in the present. For the secular, they can only look forward to an eschatology of doom, as the multitude of dystopian movies demonstrate. Christians, however, shouldn’t embrace an eschatology of doom; unfortunately most do.

As Christians there is much we agree on about what happens after Christ returns. We also agree that part of the Great Commission is to bring the gospel throughout the earth to all peoples, and build Christ’s church. What separates us are the implications of the gospel and Great Commission for this fallen world and the peoples and their cultures and their societies, prior to Christ’s return.

An Optimistic Eschatology for Gospel Transformation
Over the last several years I’ve become convinced an optimistic eschatology is necessary if Christianity is again going to influence the direction of America and the Western world, and the entire world Jesus died for. As Chilton rightly observes:

The fact is that you will not work for the transformation of society if you don’t believe society can be transformed. You will not try to build a Christian civilization if you do not believe that a Christian civilization is possible.

Or if it’s even important, which most Christians don’t think it is. Again, it is the Pietism. If we are to have a meaningful impact as salt and light in the larger culture and nation, we have to build with a reasonable expectation of success; postmillennialism gives us that whereas the other eschatological options do not.

The most important thing I’ve learned and what changed my perspective from negative to positive, from pessimistic to optimistic, is that there is biblical warrant for doing so. The most surprising thing to me about postmillennialism when I first learned about it, is that the case is completely exegetical, and thoroughly biblical. In other words, the case is made solely from Scripture. This depends, of course, on which eschatological glasses you have on. Two different sets of glasses give us two completely different interpretations of a passage. Take the passage from Isaiah 35 I quoted above. I used to believe the desert would only bloom after Christ returned. Prior to my eschatological awakening, I believed sin and the devil had the upper hand in this fallen world. After I realized that Christ’s first coming made the blooming possible now. Christ’s righteousness, the Holy Spirit working in and through us, and his authority exercised from the right hand of God now makes it possible to push back sin and evil “far as the curse is found.”

Too many Christians view the purpose of the gospel more as a means of escape from this horrible world, than as a means of transforming this into a blessed world. As I think about this specifically, how I convince others of my eschatological optimism, I go back to the very beginning and God’s covenant promises that started His reclamation project, His reclaiming the earth back from Satan. As soon as the fall happened and the curse declared, God told Satan that the woman’s seed or offspring would strike or crush his head. Then after the Lord scattered the people over the whole earth and confused their languages, he called one man, Abram, through whom he would bless all peoples on earth. The offspring of the woman, Christ, would eventually diminish Satan’s power on earth, and would come in the form of blessing.

The beauty of Christianity is that it isn’t just personally transformational but transformational in every way, societal, technological, relational, material, etc. It effects every single thing human beings put their minds and efforts to in the light of God’s word, the gospel, and His law, for our good and His glory. These blessings will eventually leak out from God’s people to bless society. And we are never under the illusion these blessings are solely due to us, but they can’t happen without us either. Jordan Peterson, one of the most important Christian apologists of the twenty-first century even though his Christianity isn’t fully formed as we would understand it, sees Christianity as essential to bringing order out of the natural chaos of life. He’s studied evil probably more than any person alive, and he sees Christianity as the answer. As Christians we should oblige him by bringing our faith into every nook and cranny of life and “infect” the people around us with a positive vision for the future.

Lorraine Boettner puts the postmillennial perspective in its definitive terms:

We hold that Christ is not merely the potential victor, but the actual victor over sin. During the interadvental reign He is steadily putting into effect the victory that He has won, gradually overcoming the forces of evil, until all His enemies shall have been made the footstool of His feet (Acts 2:35).

He also speaks of purposefully using “the word ‘conquest,’ rather than ‘conflict,’ for Christ is not merely striving against evil, but progressively overcoming it.” We are all familiar with the passage from Matthew 16:18 when Jesus says He will build His church, “and the gates of hell will not overcome it.” I never realized I was interpreting this incorrectly all my Christian life. I thought Satan and his minions and the evil they perpetuate were on the offensive, and it was Christians and the church who are on the defensive. That is exactly backward! Gates in the ancient world were defensive mechanisms. It is the church enabled by God the Holy Spirit that is on the offensive—Satan and his kingdom don’t stand a chance!

I don’t know about you, but I’m excited to be on the winning team! That is the gospel, winning and victory over sin on this earth, in this life. Quoting Psalm 8 and referring to Psalm 110, the most quoted Psalm in the New Testament, Paul says in I Corinthians 1:

 25 For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. 26 The last enemy to be destroyed is death. 

That process of subduing his enemies, sin, disease, chaos, disorder, and eventually death, started at his first advent. That is the good news, that is the gospel we proclaim for this age, and the age to come.

He Came to His Own, and His Own Received Him Not: Jesus, the Religious Professionals, and AD 70

He Came to His Own, and His Own Received Him Not: Jesus, the Religious Professionals, and AD 70

May 6, 2026 | Eschatology, Parents and Family

One thing many Christians seem to miss is that Jesus was the Jewish Messiah, that he came first exclusively to his own people. There is a tendency to see all of Jesus’ words as written to us and universally applicable, and ignoring the historical context in which the story takes place. We’ll notice as we read through the gospels Jesus uses the word generation a lot, specifically in the Synoptic gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke where Jesus uses the word twenty-six times. Each time he uses it he is referring to the generation currently living. Even in John where that specific word is not used, John starts his gospel saying that Jesus “came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him.” That statement is a good synopsis of the entire story of the gospels and Jesus’ ministry, which is the foundation upon which is built the Apostle Paul’s ministry eventually taking the gospel to the Gentiles and the entire world.

First, Jesus has to deal with the Jews and what the Jewish religion had become by the time he started his ministry. We have to look at the gospels in the context of the flow of redemptive history, and what God’s ultimate purposes were in creating a people for Himself in the first place. This requires us to go back to the very beginning. Adam was given a charge in the garden to take the world God had given him, and in effect to civilize it. Once he created man, both male and female, he gave them this charge:

28 God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.”

We call this the dominion mandate coming from the word the King James Version used for rule, dominion. Expanding on the meaning, it indicates prevailing against, to reign and rule over, to take. Adam was given a world of raw material with which to create a world of blessings for the people he would co-create with God. Needless to say, he blew it. When sin entered the world taking dominion would become a very mixed blessing, but the blessings were there to be had. Sin just complicated things. Eventually God chose Abram, one man out of all the people’s on earth to bring his blessings to every nation, to all peoples, through him and his seed or offspring, which is Christ (Gal. 3:16).

The Jews by the time of Jesus seemed to miss this message, that their religion wasn’t just for them, but for all peoples on earth. Judaism had gotten so insular, so exclusive, that Jews were not even allowed to eat with Gentiles, or to go into their houses and visit. Since God had stopped speaking through the prophets 400 years prior, the Jewish religious professionals had turned their religion into something completely foreign to what God had intended it to be. Jesus came to rectify that.

The Misunderstood Jesus
For those of us who’ve been Christians for a while and have read and heard the gospels preached many times, they don’t shock us, or even cause us to wonder what the heck is going on. Part of the reason is that we don’t realize the gospels were not written to us, but for us. In my early Christian years I thought the Bible was God speaking directly to me divorced from the historical context in which the stories took place. Needless to say that is not the most solid biblical hermeneutic, or interpretive framework. It’s impossible to understand what’s going on unless we see it as the culmination of Jewish history, as the turning point, the pivot in redemptive history.

Jesus was a corrective, and because of that completely misunderstood. His ministry, those three short years, might best be described in Isaiah 53:3, “He was despised and rejected by men.” Despite all he said and did to prove he had come from God, he was continually rejected, even by his own family! In Mark 3 Jesus is making a ruckus, and Mark tells us his family “went to take charge of him, for they said, ‘He is out of his mind.’ In Mark 6 Jesus visited his hometown, and the response of those who knew him best isn’t exactly welcoming. They say,

3 Isn’t this the carpenter? Isn’t this Mary’s son and the brother of James, Joseph, Judas and Simon? Aren’t his sisters here with us?” And they took offense at him.

As the old saying goes, familiarity breeds contempt. And as Jesus said, “A prophet is not without honor, except in his hometown and among his relatives and in his own household.”

In chapter 5 Mark gives us two stories of how how widely Jesus was misunderstood. In the first story, a demon-possessed man everyone must have known about because of his prodigious strength came to Jesus. No wonder the demons who spoke through him gave the name Legion. They plead with Jesus not to send them out of the area, so he gives them permission to go into a very large heard of pigs, who then immediately rush down a bank into a river and drown themselves. The people’s response is to plead with Jesus to leave their region. He had cost them a lot of money and they wanted nothing to do with him. The fact that Jesus commanded demons and they obeyed him was irrelevant.

The other story of rejection in this chapter is about Jesus raising a young daughter of one of the synagogue leaders named Jairus. He pleads with Jesus to come and heal his daughter, which he promptly does. When they arrive at his house, they tell him he’s too late, she’s already dead. Jesus tells them she’s not dead but asleep. The response of the people?  “But they laughed at him.” This is what reminded me of John’s observation in the first chapter of his gospel:

11 He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him.

Jesus had already done amazing works of healing throughout the region, yet they still doubted. Moral of the stories? No matter what Jesus did, many, most Jews, would never believe. In fact, at the very end of his life he is completely alone, hung on a tree, a Roman cross, as a crucified criminal, enemy of the state. Only a handful of women are there in his final hours. He was truly despised and rejected by men. He came to bring good news to that generation, that man could be reconciled to God, that the blessings promised to Abraham and the Patriarchs could be theirs, that the dominion mandate could finally be fulfilled in him, and they wanted nothing to do with it.

Jesus’ War with the Religious Professionals and the Covenant
The ministry of Jesus is the culmination of 2,000 of Jewish history starting with God calling Abram to go from his home to Canaan to the land of promise (Gen. 12):

2 “I will make you into a great nation,
and I will bless you;
I will make your name great,
and you will be a blessing.
3 I will bless those who bless you,
and whoever curses you I will curse;
and all peoples on earth
will be blessed through you.”

The expansiveness of this promise is the point, and it goes back to the Dominion Mandate. God always intended to bless the entire earth, his creation and everyone in it, and that blessing would come through His people. The Jews forgot that, and turned this welcoming religion into an insular legalistic affair for only the few. Witness the early church’s struggle with Jewish Christians welcoming Gentiles into the church. When Peter had his vision of the clean and unclean animals and was sent to the centurion Cornelius, the Jewish Christians “were astonished that the gift of the Holy Spirit had been poured out even on Gentiles” (Acts 10). That wasn’t supposed to happen!

But if we’re going to understand the full redemptive-historical meaning of Jesus and his contentious interaction with the Jewish religious professionals, we have to see it in its legal-historical context in God’s dealing with His people. This requires some understanding of Ancient Near Easter religion, and for modern people that’s not easy to imagine. What we see in our Bibles isn’t some petulant God frustrated with His people and lashing out at them. The heretic Marcion even went so far as to see the Old Testament God as a different God. Far from it. Rather, God established a legal relationship with His people typical of an ancient Near Eastern Suzerain-Vassal relationship. A Suzerain was a superior ruler, a king, or great power who exercised dominance over a subordinate ruler or state, known as the vassal. The relationship was formalized through suzerain-vassal treaties (or a word we’re familiar with, covenants), which were common diplomatic and political instruments. These were not generally agreements between equals, although such did exist, but hierarchical relationships imposed by a stronger party on a weaker one, often after conquest, alliance, or submission.

This started with God’s unilateral covenant agreement with Abram in Genesis 15, a bizarre ritual to us, where God puts Abram into a deep sleep. He tells Abram the story of what will become his descendants’ slavery and deliverance that happens 400 years into the future, and then in the form of a firepot, a blazing torch passes between cutup animals as a ceremony to formalize the suzerain-vassal relationship between God and His people. This relationship was unique, though, because it was unilateral, only one party, the suzerain, God, declaring he would fulfill both parts of the covenant. These covenants or agreements, like our contracts today, were always established between two parties. Not with God and His people. Those who would become the Hebrews and then the Jews would never be able to keep their end of the bargain.

God rescuing His people from slavery in Egypt began to formalize this relationship as we can see from the intricate details required of the people to maintain it. God lays out the conditions and consequences most starkly in Deuteronomy 28. There are detailed blessings for obedience, and curses for disobedience, more of the latter than the former. We must notice the number one stipulation, a warning at the end of the list of blessings:

14 Do not turn aside from any of the commands I give you today, to the right or to the left, following other gods and serving them.

The turning aside, turning away from their God, was a function of their following other gods and serving them. That is the essence of the human struggle with sin. It isn’t primarily our behavior that is the issue, but which god or gods we will serve. Our behavior always flows out of that. The final result of the cursing, which would prove prophetic in Israel’s history, is destruction. It’s a sobering read knowing what happened three times in Israel’s history. First with the Assyrians destroying the northern kingdom in 722 BC, then the Babylonians destroying Judah and Jerusalem in 586 BC, and finally the Romans destroying Jerusalem and the temple in 70 AD. All this was a result of Israel’s unfaithfulness, of their turning aside to follow other gods and serve them.

Israel’s Marriage Covenant with God
In the Old Testament the covenant, i.e., legal, relationship between God and His people is depicted as a marriage, and Israel is often portrayed as an unfaithful wife who had committed spiritual adultery by turning to idols, yet God remains faithful and promises restoration. God had warned Israel of the exact consequences of the agreement, and they responded to Moses three times that, “We will do everything the Lord has said; we will obey” (Exodus 19 and 24). They willingly entered into this agreement, and would have to live with the consequences. This is the ultimate context of Jesus’ ministry and mission to the Jewish people.

If we go back through Jewish history in the Bible we see a double minded people who are not sure if they want to remain faithful to their God or follow the ways of the other heathen pagan nations. God called His people to be holy, set apart and not contaminated by those heathen pagan cultures, and by the time of Jesus the Jewish religious professionals, the Pharisees, Sadducees, and Teachers of the Law, had perfected a narrowly exclusive version of Judaism that bore little resemblance to what God intended in his promise to Abram. God’s design was that the nations wouldn’t infect His people, but rather that His people would influence the rest of the world with His blessings. After 2,000 years it was clear that just wasn’t going to work, and Jesus is bringing his message of warning to his people who instead of heeding it, kill him. Yet the Apostle Peter says in Acts 2 this was all part of the plan:

23 This man was handed over to you by God’s deliberate plan and foreknowledge; and you, with the help of wicked men, put him to death by nailing him to the cross. 24 But God raised him from the dead, freeing him from the agony of death, because it was impossible for death to keep its hold on him.

Israel’s history was one long object lesson in failure, that without God the Holy Spirit dwelling in His people, the kingdom of God could never advance on earth, or Satan’s dominion be destroyed. That would take the man who would come to be called the Messiah, who in himself would fulfill all three offices of mediator that sinful humanity required, prophet, priest, and king. As prophet, Jesus was truth teller, speaking messages the people often didn’t want to hear. It was as prophet that Jesus’ contentious relationship to the Jewish religious leaders is best understood. They chaffed at everything he said and did because it condemned them. As Jesus lamented (Matt. 23):

37 “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you were not willing.

They were determined to do the same to him. As priest, Jesus would atone for the sins of the people he spent three years condemning. Sadly, they completely missed that Jesus was himself the Passover lamb, who willingly took the wrath they deserved. And finally as King, he would be their ruler, the one to whom they owed unquestioned loyalty and obedience. Instead, they proclaimed that they had no king but Caesar.

The Jews would not accept Jesus’ atonement for their sin and unfaithfulness, and him as their Messiah, so as Jesus warned them, their house would be left to them desolate. Jesus had warned the teachers of the law and Pharisees in Matthew 23 with seven woes that judgment was coming, and in Matthew 24, what is called the Olivet Discourse, he prophesies the coming destruction of Jerusalem and the temple in AD 70. God would send an unmistakable message to the Jews and the world that there was a new way to the Father, the only way, and it was Jesus, Savior of the entire world.

The Material Implications of the Gospel

The Material Implications of the Gospel

Mar 25, 2026 | Eschatology, Parents and Family

Most Christians reading the title of this post might think I’ve mixed things up. Shouldn’t it read, “The Spiritual Implications of the Gospel”? Well, yes, it does if read the right way. The gospel’s spiritual implications have material implications as well because we live in a material world. We can’t divorce spiritual from material, nor material from spiritual. Many varied influences throughout Christian history gave us a kind of dualistic thinking about things, as if material reality were on one side, and spiritual reality on the other, and never the two shall meet. And when we see or think of the word “spiritual” we envision a kind of ethereal non-material thing, ghostly, something you can see through, not something solid like a brick. I would suggest this is a faulty view of spirituality and the spiritual, more Platonic and Gnostic than Christian, influenced more by Greek philosophical thought than the Jewish faith which birthed the Christian religion.

Having recently read through the Old Testament again, I was impressed with what an earthy book it is. There is even a sect of Jewish religious professionals that developed in the intertestamental period called Sadducees who we read about in the gospels. They only accepted the first five books of the Bible, the books of Moses, and because there is little reference to “spiritual” things in the Pentateuch, they denied the resurrection of the dead, and the existence of angels and spirits (or demons). The concept of heaven and a non-material reality where God and angels dwell is an Old Testament theme, but everything about the Jewish faith is focused primarily on man’s life in this world, and the implications for it. They had no conception of a bodyless spiritual existence of the soul going to heaven when they died. The focus for Jews always remained on this world where God blessed His people with long life, prosperity, children and descendants into the future, rather than on hope for existence after death. The are many examples of God exhorting the Israelites to obedience that they might receive blessings in this life.

Deuteronomy 8 is a good example. Moses is giving the people a vision of the life they can have, the material blessings of the promised land, if they just obey and observe His commands. Toward the end he says:

18 But remember the Lord your God, for it is he who gives you the ability to produce wealth, and so confirms his covenant, which he swore to your forefathers, as it is today.

We tend to think of wealth in a narrow sense, as mainly money and material possessions. The Hebrew word for wealth, however, is much broader and all encompassing. It has the sense of a force, whether of men, means or other resources. So, it can be an army, wealth itself, money, or virtue, valor, and strength, along with the idea of being able, of activity, like accomplishments, even an army, or band of soldiers, or great forces, including power and riches, strength and valor. The way I read this verse is that because of God’s covenant promises to the Patriarchs, he gives us the ability to prosper and flourish in this life, to accomplish substantial things for His glory, our good, and the good of others. Blessing in this life is the point of Christianity, not an accidental by product of capitalism. It was Christianity that allowed for the creation of capitalism!

This more Jewish conception of blessing carried over into Christianity, but it also inherited a strong other worldly focus that often competed against life in this fallen world. Nonetheless, Christendom was built by men and women who sought blessing in this life, not escape of this life for the next.

The Origin of our Faulty Notion of Spirituality
Joe Boot wrote a book called The Mission of God, and when we see a phrase like that, most Christians immediately think of proclaiming the gospel, of saving people from their sin so they can go to heaven when they die. The word missions brings to mind the same thing, people going to the nations of the world to proclaim the gospel with primarily a spiritual or soteriological focus, the saving of people from their sins so they can have eternal life and escape the punishment of hell. Of course it is that, but it’s so much more. Everything about the mission of God changed for Christians in the 19th century, from a this-worldly spiritual focus to a primarily other-worldly spiritual focus, the faulty kind. Nineteenth century conservative Protestant Christianity is exemplified by evangelist D.L. Moody (1837-1899). All things, including doctrine, took a backseat to winning souls. By the early twentieth century, according to George Marsden in Fundamentalism and American Culture, for Christians “evangelism overshadowed everything else.”

When I became a Christian in 1978 I was born-again into a type of fundamentalist Christianity where the focus was on evangelism, Bible reading, Scripture memory, and fellowship with other Christians. Discipleship was about developing our relationship with Jesus, and sharing that with others so they too could experience that same saving faith. This is all to the good; the problem is that that’s as far as it goes. Any implications of this faith for the culture or societies in which we lived was never mentioned. It was irrelevant because the implication was that it was the spiritual, eternal things that matter, not this life and its worldly concerns. This kind of fundamentalist Christianity came from somewhere, and I’ve written about that here many times, so I won’t rehash all that. I will briefly, though, mention the word I would like anyone who is influenced by my work to remember, Pietism. That mindset, a faulty view of spirituality, is the enemy of the true full orbed mission of God in the world.

As I always have to say, however, I’m not talking about being pious, something I’m grateful to have learned from my brothers and sisters in college in my early Christian life. I still daily practice all the things I learned there, but what I constantly warn Christians about is the German Lutheran movement of the 17th century with good intentions that over time ended up destroying Christian cultural influence in the world. Fundamentalism with its narrow, truncated version of Christianity came from that influence. It went through a first and second Great Awakening, and the Moody type of revivalism in the 19th century, eventually doing battle with the German higher criticism. Praise God for the fundamentalists in the early 20th century who did battle against the modernists and liberal Christians who turned Christianity into a completely different religion, a non-supernatural religion.

By the 1920s, unfortunately, fundamentalist Christianity had become almost completely culturally enervated and lost its ability to influence the culture it once created in America. The symbolic turning point was the 1925 “Scopes Monkey Trial.” The cultural irrelevance and caricature of conservative Christianity started there until in the 1960s when it was finally openly mocked and despised, when not ignored.  Scopes was the first culturally accepted overt hostility to Christianity in American culture, and it eventually weaved its way into the popular imagination in the 1960 movie Inherit The Wind, staring Spencer Tracy and based on a 1955 play of the same name. For decades prior to Scopes, modernists were portraying fundamentalists as backward, benighted enemies of progress, science, and all that was good about civilization. As Marsden says about the liberal perception of fundamentalists:

Modern liberal culture was fighting back against the efforts of “bigots and ignoramuses” (as Darrow described them) to retard its progress, and ridicule was perhaps the most effective weapon.

After Scopes the mainstream media was merciless. Marsden says the trial and its fallout “would have far more impact on the popular interpretation of fundamentalism than all the arguments of preachers and theologians.” Unfortunately, fundamentalists often lived down to the caricature, and their alienation from the wider American culture was complete.

In trying to keep from being defiled and reviled by the culture, Christians increasingly developed their own sub‑culture. Isolated in a Christian cocoon, they were soon creating their own educational system, books, movies, and media, all of which still have little impact on the wider culture today. Much of conservative Christianity for the next 50 years embraced a Christ against culture posture which is informed by an over spiritualized dualistic Platonic spirituality. Let’s see how God in Scripture reveals to us a different kind of spiritually, one that has material implications for this world.

Christianity and Transforming Our Material World
One of the challenges of reorienting to a more this world spirituality is that modern Evangelical Christianity tends to focus on the New Testament to the exclusion of the Old. It’s built into the fundamentalist theology inherited from dispensationalism that separates the Jewish Old Covenant people of God from the Christian New Covenant people of God. The implication is that the Old is not relevant for the New, that Moses and the Law of God revealed to Israel no longer apply to the Christian life. That’s unfortunate because the New is the fulfillment of the Old, not something different from it. Everything that was revealed under the Old Covenant was to find it’s fulfillment in the New, including the material blessings of a redeemed and renewed relationship with our Creator.

I was inspired to write this post after reading one of the most powerful gospel passages in the Old Testament, Zechariah 3. Standing before the Lord being accused by Satan, the high priest Joshua is wearing filthy clothes. The Lord rebukes Satan and tells the angel to take off those filthy clothes and he tells us why. “See, I have taken away your sin, and I will put fine garments on you.” He next gives Joshua a charge to obedience that should always result from a sinner being saved, and then telling him about a Branch to come, a prophecy referring to Christ. Then the chapter ends with this:

10 “‘In that day each of you will invite your neighbor to sit under your vine and fig tree,’ declares the Lord Almighty.”

To our modern eyes there doesn’t seem to be anything overtly “material” here in terms of prosperity or success, but to an ancient Jew living in Israel in the 5th century BC it definitely suggested exactly that. The phrase “in that day” and variations is used 16 times in Zechariah, and they are all Messianic references. Do a Bible word search and you can see all 16 on one page. It’s a powerful confirmation of God’s transformational intentions of the mission of the Messiah in this world, with not one mention of a heavenly or spiritual life.

Given that the entire Old Testament is about Christ, you would expect there are probably more than a few passages that refer to the transformation of Messianic fulfillment to come, and the specific material implications for this world. It starts with God’s promise to Adam and Eve that her seed will crush or strike the serpent’s head, and that promise begins to make its way into history with God’s calling of Abram. The blessing God promises him and his descendants implies a this-worldly prosperity, and the Hebrews eventually called Jews as those from Judea certainly believed that. As I mentioned above, to them God’s covenant promises were for the blessings of a prosperous life in this world, the spiritual making itself real in the material circumstances of their lives. It was sin that got in the way of true peace and prosperity which would only be found in relationship to their Creator God as he dwelled among them. They missed that it was only in the Messiah that they would find the fulfillment of this promise, in Immanuel, the one who would be God with us.

If you want a wonderful picture of how Christ and the gospel and God’s word, the Bible, really changes the material circumstances of our lives, I’d suggest reading a wonderful book by Indian Vishal Mangalwadi called, The Book that Made Your World: How the Bible Created the Soul of Western Civilization. As an Indian, he has seen first-hand what a civilization without Christianity looks like, in his case a Hindu culture. I recently listened to an interview he did with Jordan Peterson called India, Europe & Biblical Revolution. I highly suggest giving that a listen.

A Different Kind of Discipleship
My college Christian experience was all about discipleship, but a truncated, narrow, other worldly one that ignored the culturally transforming power of the gospel. I would suggest a different kind of discipleship, one that sees cultural and societal transformation as one of the primary purposes of the gospel, of bringing God’s kingdom to earth just as Jesus taught us to pray. That was the purpose of Jesus being given “all authority in heaven and on earth,” to bring the fulfillment in this world of all the types, shadows, and promises of the Old Testament. That is a completely different, and more exciting vision for life than the over spiritualized personalized Pietism of much modern Evangelical Christianity.

That means a young person should taught beginning in their teenage years that their career is more than just making a living, but a calling, a way to live out a Christian, gospel infused world and life view in the marketplace. When we see the word gospel we tend to define it narrowly as salvation from sin and primarily personal, but the good news of Christ is that this salvation affects all that we are an everything we do. The transformation started in our hearts is then worked out into our lives into the lives of others and how those lives develop into a civilization. Christians miss this not only because of Pietism, but because of the modern notion of secularism that programs us to believe there is a realm where our faith doesn’t apply, but biblical faith applies to every square inch of existence, everything we see or do or experience, it’s all through the lens of our Christian faith.

We can see this civilizational transforming power of the gospel develop in the early centuries of the church as it battled paganism. When Constantine converted to Christianity in the early 4th century, he started the process of outlawing crucifixion and gladiatorial games, blood for sport. A nation’s laws are a reflection of its faith and worldview. Christianity had begun a slow process of infusing its morals and values into Western culture. Thomas Cahill writes in his book, How the Irish Saved Civilization:

In his last years St. Patrick could probably look out over an Ireland transformed by his teaching. According to tradition, at least, he established bishops throughout northern, central, and eastern Ireland . . . With the Irish—even with the kings—he succeeded beyond measure. Within his lifetime or soon after his death, the Irish slave trade came to a halt, and other forms of violence, such as murder and intertribal warfare, decreased.

That is the gospel! As Paul says in Romans 14:17, the kingdom of God is a matter of “righteousness, peace and joy in the Holy Spirit.” Christianity is never merely personal, and that is how we are to raise and disciple our children, with a faith that is transforming on a societal level, not just about their own personal holiness and relationship to God.

For just one example, in practice that means, speaking of laws, that if your son gets into the middle school years and likes to argue, you might begin thinking he could make a good lawyer. Then you begin teaching him about the Christian nature of law, where it comes from, what are its purposes, and so on. He can then see his calling as a lawyer as a Christian mission to advance God’s kingdom on earth by brining justice to the nation. It could lead to a political career as a Christian legislator who brings God’s law to bear upon the state’s or nation’s law. This can be done with any career, including the calling to be a wife or husband, a mother and homemaker or father. This gives our lives and our children’s lives what every person is looking for, meaning, hope, and purpose, and on a grand scale, the spiritual-material touching and influencing everything we and they do. Life doesn’t get any better than that!

Most Christians Don’t Believe in Postmillennialism, But the Left Does

Most Christians Don’t Believe in Postmillennialism, But the Left Does

Mar 18, 2026 | Eschatology, Parents and Family

In January I was listening to Steve Deace opine on the woman in Minnesota who was trying to block ICE agents on a suburban street. At one point it looked like she was trying to run over one of the agents, and he shot her. She died giving her life for the leftist religious cause of all things anti-Trump. You can bet if Joe Biden had sent Ice to deport illegal aliens, she would not have been on that street blocking them that day, and ICE wouldn’t be in the news at all. In fact, when Democrats have deported illegal aliens, and they have, there wasn’t a peep from the left, but if Trump does it, the left loses its mind. They are also invested in immigration, illegal or otherwise, because their power depends on it. A guy who goes by the moniker Raw Egg Nationalist put it well:

Mass immigration is an existential issue for the modern left, perhaps more than any other. Without mass immigration, the leftist project collapses. Kaput.

The word existential is one most people aren’t familiar with, but it says perfectly what’s at stake: existence itself. The concept developed in the mid-20th century post-World War II, “where an entire generation was forced to confront the human condition and the anxiety-provoking givens of death, freedom, and meaninglessness.” The seeds of this intellectual movement go back to Kierkegaard and Nietzsche in the 19th century, but it was the horrors of the 20th century capped by Nazi death camps and atomic bombs dropped on Japan that gave it momentum. Existence itself, and it’s meaning, seemed to be on the verge of extinction. The radical left realizes this, and unfortunately most of the Democrat Party is right with them. Trump is the ultimate threat to their power grab because he realizes their threat to the American way of life, the liberty and prosperity handed down to us from our forefathers. Too many on the right side of the political, cultural, and religious spectrum don’t seem to get this, that this is a metaphorical war for a way of life we’ve come to take for granted.

Deace sees this, and was bewildered that more on our side, especially Christians, don’t get what’s at stake. He was also marveling at the religious commitment of this woman willing to become a martyr for the cause she believed in so deeply, and he was wondering how she became who she is. The media tried to portray her as an innocent woman caught in the wrong place at the wrong time, but she was in fact an anti-ICE warrior, part of a group of activists who worked to “document and resist” the federal immigration crackdown in Minnesota. She was a lesbian who was “married” to a woman and who was previously married to a man. She likely immersed herself in the left’s religious echo chamber, CNN, MSNBC, NPR, The New York Times, etc. and was committed to applying her faith to all of life. She had a radical leftist atheistic secular worldview. She even sent her son to a woke charter school, which boasts that it puts “social justice first” and “involving kids in political and social activism.” She took her faith seriously.

What Deace was marveling at was this passionate commitment of leftists compared to most Christians who are committed to comfort and ease. For many Christians, their faith is irrelevant to this world, and thus this world is never influenced by their faith. As I’ve written about extensively here, I blame Pietism for this, the 17th century German Lutheran movement with good intentions, that over the next three hundred years changed Evangelical Christianity from a transforming force in society into a culturally irrelevant one. A curiosity to me is how many people complain about how terrible things are, but don’t seem to realize the faith they believe is a transformational faith, not just for individuals but for entire civilizations. Look what happened to the once mighty Roman Empire; it was defeated by Christianity and turned into Christendom.

The Left: No Longer Democratic Rivals, but Existential Enemies
The existential battle between left and right, between good and evil politically and culturally, goes back to the French Revolution. That conflict gave us left and right, specifically from the seating arrangements in the National Assembly (also known as the Estates-General convened at Versailles). Those who supported the king, monarchy, tradition, and the old order sat on the right. Today these are called conservatives. Those who supported radical change, the revolution, limiting or abolishing royal/aristocratic power, greater equality, and republican ideas sat on the left. These are the leftists, liberals, progressives; Democrats have become the party of the left. That first radical Revolution in France led to tens of thousands of executions, upwards of 17,000 having their heads lopped of via Madame de Guillotine. It turned out to be a revolution in innocent blood, unlike the revolution coming before it in America.

Many revolutions followed in its wake, the most consequential the October 1917 Russian Revolution, out of which came communism and what is called the “Old Left.” This left gave us Stalin and purges and war on an industrial scale, but accomplished none of the dreams of its grandfather, Karl Marx. Communism simply didn’t work. Those who yearned for a world informed by the French Revolution, taking down the old order and everything supposedly inimical to “progress,” would never give up. In the 1920s and 30s a group of leftists in Germany developed a form of cultural Marxism, moved to America before the war, and eventually developed into the New Left in the 1960s. The current batch of woke leftists are the children and grandchildren of the New Left. The old Left focused on economics, labor issues, and socialism, while the New Left’s obsessions were issues like civil rights, anti-war protests, feminism, environmentalism, and plain old countercultural rebellion, sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll.

I grew up in the 60s and 70s when screens were limited to 3 main channels, CBS, NBC, and ABC, or channels 2, 4, and 7 in Los Angeles. PBS was channel 11, and then there were a couple local stations. Shocking to you youngster, I know. Protests of leftist hysteria over one issue or another was a consistent theme, and I had a front seat to it all in our house when the screen was turned to the news every night. So the antics of the woke left in our day are nothing new, and not at all creative. They’re basically a broken record, same old story, a turgid Saul Alinsky Rules for Radicals movie, over and over again. It’s exhausting, and banal, not to mention dangerous. Susan Sontag, one of the New Left radicals, is a good example. Some people today are shocked by the anti-white racism of the leftist-Democrat liberal establishment, but Sontag wrote in 1967 that, “the white race is the cancer of human history.” You can’t get more anti-white than that! The real cancer of anti-white racism, which is anti-Christian and anti-masculine, has been around a long time.

What makes them especially pernicious is their self-righteous smug moral superiority. They believe themselves to be moral and good and right, and everyone else is evil, a fascist, a Nazi. Hitler for them is the apotheosis of evil; Satan doesn’t compare. Branding everyone who disagrees with them a fascist allows them to justify violence as a political tool. That’s why they’ve branded Trump as Hitler from the moment they realized he wasn’t one of them, and was a threat to their vision to take over the world. Of course killing Hitler is justified, then there would have been no World War II and no Holocaust. Go back to the 60s and 70s and we’ll see this is nothing new either. Their only real moral value is might makes right; the will to power rules all. Truth is a luxury they can’t afford.

The Christian Response to the Evil of the Left
These people take their faith seriously, and it is an all-consuming religious worldview applying to every area of life. Like we postmillennialists, they are confident their kingdom will eventually win and take over the world. They are something that appears contradictory, optimistic in their rage and anger. This actually reflects the futility of their efforts, but they don’t know that. They’re convinced they are, in the words of radical leftist Barack Obama, on the “right side of history.” Jesus begs to differ. When Peter in Matthew 16 declared of Jesus, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God,” Jesus told them that he was going to build his church upon this declaration, and the gates of hell would not prevail against it. For most of my Christian life I missed that gates were defensive mechanisms in the ancient world. It is the church, Christians, who are on the offensive in this spiritual war, and the devil and his minions are on the defensive.

We give the devil entirely too much credit. After the resurrection Jesus had been given “all authority in heaven and on earth,” and at his ascension was coronated as King of Kings and Lord of Lords. Paul affirms this in Ephesians 1 when he tells us that Jesus was seated at God’s right hand,

21 far above all rule and authority, power and dominion, and every name that is invoked, not only in the present age but also in the one to come.

Notice, and this is critical, Paul took it for granted that his audience understood Jesus had all this power and authority now, in “the present age.” He felt he had to remind them, it was also for the age to come. The devil has no authority on this earth, zero, zip, nada, none. He only does what God allows him to do. Scripture further tells us when the Holy Spirit was unleashed on this world at Pentecost, that Christ “must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. The last enemy to be destroyed is death” (I Cor. 15). Peter in the first sermon in Christian history in Acts 2 quotes Psalm 110 to affirm that this has been the plan all along:

“‘The Lord said to my Lord:
“Sit at my right hand
   until I make your enemies
a footstool for your feet.”’

All of this started, the ushering in of the kingdom of God on earth, at Christ’s first coming. The victory in this world is ours because we belong to Christ, we are “in him,” as Paul says many times in his letters.

We have a problem, though. Most Christians don’t believe this. I didn’t believe it either until a few years ago. I was convinced sin and the devil were such powerful forces that things would get increasingly worse on earth until Jesus came back to save the day and finally usher in his kingdom. This is a relatively new eschatological perspective in the history of the church. Most Christians believed the kingdom of God on earth had come in Christ, and it was the church’s job to advance the kingdom on earth. In the 1830s this all changed with J.N. Darby and the rise of dispensationalism. Even those who are not familiar with that term or what it means, have heard of things like Antichrist, 666, the rapture, and the great tribulation. This mentality is fundamentally defeatist in the face of evil, like the evil presented to us by the political and cultural woke left in our day.

The other problem is non-theological. Most Evangelical Christians are conservatives. Unlike secular leftist radicals, and the Democrat big money donors that enable them, we just want to be left alone to live our lives and raise our families, and be productive members of society. That’s why we’re called conservatives. We think there is value in traditions and the Christianity that gave birth to our civilization, and want to conserve them against those who fetishize progress. We are on the right side of the French Assembly squarely against the Revolution. Most normal people’s lives are not consumed by politics, yet therein lies the problem. The radical left, which is the entire Democrat industrial complex today, will never leave us alone until they’ve ushered in their woke Utopia. Basically what it’s come down to is us or them, as I said, it’s existential.

As I write this, we are witnessing an existential battle for the American way of life in the streets of Minneapolis. Either the radical left and their minions of protestors are crushed, or America is over. It’s our will against theirs. Either truth, righteousness, and justice prevails, or it’s lies, evil, and tyranny. As a culture, a society, a nation, we have a clear choice, made all the clearer by the woke radicals: it’s either Christ or chaos. The church, as Jesus said, needs to “discern the signs of the times.’” It is either them or us. I will end this with the immortal words of Thomas Paine written in the darkest days of the Revolutionary War in late 1776. They apply to our present moment in history and we need to take them to heart. There is no place anymore for a personalized Pietistic faith. As with the Patriots of old, we must decide if America is worth fighting for:

THESE are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives everything its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as FREEDOM should not be highly rated.