Seven kinds of GOOD NEWS – GOSPEL

Acts 5:42 “good news that Jesus is the Christ.”     The apostles 

Acts 8:12 “good news of the Kingdom of God.”      Philip 

Acts 8:35 “good news about Jesus.”                     Philip 

Acts 10:36 “good news of peace through Jesus Christ.”       Peter 

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Acts 13:32 “good news that the promise of God is fulfilled.” (Jesus raised)          

Acts 17:18 “good news about Jesus and his resurrection”

Acts 20:24 “gospel of God’s grace”

Look up the following 8 Bible passages and find out which of the “gospels” (above) does Jesus preach, promote and ask others to preach?

Mt 4:23, 9:35, 10:7,  24:14;              Luke 4:43, 8:1, 16:16;          Mark 1:14

Jesus’ first sermon Mark 1: 14-15              

 “…Jesus went into Galilee, proclaiming the good news (gospel) of God. ‘The time has come,’ he said. ‘The kingdom of God has come near. Repent and believe the good news!”

For those in the Kingdom, we are asked to fulfill the Great Commission of Jesus. “Make disciples…teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you.”

The primary teaching point of Jesus was concerned with preaching the gospel of the Kingdom. According to Jesus, this preaching is why He was sent. This Kingdom of God in some New Testament places is called the Kingdom of heaven,  but two things the Kingdom is NOT: it is not a place you go when you die, AND it is not an intellectual agreement of some teaching being true.   

The Kingdom of God is the subject of the majority of the parables of Jesus. It is the place where  God reigns.  It is near, present and available to all…in and during our life on earth. It is not a religion. But it is the topic of Jesus’s  first sermon. Jesus doesn’t seem interested in getting people to quit or join any religion. But he is very interested in getting people into the Kingdom of God. Other places he calls this entrance being “Born from above”, or entering into “Life”, or Eternal Life.

The Kingdom of God is first, and above all, a personal faith-experience of the believer with the Father in heaven who has made him. Jesus tells us that the Kingdom of God is within you. At least that is where the new life in Christ starts.

The Four Epochs of the Kingdom – (The Four Phases)

1. The personal experience of the spiritual life of the fellowship of the individual believer with God the Father.

(Lk 17:21) – “The kingdom of God is within you.”

2. The enlarging brotherhood of gospel believers, the social aspects of the enhanced morals resulting from the reign of God’s spirit in the hearts of individual believers. The church. (Mt 13:33; Lk 14:20,21)

3. The prospect of the more perfect fulfillment of the will of God, the advancement towards a new social order of righteous, godly living.

(Mt 13:31,32; Mk 4:30-32; Lk 13:18,19) The mustard seed. [W.Vine, G.Eldon Ladd, The Gospel of the Kingdom, 1959].

4. The kingdom in its fullness, the future spiritual age of light and life on earth.

“The kingdoms of this world SHALL become the kingdom of our Lord.” (Rev 11:15)

The teachings OF Jesus are not the same as the teachings ABOUT Jesus.  Nowhere does Jesus precisely define the Kingdom, but from the New Testament we can deduce that the gospel of the Kingdom has three essentials and at least four phases. When we look at these essentials we should take the attitude of Peter:

“…if you possess these essentials in increasing measure, they will keep you from being ineffective and unproductive in your knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ.” 2 Peter

Let’s look at these essential of the Kingdom together.

     The Kingdom of God – The Kingdom of Heaven   

The Three Essentials of the Kingdom- 

1. Recognition of the fact of the sovereignty of God.

     (Lk 19:11-15)

• the sphere of God’s rule, the arena in which His rule is acknowledged, His dominion, authority to rule. (Basileia) If God wasn’t sovereign, it would not be called a kingdom. Daniel 7:27

2.  Faith in the effectiveness of the desire to do the will of God.     

           (Mt 6:33)  

3.  Belief in the truth of our sonship with God.

           (Jn 20:17; Rom 8:16)

     “My (our) Father”  – mentioned by Jesus 170 times in the four gospel accounts.

By faith every person can have all these essentials of salvation.  This is the good news of the Kingdom. By faith everyone can enter.

Jesus announces: Mark 1:14,15 ;    Matthew 4:23; 9:35; 13: 11;    Luke 4:43; 17:20-21;   John 3:3

Jesus tells others to announce the Kingdom: Matthew 10: 5-7;  Luke 8:1-3; 9:2; 10:8-9     

Kingdom progress – Acts 8:12; 20:24-25; 28:31

17 of  the 35 parables of Jesus are Kingdom parables:  Mt 5-25, Mk 2 – 12, Lk 5-20

Conflation         

The merging of two or more sets of ideas, or opinions into one, often in error. Conflation is often used to treat two similar but disparate concepts as the same concept. Some examples of conflation:

-Entering Christianity vs entering the Kingdom of God

-Cook vs baker 

-Electrician vs electrical engineer

-Repent vs asking for forgiveness 

-Knowledge vs wisdom

–Entering Heaven (after death) vs entering the Kingdom of Heaven (now in this life)

–Belief   (credence, accepting a teaching as true, intellectual assent) vs  Faith  = when your beliefs shape and motivate what you do, speak or think, then your belief has ascended to the level of faith.

Creation  Creationist

The discussion of the Universe being created implies that there is/was a Creator. This concept of a beginning to the Universe is today accepted in both secular as well as non-secular circles. But from the nineteenth century until the 1960’s the concept of a Creation, or a Creation Time,  was preferentially disregarded by professional astronomers and other scientists, most holding on to a belief in an infinitely old Universe, that “has always been”.  The hypothesis of an infinitely old Universe is called the Steady State theory.

The discovery of the microwave radiation, called cosmic background radiation, jettisoned the Steady State theory from almost all astronomers minds. Today in many college astronomy textbooks, the beginning of the Universe is called the Creation Time, when the Universe of spacetime began.

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The word creationist is often used to describe someone who believes that God made the heavens and the earth. The way we use the term “creationist” on this website will refer to a non-secular viewpoint.

But we should point out that the term “creationist”, is often conflated with the phrase “Young Earth Creationist,” or YEC.  Most creationists believe there is enough evidence from the biomolecular world, the solar system and the local universe to lead a reasoning, educated person to conclude there is some organizing Force or Intelligent System behind the fine-tuning of the parameters of the Universe we see around us. The person defined as a “Young Earth Creationist,” also believes in this same evidence. But a YEC also has a particular slant on biblical interpretation, believing that the heavens and earth are only a few thousand years old. Because of this slant on biblical interpretation, YEC’s believe that God would only use the process of fiat creation to make His Universe. YEC’s also believe that God would not use other processes to create His Universe.  As we address these topics, it is good to remember a quote from a booklet published by  Our Daily Bread Ministries: “It is detrimental to the cause of Christ for the church to make the process of divine creation, rather than the fact of divine creation, a test of Christian Orthodoxy.”

Evolution   Evolutionist 

The topic of evolution is complicated since there are so many definitions of the word. The simplest definition in terms of a biological system, is that organisms change overtime genetically and on a molecular biological basis. Discussions of both Naturalistic evolution and Evolutionary creationism do not lend themselves to be described in a brief summary statement. But what we can do is give some of the definitions of evolution currently used. SFK Ministry believes that some of these evolutionary processes do indeed occur. There is an overwhelming amount of evidence that some of these evolutionary processes occur. The study of that evidence is called epistemology. SFK Ministry  does not believe that all of these evolutionary processes do occur. There is Conflation in this arena also between terms like naturalism, evolutionary creationism and naturalistic evolution.

Just because a ministry (or a person) believes that some evolutionary processes do occur, doesn’t mean one must believe all imaginable evolutionary processes do occur. In fact we would like to state categorically that we do not believe naturalistic chemical evolutionary processes occur. But chemical evolution is just one of the different kinds of evolutionary processes we need to define .

Listed below are 11 different definitions of evolution, or evolutionary processes. It is quite reasonable for a person who is a creationist to believe that God could have used one or more of these evolutionary processes to create different parts of His universe. But the universe of order that we investigate and observe today is not consistent with the mechanistic random processes of creation proposed by the secular academic world.

Eleven Kinds of Evolution:

1. Change over time; history of nature; any sequence of events in nature

2. Changes in the frequencies of alleles in the gene pool of a population 

3. Limited common descent: the idea that particular groups of organisms have descended from a common ancestor. 

4. The mechanisms responsible for the change required to produce limited descent with modification; chiefly natural selection acting on random variations or mutations

5. Universal common descent: the idea that all organisms have descended from a single common ancestor.  

6.  Blind watchmaker thesis: the idea that all organisms have descended from common ancestors through unguided, unintelligent, purposeless, material processes such as natural selection acting on random variations or mutations; the idea that the Darwinian mechanism of natural selection acting on random variation, and other similarly naturalistic mechanisms, completely suffice to explain the origin of novel biological forms and the appearance of design in complex organisms. SFK states that this did not occur.  This meaning is being conflated by naturalists into the other meanings of evolution.

7. Microevolution refers to changes happening within a species. A textbook example would be the change in wing color of the peppered moth in response to changes in pollution levels in the UK.   

8. Speciation occurs when one species gives rise to a closely related sister species. Take for example the evolution of the finches on the Galapagos Islands from an ancestral finch species that came to this archipelago from South America. Upon arrival this ancestral finch evolved into a variety of species that vary primarily in body size and in beak size and shape. Both microevolution and speciation have been repeatedly observed in nature and, in SFK’s opinion, are noncontroversial.  

9. Microbial evolution helps make sense of the evolutionary changes associated with the Long Term Evolution Experiment (LTEE – 1988 –2010) at MSU, which don’t really fit in any of the previous categories. These types of transformations involve changes in viruses, bacteria, archaea, and single-celled eukaryotes—changes like the acquisition of antibiotic resistance in bacteria, the ability of viruses to hop from one host to another (such as SARS and HIV), and the emergence of drug-resistant strains of the malaria parasites. Microbial evolution would also include horizontal gene transfer between microbes, which accounts for the evolution of pathogenic bacteria from non-pathogenic strains (like E. coli). Again, we don’t find microbial evolution particularly controversial. A preponderance of evidence exists for it, including the LTEE at MSU.       

10. Macroevolution refers to putative changes that require that evolutionary processes have genuine creative potential. Examples include humans evolving from a primate ancestor, whales evolving from a terrestrial wolf-like mammal, and birds evolving from theropods. Whether or not macroevolution has occurred defines much of the creation/intelligent design/evolution controversy. Fuz Rana at Reasons RTB, is skeptical that macroevolution is a real process that shaped life’s history on Earth.  Darrell Falk is, however, certain that God used this process to create new life forms. Good articles from knowledgeable Christians on both sides of this issue. See Darrell Falk’s Coming to Peace with  Science, Chapter 4, © 2004.   

11. Chemical evolution is another type of evolutionary process many Christians are skeptical about. This term refers to the processes that presumably generated the initial life-forms. According to this model, chemical selection naturalistically transformed a complex chemical mixture of simple compounds into proto-cellular entities that further evolved to yield the first true cells. (Refer to the book Fuz Rana coauthored with Hugh Ross, Origins of Life, for a detailed rationale for skepticism about chemical evolution.)       SFK Ministry does NOT  believe this kind of evolution ever happened.

From the viewpoint of evangelicals, we see good evidence for seven of the eleven definitions above. Also we believe that two of the definitions (#6 and #11) are used too often by evolutionary naturalists to conflate all the above terms. We would do well to continue research into the two definitions (#5 and #10) where intelligent and thoughtful discourse may abide in the realms of science and faith.