Transcription
Morning session. We want to look at chapter six of First Corinthians. In fact, we'll be doing it in the two hours that we have. The first hour, we will look at chapter 6, verses 1 to 11, and in the second hour, chapter 6, verses 12 to 20. Now, as a matter of fact, it won't really take us the full hour, as it were, to do simply do our exegesis and wrestle with the hermeneutical questions in these shorter sections of the letter. But it's this is a good place for us to bring some other things in the New Testament into focus in light of what is being said here by the Apostle Paul. And that's precisely what we aim to do. That is, we're going to do a little bit of what ordinarily we would call biblical theology, and not systematic theology, but biblical theology. The theology of the Bible, what is actually going on in the structures and the framework of the New Testament itself, so that one can have a feeling for how these kinds of things fit into the larger scheme of revelation. And this is a particularly appropriate place for us to do that because there are some rather crucial items that are spoken to in these two sections.
So, first of all, then, chapter 6, verses 1 to 11. In a certain sense, this chapter takes up what appears on the surface to be two quite unrelated matters. And really, in a certain sense, they are. How in the world one flows out of the business that we did in the last hour, the problem of incest and the excommunication that was to take place. How it flows out of that into chapters 1 to 11, where there is a man who has defrauded another, and that man has taken the one who has defrauded him to the civil court, which then is apparently rather abruptly followed by a matter of some people at least arguing for the privilege of fornication. And when we come to that second one in 6:12, it seems very abrupt, so much so that many scholars think that it simply is a kind of a generalization following chapter 5, where Paul comes back to the question of immorality or sexual immorality and broadens the base of that a bit. In 6:12 to 20, I think that's not what's going on. We'll talk a bit more about that when we come to that section. But let me suggest to you that in a certain sense, both of these matters really do flow out of chapter 5. It's almost as if Paul were saying, and while we're on the subject of judgment, that reminds me of something else I heard. He says, "Dare anyone?" And then he goes on to talk about some judgments. In fact, the whole passage is playing with this business that there is a man who has taken another man to court in judgment. And then, as it were, and while we're on, or after we've finished that, this is now back to some more words about this matter of sexual immorality with regard to some other things that are going on. And it seems to me that's how these two matters flow out of the kinds of things that is, what we had was sexual immorality and the judgment that should be brought upon that. And out of that flows something about judgment, which is quite unrelated but is related to the theme, and then sexual immorality.
Now, in 6:1 to 11, the Apostle Paul is so absolutely ticked by what is going on in Corinth that he responds to it by a whole series of questions. In fact, until one gets down to verse 9, in the middle of the verse, "Do not be deceived," there are only two indicative sentences in the entire section. Everything is just made up of a series of questions. One of the indicatives comes finally in verse 5, "I say this to your shame." And finally, then, down in verse 7, "To have lawsuits at all with one another is a defeat for you." Everything else is a question. Now, the questions are many times rhetorical, sometimes they are sarcastic. Now, that is, there's simply a whole bevy of questions that rush from the Apostle, that come out of this almost total, what shall I say, personal urgency that he feels. I think he's ticked. He really is. He's ticked by this thing. You can tell by the way he starts in the Greek text, "Dare anyone? Do you not know?" And the very way the questions are asked. But they're not carelessly asked. They, as usual with the Apostle Paul, and it's a pretty clear, you know, a relationship of what's going on. There's an argument, but the argument is going on on the basis of a series of questions.
Now, the problem, the problem in 6:1 to 11 is easy. Here's one of those situations where we don't need a great deal of, you don't need a great deal of help from a person on the outside coming in and saying, "Hey, what's the problem in 6:1 to 11?" All you have to do is read the text, and it becomes pretty clear what the problem is. Paul says, "Dare anyone who has a grievance against his brother?" And that, perhaps we should just say a word about the word in the Greek, *pragma echon*, which is translated in the RSV as "has a grievance," is a technical term for lawsuits. And it could well have been translated that way. "Dare anyone having a legal matter against his brother, dare he take that before the unjust?" Now, that presents some problems. Why would he call the civil courts unjust when, as a matter of fact, he doesn't really think of the civil courts as unjust? He recognizes that Roman law is very just. And why does he say "the unjust"? Therefore, well, we'll come to that in a moment. But the point is that there is a man in the church who has taken another man before the civil authorities. Then, down in verse 6, the same thing is repeated: "A brother is being judged with a brother, and this before the unbelievers." And then, finally, in verse 8, "But you wrong, or you deal unjustly with, and you defraud, and this against a brother."
Now, put those three verses together, and what do you have? Well, you have two men, what I call Man A and Man B. And Man A has defrauded Man B. We don't know what it is, but it is probably something to do with money or property. You know, that's usually the reason somebody deals with somebody unjustly. And the term means to defraud or to do him in. So he has apparently, he has apparently, with some kind of property dealings or money dealings, has simply done this man in. And Man B has taken Man A to the civil court to air his grievances. Now, that's the problem. And you say, "Well, what's wrong with that?" And if you and I had been writing First Corinthians, we would have really given Man A the business. Well, I'll have you notice that Man A gets the business, but he doesn't get the business until toward the end. All of the thing that goes on here goes against Man B. And if that doesn't disturb you, it's only because you've read the text with your colored glasses on and have made that text look neater than it really is, or otherwise you've really become so Christian that you think, "Of course, that's the way it ought to be." Now, I'm saying to you, your first response to this text ought to be one of some kind of personal inner, "Hey, come on, this is all wrong."
Okay, let's set the thing up in at least in the context of Corinth so that we have a feeling for what's happening. And here's something we didn't do the other day when we were talking about Corinth. The city of Corinth, as indicated, was a very large city. It had a rather large marketplace, and the marketplace has been beautifully excavated and stands today. And I don't know if you're getting on your field trip if you get a chance to go to Corinth. But you know, Corinth is one of those places that I just want to sit and take my Posseidonius and my New Testament and just walk the streets and put it all back together. But when you get to Corinth, and I see the nodding of heads that to many of you are going to, and you're going to find that the large marketplace, which goes in this direction, they have the marketplace actually used to have some shops in here too. And standing off to the side of the marketplace are still the remains of the Temple of Apollo. There are some of the columns still standing right in here. And right down here in Corinth, you'll find one of the shops actually reconstructed. It has a, it will look something like this when you get to it. But that's been reconstructed, you understand. That doesn't really, in the excavations, they put the stones back up. And they've left that one shop right in here in the north, in the north shops. But right about over in here, which would have been at that time in the middle of the marketplace, and actually it's back, not so out here, is a place that has also been reconstructed, but it's been carefully reconstructed in an almost, I mean, with great certainty, this is not a guess. This is a place that is known as the Bema. Now, the Bema was a large, a large stand, for all practical purposes, constructed of stone. And it was where the Roman proconsul, the man who was the governor of the city, would come from time to time and take up civil matters of the people right out in the marketplace. Shops on all sides, shops here, shops here. This is where all of the activity in Corinth is going on. You know, it's just a typical, what I call a Mediterranean marketplace. If you, when you get on your field trip, you'll see the marketplaces that it won't be quite as classy as this one would have been in its day, for the most part, especially when you're in the oriental lands today. But it's typical of the Mediterranean world of the East, where the marketplaces are where all the activity goes on. And this place will be filled with people, just literally throngs and throngs of people. And the Roman proconsul will take his position on the Bema, and there he will hear civil trials and, you know, civil cases. And what has happened is that there is a man who is a member of the Christian community, a member of this temple of God in Corinth, this community of the Spirit, and he has defrauded another member of this same community. And this second man has taken this man, and the two of them are appearing before the Roman proconsul in order for this one man to redress his grievances. And for the Apostle Paul, that is enough to make him come unglued, just literally unglued. And you ask, why does he get so totally uptight with this kind of situation? They say the whole affair strikes absolute horror to the Apostle Paul. And the reasons for it are clear enough. Number one is that it abuses the principle that we didn't note to last night, but is to be noted in verse 12 in chapter 5. It is not those inside the church whom you are to judge. God judges those outside. Or is it not those inside the church whom you are to judge? And the point is that it abuses the principle: judgment belongs inside. And secondly, the most obvious one is that it also destroys the community, and it does so in the presence of the world. Paul makes the sharp contrast between what he calls the unjust, or the unbelievers, and the brothers. Now, as I indicated earlier, there's scarcely any argument at all. The whole thing sort of alternates between horror and then argument, and then sarcasm, and then horror, and then rhetoric. And in the process of all of this, the answer becomes pretty clear.
Now, let's at least see the outline of the thought and see if we can't come to grips with what the Apostle Paul is saying, as we try then to move out to understand this in the framework of the broader understanding of the Christian faith that one finds in Paul and Jesus in the New Testament. Now, verse 1 raises the issue: "Dare anyone take lawsuits before the unjust?" Now, why the word "unjust"? Well, as I indicated, it's not because Paul himself actually considered this pagan court to be unjust. That would have been the last thing in Paul's mind. Paul knows Roman law well enough to know that it's good and that a person is basically safe under that law. He himself, as a citizen of the Empire, he's not one who would think of the Roman court as somehow being basically unjust, where the person, in other words, won't get justice. So why does he say, "You go before the unjust?" And it seems to me that the answer, by the way, the word has changed to "unbeliever" down in verse 6, and that's the real word that Paul would ordinarily use. It's the word *apistos*, it means "not having faith," the unbeliever. And it occurs regularly throughout New Testament to refer to, I mean, throughout First Corinthians to refer to the pagan world, to those who are not believers. That is the word he uses in verse 6. Well, why then the word "unjust" in verse 1? And it is chosen almost certainly because of the context. That is, what the Apostle Paul is trying to get them to see is the total absurdity of their position. Here they are, bringing lawsuits before the very ones whom God himself is going to bring judgment on. God is going to judge these people. And here you are, Christians, and you're bringing yourselves before them to have them pronounce justice for you, when those are the very people whom God himself is going to bring judgment on. Now, what he's hoping to do by that word is undoubtedly strike a sense, the sense of the absurd that they should feel in this.
Then in verses, and I don't have the verses, I've got this text all restructured and have noted it in terms of questions rather than in terms of verses. The first question, of course, is that one in verse 1, where he, it's just a, you know, it strikes the note of horror. And then in 2, he asks two questions. In fact, in verses 2 and 3, he asks two sets of questions, and they need to be seen as sets. You need to get this off. So, looking at something else on here a moment. The first question is, in fact, both of the questions are based on some point of Christian eschatology. Now, he says, "Do you not know that the saints, the *hagioi*, the people of God, will judge the world?" Now, he goes on then to ask the legitimate, you know, follow-up of that: "If, in fact, the world is going to be judged by you, are you incapable of exercising judgment in the least of matters?" Now, a couple of things to note. Number one is that "in the least of matters," he is trying to suggest that their present affairs are petty, petty in light of the kind of people they are, who they are. That is, your existence as the people of God, and I'm going to say some things about this as well. We've got to tie this into the whole New Testament understanding of what it means for them to be the people of God. But in light of what it means for you to be the people of God, is it possible that you're not capable of handling these merely petty affairs that happen in our present existence?
Now, Paul's understanding of the Christians, and especially his use of the word *hagioi*, the saints, the people of God, Paul's understanding of people of the Christian community is that the Christians are eschatological people. And we're going to have to make some explanations about what this is, and we'll get a whole bit of New Testament theology here. But it's very important for us to come to grips with understanding Paul's understanding of what it means to be a Christian and what the Christian community is. Eschatology, a word that I've used regularly. Someone finally asked me, "What does that mean?" It has to do with a study of the end times. It has to do with the coming of the end. The Greek word *eschaton* means "the end." Now, that becomes the thinking about the end is the absolutely essential framework within which one is going to need to learn to fit his whole understanding of the New Testament and how the people thought of themselves. They thought of themselves, or those at least who did the thinking in the process, thought of them as eschatological people.
Now, we've got to just say a word about what this means. The entire framework of the New Testament and how one is to understand Christian existence is within a framework that we have come to call the "already" and the "not yet," and the tension that exists between the already and the not yet. That is, that Christians are people who are already, but not yet. They are already the sons of God, to use John's phrase, but it does not yet appear what they shall be. Already the blessings of the future have arrived, but not yet have they been totally realized. Already the victory of God has taken place in our history, but not yet has it been finally consummated. But the point is that it has already happened. And what has already happened is, in fact, the future. The future has already come into the present. It isn't that we're moving along on some kind of a scale of time that says the future is still out there. For the Christian community, the future, the end, has already come, and it is to condition our present existence. It has not yet been fully realized, but it has already broken into the present existence. It is not that the future is totally future. The future is, in a certain sense, for Christians, now.
Now, why is this so important? And what all does this mean? Well, it all goes back to the understanding of the kingdom of God that one finds in the teaching of Jesus. And I understand that to you, Amber, have had a lot of teaching about the kingdom. But I also think it's important for us to understand the teaching of the kingdom of God within the framework of what I would call the historical understanding that Jesus and Paul have of that terminology. It's absolutely essential. Whatever else you'll ever say about the kingdom of God or moral government or anything else, is going to have to be thought of not in terms of 19th and 20th century government models, which is what often happens in the teaching of the moral government that comes from Charles Finney. But it's going to have to be thought of in terms of the eschatological framework that Jesus himself was living in and speaking. And when he used this terminology.
Now, everything, everything in the New Testament is conditioned by this thinking of the kingdom of God and this already-not-yet eschatological mentality. Basically, and we're not going to spend a lot of time here, but basically, of course, it goes back to David. And the following David was, without question, the great high-water mark in Old Testament history. All one has to do is simply read the Old Testament through with some care, and you can see that everything is sort of building up to David, and then after that, everything goes down. And in the process of everything going down after David, there arises in Israel a hope for the future. And the hope for the future is centered in the throne of David. There, there is the hope that God will once again, to use the biblical language, restore the fortunes of David. And usually, that is a very political idea, but it is also always a religious idea. It means not only that we will have the extension of lands such as there was in the time of David and Solomon, but it also means that the temple of God will be the center of the universe. In fact, the rabbis came to call Jerusalem the navel of the universe, and from the navel of the universe, they expected all of the blessings of God to flow out.
Now, it is within this kind of mentality that everything began to center in Jerusalem as the place where God was once again going to restore the fortunes of David, both in a political and in a religious sense, so that the whole world would, you know, have Yahweh as its God, as its king, as its Lord. The prophets had a name for that. They called it the Day of the Lord, the Day of Japheth, and the Day of the Lord was the day in which God was going to finally step into human affairs and have his time. It was a day in which the wrongs were going to be righted. It was a day in which those that were down were going to finally be up. It was a day in which justice was going to prevail. It was a day in which God would bring judgment upon the wicked and salvation to the righteous. It was, and because it was God's day, even the material world would feel the effects of it. And some of those, some of those most magnificent passages that we even still like to sing and, you know, and sense the beauty of that language, as it reflects upon the lion lying down with the lamb, and the child putting its hand over the hole of the asp and not being bitten, that the whole material world was going to somehow feel the glorious effects of the Day of the Lord. Day that finally, way down in Christian history, comes to be known as the Millennium, as a time when God is going to establish all of this actually on planet Earth, and the whole world is going to be restructured according to God's perfect order. And I thought those promises in the Old Testament are simply ways of saying that when God does his thing, now, when God's, you know, when Jerusalem, his Mount Zion, and the whole world will flow to Mount Zion, when God does his thing, the whole world is going to feel the effects of it, even the material creation. Even lions are going to eat, eat to, hey, the carnivores are going to become herbivores in the process.
I didn't, you know, just ways of saying God is going to rule. Now, what happened, of course, in Israel is that the Day of Yahweh, by some of the later prophets, was finally seen not as a day of salvation at all, but as a day of doom. Joel says, "You've been looking for the Day of Yahweh because you're thinking that you're the ones that are going to get, you know, your comeuppance." You just remember, it's a day of doom and darkness. It became a day of judgment even on Israel, and they went into exile, and things were in a pretty pass for Israel, and all of these promises and these hopes seemed to have faded out until the restoration. And then they began to see the restoration is now, is the time when God's going to really have his day. And all you have to do is to read the prophetic utterances and the Psalter in those places that reveal the earliest hopes that have to do with the restoration. Boy, the desert is going to blossom like a rose, and it's going to be a highway, and we're going to come back from Babylon, and, you know, the whole universe is going to come to Jerusalem. And they got back to Jerusalem, and not even, not even a drop in the bucket in terms of the number of people that were in exile returned to Jerusalem. And as a rubble of the signet of the Lord, who was the scion of the house of David, dies, and an awful lot of prophetic hopes, or I mean, eschatological hopes, died with him. And the temple is rebuilt, but in comparison with the first temple, as Haggai says, "Oh, he says, what is this that has happened among us? You that have seen the temple in its first glory, how do you see it now?" You know, I just, the restoration was a colossal disappointment. It was such a colossal disappointment that what happened in Israel was a period of dark ages. They simply, they simply went into nothing for a while until the time of Ezra, Nehemiah. And even then, after that, there's a restoration, but it's a restoration in terms of law. And just when it looks as if things are going to get better, they get worse again. And finally, Israel isn't so long, a little pond between warring states. And all of this time, things are going on, of course, in the world around them. There's the, you know, Alexander finally comes to power and gets rid of the Persian Empire. And surely now, you know. So what happens is Alexander dies, and his lands are divided between the Ptolemies and the Seleucids. And here you have these warring parties now. And Israel stands as the buffer state between the Seleucids and the Ptolemies. And for most of the time, they're under the Ptolemies. And finally, they get out from under the Ptolemies, and they think, you know, and it turns out that Antiochus Epiphanes is so much worse than the Ptolemaic rule that they literally, things just go to seed. And what happens in this period is there grows up a new expression of the prophetic hope. Now, none of this is in our Old Testaments because this is what we call the intertestamental time. But this is absolutely crucial to understanding John the Baptist and Jesus and the Apostle Paul because they come not directly out of the Old Testament, they come out of the Old Testament through the history of Israel of the intertestamental time into the New Testament. And you need to always remember that. That is, it hasn't been as if there's been four hundred years, nothing's been said. There's been four hundred years of all kinds of things going on. And when Jesus, John the Baptist, and Jesus come on the scene, they come on the scene precisely within a framework that is already there for them and existed for many years, hundreds of years.
A group of people who come on the scene are known as apocalyptic. Now, the apocalyptic keep the prophetic hope, but they make some, they make some slight changes to it, if you will, in terms of their eschatological understanding. The prophetic hope was almost always a hope of God's doing something within the framework of history. That is, what they expected was the restoration to be carried out in history. What they expected was somebody of the seed of David to sit on the throne in history. They were looking for God to do something within the framework of human history, just as he had been doing all along. Well, by the time the apocalyptic come along, around the year 200, 165 and following, this is BC, they have simply given up on history. And what they have come to understand is that the prophetic hope isn't so much something God is going to do within history, but it's going to be something God is going to do at the end of history. And so what happens is the prophetic hope has now become, what I call, totally eschatological. It is not something God is going to do inside of history in the future, but it's something that God is going to do by bringing history to an end. And that's the *eschaton*. He's going to bring the *eschaton* and bring a conclusion to history, and he's going to usher in a brand new age. And the Day of Yahweh is no longer a day within the framework of history, but it is a day that belongs outside of history as we know it. It's a time when God is going to simply step into human affairs and have his day. And when he has his day, it's no longer the ongoing of history, it is an end to history, and God is going to start a new age.
Now, this hope of the apocalypticism, ever so many ways, sometimes with Messiah, sometimes not. Sometimes they don't need a Messiah. Some of the literature, you know, God just comes with his mighty arm and boom, you know, brings it to an end. But what is absolutely constant from this time on in Israel is a new framework of history that can be divided like this. Here's the *eschaton*, the end, and God is going to step in from the outside and bring it to an end. It's going to go blue, and he's just going to, you know, step into human affairs and bring the end. Now, most of the time, that is accompanied by a Messiah. That is, it is a messianic figure of some kind who causes this. That is, whom God brings to bring this end. But the Messiah is no longer somebody who is going to, you know, restore the fortunes of Israel in the old prophetic sense of keeping things going. God is going to do something apocalyptic. That is, he is going to do something with signs and wonders, and the whole thing is going to come to its great end. And in the process of this, there are the concept of the tribulation and woes and, you know, the great signs that precede the coming of the end, and all this kind of language that has to do with the fact that God is about to step on human soil. And when he does, you know, I'm not necessarily God himself, but you know, by his Messiah, and when he does, that's the end.
Now, this is absolutely consistent to eschatological hopes and Jewry from this point on. And they divide all history, therefore, history, but history as we now think of it, into two ages: this age and the age to come. This age is Satan's age. It is marked by sin. It is marked by oppression. It is marked by the fact that there is wealth and poverty, that is, there are those that are out of it, down, and always are getting crushed and crunched, the oppressed. And that it is marked by demon possession. It is marked by sickness. It is marked by all of those things that demonstrate that this age is Satan's age. And the language that they use, Paul uses in Galatians 1, "this present evil age." There's that language. "This age and the age to come." That's the language of Jesus. Not that he didn't invent that language, and I defy you to find that in the Old Testament, you understand. But that's the language of Jesus: "this age and the age to come." "This age and the age to come."
Now, why does he use that language? Well, he does because that's precisely the language of Jewish eschatological hopes. That's what everybody is doing. That's the nature and the framework of understanding of what God is about. Now, the age to come, of course, is now to be identified with the Day of Yahweh. But in the intertestamental period, a new terminology has arisen. Instead of the Day of Yahweh, the terminology now is the Kingdom of God. The Kingdom of God. So the Kingdom of God is the terminology of the apocalyptic, and of course, it flows out of the Old Testament understanding, but it's never used in the Old Testament. But it becomes the absolutely essential language of Jesus. Thank you. Can I remember one time teaching a class, and the, and Jesus at the College, forty students were in the class. And we had gone through some preparatory material and looked at the synoptic tradition and basically dealt with Jesus, the birth narratives, and the baptism, and the temptation. And then we started, we turned to the teaching of Jesus. And I said, "I want everybody to take out a piece of paper, this little piece of paper and a pencil, and write down in three words or less, in a phrase or a word or two, what is the absolutely essential part of the teaching of Jesus?" And out of 40 responses in that class, I had only three who gave me the Kingdom of God. The others gave me love. You know, many times Jesus talks about love. Outside of the Gospel of John, that is, in the synoptic tradition, only twice. "Love God with all your hearts and your neighbors yourself," and "love your enemies." The only two times the word "love" appears in the entire synoptic tradition, Matthew, Mark, and Luke. Now, I'm not suggesting that love isn't what it's all about, but it's obvious that the most significant word in the mouth of Jesus, according to the Gospel writers, what is significant in the mouth of Jesus, according to the Gospel writers, is the term "the Kingdom of God." It is found on his lips everywhere. When Matthew, when Mark summarizes the teaching of Jesus, he summarizes the teaching of Jesus in terms of the Kingdom of God. "The time is fulfilled, the kingdom of God is at hand. Repent and believe the good news." That's Mark's summary of the entire ministry of Jesus. The time is fulfilled. That is, the great time of expectation, it's fulfilled. The kingdom of God is at hand. Repent and believe the good news. And at the heart of that, of course, is before the kingdom of God is at hand, that is, the time is fulfilled. What time is fulfilled? The time for the kingdom of God to come. The kingdom of God is at hand. Therefore, repent. Why? Because the kingdom of God is at hand. And believe the good news. What good news? The good news that the kingdom of God is at hand. Everything has to do with the fact of the presence of the kingdom of God.
Now, before we get to that, just a way of saying that that's absolutely essential. That's at the heart of the teaching of Jesus. It is language that belongs to the age to come. It has to do with the coming age, the new *aeon*, the new era, the future. Now, into these kinds of expectations, of course, when God has his day, he's going to undo this. And the great mark, and here's what we need to just say a word about this, and now to tie things we were saying yesterday into today, should say, the great mark, the one thing that is going to characterize the kingdom of God, that the new age, above every else, everything else, is that it's going to be the age of the Spirit. Back here, here a little, and there a little, you know, a prophetic voice now and then, a man of the Spirit for a task here, and another task there. And in the intertestamental period, the Spirit was completely gone, as it were, from their midst, according to their belief. In fact, the last one of the last verses in Zechariah says, "If a child grows up and says that I'm a prophetess, parents ought to slay him through, because there's no prophetic voice that's going to be heard in the land." Man, Israel is going through this time. So these apocalyptic are unknown to us by name. And the reason they're unknown to us by name is that they write in the name of somebody from antiquity. You know, they write in the name of a prophet who did speak in the name of the Lord. So speaking in this intertestamental period is Enoch, and Baruch, the scribe of Jeremiah, and we have the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, and they speak in their own name. Everybody is speaking as a prophet, but speaking as though he were speaking many, many years before, because there's no prophetic voice. The Spirit is missing. He's absent from the land. But the great promise of the coming day is that God is going to pour out his Spirit upon all flesh, the whole human race. That is, the whole people of God, the whole human race in the sense of the people of God who belong to the end time, you know, the eschatological people, whoever, whoever go with God into the end, into the eschatological age, those people, all are going to have the Spirit. And that's exactly why the Spirit is so crucial in the New Testament, because it is a recognition that the end is dawn, that the age has actually come. Why do we know? Because the Spirit has come upon God's people. And so it is going to be the age of the Spirit.
Now, into these kinds of expectations, there comes a wild figure of a man, and he is really a wild man. He's out there in the desert near Jericho, and he's got funny dress, and he eats a weird diet, and he's crying out, "Sing, repent! Why? Because God is about to do it. The age is about to come to its conclusion, and the new age is about to dawn." Now, the remarkable thing about what John the Baptist is doing is that he's baptizing even Jews. You and I read the New Testament, we think, "Well, of course, they got to get baptized like anybody else." I'll, of course, nothing. The only thing, only people who were being baptized in antiquity were people who were becoming proselytes. And very few people became proselytes because it meant circumcision and baptism, and thereafter becoming full Jews, and they could get all the benefits of the Jewish religion by sitting at the back of the synagogue without having to become full proselytes. And here's the puff, I mean, here is that in John the Baptist sitting out there in that river, that muddy old dirty stream, and the whole nation is coming out to hear, and they're wondering in their hearts, "Is this the coming one? Is this the one who's going to usher in the age?" And all is crying out, "As a repent, repent! The age is about to come!" And lo and behold, these Jews are submitting to baptism. They're saying, in effect, to John, "John's right. I'm not ready for the coming of the age. Birth as a Jew doesn't count. God can raise up children from these stones. That's of no account to God. It's not being Jewish that makes it into the end, but the people of God, and the people of God are those who are doing his will. And I'm not one who's doing his will, so I submit to baptism as an expression of my making myself ready for the coming of the age." John the Baptist says, "I'm not it at all. I'm doing is pronouncing the coming of the end. There stands one in your midst who is going to bring it." His way of saying it is, "I baptize with water," three insignificant preparatory water. But the one who stands in your midst, he is going to usher in the age of the Spirit. The language used, of course, is "baptized in the Spirit." And he doesn't mean individual believers' baptisms. He means he's going to be the one who's going to usher in the Messianic age. He's going to baptize in the Spirit. Compared to what I'm doing, it's nothing. But get yourselves ready, because he's there already in your midst. He stands among you.
Now, it's into that context that Jesus himself comes preaching, "The kingdom is at hand. The kingdom of God is at hand." Well, now we've got all kinds of trouble for the teaching of Jesus at this point because all you have to do is to read the Gospels, and you can get yourself into such a muddle. There's such ambiguity at this point that most of us simply leave the texts alone, or else make the kingdom be something like a spiritual thing inside my heart, or, you know, make the kingdom have to do with the church. Or some have even so totally destroyed Jesus' teaching that the kingdom is equated with a millennium, and what Jesus did was offer them the kingdom, but they refused it, so he took it back and decided, "No kingdom, we'll just have the church instead. After the church, then we'll bring the kingdom," kind of stuff. Now, you know, just not listening to Jesus at all. But there are good reasons for all that kind of thing going on because all you have to do is read the text for yourself, and you can see that Jesus over and over and over and over again talks about the kingdom of something in the future. "This man shall come from east and west and sit at table in the kingdom." He says, "I will not eat anymore, but I will eat it anew with you in the kingdom." Over and over again, the kingdom is in the future. But just as surely as the kingdom is in the future, and and and one of the reasons, I mean, among the many texts, and I don't even have these in my notes, I'm just running this off the top of my head from the Jesus materials, but many of the texts refer to the, you know, the great reversal of order. The oppressed are going to finally have the gospel preached to them. You know, that to the wrongs are going to be made right. "Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. Blessed are those who mourn, for they..." all of those down are going to be up. And although there's going to be a great reversal, and it's going to be in the future, "men shall come from east and west and sit at table with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in the kingdom. The sons of the kingdom will be thrown out." A great reversal, I'll tell you. Now, just as surely as those texts are there, there are also another whole group of texts that indicate that the kingdom is already present. The kingdom is already now. Jesus went preaching, "The kingdom of God is at hand. It is here. It is in your midst." The Pharisees finally asked Jesus, "When is the kingdom coming?" And notice that's the proper language, not "What is the kingdom?" but "When is the kingdom?" And Jesus says, "Hey, look, don't go looking here and there. The kingdom is not something that comes with signs to be observed, for the kingdom stands in your midst." Now, I know your King James Bible translates that, "The kingdom of God is in them," you know, "as within you." But come on, Jesus is talking to Pharisees, and that's the last possible thing he could have meant to a group of Pharisees, that the kingdom of God is in their hearts. What he's saying to them is that the kingdom of God doesn't come with signs to be observed because the kingdom of God is already present in your midst. Open your eyes.
Now, that means we've got to say something about the term "kingdom." Kingdom, therefore, is not a word that refers to a place. It is not a geographical term at all. It is not a term that belongs to the category of space. It is a term that belongs to the category of time. It is a temporal term. It is not a place to which we go. It is a time in which God is going to exercise his sovereignty and his total community and authority over the affairs of men. It's the time when God is going to set up his rule. God's time. So that's the proper question: "When is the kingdom coming?" And Jesus says, "The kingdom already stands in your midst." Well, how so? Well, obviously, because we're the kingdom. Where the King is, the kingdom is. Where the King has come, he is exercising his sovereignty. That's why Jesus said, "If I by the finger of God cast out demons, then the kingdom of God has come upon you." Precisely because the great reversal of Satan is in the process of taking place. He says, "The strong man holds on to his goods until the stronger man comes, and then the stronger man can bind the strong man and spoil his house." The strong man is obviously Satan, and God's stronger man is Jesus Christ, who has come and has started to rip up Satan's territory and claim it for his own. He is in the process of binding Satan and cleaning out his house and making it his own kingdom, his own rule. And that's exactly how Jesus understood his ministry. The kingdom of God is present. The kingdom of God is being preached, and men are pressing into it. They are being violently overthrown as they come into the kingdom of God. The time when God rules.
Now, what that means, and especially in light of the cross and resurrection that we spoke of some last night after we were off the TV, is that in the cross and resurrection, God himself established his kingdom. He brought the future into the presence. The rule of God has already come. Now, what this means for the early church, and this is why we've got to get back down to the text in First Corinthians, what this means to the early church is that they are to think of themselves as people who belong to the future. They are future people. They are eschatological people. They are people who belong to the new age. And the fact that they belong to the new age is to condition every last thing they do in the present age. Everything is conditioned by the new thing, by the fact that God's rule has come, by the fact that we are now under God's rule, his kingdom, his time to rule has come, that it has not yet been consummated. And that's why the Second Coming is the consummation. It is not a new thing God is going to do. It is the completion of what God has already done in the
Coming of Jesus Christ, and now we use the language and New Testament theology of inaugurating the kingdom. The kingdom has been inaugurated; it has not yet been consummated. But everything that the kingdom is to be in the future already is present, except its fullness, its final completion. That's why there is authority over Satan. That's why Paul says in Colossians 2:15 that in the cross, God made a public display of the demonic powers and triumphed over them in the cross.
The time of God's rule has already come, present. The future is absolutely certain because the present has already happened, because the future has already dawned, because we are already eschatological people who are living out the time of the end. We're in kind people living in this present existence now. Once you begin to hear that, and it's going to take a while for you to read the New Testament to let all of that sink in, but you've got to put yourself into that framework because everything is conditioned by that.
That's why in 2nd Corinthians 5, Paul says, and and you know that what what's going on in Corinth in 2nd Corinthians? Well, they're still having trouble the Apostle Paul because of their theology of glory. Remember we said that the other day? How can this weak apostle, you know, be the power of God? Well, he's not the power of God; the power rests in the Spirit. But he and they are eschatological people; they belong to the new age.
So in chapter 5, he says, "Look, I've got this one great conviction." This is in five about 13, 14. He says, "Jesus Christ died for all." Now, if that's true, and it is, then he says that means that all have died. That means death has already taken place in the cross. Death, God's judgment, has already taken place in His death. Mankind died; he's got literally wiped out. Now, you understand that he really means that this isn't just metaphorical language to the Apostle Paul. He means that if one man died for all, that means all have died.
Then he goes on to say, "So that those who have now life have what kind of life? The life of resurrection." He said, "We have been raised." And since we've been raised, it is not our life that we have to live. Listen to the text, and you can read it for yourself. I'm not making things up; this is the text of 2nd Corinthians. Paul says, "The life that we now live, you can no longer live unto yourself." Why? Because you died. And the life that you now live is the life that God has given you to live in the new age. You are living resurrected life in this present age, and it's, if you will, I was going to say life on borrowed time. That's not quite the proper terminology, but it's it's given life that is your present existence isn't your own. It is a given life to you. The reason is you've already died the death of Christ. All mankind died, and the only ones who were living are those who have been called into life by the resurrection power of Jesus Christ.
And so there are only two kinds of people in the face of the earth: there are the dead and there are the alive. And those who are dead can only come to life by the gift of the resurrection. They can only be raised to life. Paul says, "And if you've been raised to life, that means you can't live for yourself anymore. You can only live for Him who died for you."
Now he goes on in verse 16 and says, "Now look," he says, "we don't view anybody any longer kata Sarka, according to the flesh." Well, now here's a nice piece of text that has been terribly abused in the church. "We don't view anybody caught a Sarka." That means we don't look at anybody in terms of their flesh. Now, that's not what Paul says at all. Says, "Even we know Jesus caught a circuit." We don't know in that way anymore. What is he talking about? He's saying, "We don't view anybody any longer from a merely human point of view."
"All things," well, yeah, he says the the all this past. And get it into verse 17, and here's a text that's a nice text for evangelism. But let's face it, the text hasn't to do with evangelism; it has to do with the fact that these Corinthians are looking at Paul from a worldly point of view, and he's telling him, "Stop it." And in the process, he said, "All things." Well, yeah, he says, "Therefore, if any man be in Christ," you know, beat into this new risen life, "If any man be in Christ, all things have passed away. The old has gone, and the new has come." Because the new age has come, and we belong to the new way of looking at things, and therefore the old way is gone; it's past. So stop looking at me caught us ARCA, stopped looking at me from a merely human point of view. You don't belong to that age anymore; you don't belong to that old Aeon; you belong to the new Aeon. You're an eschatological person, and therefore you to view people cotta pluma, according to the Spirit.
Now, everything in the Apostle Paul is conditioned, or he insists that we are conditioned by the future. We belong to the future; we are eschatological people. We poland', and therefore everything changes. All of that to get back to first Corinthians 6, which we're going to do in the following hour, but it's it's absolutely imperative that we have this before us because this is where Paul is coming from. You understand this isn't that something I'm simply making up and imposing on the Apostle; this is the absolute foundational framework of his thinking. Already, but not yet. But the emphasis is only already. And in the process of obvious of his thinking, eschatological and speaking to the Corinthians, everything that we now are, we are to think as those who are conditioned by the future.
Now, there's still a future, praise God. But it is a future that has already been partially realized. It has not been fully realized. I understand the reason that Christians want the second coming. The reason we pray urgently, "Thy kingdom come," and there is again one of those already not yet texts. You see, I didn't use that language the other night when I was speaking on it, but I said everything around using the language. It's a it's a text that has to do with a the final consummation. "Thy kingdom come, O Lord, let the day come when You fully realize Your rule." But of course, that's because the kingdom already is. And so we're praying for the kingdom now to be, you know, being exercised and having its sovereignty and its authority and its its way in our lives.
The fact that we're already people of the future is going to so completely condition everything we do now. The point is, it's going to condition our ethics, and that's what's going to happen in this text. You see, it so totally conditions us that we no longer think from a worldly point of view. Now, if I get exercised at times, and I do, this is one of the places where I really get exercised. There is going on in the United States of America, and there has been for a number of years, a kind of theology that says, "Serve God and get rich." If you serve God, He owes you a living. He owes you land and money and influence. And if I say, if there's anything that has caught a Sarka, that is that so caught a Sarka it makes me vomit, that is viewing the world from that is viewing the Christian faith from a merely we're only point of view. We don't belong to this age, and all of the trash and the effluents and the money and the influence at everything else that's of this age, it's passing. We've been conditioned by the future; we're future people, and we are no longer look upon the world cata Sarka, according to the flesh, from a worldly point of view. We belong to the new age; we are people of the future. It is ours, and we should be living it out now in everything we do and think, everything we do in society, because we are the people of the future, because we are now the people in the future. Now that's to condition everything, and in our next hour, we're going to see how that conditions our ethics totally, because that's the point of the text. Finally, okay, for now.