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God's Emerging City
While God’s call upon our lives has brought to us a sense of eternal destiny, His ways of bringing us into the realization of that destiny are vastly different from ours. The road into full spiritual maturity is the way of the cross. The way in which we live and the spirit with which we speak will determine the ultimate fruit of our lives on Earth. Like Jesus, our job description is not to destroy men’s lives but to see them saved. In giving ourselves to this task, we face the way of the cross. Anyone promising an easier route to spiritual fruitfulness is either deceived, a deceiver, or both.
Behold My servant will prosper...
(Isaiah 52:13 NASB)
The Father’s intent for the Messiah was that He would prosper. Yet immediately following this promise of messianic success, Isaiah prophesied that it would come through suffering.
Suffering is the path to prosperity in God’s kingdom. While it is not pleasant to hear about testing and tribulation, the Lord has designed only one road leading to honor. And it leads through Calvary.
By going to the cross, Jesus humbled Himself more than any other individual in all of human history.[3] As a result, the Father gave Him the highest place of honor in the universe (Philippians 2:6 - 11).
When Satan tempted Jesus in the wilderness, he proposed an easier way. He offered Him all the kingdoms of the world and their glory if He would only bow down and worship him. But the Father had already made the same promise.
Ask of Me, and I will give You the nations for Your inheritance, and the ends of the earth for Your possession.
Only one had the right to make the offer. Either Psalm 2 depicts the Father trying to deceive His Son, or Satan was attempting to do so during Jesus’ wilderness temptation. I think it is obvious who was lying.
Many incorrectly believe that Satan owns the Earth and therefore had the right to make his offer to Jesus. “After all, he’s the ruler of this world.”[4] While this statement is true the Earth and the world are not necessarily the same thing. The world system and the current expression of the Kingdom of God (His present rule among men) exist side by side on planet Earth. The world system worships its ruler and follows his line of thinking. On the other hand, God’s kingdom is where we seek to do His will on Earth as it is done in Heaven. So both God’s kingdom and the world system co-exist together on planet Earth.
So who actually owns the planet?
The earth is the LORD’s, and all its fullness, the world and those who dwell therein.
Ultimately, God’s kingdom will bring the world system to its knees and fill the planet with His glory.
For the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the LORD, as the waters cover the sea.
Satan lied when he made the offer of the nations to Jesus. He lied that he both had the right to make the offer and that God’s route through the cross was unnecessary.
Jesus knew well the contents of Isaiah Chapter 53 during His earthly life. He had surely read this passage many times while growing up. As He read, He saw clearly His call to prosper in God’s purpose, as well as the necessary route to arrive there. Therefore, He humbled Himself by becoming obedient even to death at Calvary. This is not to imply that Jesus’ motivation for going to the cross was simply to achieve some sort of personal success. He did so because of love. And it is through the expression of such amazing love that He laid out for us God’s path to eternal glory.
While it is true that God has goals for our lives, one of our tendencies is to focus more on them while sometimes disregarding the proper way to get there. But the Lord emphasizes both.
Jesus said to him, “I am the way (i.e., the proper route), the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father (i.e., the proper goal) except through Me.
If we do not take the proper way, we will not arrive at the proper goal.
For example, it boggles our minds that Jesus spent a number of years laboring as a carpenter. We might have thought, “Lord, don’t You see all those people dying and going to Hell? Don’t you see the Roman Empire crushing Israel? You are God! You are here in the flesh! What are You doing making yokes, doors, and tables? Why don’t You do something?” But Jesus was under the discipline of His Father. So He submitted to Joseph and Mary and became a carpenter. He went the way of His Father.
As a result, when released into ministry, it took only three and a half years to fully reveal the nature of God, confront the religious and secular systems of this world, and defeat the powers of darkness.
In Old Testament times, many in Israel probably concluded that when the Messiah came, He would crush all their enemies and rule over the world. All nations would stream to Zion and from there He would send forth His Law, establishing Israel as the chief of the nations. It would be a glorious time. But then when they would read Isaiah Chapter 53, they must have had questions about the suffering servant. Who would he be? Could he be the Messiah, or perhaps a second Messiah?
Some believed in two Messiahs: one who would reign and one who would suffer. When reading aloud from Isaiah Chapter 53, the Ethiopian eunuch had no idea who the prophet was referring to. So Philip preached Jesus to him (Acts 8:35). When the eunuch realized that Jesus was both the suffering and the reigning Messiah, he suddenly gained insight not only into the Messiah’s identity but into the ways of God as well.
Scripture refers to the Church not as the body of Jesus, but as the body of Christ. To be clear, Jesus is the Lord God of Heaven and Earth who became a man two thousand years ago. The resurrected body of Jesus had the marks of crucifixion in His hands, feet, and side. And He is now glorified, seated at the right hand of His Father having poured out His Holy Spirit upon us. When He comes again, He will do so visibly in the same way that He left, and we will see Him face to face, recognizing Him as the crucified One.
This glorified God-man is also the life-giving Spirit now living within His people through the power of the Holy Spirit. While the body of Jesus is in Heaven, a major part of the body of Messiah is on Earth. Of course, Jesus is the Messiah, the Christ.[5] However, His ministry as the Messiah did not end when He ascended into Heaven. He continued His messianic ministry among the nations through His people, His corporate body.
Jesus, the Son of God, was the anointed One that God sent to Israel that she might be saved. And when the Spirit descended upon Him like a dove, He shook the powers of both Hell and religion for three and a half years. But then He began to release that messianic anointing in Acts Chapter 2 upon one hundred and twenty people meeting in a house in Jerusalem so that it literally began to spread across the Earth.
God’s intent was that He would now continue to reveal Israel’s Messiah on the Earth through a people filled with the Holy Spirit. As a result, all through the book of Acts He continued to send Messianic ministry to Israel as He wooed the Jewish people unto himself. Even when Israel was defeated and scattered by the Romans in A.D. 70, the emerging body of believers stood as testimony that God had not given up on the Jewish people (Romans 11:11). Their Messiah would be progressively made known even among the very nations to which they as a nation had been scattered.
So shall He sprinkle many nations. Kings shall shut their mouths at Him; for what had not been told them they shall see, and what they had not heard they shall consider.
In his day, Isaiah realized that the gospel was not simply for Israel but for every nation on Earth. Both Jew and Gentile would benefit from the Messiah’s death, because His blood would be sprinkled upon every nation. Political leaders would shut their mouths on account of Him. The mighty and powerful would be stunned when they experienced His presence. Amazingly, the nations that had no heritage of God’s Word and Spirit would experience the results of His sacrifice.
God intended to go beyond Israel’s borders into all the Earth. People who had never heard of Him or understood His ways would begin to experience Him and His works. We who are Gentiles need to be very thankful that the Lord reached out beyond Israel into the nations, so that we who had no spiritual heritage could be grafted into Him and His purpose. As a result, we have an ancestral lineage rooted in Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and all the prophets (Ephesians 2:11 - 16).
Calvary not only revealed God’s solution for humanity’s sin, it also showed the route we must take to be conformed to the image of His Son. There are no short cuts, no easy ways for us to become like Him. We must pick up our crosses daily, follow Him, learn His ways, and bear His presence to others. As we become like Him, the gospel we preach will bear the authority and authenticity of Heaven and will ultimately produce the fruit of Christ’s glory and character in others. The spread of such a gospel and the increase of such a people is what we must give ourselves to in our lifetimes. In the end, God will see His objective for the Earth completed as He fills it with His glory.
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