The Kingdom of Heaven on Earth?! Jeff Durbin, Dr. Joseph Boot and Sye Ten Bruggencate

Christ’s Lordship Over Every Sphere

Alright, so let's talk a bit about where do we go from here, right? So, I mean, the basic things that we argue for constantly is that Christ is King, and that He has all authority in heaven and on earth.

He is King and has lordship authority over our minds, over our families, over our churches, over our government, over all of our culture. There's no realm Jesus doesn't say, that's not mine. And so you mentioned something at dinner, you said something about the table, Jesus and the table, what was that?

Well, that so often Christians talk about their desire to have a seat at the table, the sort of pluralistic, multicultural, philosophically relativistic spread that is out in modern western culture today.

But Jesus never asks for a seat at the table because He owns the table. And so, therefore, our task is to assert the crown rights of Christ the King in every area of life. That's the way the Puritans would have put it.

And we may have forgotten that, but that doesn't mean that our forgetfulness, our Christian amnesia is not a good thing. You know, culture is religion externalized, it's the public manifestation of religion.

So, through the institutions and organs of any society, religion is always inescapably being manifested. There's no such thing as a neutral culture. Culture cannot be neither one thing nor another. So it's a very simple question, true worship or idolatry?

The Lordship of Christ or some other God.

The Great Commission and the Cultural Mandate

Jesus Christ said, go therefore and make disciples of all nations. You hear people recite the Great Commission and they start there. Go therefore, and when you see in scripture, go therefore, you have to think, go what for?

All authority in heaven and earth has been given to me. Go therefore, and that's true with apologetics, that's true with any aspect of life. And one of the things that I do is that I debate people. And often you see debates, you know, some of the most awkward debates, where they're trying to get creationism on the table in schools.

And like Joe was saying, how pointless that is, that we don't want a seat at the table. Jesus Christ owns a table, we have to start fresh, you know, from our own perspective. And then, and like Marcus says often too, he says, then the culture will want to be a success when they see what's going on.

And I think that's the way to go.

And Christians, Joe, I mean, I think we'll grant that. He's the king over heaven, right? But it's the on earth part that we're struggling with. And as a result of the struggling with it, we've abandoned the world culture to the darkness.

Because we don't think Jesus is in charge of every realm here. So Jesus says, go therefore and make disciples of all nations. So when he talks about discipleship, he talks about it in terms of nations.

Not simply just individuals, but nations. So how do we do it? I mean, here we are now, we've allowed our, we've given up the gardens of the weeds. And we've let them grow and flourish in the garden. And so here we are.

Christians called to be salt by Jesus, called to be light by Jesus, to preserve the world around us, to scatter the darkness. And here we are now, eating the fruit of our labors, which is none. No labors.

And so here we sit. Not to say that God hasn't had always faithful Christians, but now we are facing what our predecessors have given us. So Joe, where do we go from here, from a gospel-centered approach?

Recovering the Full Gospel of the Kingdom

Well, we certainly have to blow up the notion that this is about being right wing. God doesn't define his agenda by the seating positions of the French Revolution. Whether we're right or left. We're biblical.

We're Christian. And I like your image of the garden. I think that's the most appropriate one because, in a sense, the Great Commission is what the cultural mandate looks like after the resurrection.

That's right. That's right.

So God created the whole universe. In fact, when you look at it in Genesis, he creates the, creation is a temple itself. This great dome above us, the firmament. And he sets his priest kings in creation to be his vice regents in the earth.

To turn creation into a culture, to cultivate it. And we've been letting the weeds grow in God's temple. And the tabernacle of the temple is a copy of Eden as well in scripture. So whether it's from the decorations within the tabernacle and in the temple, on the robes of the priest and so forth, it's an image of creation itself.

Now Christ comes as the second Adam, and he calls us to be his kingdom people, to be prophets, priests, and kings in God's creation. He restores us to that mandate, and then he commissions us, restates the cultural mandate, in the form of the Great Commission to go and teach and disciple and discipline the nations.

So the way I think we need to go about that now is to recognize, as you've clearly stated, that there's weeds all around us. This cosmos is God's temple. We have a responsibility for every aspect of it.

God doesn't just say, well, you're restricted to this flower bed. Or you're restricted to that flower bed. The whole of creation is to be cultivated in terms of the lordship of Christ. And so that means that whether it's education, whether it's medicine, whether it's charity, whether it's the university, whether it's law and politics and all of those things, we have to recultivate them in terms of the lordship of Christ.

You know, when the eschaton takes place and the consummation of all things tells us that the city of God comes down out of heaven into the earth, and the image we have actually in Scripture is of a garden city.

It's of a cultivated place where man, under the lordship of Christ, has turned God's creation into the culture of Jesus Christ. And that's going to require children sitting with the curriculum of Christ at their tables.

And it's going to require politicians with the law of God and the word of God in front of them. It's going to require legislators and judges to take God's word again seriously and to apply it into every sphere.

That's what we have to do. And I think we may have, as Christians in North America and the West today, we have a few tidy flower beds where we feel are fairly free from a few weeds, and that might be certain parts of the church.

And everywhere else, as you said, we've got the creepers and the dandelions and the weeds that are overrunning God's garden. Now, we have an obligation to cultivate it in terms of the kingdom of God. That is the gospel.

It's the gospel of the kingdom. And Jesus says that the Son of Man appeared for this purpose. He tells us why he's come, to destroy the works of the devil. Is abortion a work of God? Yes. I mean, we're the devil.

Right, yes.

Is gay marriage a work of God? Is lawless, godlessness in our society a work of God? Is neutral education a work of God? No. If they're not works of God, whose works are they?

The works of the devil.

So we're called to be part of their destruction. They're overthrowing them. So the culture of Christ, that is the gospel of the kingdom, to which we're called to pray. So Christians so quickly forget, don't we?

Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth. As it is in heaven. The gospel is much less about getting people out of the earth into heaven as it is about getting heaven into the earth, to get God's will and purpose done right here.

The Gospel of God’s Son, the Kingdom, and the Great Commission

Right. And so you brought something up that I think we should unpack a bit. You have Paul calling it God's gospel in Romans chapter 1, the gospel of God's Son. It's the gospel of Jesus Christ. But Jesus goes out in Matthew chapter 4 proclaiming the good news of the kingdom.

And I think that when I think about, okay, we need to take the ax to the root always. And look at the Christian culture around us today and think, well, what's wrong? Why don't we have a bigger vision, an enlarged vision of just how far reaching the salvation and forgiveness with Christ actually goes?

I think about it in terms of, well, the real issue is that we don't think that Jesus rules and has all authority and that that authority is supposed to spread. And through the proclamation of salvation and forgiveness throughout the world.

Okay, so what do we do? Nuts and bolts. Because you talk about education, you talk about science, you talk about politics, legislatures, things like that. So what do we do as Christians now? Because now we have a long road ahead of us.

I mean, the Puritans really did view the kingdom of Christ as the big thing and all of life being subject to Christ and everything else. And that included the legislature. They just assumed that. Well, we've lost the majority of that.

And what is in place now is hanging by a thread, particularly in America. So what do we do as Christians? What do we do? I mean, obviously it's centered with the gospel, repentance and faith. Salvation comes before anything else.

We're not going to save society from the very top. But what do we do as Christians to get back on track?

Preaching the Kingdom, Not a Truncated Gospel

Well, the first thing I think is that we have to stop truncating the gospel. As you pointed out, we have to, in a sense, recover the gospel of the kingdom, a full-on gospel, so that we cease to truncate it into this idea that my sins are forgiven, I'm going to heaven, and let's reform liturgy in the life of the church.

As though God's purpose is for the restitution and reconciliation of all things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, is restricted to liturgical reform. So we have to recover, I think, first of all, a full-on gospel for the pulpit.

Nothing is ultimately going to change until once again we start to preach that Christ is the ruler of the kings of the earth, Revelation 1 .5, that He's the Christ of the Philippians 2, of Psalm 2, who rules the nations and shatters them like a potter's vessel.

And the Father threatens the kings of the earth.

You kiss the sun, you perish in the way. So this vision again of a gospel where Peter gets up in Acts 4 .12 and says, There's no other name under heaven given to men by which you must be saved than the name of Jesus, is a direct rebuttal of Augustus Caesar's published claim that he was the savior of the world.

So we're wrestling, we're struggling with first an under-realized soteriology. Some people say to me, that's an over-realized eschatology. No, the problem is an under-realized soteriology. Our doctrine of salvation is so narrow that we've lost that vision of old evangelicalism and we need to recover it.

That's the first thing. The second thing is, of course, evangelism and apologetics aren't eclipsed in this. They're not secondary. They're primary. So we have to spread the gospel. You can't impose on an unwilling people God's order.

It has to be embraced. So the idea that this has got anything to do with some sort of dictatorial Christian regime imposing stuff on people is complete nonsense. We preach the gospel of Christ and we declare its full scope and extent and we work in all of these areas and we have to take the long-range view.

Because this isn't going to happen overnight. This is not going to maybe happen in 50 years, maybe even 100 years. But Scripture says, The earth shall be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.

If the increase of his government and peace, there'll be no end. So we have to believe that our calling and our purpose in life is not to simply have an eye on the Middle East and Middle Eastern oil so that we can leave the world and escape the earth.

That's a Greek notion that salvation is escape from the body and from the material world, from creation into the other realm of ideals and spirits and ideas. Christ was resurrected in the body for a reason.

He's incarnated in the body, in the physical world for a reason. He's raised incorruptible in the body for a reason. That's our destiny. All creation is moving in terms of that purpose ultimately. We have the privilege of participating in that.

So we have to say to ourselves, that's the gospel. And then we have to labor in terms of it. So that means practically, we need to begin Christian schools again. We've just started one in Toronto, Westminster Classical Christian Academy.

We have to begin again Christian health work that is dedicated to a Christian vision of medicine. Right now in Canada, we have got the bureaucracy essentially seeking now to force doctors to be engaged in euthanasia and abortion because it's state controlled.

And conscience rights for doctors are under threat to actually not be able to say, I'm not going to do that, and I'm not going to refer you for that. That's no longer allowed. So we have to be praying and asking God to help us recover medicine.

We have to tithe again. So we have to start to give to God his due. Jesus says, render to Caesar what belongs to Caesar, to God what belongs to God, what belongs to God. The tithe. Caesar's not going to get any smaller until the tithe gets bigger.

Caesar always steps in where the church has stepped out. So it's a very practical thing. When Christians ask, well, that sounds all very grand, Joe. What do we do? Well, start to tithe. Make sure that the tithe is going towards health, welfare, education, evangelism, apologetics, that these things are taking place.

And then Christians, in all of their vocations, have to be faithful to the gospel in that vocation. They have to be faithful to God's word in that vocation. Until that happens, we can't recover law. We can't recover the political arena.

And we have to be willing to do what men like William Wilberforce did and say God's covenant means that if we do not get rid of this sin, our nation will be judged for it. That's what he believed about the African slave trade.

That it was ultimately Britain would suffer if they did not abolish this because God's judgment was upon us for it. And we have to again raise voices like that. It was 300 to 1 for Wilberforce. It looked completely hopeless.

But he rallied with other Christians. He plied his faith right there in Parliament. He marshaled the best arguments. He prayed all his life to see that evil abolished. That's what the Christian life is about.

It's the assertion of the crown rights of Christ the King in every area so that Christ will say to us, well done, good and faithful servant. We take that great gospel and we apply it everywhere so that we destroy the works of the devil so that the liberty and freedom that is in Christ is made manifest in every sphere.

Christ's freedom in education. Christ's freedom in medicine. Christ's freedom in politics. Christ's freedom in the courts. Those things where God's justice and righteousness is being made manifest. That, after all, is how we're taught to pray.

But it begins in the simplest of ways. Am I leading my family in the word of God? Am I leaving my children in a devotional life? Am I faithful to my spouse? Am I tithing of my income to the Lord? Am I pressing the battle to the gates in my vocation, in my workplace to apply God's word there?

That's what it means to be a Christian. I was reaching for it in our first interview where Jesus says the connection between morality and epistemology. He says if any man would know if the doctrine is true, he must do the will of my Father.

Anyone who does the will of my Father will know if the doctrine is true. So Jesus connects morality, our ethical attitude towards God and our ability to know rightly. If we're not ready to submit to the will of God, we cannot know the truth.

That's right.

Yeah.

The Antithesis, Neutrality, and Presuppositional Apologetics

And I think a powerful, forceful statement of Jesus is whoever's not gathered together with me, whoever's not for me.

Scatters.

So that's it.

I mean, Jesus doesn't qualify that statement.

No.

Over here.

Period.

For him or against him.

Yeah.

And so you have to press that claim. For him against him in epistemology. For him against him in science.

This is why this is presuppositional cultural apologetics.

Yeah.

Exactly that. Because we're saying we're going to press the antithesis here. We're going to say that if Jesus Christ is Lord, and that's all things visible and invisible in heaven and in earth, what's left out?

Right.

Nothing is left out. Therefore, to press the Lordship of Christ to its logical conclusion, as Christ wants us to press it, as you said, if you're not for me or against me, means that there's no aspect of culture which we can say is neutral.

That's right.

There's no such thing as a neutral culture anyway. To overturn one prejudice is simply to inculcate another. All law, all education, all art will be developed and conducted in terms of a worldview perspective that will either be honoring Christ or dishonoring Christ.

How can a Christian support and celebrate that which is dishonoring to the Lord?

That's right.

I think it's good to emphasize something you already said, but let's just put it on record because people hear this and they see the biblical richness of it. You have people who have, I think, an unbiblical view of the future and of Christ's authority and Lordship and law, and they'll tend to say something to the effect of the law issue, legislation, everything else.

I try to emphasize what you've already put down, but I want to emphasize it again. There's no way that the world changes because you drop the law of God on them. There's no way that society is going to be healed because you drop the law of God on them.

It only comes from hearts that actually desire the law of God. And so the promise of the old covenant coming into the new was Jeremiah 31. He puts his law within us. It's internalized now. We desire it now from an internal perspective.

Ezekiel 36, heart of stone to heart of flesh. I will put my spirit within them and cause them to observe my statutes. So it's the gospel first that transforms people's lives and hearts that are joined together with Christ as the beginning of the new creation, and they love God and love his law.

And so when we think about the future, we're looking, and you said long-term vision, long-term perspective that we get to a point one day where people so love the Lord and have so been transformed, they look to his law as a standard of justice.

So talk about that more so that we can put to death any kind of argument or reason to oppose the gospel of the kingdom by saying something like, well, you just want the law to save society or something like that.

Law as Grace, Sanctification, and the Hope of Cultural Transformation

Well, first of all, the law was never given to redeem anybody.

That's right.

At any point in history. So what we're not saying here is that God's law will redeem and save man. Jesus Christ is the only Savior. It's by his grace and by his blood that we're redeemed. But Paul tells us in Titus, he says that we've been redeemed from all lawlessness.

That's what we've been redeemed from, lawlessness. The devil is the lawless one. He's the man of lawlessness and sin is lawlessness. So we've not been redeemed so that we can be sinners and be lawless.

We've been redeemed so that we can be conformed to the image of his son. And Christ was the one who obeyed the law perfectly as the new Adam who fulfilled the covenant works in its totality by rendering perfect obedience.

So by the work of the Holy Spirit, we're now being conformed to that. Now when people think about this issue, they sometimes say, you can't legislate morality. But the truth is you can only legislate morality.

All law is the legislation of morality or procedural thereto. So somebody's law is being legislated. Now law and education reflect the religion of the people. So right now we're in a revolution against biblical law.

We have been for about 100 years, but especially since the end of the Second World War. We've been interacting indirectly all of the time with biblical law. Our repeal of Sabbath day laws. Our repeal of marriage laws here in Canada pertaining to the redefinition of marriage.

These are all indirect engagements with biblical law as we're changing our faith as a people. Now of course as the gospel prospers, those people, God's people, who recognize the benefits of the gospel, even non-believers who recognize the benefits of the gospel, will demand righteous laws and righteous government.

And so that's how it takes place. It's when people say, this is our faith, this is our God, he's our covenant Lord and we're going to obey him. So that is the vision that we have for culture. And when people say, oh, it's unrealistic, it's impossible.

Well, we walk by faith, not by sight, don't we? I mean if a man is converted in his home, his wife may be converted, and then he leads his children to faith. And if that man leads his children to faith in a small town or a community and they start sharing the gospel, what if a street is converted?

And what if that street shares the gospel in such a manner and lives the gospel in such a way that that village turns to Christ? And you've got 70 or 80 of the people there wanting to go to church, which used to actually be the case in a place like Toronto, wanting to be in the house of God to worship Christ.

And what if that town is a province? And what if that province is a nation? And so when people doubt the possibility of this, who are they doubting? They're doubting God. They're doubting the power of the gospel.

They're doubting the omnipotent work of the Holy Spirit to convince the world of sin, righteousness, and judgment. I don't think we should be about unbelief in what God is able to do in and through his people by the power of his Holy Spirit.

It's not about us winning arguments or imposing things. This is about the work of the omnipotent God, the Holy Spirit, God the Holy Spirit, transforming all of creation into the culture of Christ so that the last enemy to be defeated, Paul says, is death.

That's the last enemy. He must reign until he's put all his enemies under his feet. Now that's a vision of hope and of the kingdom of the gospel that I think young people today, especially having been fed pietistic retreatism and a truncated gospel for a very long time, want to get on board with.

Because it's biblical.

Because it's exactly...

It resonates within the heart of every believer.

With every person, that Christ is who he says he is. He's not lord of some ethereal, merely king of some ethereal...

Neverland.

Neverland of ideals. He is lord of heaven and earth. That's the gospel. And the gospel is the gospel of the kingdom. It is the covenant law and grace of God. They always come together. By his grace he redeems me from all lawlessness that I might live unto him, that the righteousness of God might be fulfilled in us as we live out gospel truth.

So to me, in a sense, if I can put it this way, law is gospel. It's all the good news. It's the new covenant written on the heart. It's good news to me. The law is a gift of grace. It was a gift from the greater to the lesser.

Therefore, God's covenant law is a gracious gift already to his church. It's not the means of salvation, but it's the path of our sanctification. And scripture, God's word, God's covenant word is laid down not for a few people in the life of the church.

It's given to all men. Since when is God's word just for a few men? It's for all men in every place, in every age, at all times right here today in North America.

That's right.

And so it's good news that God saves sinners as a gift of his grace through the redemption that's in Christ through what Christ has accomplished apart from any work of law. That's good news of forgiveness and salvation.

It's good news that Jesus is king over heaven and earth.

He reigns.

And it's good news that God's law is written in our hearts now. That's also good news. So what we're really arguing for here is nothing new. We're talking about recovering what is ancient Jewish eschatology, ancient biblical eschatology, the faith of our fathers in many respects.

There's nothing presuppositionally here that's different or opposed to anything Christians have believed for all of history. And in particular, we're talking about recovering what the Puritans brought over to America.

And all of it is saturated through and through with a rugged biblical theology and view of Christ and his kingdom and his gospel. I mean, in the end, what we're arguing for is just what every reformed Christian constantly tries to convince people of, the power of God's spirit to bring about life from death and to open the eyes of sinners and to change their hearts.

We're arguing for what reformed folks have always argued for, and that's transformed lives. Perseverance of the saints was never about God saving and letting you go. It was about God saving and causing you to persevere.

All the works that happen in my life, everything is because of the spirit of God who now indwells me and changes my life. So in reality, this is reformed theology with legs.

Yes.

Moving into the world.

Yeah. This is exactly, I think it's saying it's not enough to just say, well, I'm reformed, I believe in the doctrines of grace.

Right.

That's rung one of the ladder of the reformed story of reality. It is, do we believe in the sovereignty of God? That's the reformed contribution. The reformed contribution wasn't predestination. Luther was much more the theologian of predestination than Calvin was, though Calvin believed it.

But Calvin's contribution, the distinctively reformed contribution, was the sovereignty of God, the lordship of Jesus Christ, and the priesthood of all believers. That whether you're a butcher, a baker, or a candlestick maker, your vocation is holy unto the Lord.

It's a priestly calling. And we are, Peter says, a royal priesthood. We're a kingly priesthood. Do you sense much kingly about the modern evangelicalism today? Or even priestly in our mediatorial function?

We've let that calling that we have in Christ slide. And so we've increasingly limited our realm and our calling under God into an ever-narrowing sphere. And that's why our culture is the way it is today.

And what happens then when culture starts to pursue a course of death, I mean, Christ is light and life. If you turn away from light and life, it's death and darkness. When it pursues that direction, what tends to happen is Christians start to develop theologies of retreat and escape from a bad world, rather than recognizing a biblical theology of restitution and reconciliation.

Paul says the ministry of reconciliation has been committed to us. And it's the reconciliation of all things to Christ. That's why I want to be part of that.