Dennis Tuuri

# Acts 28 – Pastor Dennis Tuuri

Of the acts of Jesus Christ through his church as we have just sung about. We’re in Acts chapter 28, concluding the book this week. And we read of Paul’s coming to Rome and what he accomplished there and what he did. Acts 28, we begin reading at verse 23. Please stand for the reading of God’s word.

Acts 28, beginning at verse 23.

And when they had appointed him a day, there came many to him unto his lodging to whom he expounded and testified the kingdom of God, persuading them concerning Jesus, both out of the law of Moses and out of the prophets from morning till evening.

And some believed the things which were spoken, and some believed not. And when they agreed not among themselves, they departed, after that Paul had spoken one word, “Well spake the Holy Ghost by Isaiah the prophet unto our fathers, saying, Go unto this people, and say, Hearing ye shall hear, and shall not understand, and seeing ye shall see, and not perceive. For the heart of this people is waxed gross, and their ears are dull of hearing, and their eyes have they closed.

Lest they should see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and understand with their heart and should be converted, and I should heal them. Be it known, therefore, unto you, that the salvation of God is sent unto the Gentiles, and that they will hear it.” And when he had said these words, the Jews departed, and had great reasoning among themselves. And Paul dwelt two whole years in his own hired house, and received all that came in unto him, preaching the kingdom of God, and teaching those things which concern the Lord Jesus Christ, with all confidence, no man forbidding him.

Let us pray. Father, we know that it’s impossible to understand this, nonetheless obey it, apart from the grace of your Holy Spirit. We thank you that this grace is ours through the work of Jesus, our Savior. And we pray that He may indeed fill us and illumine us with an understanding of this text that we might obey it. In Jesus’ name we pray and for the sake of His kingdom. Amen.

What do you do in a time of the manifestations of God’s judgment in temporal, earthly matters? What do you do when you have too much of the elements that produce manifestations of judgment round about you? What do you do when the visible church is not walking in obedience for the most part to the Lord Jesus Christ? What do you do when a significant element of the visible church compromises itself and follows the world along its dismal, sin-rent and cursed path?

And what do you do when another element of the visible church, still rejecting the lordship of Jesus Christ, pulls back into a ghetto, pulls back into what are perceived as safe enclaves?

I saw a movie a couple weeks ago. I do not recommend it. It has two scenes in it that are very objectionable. Most of it is not like that. But this movie was called Safe. It’s a picture of a rich woman in Los Angeles. The first half of the movie, she grows increasingly sensitive to the pollutants around her in her environment, begins to obsess on them and get deathly ill.

And then about the middle of the movie, she goes off into this place called Renwood in the desert, a place for the environmentally ill. And improves for a short period of time, then continues to get worse. And finally there—it’s really a cult-like atmosphere, a new age sort of cult. It’s not really a medical facility. And finally there she enters into an igloo lined with porcelain, a safe area for her supposedly.

The whole movie is called Safe. She retreats, retreats, retreats. One of the concluding scenes, she’s actually seen as allergic to her own husband somehow. Retreats into the safety supposedly of this igloo and stares into the mirror and bruises on her face and she says, “I love you. I love you.” Self love.

Well, what do you do when the church acts like that? The church who retreats increasingly from the culture, not wanting to accommodate itself to the culture of course which we don’t want to do, but retreats, retreats—you end up with retreat even from each other with that kind of mindset.

What do you do when that’s the state of the church? And what do you do when even the people that do begin to wake up to the lordship of Jesus Christ are so easily pulled off the path and so easily fall away from the doctrine, or if they hold the doctrine so easily fall away from the practice of the doctrine relative to interpersonal relationships in the context of the body, relative to the mission of the church, that they fade away and aren’t there for support in the context of difficult times?

In other words, you’ve got a small portion of the church that may be awakening to the lordship of Christ, and even that small portion falls away so easily. These are manifestations of judgments. What do you do in those sort of times? What do you do?

I’m not talking about our time. I’m talking about the Apostle Paul. And Paul shows us what he did here. See, Paul has just gone through the manifestation of physical judgment in that great sea trip, right? He knows what’s happening. And the world is beginning to experience more and more judgments—earthquakes, etc., as our Savior predicted, coming up to that great cataclysmic event, the destruction of Jerusalem.

And we mentioned also the earthquakes of Vesuvius erupting, etc. that would fill the world with judgment. At that time, Paul had known about those things. He knew about the impending judgments and that were already in the earth and the shakings that had gone on.

And he knew that the visible church—the Pharisees—were not acknowledging the lordship of Jesus Christ and were instead pulling back into these enclaves, and the Sadducees were accommodating themselves to the spirit of the age. And he knew that even the church of Jesus Christ, that believed on Jesus and made an affirmation of His lordship, he knew that even they fell off so easily.

Remember Barnabas, the great man who really ushered Paul into the church—tremendous division. Barnabas didn’t handle it correctly. That’s my read of the text. And he’s gone.

And Paul here, he’s welcomed into Rome at first by this procession of people going out to meet him in his procession to Rome. But when—he will write shortly hereafter that everyone deserted me. The whole church fell away so quick when troubles came.

The Apostle Paul knew what judgment was about both exterior in the world and interior to the church. And if we want to see the correlation in our day and age, they’re there to be made. We’ve gone through since mid-December too much wind, too much snow, trees breaking, power lines breaking, the distribution of the power grid falling to pieces, too much ice, too much water, and probably we’re heading into a period of too much sun and heat. It’s supposed to be in the mid-60s this week, February, middle of February.

What’s going to happen to the snow? I don’t know. We know what that’s like, and we will know increasingly what it’s like as God’s judgments continue to manifest themselves. Bob Evans pointed out to me the last time we were here was when we prayed the prayer of malediction asking that God would send forth his judgments upon the church and then not to the world. We’ve been kept from here since then. We know what it’s like.

And we know what it’s like when a church—when the visible church accommodates itself to the culture the way the mainline denominations have. Just follow along after the world. In the last month, we’ve seen more and more of that. We’ve seen liberal Christians band together for political action and combat this conservative Christian voters guide with one that’s pro-abortion, etc. Last Sunday’s paper, John Thomas showed me an article about how these liberal Christian groups in our area are banding together to protect the environment and the covenant God has made with the earth, of which we’re kind of secondary elements supposedly.

The real covenant is with the animals and the earth. We’re just sort of included in that, as it were, by the side.

Like, we know what it’s like to see the Sadducees compromise in our day and age. And we know what it’s like for the fundamentalists to pull back from all of that, only to end up with bickering in the context of their local churches and a complete ineffectiveness in the culture, where that woman in Safe kept pulling back, back.

We know what that’s like. And we know what it’s like for people who begin to wake up to the lordship of Jesus Christ—that He’s a king who rules over His people. He is sovereign and He has a law and He has an eschatology. His eschatology is positive—the manifestation of His kingdom. We know what it’s like for people who espouse those doctrines to pull back from other people that espouse those doctrines when times get tough, when it might hurt the pocketbook or when it might damage interpersonal relationships.

I thought of the death of Dr. Bahnsen this last week, and I thought, you know, our great loss was his great gain. Apart from his desire to serve Christ wherever he was, do you think he really wanted to stick around here? Do you want to?

In the manifestation of judgment that we see, last year getting counsel from him on a matter, and he described some things that were happening and he said, “Are there no men left in the church?” and we’re talking about our friends here—people who espouse the same doctrine we espouse. “Are there no men left?” he said. And the sad answer is there are darn few of them.

So we know what it’s like to have friends, the way Paul had friends, who all of a sudden desert you. We know what that’s like. And I think that if we want to know what to do about our world, then we want to look at Paul’s example about what he did in the context of his world. It was the same dilemma that pressed upon J. Gresham Machen as the Presbyterian church broke up and the Orthodox Presbyterian church was begun by him and others.

He knew that the fundamentalists were retreating from culture. He knew that most of the church was accommodating itself to culture. And what do we do? He said, what we do is we attack that false culture. We preach gospel. We don’t go on the defensive. We go on the offensive.

And that’s just what the Apostle Paul does. And guess what? History moves in the context of those people who pursue that positive-oriented goal of proclaiming the gospel of the kingdom, which Paul did. Paul won the day. Little tiny dominion of Paul. Abandoned constantly by friends, attacked by enemies, plots on his life. All these enemies arrayed against them and all the enemies arrayed against us, and the only weapon Paul had was the power of God, and that’s the only weapon we have, but it’s the only one you need.

And next week I’ll talk more about the eschatology of all of this as the book ends with a positive statement of the movement of the earth, movement of the history of the earth in relationship to the preaching of the gospel. But today I want to talk about what we do. I want to talk about—to make sure at the summation of this book that we leave it with some very practical instructions for us on what we do.

Now, I’m going to be talking primarily about what we do to talk to people in the church and outside of the church. That’s our mission. Go into all the world and preach the gospel and disciple the nations. That’s our mission. That’s your mission. It’s why you’re here. You’re here to serve the king and to talk about the kingdom. Now, it has implications though for a lot of other things you do in life. The same method that Paul uses to do that is a method that you use making disciples of your children. And you can look at these the same way. But what I want to talk about is really kind of an expansion of what I began three weeks ago.

If we look at Paul’s address to the Jews that came to him in verse 23, what does he do? He expounds and testifies the kingdom of God. And he persuades them concerning Jesus out of the law and prophets.

Paul expounds. Paul testifies. Paul persuades. And that is the method of his work. The message according to that verse is the kingdom of God in Jesus. The kingdom of God in Jesus. And then look at the next to last verse—well, the last verse, 31. What is there—the summation of what he does for years there in Rome as people came to him? He preaches the kingdom of God and he teaches those things which concern the Lord Jesus Christ.

Preaches and teaches, and again the message is the kingdom of God and the Lord Jesus Christ.

So this gives us our job to do in the context of judgment. This says that what we’re supposed to do individually and corporately, and increasingly getting others to do with us as well cooperatively, is to expound, to testify, to persuade, and also then to see it summarized by preaching and teaching. And the message we’re to carry is the kingdom of God and Jesus, the Lord Jesus Christ.

And this is the same thing that happens in the context of your families as you disciple your children. You’re supposed to do these things. You’re supposed to expound. You’re supposed to testify. You’re supposed to persuade them. You’re supposed to preach to them and teach them. And the content of your homeschool curriculum should be the kingdom of God and Jesus, the Lord Jesus Christ, the King of kings.

I think fits in the context of those methods and that message. That’s what we’ve got to leave this with in terms of the book of Acts and its application to us.

Well, let’s go over that a little more slowly.

We expound. To expound means to lay out in a linear structure built upon a foundation. The stem of the Greek word used here for expound means to bring to a place or to lay a foundation. So to expound is to lay a series of stones and foundations, to lay out arguments about the kingdom of God and the Lord Jesus Christ.

In Acts 7:21, we read that when Moses was cast out, Pharaoh’s daughter took him up and nourished him for her own son. And the term “cast out” there is the same Greek word as expound. Okay? So you got a nice visual picture of Moses being cast out in public into the river and Pharaoh’s daughter taking him up.

So when we expound things, we lay out those foundations openly before people. We take the word as it were and cast it out—not rejecting it. Casting it out in front of people means a knowledge of the word as it relates to the kingdom in Jesus. But the method is to lay it out in front of people. To expound is to lay out in an orderly fashion.

To expound means—and I don’t want to make these divisions too strong and fast, but in a sense, expound addresses the intellectual, ideological side of men. Okay? It appeals to the intellect. It lays things out in a logical fashion before men so that they can understand it.

Paul said he also testified relative to the kingdom of God. The word to testify here is an intensified form of another word that means to bear witness or to summon to witness. Okay? And it’s all related to the word martyr as the root—a witness. But it means to call a witness or to bear witness.

And the particular word here used to testify is an intensified form of that. Okay. A strong, a strengthened form. And it means to testify—to protest solemnly in front of people. To invoke someone as a witness about something is part of the root meaning here. To make a solemn declaration about something, an emphatic assertion that something is so. Okay? That means to testify.

Let me give you a couple of examples from the scriptures. And you’re not going to recognize the word here, but in Titus 2:15, Paul said that he charged people before God and the Lord Jesus Christ that you observe these things without preferring one another before another. And the word “charge” there is the same word as testify. It means to summon the person to a realization of the veracity of what you say—that it is truth.

We don’t put out doctrines that people can pick and choose and say, “Well, that’s interesting and I might lay it into my system. I might not.” When we lay out the exposition of God’s word as it relates to a matter, we solemnly testify that this is the truth of God.

You see, that’s a very important matter. This last week, I had several instances, and I won’t talk to you about them individually, but I had several things happen at which it became increasingly apparent that one of the great problems we have in the context of the religious culture in which we live is pluralism. Just as our society is pluralistic—you know, you do your thing, I do my thing, I’m okay, you’re okay, and we all just get along. And the only heresy in the public arena is to say, “My way is right, your way is wrong.”

That’s happening in our churches. In fact, it probably happened in our churches first, didn’t it? Because the church rules the world. And the churches—you know, you, everything’s okay. Yeah, I’m a Calvinist. I’m Armenian, or Arminianism doesn’t make any difference, you know. But when you assert the truth of one thing as opposed to something else, you strike right at the root of one of the biggest sins our church has, which is religious pluralism.

And that is involved in testifying to these things and charging men relative to what you’re saying—to bring a solemn affirmation of this.

And then third, what Paul did was to persuade men. To persuade them. And the word here means to convince by an argument, or to pacify, or to conciliate with someone. According to Vine’s Expository Dictionary, it signifies to apply persuasion, to persuade upon, or prevail upon, or win over—to persuade. To bring about a change of mind by the influence of reason or moral considerations. Okay?

There is, in one of the other books that defines these Greek words, a definition that says that really the meaning of to seduce can be seen in some of the ways this word is used in the Greek New Testament. The word persuade—to seek to win men over with sincerity and insistency to your particular view.

In Acts 13:43, when the congregation was broken up, many of the Jews and religious proselytes followed Paul and Barnabas. Paul and Barnabas were preaching—people had converted, and these Jews followed them around, and speaking to them, persuaded them to continue in the grace of God.

On the other hand, in Acts 14:19, the Jews later came and persuaded the people to stone Paul. Okay?

In Acts 27:11—nonetheless, the centurion believed the master, the owner of the ship more than those things which were spoken by Paul. Let me read that one more time. This is the context for this verse in Acts 27: remember when Paul said, “We shouldn’t put out. The winds are not going to be good for us.” And they said, “Well, we think it’s okay.” So that’s the context of this.

Nevertheless, the centurion believed the master and the owner of the ship more than those things which were spoken by Paul. That word “believed” means he was more persuaded by one side than the other. Okay?

And persuasion is broader than just an intellectual argument. It appeals to the heart—here, I guess, is what I’m trying to get at with persuasion. It’s interesting. In Hebrews 13:17, we have this verse that says, “Obey them that have the rule over you and submit yourselves”—talking to people relative to their ecclesiastical leaders.

And the word “obey” isn’t the normal word to just simply obey. It means to be persuaded to their position. And so when push comes to shove—now, not if they’re wrong, but if there’s a benefit of the doubt to be given, it’s to be given to the leadership of the church. You’re to let them persuade you, to put yourself in a persuadable mind to them. And some people would, you know, hate such an assertion in the context of autonomous America and its independency.

But persuasion—if exposition has as its target the mind, and I said I don’t want to put these distinctions too broadly, then persuasion has as its target the heart. Okay?

You know, Rush Limbaugh—I heard him, listen to him a little while ago, and I was thinking of this sermon. He said, you know, conservatives are ideologically driven, and liberals—speaking politically of course—are emotionally driven. So you got these ideological things, and conservatives can’t understand—if you just lay it out there, why people don’t do it. And the liberals, they appeal to the heart and say… And so what I’m saying is the word of God says we’re not supposed to be conservative or liberal. We’re supposed to bring those things together.

It’s not enough to go out to your brothers in the church and say, “Well, Jesus Christ is sovereign, or He has a law we’re supposed to obey, or He has a mark of citizenship that we’re supposed to give to our children upon their birth”—lay out the doctrine. This is the truth of God, and if you believe it, you’re blessed. And if you don’t believe it, you’re cursed. And end the matter.

Paul didn’t stop there. Paul went that third step, which was persuasion. Paul had a heart for these people. He would write later on, “I would that I could be cut off from salvation if my countrymen could be brought into the faith.” Is that your attitude as you take the message of the lordship of Jesus Christ to your neighbors and to your friends and to the pagans completely outside of the church?

Do you have that attitude? Or do you just want to do your duty, lay it out there, and if they accept it, they’re great, and if they reject it, they’re cursed and cut people off? Not the right way to do it. You want to have that heart attitude.

You know, I probably do this too much, but I can correlate these three to the requirements that the prophet Micah says we should have, right? And what are the three things does God require of you? What does God require of you, a man? To do justice, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with God.

To do justice refers to these external obvious standards of justice, and they be related to the exposition of God’s law. But to love mercy means to love, to extend mercy and grace to people on the basis of God’s word and according to His model. But nonetheless, it has this heart thing involved. You see?

And as Christians, we’re supposed to love mercy. We’re supposed to want to see people brought into a full apprehension of the faith. And the key to that is the humility before God. And that’s where testifying brings the humbleness, brings the solemnity that we’re coming not in our own name and authority but in the name and authority of the Lord Jesus Christ with this message to each other, to our children, to our friends, okay, to our relatives.

James B. Jordan talks about how the Psalter is what should occupy a large part of our worship because it appeals to both—not appeals, it feeds both the formal nature of man and the personal nature of man. You could say the intellect as well as the heart. It has exposition in it and it has persuasion in it.

The Psalms are written as liturgies. They’re liturgical devices, and we’re all supposed to do them together. We’re not mind-numbed robots. No, because the Psalms are intensely personal in their content. We corporately recite together these things, but they’re intensely personal songs. So you have in them both the formalistic Anglican or conservative Presbyterian mode of liturgical development and the charismatic perspective on the persuasion of the Holy Spirit and His working on our heart personally—all brought together in Psalter worship.

See? And so I think when Paul’s method is seen here, and we see this is what we’re supposed to do, then it’s very easy to keep this model in mind because of these correlations that are made in the scriptures. We’re to lay things out. We’re to testify and bring men to humility before God. And we’re to have a heart and love to show compassion and mercy to people—the demonstration of covenantal faithfulness on the part of God to His elect by seeking them out and doing all we can to persuade them of the truth of what we’ve told them.

It’s not a take-it-or-leave-it proposition. Ultimately, it is. Ultimately, it is. But in terms of our method, we should not see it that way. We should want to go the extra mile and mile and mile to win people. That’s where the term probably comes from—is that kind of idea—to the Lord Jesus Christ.

Now that persuasion is bounded by the word of God. It’s not, you know, our own deal. Okay.

Proclamation. Paul preaches and teaches. That’s the other method that’s talked about here. I talked about that three-fold method. Please remember that because I really do believe it’s a summation of what you’re supposed to do with your children, with people you speak with. Please remember that: expound, testify, persuade.

And then he also summarizes this at the conclusion of the book by saying that Paul taught—he was involved in preaching and teaching the same message.

Now, preaching is something we need to spend just a little bit of time on here to correct our goofy attitudes. We think preaching means a three-point outline. It means those sermon illustrations. It means a beginning and an end. It means having a good voice and good articulation and enunciation. And it means using good English and all this stuff. And I’m not trying to say that’s all unimportant. It is important.

But at its essential meaning, preaching is none of those things. Preaching means to cry out or to proclaim. Preaching is proclamation. It’s not a series of nice exegetical points. Exposition is important in the context of it. But the proclamation side of it is what is meant when we read again and again in the scriptures the word preaching.

The gospel of the kingdom. Okay? Preaching is—see, in its development of the word—it is a summons to something. You don’t just cry out in the abstract. When the word is originally used in the Greek, it meant to summon to something. Okay?

First of all, proclamation or preaching of the word in the kingdom means to summon to something. Secondly, it is a term that was used in the Greek in the context of public games. It wasn’t a term that was used in the context of philosophical discussions and arguments. It was used in the context of the games, and it would be used to proclaim forth that the games were going to happen and then to proclaim forth who the victors were.

And there’s a particular historical—there’s a particular Greek record where the proclamation would go out, and then the Greeks would all be freed as a result of the proclamation. And the point I’m trying to make here is the proclamation of preaching is a public announcement or crying out or heralding. Okay? It’s a public term, not a private term.

The third thing that’s important is that the proclamation involves the will of the king. In Daniel 3:4, we have a negative example. But nonetheless, in the Old Testament, the same word that’s translated with the Greek word proclamation or preaching in the Septuagint—in the Old Testament, the word is used in Daniel 3:4 when the king was going to have people come and worship on a particular other day and he sent out his herald with the news. You see? It was a public announcement. It was a summoning to obedience, and it was a proclamation from—or describing rather—the will of the king.

The fourth truth of the word that’s used for preaching or proclamation in the New Testament, and hereby Paul’s is a summation of what he did, is that it is a summons to a reality. In the context of biblical preaching, it’s not a summons to something that might or might not happen. It is the proclamation of an event that has occurred on the part of the king. It is a summons to a reality. Okay? Not some sort of abstract idea. It is a summons to a reality. Because it is a summons to a reality, it also then is a summons to a decision on the part of the people that hear it.

Let me read a reference here. This comes from the theological dictionary of the New Testament. You’d be very careful using it. There’s a lot of liberal stuff in it. But in this particular—let me read a quote here on proclamation. I think it is very good.

The preaching of Isaiah 61:1 is—he’s describing that the prophet is to proclaim liberty to the captives. In so doing, he brings what he proclaims. He proclaims freedom and the prisoners are free. He proclaims sight and the blind see. His word is efficacious because he is sent by God and the spirit of God rests on him. His word is God’s word, which does not demand but gives. Well, it does demand as well. According to the New Testament, the prophet who has proclaimed this word is Jesus, who is said, “This day is the scripture fulfilled in your hearing.” That’s from the gospel account of our Lord and Savior.

So proclamation means to call out or to proclaim. It means to do—to summon people to something. It means to proclaim the will of the king. And in the context of the King Jesus, proclamation is a summons to a reality that is affected by the proclamation. And it is a summons to a decision on the part of the person who hears the message.

Our Lord Jesus in Matthew 4:23—we read that Jesus went all about Galilee teaching in their synagogues and preaching. The content is the gospel of the kingdom, and healing all manner of sickness and all manner of disease among the people. And there you have a picture of all that I’ve just said.

Jesus went with a public proclamation. He taught in the synagogue. He proclaimed—not just in the synagogue but publicly to the people—the will of the king. And the reality of what had come forward, because God’s power was efficacious. The miracles accompany the preaching of the kingdom of God, not because they’re more important, but because they’re a sign that when the proclamation of Jesus goes out, reality changes. Okay? It’s not Jesus is hoping things will change. By the demonstration of the miracles that accompanied his preaching, it was attestation to the fact that he spoke for God, and God is the author of reality, and reality had now changed as a result of the event that was being heralded.

And so that’s what we do today. We proclaim things. The Apostle Paul proclaimed things. He taught and he preached. Now, really, proclamation has all the other things I mentioned to it. It has the exposition of the scripture as its base. It has the solemn testifying to the reality of it—that this is the herald of the king. And it is also a message that demands decision as a result—is persuasive—command.

So Paul’s methods are those particular elements, and he spoke with boldness. By the way, confidence is the way it’s translated in the last verse of Acts 28. And we have to pray to God that he would give us holy boldness. The Apostle Paul—one of his repeated prayer requests—was that he would be confident or bold in his proclamation or heralding of the gospel and in his exposition and testifying and in his persuasion.

And we need to be bold, confident, which at its root means to be outspoken about what we believe, about what we know to be the truth. Okay?

And I want to conclude by talking a little bit about the content. This is the method that we are to use—these things I’ve just talked about. But what’s the content?

I asked my kids this week. We were looking at this text. And you look at Acts 28, and you look at verse 23 where he was teaching and persuading and expounding. And you look at verses 30 and 31 where he is preaching and teaching. And where’s the gospel? Where’s the gospel here? Where is it? Do you know? Where’s the gospel in verse 23 and verse 31?

Well, the word gospel isn’t used, but the gospel is there. The gospel is the kingdom of the Lord Jesus Christ. That’s the message. The gospel, as Reverend Jordan taught us last August, the good news that had come to the earth with Jesus Christ was not that men would be saved via justification by faith. That was always true. People were saved by faith in the Old Testament. Nothing new about being saved by faith in the New Testament. Everybody knew that. All the believers knew it. There were many—David knew it. All those men knew it.

What was the good news that was now being proclaimed? It wasn’t that. It was that the Lord Jesus had come and initiated the kingdom. Paul’s message is the kingdom and Jesus. And it’s the kingdom of God. Verse 31—and the Lord Jesus Christ, the King. That’s what it is.

You see, the good news is that things are changed now. Jesus has been given power from God. The Holy Spirit has been given to men in abundance now. And Jesus, unlike David, David was limited in what he could affect and the power of the spirit that came upon him—all that stuff. But Jesus Christ is the God-man who takes on human flesh and reigns through his church now and brings a stop to all the evil that men do.

And we wonder why in a period of flooding why people go down to Portland and help each other out. Well, I don’t think people used to do that. I don’t read that about the Canaanites. Maybe they did, but I don’t think so. I think people were a lot more wicked back then. Now, I know that their wickedness is still the same and their rebellion to God, they’re doing it for the wrong motivation. I understand all that. But I’m saying that the preaching of the gospel has changed the world for 2,000 years. And things are not the same now as they used to be.

And Jesus does put a stop to atrocities over the space of history and time. I know there’s a lot of work to be done. What I’m saying is the gospel is the good news of the kingdom of Christ.

What I want to do, and I don’t know when I’m going to do it—in a month or two maybe. I’m not sure when. Maybe in a couple weeks. What I want to do is equip you to take the basic truths that we think represent the full representation of the gospel of Christ and that makes us somewhat distinctive at this church from other churches.

I want to equip you so that you can go and talk to your neighbors and your children and your friends and relatives and lay out for them real simply the basis for infant baptism and infant communion and the law of God and an optimistic eschatology and the sovereignty of God, and why we don’t believe in religious pluralism. You should be able to speak to each of those things by the time we’re done, Lord willing, so that you can do just what we’re talking about doing here.

We were talking about this at our last council meeting about whether this would be good to do in a Sunday school class or sermons, and the guys think it’d be best to do in sermons and provide you some talking points for your friends about these matters and help you to be able to lay it out—to expound it, make it open and visible to him, and to persuade people and to testify to him about these things.

And Elder Meyer said, you know, the center of this has to be Jesus. And of course it is. When we talk about all of these things, it should be seen in the context of this last thing we’re talking about here from the book of Acts. And that is that Paul’s content, his message, was the kingdom of the Lord Jesus Christ.

A kingdom means that there is a king—the Lord Jesus Christ. He has a people—his church. He has a land that he operates in the context of. The king rules by means of a book. In the book of Revelation, Jesus goes into heaven and takes the book, and that’s what reigns and by which he rules. The king has a law that he rules his subjects by. And the king’s kingdom gets better because he’s the sovereign king of all creation.

And so when we talk about infant baptism, we want to put it in the context of—the king has citizens. And this is how he says his citizens should be marked. And if they’re full citizens by means of infant baptism, the citizens get to eat at the king’s table. The Lord Jesus says so. The Lord Jesus says the citizens live their lives according to his rule book that he makes public to you. And then he gives you his Spirit of the King to invade you and to take that word and write it on your hearts and cause you to walk in essential obedience to it. And the king’s land gets better over time. That’s the long perspective.

See? All these things we’re talking about relate to the central message of the kingdom. And yes, salvation is the entrance point into a full realization of all that. But it’s not the only entrance point. When we talk about the kingdom of Christ, there’s two things we’ve got to keep right in mind here.

It doesn’t say at the end of Acts that Paul heard all the members of the visible church that came to him. There probably were pagans that came to him, too. You remember what he—how he talked to pagans? Didn’t start with the scriptures. He said, God made you. God takes care of you. God’s going to judge you. Jesus is what he talked about. And the kingdom—you’re living, whether you like it or not, pagan friend, in the kingdom of Jesus. And he made you and he’s providing all the sustenance for you. And he’s going to judge you in the context of your life. Okay?

So the kingdom extends to every part of the created order. And the kingdom is not of the earth. It’s of heaven. But God says that what Jesus is doing is taking that heavenly kingdom and causing it to be affected in visible form here on earth. We pray for that: “Thy will be done, thy kingdom come, thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” Okay?

The message is the kingdom of the Lord Jesus Christ. So that’s what we want to do. We want to operate in the context…

I saw one other movie. I’ll stop with this last week, and again, I’m not recommending it. There are a couple of scenes that are not that good to watch. The movie is Excalibur. It’s about the Arthur legend, and things change in the context of that legend when Arthur comes on the scene. The old ways are gone, and a new creation has kind of come, and men are more important in the new creation. In a way, that’s what happens at the coming of Jesus. And then the land flourishes under Arthur and Camelot, and everything’s great and everything’s hunky-dory, and then problems happen in the context of the kingdom, and the kingdom falls away.

And why is all this evil happening on the land? Why are all those manifestations of judgments on Camelot? Because the essential truth the movie reveals is the king and the land are one. The king’s people and the land are one.

When we see the manifestations of judgment, when we see the trees dying instead of blossoming, when we see unrighteousness beginning to rear its head increasingly instead of righteousness, when we see manifestations of judgment, it’s because the church, the king’s people—who, in this age, while Jesus reigns from the right hand of the Father, we reign on this earth. We bring destruction to this earth. We are unfaithful, untrue.

And when we act apart from the morality of the scriptures and of the king who reigns from heaven, as a result, judgment happens to the land. That’s kingdom teaching. That’s a kingdom truth—that the manifestation of Christ’s kingdom is tied to the faithfulness of his people. We want to be faithful people. We want to see the land blossom. We don’t want to fall apart. We don’t want to be fundamentalists who retreat back even from each other.

And we don’t want to be Sadducees who compromise with the world. And we don’t want to be people who restrict the gospel to personal salvation. It’s not that. Personal salvation is extremely important. But the gospel is far broader. The gospel is the kingdom of Christ. And all the things that we believe flow out of that central truth. They flow out of an apprehension of the King, the Lord Jesus Christ.

And we’re in his hall today to worship him. Let’s continue to do that.

Father, we do pray that you would equip us in the weeks and months to come that we might be effectual warriors for the Lord Jesus Christ. That our hearts might be filled with a concern and a desire to persuade men to bow the knee to the Lord Jesus Christ. That our minds and intellects might be filled with the truths of your scriptures and be able to simply put them forth, to lay them openly in front of men.

Remove from us, Lord God, our cowardice. Remove, Lord God, our hindrances to confidence, the primary one of which is personal sin. Make us, Lord God, righteous. Make us an upright people full of moral rectitude before you, and fill us with confidence and boldness that we may take the message of the King and all the implications of that kingdom into our world and might see this world once more flower.

Father, we acknowledge that with the things we’ve remembered this last month—tremendous sin of abortion, tremendous sin of sodomy filling the land, manifestations of your judgments. We acknowledge, Lord God, that all this happens that your people might awaken and come to their senses once more and ride out as victorious warriors for the Lord Jesus Christ by proclaiming these tremendous truths of your kingdom and of the Lord Jesus who is King of Kings and Lord of Lords.

Fill us with your power, Lord God. Make our time and our efforts effectual for his purposes. We ask it in his name. Amen. Amen.

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Any other questions or comments? Yes.

Speaker: I wanted to clarify something you mentioned—that the gospel is a starting point, or rather salvation is the starting point to get into the kingdom, but not the only starting point.

Yes. What I meant by that was there’s a sense in which the kingdom people and the context of the church are separate from everybody else. But it’s not as if the kingdom doesn’t have sway over everyone. So what I was trying to take is, you know, there’s two people groups—people that Paul talked to. Well, three really. He had the Jews and the God-fearing Gentiles. And they were both like visible church. He was bringing those together into one church.

And then he also would talk occasionally, not very often, to complete pagans. And in the context of the pagans, he talked to them about creation, providence, and judgment. Well, that’s kingdom talk. If they were outside of the kingdom, they wouldn’t have the king’s sanctions applied to them. So they’re really in the kingdom in a particular sense, too. So yeah, I shouldn’t say that salvation is entrance into the kingdom—the visible kingdom people of God, those people that are under the particular provision, protection, and provision of God.

But it’s not as if his kingdom is restricted to just those people. It also includes all men. And so we can call all men to there is a Jesus. He’s king. You were created by him. He sustained you. And the king is going to judge you. You’re under his kingdom. Okay?

So kingdoms can be built by pagans. The God’s kingdom can be built by pagans too. For instance, computers and networks.

Well, yeah, the kingdom—

Speaker: Yeah, it seems like language is kind of tricky, but one of the problems that has happened to reconstructionism over the last ten years is that people say we’re trying to bring in the kingdom or build the kingdom or make the kingdom. The kingdom is just a king and his people on a place of ground, and there’s a law by which he rules. That’s in place. But what history is about is the manifestation of that. So more and more the kingdom flowers, and yeah, and pagans can make the kingdom flower by providing technology. The ungodly have created musical instruments that were then taken over by the godly, made essentially by God through the pagans for the godly to use and worship. So yeah, the pagans can make the kingdom flourish—like the Syrians—wait, what was it—the Syrians were hired to do the gold work on the temple? I don’t remember if they were Syrian or not, but yeah. Okay?

Any other questions or comments? Okay. I think your statements about the kingdom today are where a lot of Calvinists missed the mark in their argument with, or the arguments that often come up. How can Calvinism be reconciled with the free—