The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life In God

the one who has damaged you. 6. Having an enemy, (vv. 43–48) Hate your enemy. Love and bless your your enemy, as the heavenly Father does. And now with the preliminaries about the structure and progress of the Discourse on the Hillside before us, we can begin to immerse ourselves in the substance of Jesus’ teachings on the rightness of the kingdom

These are things that we all know to be true. “Though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor,” Paul points out, “and though I give my body to be burned, and fail to love as God does, it is of no gain to me.” So whatever the point of the Beatitudes, it cannot be that they state conditions that guarantee God’s approval, salvation, or blessing.

It is the person of Jesus and his death for us that makes clear what it is about God that makes him “really good.”

Peter Wagner, perhaps the best-known leader in the worldwide “church growth” movement, also refers to the unanimous opinion of modern scholarship that the kingdom of God was the message of Jesus. Then he adds, I cannot help wondering out loud why I haven’t heard more about it in the thirty years I have been a Christian. I certainly read about it en

We who profess Christianity will believe what is constantly presented to us as gospel. If gospels of sin management are preached, they are what Christians will believe. And those in the wider world who reject those gospels will believe that what they have rejected is the gospel of Jesus Christ himself—when, in fact, they haven’t yet heard it. And s

The Atonement as the Whole Story

The human job description (the “creation covenant,” we might call it) found in chapter 1 of Genesis indicates that God assigned to us collectively the rule over all living things on earth, animal and plant. We are responsible before God for life on the earth (vv. 28–30).

The history that has brought this about—being filtered through the Modernist/Fundamentalist controversy that consumed American religion for many decades and still works powerfully in its depths—also has led each wing to insist that what the other takes for essential should not be regarded as essential.

Dr. I. Howard Marshall of the University of Aberdeen has commented, “During the past sixteen years I can recollect only two occasions on which I have heard sermons specifically devoted to the theme of the Kingdom of God…. I find this silence rather surprising because it is universally agreed by New Testament scholars that the central theme of the t