To be a Christian is to believe that Christ lived, died, rose bodily to immortally, ascended into heaven and sent the Holy Spirit at Pentecost as recorded in Acts 2. It means to believe that Jesus will come again, that all the dead shall be raised and judged—either vindicated in Christ or condemned for their sins.
To be a Christian also means to believe “the New Testament” (as we call it) records the origin of Christianity. We have been raised for generations to believe that these documents mainly teach the substance of what I listed in the first paragraph. Virtually no believer comes to the Greek Scriptures expecting anything else. Christianity is basically a “movement” that began with Jesus and Pentecost and then has been transmitted throughout the world from that point in time and space. Eventually the Apostles and the first generation of Christians died, but their younger converts continued and grew the “movement.”
Notice that Evangelicals don’t have such an interpretation of the so-called “Old Testament.” While they often don’t show much interest in anything that seems unrelated to a kind of “pre-movement” view, they do acknowledge that the Word or God contains a lot of geo-politics and other social disruptions and transformations. The Hebrew Scripture may not be read or studied as much as they should be, but one can point out that they teach something beyond the creation of a “movement.”
There IS much in the “movement” view of the Greek Scriptures that is true and essential. The Great Commission in Matthew 28:18-20, with many other passages, fits this vision. The Apostles preached a future resurrection of the righteous and the wicked that will end this mortal era of human history. We are obviously in an age of indeterminate length between Pentecost and the Second Coming. So the “Jesus movement” interpretation, made by interpreters in this segment of history’s time line, makes sense.
A SUBPLOT?
But complications spring up. There have been questions for a long time. Do we still have apostles? Do we still see signs and wonders? Should we still expect Pentecost events or Pentecost-like events? Should we expect Christians to speak in other languages that they never learned and perhaps don’t even understand? Do angels help and guide our missionary endeavors? (Acts 8:26; 27:23)
On the “movement” view, one would expect all these things to continue. But they haven’t. Even those who claim they do continue show that they don’t. Invisible signs and wonders that never make the news? These sorts of stories only underscore the truth that we are living in an age when “New Testament” miracles don’t happen.
What about Paul’s advice to stay unmarried?
Are you bound to a wife? Do not seek to be free. Are you free from a wife? Do not seek a wife. But if you do marry, you have not sinned, and if a betrothed woman marries, she has not sinned. Yet those who marry will have worldly troubles, and I would spare you that. This is what I mean, brothers: the appointed time has grown very short. From now on, let those who have wives live as though they had none, and those who mourn as though they were not mourning, and those who rejoice as though they were not rejoicing, and those who buy as though they had no goods, and those who deal with the world as though they had no dealings with it. For the present form of this world is passing away (1 Corinthians 7:27–31 ESV).
On the “movement” view, we are as bound to this perspective as anyone in Corinth to whom the letter was first read aloud. The “present form of this world” continues.
Other questions have arisen. Jesus said that a great judgment would be brought on “this generation” (Matt 24:34/ Mark 13:30/ Luke 21:32). Furthermore, Revelation says it is a prophecy of events that “must soon take place” (Revelation 1:1; 22:6). Many have assumed and/or insisted that Jesus was referring to the Final Resurrection of the righteous and the wicked.
Two thousand years later with no Second Coming, Bible believers have to cope by committing to nonsense about centuries and millennia of temporal “nearness” of the Final Judgment. But, plainly, the Final Judgment was not soon to the time of the apostles. If they taught it would happen soon, then the Bible is not infallible and they are false prophets. If Jesus did not teach error, then his prophecy in Matthew 24 must have happened in that generation. If John was not a false prophet, then Jesus must have come quickly during the lives of the Christians in those seven churches (Revelation 2-3).
Note, that nothing here depends on the dating of the book of Revelation. If John wrote a prophecy at the time of Domitian, then it still had to come true soon after or else that book is nothing but a major error. It needs to be removed from that canon or the doctrine of inerrancy must be rejected.
We know how God speaks of times that are far in the future. He says: “But you, Daniel, shut up the words and seal the book, until the time of the end. Many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall increase” (Daniel 12:4 ESV). That’s the opposite of: “Do not seal up the words of the prophecy of this book, for the time is near” (Revelation 22:10 ESV).
So the “Jesus movement” view has to be nuanced a bit, it is thought. Jesus and the apostles had to predict something that sounds to us like the Final Judgment but is not that. Thus, many Christians have pointed out that the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans was being described in the cosmic language used by the prophets. This view in eschatology has become known as PRETERISM as opposed to FUTURISM. It claims that many of these “end times” passages are in our past rather than to be looked forward to in the future.
OR A MAJOR PART OF THE PLOT?
But there are problems that arise here, too. Presented as “just” a judgment on unbelieving Jerusalem, people wonder on why Paul would be writing about it to the Gentiles. Those that think that Matthew 24 and Revelation are regarding the same events (and thus adopt an earlier date for when John was given the vision), struggle to see why the churches in Asia would be so interested in those event.
Our commitment to the “movement” view as the grand paradigm for the message of the koine Scriptures still obstructs us from reading the text for the story it tells.
Rereading Matthew for the first time
But imagine if you read Matthews Gospel without a prior commitment to the “movement” perspective. What if you read it right after finishing the “Old Testament” as a geopolitical history book of God’s work in the world?
- Matthew 1 starts with a genealogy going back to Abraham that presents the birth of the Davidic monarchy and the exile to Babylon as the two major points setting precedent for Jesus (summed up for our attention in verse 17).
- Then Jesus is born miraculously, who will “save his people from their sins.”
- Then magi from the East come to honor him resulting in a massacre by a king hoping to kill a rival and a life in hiding ultimately away from Judea in Galilee.
All this is firm Biblical territory. (Why was I tempted to write “firm Old Testament territory”? The so-called “Old Testament” is seventy-five percent of the Bible, and Matthew is obviously following the same narrative.) The rise of David took place after the destruction of the Tabernacle and the judgment on the priesthood and led to a new Temple and a change in priesthood. The mention of David and deportation fits with Jesus attracting the obedience of the wise men from the East. Delivering “his people from their sins” has a host of implications in addition to the ones we are trained to care about. The phrase would absolutely not be heard as a general atonement theory for all “the elect” before and after it happened. It would have been understood as a promise of a public deliverance in history. A few examples:
Help us, O God of our salvation, for the glory of your name; deliver us, and atone for our sins, for your name’s sake! Why should the nations say, “Where is their God?” Let the avenging of the outpoured blood of your servants be known among the nations before our eyes! (Psalm 79:9–10 ESV)
“O Lord, according to all your righteous acts, let your anger and your wrath turn away from your city Jerusalem, your holy hill, because for our sins, and for the iniquities of our fathers, Jerusalem and your people have become a byword among all who are around us. Now therefore, O our God, listen to the prayer of your servant and to his pleas for mercy, and for your own sake, O Lord, make your face to shine upon your sanctuary, which is desolate. O my God, incline your ear and hear. Open your eyes and see our desolations, and the city that is called by your name. For we do not present our pleas before you because of our righteousness, but because of your great mercy. O Lord, hear; O Lord, forgive. O Lord, pay attention and act. Delay not, for your own sake, O my God, because your city and your people are called by your name” (Daniel 9:16–19 ESV).
As in the days when you came out of the land of Egypt, I will show them marvelous things. The nations shall see and be ashamed of all their might; they shall lay their hands on their mouths; their ears shall be deaf; they shall lick the dust like a serpent, like the crawling things of the earth; they shall come trembling out of their strongholds; they shall turn in dread to the LORD our God, and they shall be in fear of you. Who is a God like you, pardoning iniquity and passing over transgression for the remnant of his inheritance? He does not retain his anger forever, because he delights in steadfast love. He will again have compassion on us; he will tread our iniquities underfoot. You will cast all our sins into the depths of the sea. You will show faithfulness to Jacob and steadfast love to Abraham, as you have sworn to our fathers from the days of old (Micah 7:15–20 ESV).
When God saves his people from their sins, he delivers themselves from the circumstances that their sins have brought about. The promise to Joseph was no less than that.
So when John the baptizer begins prophesying (Matt 3:1ff), his prophecy is about national judgment.
“Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand… Even now the axe is laid to the root of the trees. Every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. I baptize you with water for repentance, but he who is coming after me is mightier than I, whose sandals I am not worthy to carry. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor and gather his wheat into the barn, but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.”
Matthew quotes John in a way that calls back to the genealogy of Abraham as the ancestor of Christ, saying that no one who does not repent can take solace in their descent from Abraham (3:9).
So a new kingdom is at hand and judgment is about to fall. John was not preaching about how all people in all history are facing judgment when they die and must either be saved by the God’s grace are thrown into eternal punishment. He was prophesying an event and a new society (“the kingdom of heaven”) that would come with and/or as a result of judgment (“the axe” and “the winnowing fork”).
This is the context of Jesus’ own work:
Now when he heard that John had been arrested, he withdrew into Galilee. And leaving Nazareth he went and lived in Capernaum by the sea, in the territory of Zebulun and Naphtali… From that time Jesus began to preach, saying, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand” (4:12, 13, 17 ESV).
Matthew wants us to know John and Jesus declared the same message. The kingdom was coming and that meant there would be a great judgment destroying the wicked and vindicating the righteous.
This leads into the Sermon on the Mount. The important point here is that it is never presented as a context-independent aphorisms for all humanity for all of life. We are the ones who have stripped the context by assuming it is general guidance forever. Obviously, we can and should appeal to it, like we also appeal to the Decalogue or to any other part of Scripture. But nowhere does that passage itself indicate it is a collection of timeless, contextless instructions.
It is especially important to see how Jesus’ preaching substantiates John’s point that Abrahamic descent is useless.
Blessed are you when others revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for so they persecuted the prophets who were before you (5:11, 12 ESV).
Did faithful Jews think this way about their heritage? I doubt it. They thought of themselves as loyal to the prophets. But the prophets were killed by Abraham’s descendants who didn’t want to listen to Abraham’s descendants. Even if Matthew 23:35 was not included in the Gospel, we would already be justified in seeing here a Cain and Abel story of fratricide due to resistance to God’s Word.
So a national judgment is coming, says Jesus, but you have to be willing to suffer at the hands of the wicked before it comes.
What would they suffer? All the Gospels confirm that Jesus believed Israel’s leaders had murdered the prophets. Jesus was explaining that his disciple needed to faith death by feeling honored and privileged.
In Matthew 10 this all described in nasty detail. Jesus warns what is ahead for his disciples. His sending them out in pairs (10:1-15), leads to a prophecy of what will happen later. Matthew 10:16ff is vivid and violent and, frankly, threatening to believers.
“…Brother will deliver brother over to death, and the father his child, and children will rise against parents and have them put to death, and you will be hated by all for my name’s sake. But the one who endures to the end will be saved. When they persecute you in one town, flee to the next, for truly, I say to you, you will not have gone through all the towns of Israel before the Son of Man comes… And do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell. Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? And not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your Father. But even the hairs of your head are all numbered. Fear not, therefore; you are of more value than many sparrows. So everyone who acknowledges me before men, I also will acknowledge before my Father who is in heaven, but whoever denies me before men, I also will deny before my Father who is in heaven… Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me, and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. And whoever does not take his cross and follow me is not worthy of me. Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it…”
My point is this: Long before Matthew 23 and 24, we have presented to us, from the beginning of the Gospel, a situation is which a horrific judgment is coming upon first-century Judaism, and Jesus’ disciples will be called upon to make the ultimate sacrifice to provoke that judgment.
“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you build the tombs of the prophets and decorate the monuments of the righteous, saying, ‘If we had lived in the days of our fathers, we would not have taken part with them in shedding the blood of the prophets.’ Thus you witness against yourselves that you are sons of those who murdered the prophets. Fill up, then, the measure of your fathers. You serpents, you brood of vipers, how are you to escape being sentenced to hell? Therefore I send you prophets and wise men and scribes, some of whom you will kill and crucify, and some you will flog in your synagogues and persecute from town to town, so that on you may come all the righteous blood shed on earth, from the blood of righteous Abel to the blood of Zechariah the son of Barachiah, whom you murdered between the sanctuary and the altar. Truly, I say to you, all these things will come upon this generation” (Matthew 23:29–36 ESV).
“Preterism” cannot be something we invoke for special passages in Matthews Gospel during Holy Week. The crisis and judgment coming upon those who were contemporaries of Jesus, either for condemnation or vindication, is basic to the narrative from the beginning.
It also means that he is not to be taken figuratively when he tells his followers “take up his cross” (10:38; 16:24). Or, if he is, the figure is that some won’t be literally crucified but rather stoned to death, or burned alive, or maybe merely get flogged and have all property pillaged.
Since Jesus himself taught that facing death as a disciple required a certain way of living (note Luke 9:23 “take up his cross daily”), the passage can also to the taken figuratively. But if it is done so predominately by later generations, that is because they are the beneficiaries of first generation of believers who sacrificed themselves to remain faithful. Jesus preached that a great many of that first Church were meant to be slaughtered. That would provoke the end of the old world in judgment.
From Matthew’s Gospel to the World
Note that Jesus extends his warning to Jerusalem in terms of primal history. Israel is not warned of a judgment on the nation’s wickedness. It is not even warned of a judgment on the culminating sins of all Abraham’s descendants. He goes back far beyond Abraham. The judgment will be on all the sins going back to Cain and Abel (23:35). What will happen may be mysterious to us, but it definitely had primal implications. We cannot marginalize what he predicted as merely a “local” judgment. Jesus didn’t think that way.
In the book of Acts we see the message of the Gospel being spread outside of Palestine. But we do not see merely a Jesus “movement” unless we have decided, due to our expectations, to impose that meaning on the text. Peter preached to a non-pagan, godfearing Roman centurion who respected Israel and financially supported Jews (Acts 10:2; compare Luke 7:4, 5). He valued his reputation with the Jews (10:22). When Paul went on his missionary journeys he preached to mix multitudes of Jews and god-fearing Gentiles who worshiped at the synagogues. These non-jewish believers were already recognizing God’s covenant with Israel and supporting it, though it made them accept a “second-class” status in some respects. Gentiles who believed the Gospel typically rejoiced at their elevation while the Jews who refused to believe typically were driven by the fact that the Gospel claims made an end of their special status. But in that age, unlike ours, Paul practiced preaching “to the Jew first and also to the Greek” (Romans 1:16).
Note that this means not only that believing Jews had to learn humility, but so did believing Gentiles, as Paul would later warn (Romans 11:17-24). Matthew shows that Jesus, though he never told the disciples about Gentile reception even after his resurrection, prepared them for this trial. After dealing with the rich, young man (19:16-26), Jesus assured the disciples that they will be wealthier by far in the Kingdom. Then he told the parable of the laborers in the vineyard (20:1-16). The parable ends the same way the discourse about riches ends—“So the last will be first, and the first last” (20:16; 19:30). Jesus is warning the disciples not to begrudge others who don’t come in as soon, or seem to pay the same price, that they do.
In Acts we see how this looks. Corinth provides an instance:
When Silas and Timothy arrived from Macedonia, Paul was occupied with the word, testifying to the Jews that the Christ was Jesus. And when they opposed and reviled him, he shook out his garments and said to them, “Your blood be on your own heads! I am innocent. From now on I will go to the Gentiles.” And he left there and went to the house of a man named Titius Justus, a worshiper of God. His house was next door to the synagogue (Acts 18:5–7 ESV).
So is that the end of the possibility of salvation for the Jews? No. “Crispus, the ruler of the synagogue, believed in the Lord, together with his entire household. And many of the Corinthians hearing Paul believed and were baptized” (18:8).
So, even though the synagogue as an institution was under the control of unbelieving Jews, we don’t know how many continued to convert. Jesus promised Paul He still had “many” in Corinth (18:9).
Later, the synagogue tries to get Paul prosecuted. The Roman authorities rebuff them and Sosthenese, the unbelieving synagogue ruler, gets beaten for he efforts (18:17). But it still was not too late. By the time Paul wrote his first letter to the Corinthians, Sosthenese was with him and his authority in the Church as a witness is recognized (1 Corinthians 1:1). How did Paul’s recalcitrant Gentile readers feel about receiving rebuffs from this former unbeliever who had tried to persecute the Church? Hopefully they forgave and forgot.
But again this shows that for all the churches, the centrality of the Jews and of Jerusalem would have been widely understood. It had been experienced. The god-fearing Gentiles had submitted to it. The destruction of Jerusalem would have been understood exactly as Jesus presented it, as an end of the old cosmos as it had existed since creation as a sanctuary/garden in a special Land as a source of blessing to the rest of the world. This order was obsolete and was “ready to vanish away” (Hebrews 8:13).
Jesus, Good Friday, & the First Generation Church
Jesus disciples vowed they would never abandon him. But they all did, Peter even publicly disavowing him (Matthew 26:30-31; 69-75). But this did not count as a final apostasy. Jesus actually told them how they would fall and promised to restore them.
But Jesus had promised James and John that they would bring from the same cup (Matthew 20:23). And, as he explained himself, Jesus told all the disciples that they had to follow his example:
It shall not be so among you. But whoever would be great among you must be your servant, and whoever would be first among you must be your slave, even as the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many (Matthew 20:26–28 ESV).
And how would they ransom many? They would fill up the sins of the old order by their willing suffering and deaths so that God would end the old world (23:32-36) and liberate the new world that Jesus started by His death and resurrection.
Thus Paul spoke of his own suffering:
Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I am filling up what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church, of which I became a minister according to the stewardship from God that was given to me for you, to make the word of God fully known, the mystery hidden for ages and generations but now revealed to his saints. To them God chose to make known how great among the Gentiles are the riches of the glory of this mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory (Colossians 1:24–27 ESV).
His own death he described as a sacrifice.
Do all things without grumbling or disputing, that you may be blameless and innocent, children of God without blemish in the midst of a crooked and twisted generation, among whom you shine as lights in the world, holding fast to the word of life, so that in the day of Christ I may be proud that I did not run in vain or labor in vain. Even if I am to be poured out as a drink offering upon the sacrificial offering of your faith, I am glad and rejoice with you all. Likewise you also should be glad and rejoice with me (Philippians 2:14–18 ESV).
In the context of Paul’s discussion in Philippians 1:19-26, he is clearly referring to his possible death as a drink offering (confirmed in 2 Timothy 4:6). Furthermore, his reference to “the sacrificial offering of” the Philippian Christians’ faith includes their suffering (1:29-30). Their suffering, like the blood of the “prophets and scribes and wise men” that Jesus promised to send (Matthew 23:34) is a sign of wrath coming on the persecutors:
Only let your manner of life be worthy of the gospel of Christ, so that whether I come and see you or am absent, I may hear of you that you are standing firm in one spirit, with one mind striving side by side for the faith of the gospel, and not frightened in anything by your opponents. This is a clear sign to them of their destruction, but of your salvation, and that from God. For it has been granted to you that for the sake of Christ you should not only believe in him but also suffer for his sake, engaged in the same conflict that you saw I had and now hear that I still have (Philippians 1:27–30 ESV).
Paul’s uniqueness as an apostle does not mean that lay Christians can escape the calling to take up their cross and follow Christ to death and vindication. God will respond to their suffering faithfully. By referring to his own suffering and theirs as an “offering,” Paul is essentially equating it to an effective prayer for a deliverance.
CONCLUSION
What I am claiming here is that the theology of the Apocalypse starts in Matthew’s gospel. Hopefully, I have also made a case for the plausibility of finding that theology throughout the “New Testament.”
When he opened the fifth seal, I saw under the altar the souls of those who had been slain for the word of God and for the witness they had borne. They cried out with a loud voice, “O Sovereign Lord, holy and true, how long before you will judge and avenge our blood on those who dwell on the Land?” Then they were each given a white robe and told to rest a little longer, until the number of their fellow servants and their brothers should be complete, who were to be killed as they themselves had been. (Revelation 6:9–11)
And I heard a loud voice in heaven, saying, “Now the salvation and the power and the kingdom of our God and the authority of his Christ have come, for the accuser of our brothers has been thrown down, who accuses them day and night before our God. And they have conquered him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony, for they loved not their lives even unto death (Revelation 12:10–11 ESV).
What Christ did alone and abandoned on Good Friday was obviously unique in what he accomplished. But he called his brothers, the bride, to follow in his path, promising that would cast down the accuser and bring judgement on the old creation.