Ideas about the Kingdom of the Heavens around us and the unity of believers in Christ within it
Jesus’ early preaching was that his hearers must repent. because the Kingdom had already arrived and was “at hand”–standing right in front of them, in his person. Therefore, they were to repent–change their behavior–and believe the good news (Gospel) he was preaching to them.
An extended glossary of terms that will be used in discussing spirit and spirits, angels and demons, in the coming series on angels and on what it means that some of them “sinned” and “abandoned their proper abode.” The conclusion of this series is briefly summarized in this way: angels are messengers, not the message, and some of them sinned when they left the status of a messenger to become the focus of their message.
The early church were mostly outcasts, who understood the cost of discipleship and shunned fame, power and wealth as measures of their success. But we have embraced all of those things, and lost our witness and the core of our life in Christ as a result.
God is a complex unity–Three in One by nature–and is also one with us who believe, by adoption. He is not an absolutely simple unity, as is often taught. This false teaching comes from early efforts to make the Gospel more acceptable to the upper classes of Roman society by introducing Neoplatonist philosophy into it. But it instead destroys the Gospel by making God incapable of having any real unity with his children.
This post will draw no conclusions, but will simply briefly raise a question: is the Church acting in oneness one of the conditions that must be met before the Lord returns? This question arises from two independent lines of scriptures. First, in Matthew 24:14 (NASB), Jesus stated that “this gospel of the kingdom shall be preached in the whole…
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