That the Lord sent out His prophets and apostles to preach and teach the Gospel of the Kingdom of God is evidenced throughout the Scriptures. As stated in the previous posting, after His resurrection and ascencion to heaven, Jesus returned to earth where, for 40 days, He spoke to His followers about “the things pertaining to the kingdom of God” (Acts 1:3). Nowhere do we find Him speaking to His people for that length of time about any other single subject. THE KINGDOM GOSPEL IS THE FOCUS OF HIS AND HIS MINISTERS’ MESSAGE. It’s all about the future. The present is the time in which we prepare for the future. For this reason we are to now “seek those things which are above … not things on the earth, for you are dead (to the world) and your life is hidden with Christ in God” (Col. 3:1-3). As Jesus prayed to God in Matthew 6:10, “… Thy kingdom come (later), thy will be done in (on) earth as it is (at that time) in heaven.” The Kingdom of God was at that time, and remains, in heaven. It will descend to earth at His second advent. The commission He gave to His messengers was to tell the world about that kingdom and about how the “few” will enter it (by obedience to His Word) and why the “many” will miss it (for rejecting His Word). Everything is judged relative to that Standard. Man’s thoughts, beliefs, wishes, surmisings, interpretations, twistings, editorializings, eradications, interpretations are meaningless. The Institutional Church does all of the above unceasingly, thereby separating her from the Biblical God. By committing those she misses His strait gate and narrow way that lead to life. Her insistence on having her own definitions of right and wrong causes her to miss the way of Christ–the way He lived and the way for which He died. Today He lives so that, through obedience to His Word/way, His true saints will one day live with Him in His Father’s kingdom.

Paul states in First Corinthians 2:2 that he preached “… Jesus Christ and Him crucified.” He preached belief in and obedience to the crucified Christ as the only way into God’s Kingdom. That the other apostles preached the same message is evidenced by the fact that they met periodically to make certain that they were all on the same spiritual page. The Lord stated that He was THE WAY, THE TRUTH AND THE LIFE (Jn. 14:6), not the ways, truths and lives. Spiritual Truth is singular; there is only one. Statements such as, “But I believe ….,” and “It just make sense to ….,” and “But that’s not why I do it ….” are irrelevant. One must live and walk God’s Truth only to have any chance for eternal life. Truth is the Word of God (Jn. 17:17)–the Words He spoke to the Old Testament prophets (2 Pet. 1:21) and the New Covenant apostles (Eph. 2:19,20) through His Holy Spirit (2 Tim. 3:16). As stated in First Corinthians 10:11, the words of the prophets were recorded for OUR INSTRUCTION and are not to be altered in any way: “… knowing this FIRST OF ALL that no prophecy of Scripture is of any PRIVATE INTERPRETATION, for prophecy never came by the will (reasonings) of man, but HOLY MEN OF GOD SPOKE AS THEY WERE MOVED BY THE SPIRIT OF GOD” (2 Pet. 1:21). All of man’s intellectual editorializing–“higher criticism” of God’s Word– is Satan-induced. Any deviation from God’s written Word is perversion (Gal. 1:6-9) of that Word. The Words spoken by God through His prophets and apostles form the Rock solid foundation upon which the Church of God (not the denomination) is built. All other foundations (church doctrines, customs, traditions, etc.) are shifting sands. The foundational Truth is the Gospel of the Kingdom of God–a paradise on earth where His saints will rule and reign with Him forever (Rev. 22:3-5). L.J.