WHY DID CHRIST SAY HE HAD COME?

By

Pastor Robert B. Record

Is Christ Saving People So He Can Take Them Off To Heaven?

    I turned my radio on the other day and I heard a popular preacher from Lincoln, Nebraska, telling Christian Believers that the only reason the Lord leaves us here after He has saved us is so that we might carry out the “great commission.”  In other words, serve as His witnesses.  “We were left here,’ he said, “so that we might bring to others the message of reconciliation.”  “I want to emphasize this,” he said, “that if it were not for the great commission, the Lord would take us off to heaven immediately after He saves us.” To further emphasize his point, the speaker quoted Christ when He said, “As the Father hath sent me even so I send you.” To cap it all off the speaker referred his listeners to John 17, where Christ was praying for those whom the Father had given Him, and especially, to verse 14, where Christ said of them, “They are not of this world even as I am not of this world.”  “Our citizenship is in heaven,” and so forth.

                                       Why America Is Going Down The Drain

    Now, ladies and gentlemen, there’s an element of truth in all this, but it’s more fiction than fact, and therefore confusion confounded! The whole sum and substance of this teaching is built around hymn-book theology.  It declares in effect, “this world is not our home, we’re just strangers here.”  “Our  citizenship is up in heaven where the Lord is building mansions for us and where we will someday go to live forever.”

    Let us take a second look at this heavenly minded, out-of-this-world teaching that’s so often presented as sound, fundamental, Bible doctrine. It’s a good illustration, my friend, of why the world is going down the drain and our country with it. Otherwise good Christian people are putting a disclaimer on this world as being their home; they’re “just strangers here.”  The world is pictured as lost and doomed, and damned, and the Lord has sent His saints out on kind of a salvage program to save as many sinners from it as He can and to take them off to heaven when He returns to earth the second time.  How about it, my friend, is this what Jesus had in mind when He said, “As the Father hath sent me, even so send I you?”  Did our Lord offer no hope for this world, or for His Kingdom people and Nation?

    Did Christ ever once preach a heavenly minded, or out-of-this-world gospel such as the one to which we’ve just referred?  Not Once!  Oh, I know, He once said, “In my Fathers house are many mansions, and I go to prepare a place for you,” but if you will examine these words with a little honest sincerity, you’ll discover that He is talking about the Church which He is building, a spiritual house made up of “living stones.” He’s not talking about the Lord being up in heaven in the real estate business at all.

                                                    What Did Jesus Say?

    What did Jesus say was the reason that He came into the world?  Let’s look at the Scripture, which says, “As the Father hath sent me, even so send I you.”  Why did Jesus say He came into the world?  In Matthew 18:11, for example, Jesus says, “The Son of man has come to save that which was lost.”  Take a second look at this verse.  It does not say that Christ came to save those who are sinners and lost.  It says He came to save “that” which was lost.  Well, who or what was lost?  What saith the Scripures?  In Jeremiah 50-6, we read where God says, “My people, have been lost sheep.” And again in Ezekiel 34:15-16, “I will feed my flock, and I will cause them to lie down, saith the Lord God.  I will seek that which was lost, and bring again that which was driven away.”

    Now, any Bible student should know the reference here is to the nation of Israel (which by the way, was not Jewish) which was divorced of God and scattered among the nations in about 721 B.C., to become “the lost sheep of the house of Israel.”  Turning to Matthew 15:24, we find Jesus saying, “I am not sent but to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.”  Now this could not have any references to the Jews, because the Jews were never lost. Neither do they comprise the great national house of Israel. But it does refer to the Israel people to whom the new covenant was promised and made, as we read in Jeremiah 31:33 and Matthew 26:27-28.

    As Christ introduced the Lord’s Supper He said, “This is my blood of the new covenant.” Who was He making this with? Gentiles?”  It was promised to Israel.  Then, it must have been made with Israel. Who are the people that by and large have entered into this new covenant relationship to God? Who have become Christian, and who are the people we call “saved”?  Is it the Jew?  No!  It’s the Anglo –Saxon, the Celtic, the Nordic, the English-speaking peoples, by and large.  Who are they?  Why, they’re modern Israel! Gentiles!

                                                The Teaching Of Zacharias

    As Zacharias heralded the coming birth of Jesus in Luke 1, he specifically mentions the purpose of Christ’s coming into the world.  I quote, beginning with verse 68, “He hath visited and redeemed His people. . . that we would be saved from our enemies.” (He didn’t say just from sin), “and from the hand of all that hate us; to perform the mercy promised to our Fathers,and to remember His holy covenant; the oath which He sware to our father Abraham.”  You recall that Abraham looked for a city whose builder and maker was God, and that city is a type, or symbol of the Kingdom of God on Earth!  It doesn’t say that this city is heaven, or up in heaven somewhere.

                                            Christ’s Parables Teach Of A Kingdom

    Now, let me ask you, does this sound like Christ came to evacuate the earth for a heaven above – that the reason we’re here is to help salvage what we can from a doomed world?  All during our Lord’s ministry He taught His disciples concerning the Kingdom.  You’ll find this time after time in Matthew and Mark and Luke.  He taught of the Kingdom in parables.  When the disciples asked Him one day to teach them to pray, He said, “After this manner pray ye.” They were to begin by recognizing the Father: “Our Father which art in heaven, hallowed by thy name.”  Then what did He say?  “Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”  Notice, “on earth as it is in heaven.”  Does this sound like this world was not to be our home?  Does It?

    Furthermore, the reward of the faithful is not heaven, nor a mansion in heaven, but the right to rule with Christ in His Kingdom.  Take, for example, our Lord’s parable of the husbandman who went to a far country.  When he came back to reward his servants, what did he reward them with?  A mansion up in heaven?  No, he gave them rulership over cities in the Kingdom.  Christ, Himself, was to rule in that Kingdom as King, and the government was to be upon His shoulders.  Where?  Here on the earth. “And of His kingdom,” it says, “there shall be no end.”  Oh, I know in John 18:36, “Jesus declares, my kingdom is not of this world.”  But what was He saying?  That it was not upon this earth?  Not for a moment. The word, “world,” here, is the Greek, “kosmos,” meaning, “world system.”  With Rome in power and still to run her allotted span of time, Christ could not have set up His Kingdom there under the Roman system; nor was that His purpose.  It would be set up elsewhere, and at a later date.

    Having noted that Jesus spent most of His earthly ministry going from village to city, preaching the gospel of the Kingdom, what, then, must Jesus have had in mind in the great commission of Matthew 28:18-20, when He told His disciples to go and disciple the Nations, baptizing them, etc., and “teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you?”  Why were the disciples of Christ told to go and disciple the Nations?  Why were they to preach the gospel of the Kingdom? To get people ready to go to heaven when they died?  No Sir!  They were to occupy for Christ and His Kingdom.  After making disciples of them, Christ didn’t tell them, “now you’re ready for heaven, so you go out and get some others saved so they can go with you.”  No, they were to teach these disciples what He had taught them.  And what did He teach them?  He taught them concerning His Kingdom.  We find in the sixth chapter of Matthew where Jesus said they were to “seek first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness.”  In His parable of the Husbandman in Luke 19:13, He said, “occupy until I come!”  Occupy, How?  In the Kingdom – in laboring and seeking to establish  kingdom principles in the earth.

    Again, I ask you, does this honestly sound to you like the Christian had no other purpose in staying here on earth, save to salvage what he could from this earth and get ready for a heaven above?  Ladies and Gentlemen, it is this unearthly, out-of-this-world, hymn-book theology, this disowning of the world as being our home, and this spiritualizing of the Kingdom and repudiating the Kingdom for which Christ taught us to pray, that has brought our Nation to the brink of national collapse.  It leaves our men in Washington, D.C.  without chart and compass for these troubled days.  It’s such time we were waking up to the fallacy of such teaching.                         

 First Published by THE NATIONAL MESSAGE MINISTRY

//////////

Editorial Note: Consider the so-called Great Commission!  The reference to it usually applies to Matt.28:19..There, Jesus is speaking after the resurrection, His very last words to His disciples while yet on earth. And in doing so, He advises them to “go and teach all nations.”  Here the word “nations” has been used to imply a general Universality to His instructions, creating the ‘multiculturalism’ touted today.

When the word Nations appears in the Bible, it is almost always applied to the principle subject of the Bible, Israel!  The Nations of Israel and not to the other, separate races that only appear as they came obliquely into contact with the Nations of Israel throughout history! And in most cases, detrimental to the well-being of ancient Israel.

Consequently, it is most unlikely that Jesus would have used His last few minutes yet on earth, to abruptly change all of His previous instructions to the disciples during His ministry on earth.  He had previously instructed His disciples to “go only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel”, (Matt.10:6) and stated as well, that His own purpose in being sent to earth, was “but to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.”  (Matt.15:24)

It is unfortunate that so many “blinded in part” Shepherds of Christianity have failed to “see” the import of these words and in their misguided view, even offered up their own status as the “Chosen of the Lord,” to Usurpers clever enough to take advantage of them. (Read Rom.11: 25)     J.R.N.