Cornerstone Curriculum, Official Certification Edition - Mentor's Guide

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In a sense Jesus establishes in his coming the prototype and standard of all legitimate spiritual warfare. We defeat the enemy not by destroying others’ lives, but by sacrificing our lives for them; we win the battle against the enemies of God not by killing human beings, but by living as living sacrifices, acceptable to God (Rom. 12.2; John 12.25). We win not by the power of the gun, the knife, and the missile, but by the Word of God and the shield of faith (Eph. 6.10-18). Jesus’ defeat of the enemy proves that a significant portion of the fight deals with our own internal struggles against evil remaining within (Rom. 7.7-25; 2 Cor. 10.1-6). This idea, that in the coming of Jesus Christ the Kingdom was made visible in the world, is a significant revelation in the fulfillment of God’s covenantal promise to restore his reign in the earth. With Jesus we experience the coming of the Messianic age in reality, not merely as an idea or hope or longing, but in actual fact. G. E. Ladd makes this point explicitly when he suggests: Jesus proclaimed that this Promise [the Promise of the coming of the Kingdom] was actually being fulfilled. This is no apocalyptic Kingdom but a present salvation. Jesus did not promise his hearers a better future or assure that they would soon enter the Kingdom. Rather he boldly announced that the Kingdom (Herrschaft) of God had come to them. The presence of the Kingdom was “a happening, an event, the gracious action of God.”The promise was fulfilled in the action of Jesus: in his proclamation of good news to the poor, release to the captives, restoring sight to the blind, freeing those who were oppressed. This was no new theology or new idea or new promise; it was a new event in history. “The wretched hear the good news, the prison doors are open, the oppressed breathe the air of freedom, blind pilgrims see the light, the day of salvation is here.”

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T h e o l o g y a n d E t h i c s

& 6 page 183 Outline Point I-D

~ G. E. Ladd. The Presence of the Future. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans Publishing, 1974. pp. 111-112.