The Kingdom of God, Mentor Guide, MG02

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T H E K I N G D O M O F G O D

God’s Reign Consummated

Welcome to the Mentor’s Guide for Lesson 4, God’s Reign Consummated . This is perhaps the longest and most difficult lesson to master of them all. The amount of material covered in this lesson is nearly obscene; you ought not assume that you will be able to deal with all the complexity of the issues simply or easily. Frankly, the Church of Jesus Christ, and its godliest, most sincere, and most capable biblical scholars and theologians have disagreed on the specifics of the claims on the issues of death, the intermediate state, the structure of the resurrections, the Rapture, and the tribulation, let alone heaven. Your class and students will probably not be any different. Expect a goodly amount of disagreement on the various details associated with the Second Coming and the events connected to it. The level to which you all disagree will undoubtedly be dependent upon the denominational background of the students, their own doctrinal orientation, the level of study they’ve done on these issues, and their ability to weigh carefully opposing and complex theological views on controversial matters. What is significant in this lesson are the essential truths associated with the end times and eschatological themes. It will be important for you, as a kind of coach and referee, to mediate the various opinions shared by your students with the basic creedal theological claims made about the Second Coming. In other words, it will be important for you to stay on the main road of the Kingdom’s consummation at the Second Coming of Jesus Christ, and deliberately downplay the wide range of possible alternative renderings on the details. The “Big Picture” must become your theological and pedagogical purpose, for if you become distracted, given the amount of material you have to cover, your teaching session will undoubtedly suffer. There simply is not enough time to deal with all the questions that will come up, so you will have to use your discretion as you go along. The goal of this Kingdom of God module is to provide your students with a biblical framework to understand what God is doing in human history, and prepare them to be able witnesses of Christ and his Kingdom. This final lesson concentrates on a number of big ideas which are critical for bringing our Kingdommodule studies to a close. This lesson deals with all the classic themes covered in eschatology in systematic theology volumes, in other words, the study of the last things. In it you will find summary teachings on all of the major ideas associated with it–the reasons

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