Welcome to the Based Boomer podcast on Eschatology members part of the Fight Last Network Parables of the mustard Seed in Leaven Did Jesus really mean it?

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Now Ever, since, shockingly to me, I embraced post millennialism in August twenty twenty two and learned about these parables of Jesus in Matthew thirteen.

Also Mark three Luke thirteen.

I've wondered how people can deny the message he was conveying, or how they can interpret it to be saying something other than what Jesus was clearly saying.

For almost forty four years, I never gave the parables a thought, nor did any passes of any church we ever attended address it that I can remember.

The reason is because of the eschatological assumptions I used to hold about the Kingdom and most Christians still do, which are completely different than what I now believe.

I'll deal with that in more detail, but let's first take a look at the parables He told them.

Another parable, the Kingdom of Heaven is like a mustard seed which a man took and planted in his field.

Though it is the smallest of all seeds.

Yet when it grows, it is the largest of garden plants and becomes a tree, so that the birds come and perch in its branches.

He told them still another parable, the Kingdom of Heaven is like yeast that a woman took and mixed into about sixty pounds of flour until it worked all through the dough.

First we notice he is speaking about the Kingdom of Heaven, which is equivalent in the other Gospels to the Kingdom of God.

The word kingdom is a key concept in the Gospels if we're to understand the meaning of what Jesus is conveying in the parables.

The word is used one hundred and sixteen times in the Synoptic Gospels, so on frequency alone, God has revealed to us as a critical concept for what he is doing in the world.

In fact, when John the Baptist and Jesus were announcing his ministry, they use identical words.

Repent for the Kingdom of Heaven has come.

The key inference from the word kingdom, and everyone would have understood this in the ancient world is that a kingdom assumes a king who is ruling, who calls the shots.

The king who ruled the world prior to Jesus coming wasn't God but Satan, the god of this fallen world.

We learn this when Jesus is tempted by Satan in the wilderness Matthew four.

Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor.

All this I will give you, he said, if you will bow down and worship me.

The kingdoms of the world belonged to Satan.

He was their king and ruler, and the one who had the authority to hand them over to Jesus.

By rejecting his offer, Jesus was going to earn his kingship and the power to rule the world, not have it given to him by the deceiver.

Post resurrection and ascension, the Lord still allows a Satan a measure of influence.

In case that's not clear enough.

From all the misery and suffering in the world.

Paul called Satan the god of this age second Corinthians four to four, and the ruler of the kingdom of the heir Ephesians two two.

The apostle John tells us the whole world is under the control of the evil one one John five nineteen, and he also makes a strong contrast between everything in the world and those who do the will of God one John two fifteen through seventy.

The difference after the Ascension and Pentecost is that Satan and his minions are now on the defensive and the gates of his Satanic kingdom are no match for the onslaught of the Church, Christ's body on earth.

That is a completely different orientation than most Christians currently have, which sees the Church on the defensive.

The kingdom and the Church.

When God created the world, he appointed man in the person of Adam and eventually his progeny to rule it.

Man is and would always be God's vice regent, a person who acts in the place of a ruler, governor, or sovereign.

When Man rebelled, he lost his authority and transferred it over to Satan.

Man became his vice regent instead of Gods.

Now man had a choice, and, as history teaches, it would always be the wrong one.

As Dylan saying, you got to serve somebody.

It may be the devil, or it may be the Lord, but you've got to serve somebody.

Prior to God calling Abram and creating a new people of his own to take back the world.

The default choice of man was always the devil.

For all intents and purposes, the devil had complete carte blanche in the world until that is, God chose one single solitary man out of every person on the face of the earth.

With Abram, he began the process of creating a people specifically to engage the cosmic battle of these dueling kingdoms on earth.

Since God is never in a hurry, it would take two thousand years to fully implement the beginning of the plan in the coming of himself in the person of his son.

As Shakespeare said past his Prologue, or as Jesus put it in Luke twenty four, the entire Old Testament is about him.

Prior to embracing postmillennialism, I mistakenly conflated the Kingdom with the Church.

My confusion was that I limited God's Kingdom work pretty much to just the Church.

It seemed clear to me the work of God in the Kingdom was a spiritual work, so it clearly couldn't apply to non Christians and all they do in the fallen world.

The problem with this is dualism, as in there are two non intersecting realities material fallen in the spiritual redeemed, the world is the former, in the Church is the latter, and never the two shall meet.

This, however, is not the perspective of Jesus and the Apostles and the New Testament.

There is no spiritual eternal material temporal distinction, because all things are spiritual and eternal, as Paul says.

Therefore, my dear brothers, stand firm.

Let nothing move.

You.

Always give yourselves fully to the work of the Lord, because you know that your labor in the Lord is not in vain.

Pre postmil I would have read labor in the Lord to mean the spiritual work, you know, doing evangelism, church, Bible study, fellowship with other Christians, et cetera.

I would not tend to view my labor in the Lord as what I do for a living five days a week, or taking care of my house, or being involved in local politics, et cetera.

That's this life stuff, not the Church, so it's not Kingdom work.

There is irony in my conflation because since I was probably twenty and exposed to Francis Schaeffer, I've always been a Christian worldview guy, always applying my Christian faith to all of life as best as I could, but still the conflation, the bifurcation, the dualism persisted, even if at a subconscious level.

I'm sure I could not have made the argument they were the same in any coherent way because I didn't really think much about it at all.

It was an assumption I held without really knowing it, which means it was the default perspective of all the Christianity I've been exposed to for over four decades.

The nature of the kingdom.

If the Kingdom of God is not the Church, then what is it.

It is anywhere on earth where Christ rules, and that means in and through and for God's people.

So anything they do under the Lord is advancing God's kingdom and extending Christ's reign.

It is Christ's body and all its parts, extending its influence throughout the world.

In other words, the kingdom includes the Church and anything God's people do outside of the functions of the Church.

This opens up the entire world as our field of dreams, every square inch being exposed to Christ's rule to push back the fall.

As far as the curse is found, those who are not Christians can then participate in the Kingdom of God by experiencing the blessings promised Abraham and the patriarchs, that through them all the nations of the world would be blessed.

There are many passages in scripture that point forward to God's kingdom victory, but one that comes to mind is habakak To fourteen.

For the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.

That's a lot of knowledge.

Notice the metaphor leaves room for earth.

So the prophet is not referring to the consummated state when God redeems the entire world, as I used to assume.

But here now, in this fallen world, among fallen people living in fallen bodies.

After the fall, God said to Adam and Eve, the seed of the Woman, the Messiah would strike the serpent's head, while the serpent would strike his heel.

While the kingdom brought to earth by Jesus will always be one of conflict, the damage we can do to the serpent is far greater.

Thus, victory in Jesus, the advancing of his kingdom rule was always part of the plan.

The plan was never to save people to go to heaven.

When they die to escape this horrible fallen world, but to bring Heaven to earth.

The Lord himself taught us to pray after we hallow God's name, Thy Kingdom Come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

The direction of the Christian life in the Church's mission is all heaven to earth, not earth to heaven.

Ever since Pietism and dispensationalism effectively took over the Evangelical Church in the nineteenth century, we've gotten this exactly backward.

Our hope is Christ conquering the final enemy, death and our resurrection from the dead to inhabit this renewed and redeemed creation, not our souls going to heaven when we die.

The justification for our hope, our confidence, and indeed our optimism is not us.

This is critical to understand because the critics of postmillennialism always get this wrong, claiming we think it is primarily because of our efforts that God's kingdom is advanced.

Yes, without our efforts, nothing happens.

But the only reason things happen is because of the cosmic authority over God's creation, Christ earned by his death, resurrection, and ascension.

Jesus told the apostles that all authority in heaven and earth had been given to him.

Therefore go.

Paul confirms this in Ephesians IE, telling us Christ was exalted to the right hand of God at his ascension into a position far above all rule and authority, power and dominion, and ever rename that can be named.

We see a prediction of the ascension and its meaning five hundred years before Christ in Daniel seven.

In my vision at night, I looked, and there before me was one like a son of Man, coming with the clouds of heaven.

He approached the ancient of days and was led into his presence.

He was given authority, glory, and sovereign power.

All nations and peoples of every language worshiped him.

His dominion is an everlasting dominion that will not pass away, and his kingdom is one that will never be destroyed.

For most of my Christian life, until just a few years ago August of twenty twenty two, to be exact, I believed this authority and dominion given to Christ was only for his people and the Church in this life, and then would only be fully realized once He returned to judge the living and the dead and apply his saving work to all of creation.

Now I realize this dominion, his kingdom, rule, the new heavens and new earth promised in Isaiah sixty five.

I've started at his first coming.

Isaiah's prophecy in chapter nine beautifully tells us the nature of this kingdom.

When this child is born and this sun is given, the people walking in darkness have seen a great light.

On those living in the land of deep darkness, a light has dawned.

The apostle John tells us who this light is.

In the first chapter of his Gospel.

The true light that gives light to everyone was coming into the world.

Light is the nature of the Kingdom, and Jesus came to enable the light to conquer the darkness.

Light always pushes away darkness.

Think of the smallest candle in a dark room, the darkness flees.

In fact, jesus ministry of casting out the demonic was a real world metaphor for his parable of the binding of the strong man that is Satan in Mark III.

This victory he accomplished, Paul tells us, is for the church.

Speaking of the resurrection, we read in Ephesians I that power is the same as the mighty strength.

He exerted when He raised Christ from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly realms, far above all rule and authority, power and dominion in every name that is invoked, not only in the present age, but also in the one to come.

And God placed all things under his feet and appointed him to be head over everything for the Church, which is his body, the fullness of Him who feels everything in every way.

Christ, at the right hand of God, then brings this light and victory over the forces of darkness to this fallen world.

That process started two thousand years ago at Pentecost and continues this very moment until Christ returns the mustard seed and Leaven.

So we finally get to the point of this episode.

If we're going to correctly understand what Jesus was trying to communicate using parables of a mustard seed in leaven, we first need to appreciate the all encompassing nature of his mission to bring the Kingdom of Heaven into a fallen world.

And most importantly why we know from the case I made above, the context of everything in this cosmic war initiated in the Garden of Eden is this earth.

It is difficult to convey just how important this change of orientation is to the Christian life.

We must grasp that the vision and hope Christ came to bring is not heaven.

That's almost a distraction from the real business at hand, which is the transformation of life on this earth.

I know this statement is controversial for many Christians, but it happens to have the benefit of being true.

Our proclamation is not the immortality of the soul, but the resurrection of the dead, and this coming back to a new life in completely transformed and spiritual physical bodies, incomprehensible to us at the moment, is on this very earth on which we now live.

I used to not quite get that had a kind of muddled idea of something completely new replacing this heaven and earth.

But that's not the hope in which the creation Groans Romans won.

The Apostle John tells us in Revelation twenty one.

I saw the Holy City, the New Jerusalem, coming down out of Heaven from God, prepared as a bride, beautifully dressed for her husband.

And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, Look, God's dwelling place is now among the people, and He will dwell with them.

They will be as people, and God himself will be with them and be their God.

He will wipe every tear from their eyes.

There will be no more death or mourning, or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.

The direction isn't from Earth up, but from Heaven down.

Without fully understanding this world mission of God in Christ, these parables lose their power, their impact, their very meaning, as it did for me for over for decades as a Christian.

Maybe I thought they had something to do with my own personal sanctification or the advancement of the Gospel and populating heaven.

If I thought about them at all, my attitude was likely praise God, we win in the end.

Until then, it's pretty much hell on earth.

That's not the most inspiring vision, and for eighteen hundred years it wasn't at all the vision of the Church.

Rather, at his first coming, the flag of Christ's kingdom rule on earth was planted like a warrior in battle, planting a flag right in the middle of enemy territory to show there's a new sheriff in town, a new king on the throne, a new way of doing business.

Now as Paul tells the old has gone, the new has come.

And when he writes these words in two Corinthians VI.

Seventeen, the contexts are those in Christ to have become a new creation.

Prior I assumed this new creation was mainly about me and other Christians.

Kingdom is the Church and all that, rather than about the only creation that exists and us in it.

So what is Jesus teaching by these parables?

Simply the growth of the Kingdom, Christ's rule and influence in this fallen world will be slow, most painfully slow, but it is as all encompassing as it is inevitable.

That's it.

This is not a difficult concept to grasp, except our pietistic gnostic dualism makes it so.

One tiny seed planted his kingdom becomes the largest tree in the garden.

And isn't a coincidence Jesus used the context of a garden.

It was in the garden that the kingdom was taken away from its rightful owner, And now Jesus is saying he's taking it back step by step, inch by inch, line by line, until all his enemies have been defeated, the final enemy being death.

One Corinthians fifteen twenty five.

The parable of the leaven yeast really brings home the message because of the contrast between the leaven or yeast and the amount of doe.

This doesn't communicate in the English, but the amount of dough is huge.

My old NIV says a large amount, while other versions say more literally three measures.

The New nivy is more helpful, saying about sixty pounds of flour.

That is a lot of flower and will make a very big loaf.

The woman took the yeast and mixed it until it worked all through the dough.

Slowly, but surely, inevitably, that yeast affected every molecule in the dough as it turned into bread.

That is the story of the Kingdom, initiated at Christ's birth, his life, death, resurrection, and dissension.

Slow, steady, inevitable progress, often not apparent to us, but happening all the same.

And think about it, We're only two thousand years into the process.