The Gospel Of The Kingdom
By: Apostle Skhumbuzo Sangweni
If we are looking for new wineskins, we should also expect new wine—a new message. If this is the final harvest that is the end of the age, then we know that this message will be the “gospel of the kingdom.” We can expect this to begin to eclipse the main focus since the Reformation, which is the gospel of salvation.
The gospel of personal salvation will be a crucial part of our message, but the gospel of the kingdom is about far more than personal salvation—it is about the coming salvation of the whole world and all that is in it. God so loved the world that He sent His Son. He may love men more than sparrows, but He loves the sparrows too. God loves the whole world that He made and will restore it to the paradise it was created to be, as we see in Isaiah 11 and other prophecies.
As we see with the last trumpet in Revelation, the last message to go forth is “our God reigns,” or the kingdom. We can expect this to be a major new thrust. Even though there are presently a number of messages that claim to be the gospel of the kingdom, what we can expect has yet to be proclaimed. This is not to say that the messages claiming to be the message of the kingdom do not have aspects of it, but we all “see in part and know in part.”
The first-century church preached “Christ and the resurrection from the dead.” The gospel of the kingdom is first about the King and then His coming reign. There has never been a more revolutionary force than the Gospel preached in its purest form, as the early church demonstrated. As the message at the end returns to the purest form of the Gospel, with the added element of the impending kingdom, we can expect Christianity to become the most revolutionary force again, with an even greater impact than the first century witnessed.
As the promised presence of the Lord is revealed in His temple, the prophecies assure us that the mountains (governments) will quake and even “melt,” as we see in Psalm 97. The message that prepares the way for the Lord brings the mountains and hills down and raises up the valleys and low places. This speaks of radical change coming to the earth as this Gospel goes forth. In the last chapters of Revelation, we get a perspective of what that will look like.
We can expect the coming gospel of the kingdom to have another important factor: the emergence of a new and transcendent leadership that demonstrates the power of the kingdom. As the Apostle Paul declared in I Corinthians 4:20, “For the kingdom of God does not consist in words, but in power.” So we can be sure that when the gospel of the kingdom comes, it will not just be in words but also in a demonstration of its power.
