Radical by David Platt

Author:David Platt [Platt, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-1-60142-222-4
Publisher: The Doubleday Religious Publishing Group
Published: 2010-06-27T16:00:00+00:00

WHAT ARE WE BUILDING?

What scares me most, though, is that we can pretend that we are the people of God. We can comfortably turn a blind eye to these words in the Bible and go on with our affluent model of Christianity and church. We can even be successful in our church culture for doing so. It will actually be a sign of success and growth when we spend millions on ourselves. “Look how big that church is becoming,” they’ll say. “Did you see all the stuff they have?”

I think we actually believe that what we’re doing is biblical. And so did Jesus’ disciples. That’s one of the reasons they were so shocked when Jesus walked away from his conversation with a rich young man, saying, “How hard it is for the rich to enter the kingdom of God!” The very next verse says, “The disciples were amazed at his words.”12 Why were they so surprised?

The answer is steeped in Old Testament history. From the beginning of the nation of Israel, God had promised to bless them materially. God poured out material blessings on Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph. God promised his people that as they obeyed him, they would receive abundant material prosperity.13

Why the promise of material possessions? God was forming a nation for himself that would be a demonstration of his greatness to all other nations. In so doing, God established a place for his people and his glory to dwell. David and Solomon amassed great amounts of wealth as they established a kingdom, and one important part of that kingdom was the temple that Solomon would build. As seen in 1 Kings 8, Solomon dedicated the temple and asked God to make his glory known through his people in that place.14 Material blessing aimed toward the establishment of the people of God in a physical place with a physical temple is a fundamental part of the history of Israel.

So when a rich Jewish man came up to Jesus, and Jesus told him, “Go, sell everything you have and give to the poor,” the disciples were naturally confused.15 Why would obedience to Christ lead to this man losing his possessions?

The disciples would soon realize that a radical shift was taking place. It was not that God had changed or that the God of the Old Testament was somehow different from the God of the New Testament. Instead, the eternal plan of God was unfolding, and Jesus was ushering in a new phase in redemptive history, one that would affect the relationship between faith and material blessing.

In the dawn of this new phase in redemptive history, no teachers (including Jesus) in the New Testament ever promise material wealth as a reward for obedience.16 As if this were not startling enough to first-century Jews (and twenty-first-century American Christians), we also see no verse in the New Testament where God’s people are ever again commanded to build a majestic place of worship. Instead God’s people are told to be the temple—the place of worship.

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