The King of God's Kingdom

The King of God's Kingdom
by David Seccombe
Paternoster Press

David Seccombe's The King of God's Kingdom is a massive tome of over 600 pages, but it was so easy and enjoyable to read that it seemed shorter.

The book's subtitle is "A Solution to the Puzzle of Jesus". Seccombe identifies the "puzzle" in a series of questions at the beginning of the book. Essentially it is what is the relationship between the Jesus of the gospels and his teaching and the Christianity of his followers, the Christ of the letters, and the apostles' teaching. Or to put it another way, how does Jesus' gospel of the Kingdom of God with its historical, social and political implications fit in (if it does) with the apostles' gospel of new birth, salvation by faith, justification and so forth.

Seccombe's solution is not a radical one, but an evangelical one. His conclusion is that Jesus established the Kingdom of God by defeating the powers of this world including sin, death and Satan, but left it to his followers to extend the Kingdom to the ends of the earth (Acts 1:8). He writes (pp. 601-02):

As surely as the backbone of Satan's power was destroyed, God's kingdom was established in the world and the way was clear for men and women of all nations to be drawn to the fellowship of the crucified but victorious King-Messiah. The task of gathering the new age community Jesus gave to his followers. Having defeated the central rebellious power, he sent them out into lands which were still very much in the power of evil - much as a victorious general might divide his forces, sending them into the far reaches of a newly conquered land to declare his victory, offer amnesty, and a place in the new order to all who would lay down their arms and surrender their allegiance to the king.

The book reads in part like a harmony of the gospels, but it is much more than this. It's main concern is to show how what Jesus did during his life is connected with his life's work (including his death and resurrection) of establishing God's Kingdom on earth.

My only real criticism is that because the author has one foot in the camp of the academy and one foot in the camp of the community of faith, he sometimes overstresses the fact that many scholars do not take the gospel accounts of miracles and even Jesus' teachings at face value. Time after time, he announces that many do not accept this or that before then giving for the most part fairly standard conservative reasons why we should, in the end, accept what the gospels say. This was a weakness. Perhaps he could have dealt with this issue in a preliminary chapter or an appendix.

Despite this, I really enjoyed reading this book and would warmly recommend it.