Quotes from George Eldon Ladd

The righteousness of God's Kingdom is the product of God's reign in the human heart. God must reign in our lives now if we are to enter the Kingdom tomorrow.

The life and fellowship of the church is to be a foretaste of life in the Kingdom of God.

Jesus' message of the Kingdom of God is the announcement by word and deed that God is acting and manifesting dynamically his redemptive will in history. God is seeking out sinners; he is inviting them to enter into the messianic blessing; he is demanding of them a favorable response to his gracious offer. God has again spoken. A new prophet has appeared, indeed one who is more than a prophet, one who bring to people the very blessings he promises.

Love does not mean the abandonment of justice and right; nor is it a sentimental benevolence which does not have the capacity for holy wrath.

The righteousness of the Kingdom is a righteousness which only God Himself can give. Perfect purity, perfect honesty, perfect love, perfect forgiveness: what man is there anywhere in any dispensation who can live such a life?

Thus while the ground of justification is the death of Christ, the means by which justification becomes efficacious to the individual is faith.29 Justification is a gift bestowed to be received by faith (Rom. 3:24, 25). Faith means acceptance of this work of God in Christ, complete reliance upon it, and an utter abandonment of one's own works as the grounds of justification

Now I know in part." This lays a demand upon us that we hold the Word of God both in humility and in charity: in humility towards God and in charity towards our brethren.

Discipleship to Jesus was not like discipleship to a Jewish rabbi. The rabbis bound their disciples not to themselves but to the Torah; Jesus bound his disciples to himself. The rabbis offered something outside of themselves; Jesus offered himself alone.

However, in view of the verb used, it appears that the realm of death is the aggressor, attacking the church 49 The meaning then would be that when men and women have been brought into the salvation of the Kingdom of God through the mission of the church, the gates of death will be unable to prevail in their effort to swallow them up.

He will lead the disciples into all truth (16:13). In its Johannine setting, this does not indicate so much an intellectual apprehension of theological truths as a full personal apprehension of the saving presence of God that has come to humanity in Jesus.

All of this is but commentary on the saying that initiated this study, "You will know the truth, and the truth will make you free" (8:32). The organ of reception is not the mind but the whole person. The Greek concepts of "mind" and "reason" play no part in the Fourth Gospel.35

The goal of redemption is nothing less than the establishment of God's rule in all the world, "that God may be everything to every one" (1 Cor. 15:28).

A closer examination of the passages in Romans 5 and 2 Corinthians 5 leads to the inescapable conclusion that reconciliation is not primarily a change in humanity's attitude toward God; it is, like justification, an objective event that is accomplished by God for humanity's salvation.

The canonical books thus share in a unity of redemptive history that is intrinsic within them rather than superimposed upon them from without.53

We shall see later34 that while God's Fatherhood is one of the most important characteristics of Jesus' view about God, he never speaks of God as Father of any but his disciples. Fatherhood is the gift of the Kingdom of God.

La resurrección de Jesús no es un hecho aislado que proporcione a las personas una confianza cálida y una esperanza de una resurrección futura; es el comienzo de la misma resurrección escatológica.

One of the most notable features in this eschatological people is that of fellowship (koin?nia).44 Fellowship was one of the distinctive marks of the Jerusalem church (Acts 2:42). This is something more than human fellowship or the pleasure people of like mind find in each other's presence. It is more than a fellowship in a common religion. It is an eschatological creation of the Holy Spirit.

By fulfilling the promise given to Abraham, Christ has ended the age of the Law and inaugurated the age of Christ, which means freedom from bondage and the end of the Law for the believer. However, it is clear that inasmuch as Paul always regards the Law as holy and just and good, he never thinks of the Law as being abolished. It remains the expression of the will of God.

The teachings of the Kingdom of God in the Synoptic Gospels, eternal life in John, justification and the life in Christ in Paul, the heavenly High Priest in Hebrews, and the Lamb who is a Lion and a conquering Son of Man in the Revelation are diverse ways of describing various aspects and depths of meaning embodied in the one great redemptive event — the person and work of Jesus Christ.

It is a work … outside of us in which God so deals in Christ with the sin of the world, that it shall no longer be a barrier between himself and men … reconciliation, in the New Testament sense, is not something which is being done; it is something which is done.35

The Kingdom is God's reign and the realm in which the blessings of his reign are experienced; the church is the fellowship of those who have experienced God's reign and entered into the enjoyment of its blessings. The Kingdom creates the church, works through the church, and is proclaimed in the world by the church.

The verb anatethrammenos may well mean "reared from infancy," and may express the claim that while he was born in Tarsus, his family moved to Jerusalem while he was still a child, and his entire schooling was in Jerusalem.

We may conclude that a moderate futurist interpretation understands the seven letters to be addressed to seven historical churches that are representative of the entire church. The seals represent the forces in history, however long it lasts, by which God works out his redemptive and judicial purposes in history leading up to the end. The events beginning with chapter 7 lie in the future and will attend the final disposition of the divine will for human history.

However, the reason for Paul's appeal to nature and conscience is not primarily to suggest that human beings have an intrinsic inner guide for correct ethical conduct. It is rather to assert that even those who do not have the revealed Law do have an inner sense of right and wrong, but have failed to be obedient to the light they have even as the Jews have failed to keep the Law.