namely, that through the gospel the Gentiles are fellow heirs, fellow members of the body, and fellow partakers of the promise in Christ Jesus.

There are three “fellow”s in this verse, trying to reinforce the fact that Gentiles are now on equal footing with Jews.

Again, thousands of years removed, we may not fully feel the impact of those words.

It was not something known before, but has now been revealed. And here is a Jew preaching it.

It was not something you could pick up on the street; it was something revealed. It is an inversion of human understanding of reality, confirming to us that God’s thoughts are not our thoughts (Isaiah 55:8–9).

Jews had to revisit what they thought they were sure of, the very foundation of their understanding centered on Moses, and recenter it on Jesus.

To illustrate this, Paul was blinded after he met Jesus (Acts 9:8–9), symbolizing the veil that had been in his heart when he was still with Moses; he later wrote that the veil is removed when we turn to the Lord (2 Corinthians 3:16).

The gospel is the ultimate leveler because it gives the same answer for sin to both groups.

Gentiles are sinners (Romans 3:23), and Jews have not attained to righteousness (Romans 9:31–32) after hundreds of years of the sacrificial system laid down by Moses.⁠

But in the prophetic writing, God started expressing frustration with the sacrificial system, so what did they do?

They created laws about laws to ensure people would not sin and then come under God's judgment.

But Jesus came and said it is about your heart. You say do not commit adultery, what about the lust (Matthew 5:27–28)? You say do not murder, what about the anger (Matthew 5:21–22)?

He is telling us that what God wants goes beyond what you are doing, to what you are thinking and who you are at the core of your being. That is why the only solution is the new creation in Christ Jesus (2 Corinthians 5:17).

Paul said the law was our tutor (Galatians 3:24); it made sin very sinful (Romans 7:13) so that we might come to Christ. And that is the gospel, that is the message, that is the power of God for salvation.

The gospel, Paul wrote, is the power of God (1 Corinthians 1:18), and it pleases God to save those who believe through the foolishness of preaching (1 Corinthians 1:21).

That Gentiles are fellow heirs, fellow members of the body, and fellow partakers of the promise in Christ Jesus is about God welcoming you into His fold with the red carpet of the works of Jesus, not your own; his obedience, not yours; the punishment He bore for our sin. And it is through the preaching of the gospel that that reality is unveiled, which is the gospel of the kingdom. There are no two gospels.

When Jesus said “this gospel of the kingdom…” (Matthew 24:14), it was not for us to try to find out what is wrong with the messages that have been preached and to create something else.

That is, in my opinion, the way we try to create daylight between Paul and Jesus, as if one person used the word gospel differently than the other.

So people want to say that means Christians should rule/occupy prominent places in society, and that is the gospel of the kingdom.

But since Christians are already in the world, they only need the light to shine through the power of the Holy Spirit.

The gospel of the kingdom is not about the so-called seven mountains of society backed up by the myth (and it may be true) of two men meeting at a restaurant, and with that, we go on a tangent away from the truth, away from the gospel, and then we begin to have “apostles and prophets” to the seven mountains of: religion, family, education, government, media, arts/sports/entertainment, business.

That is leaving the truth of Christ to chase shadows, in my opinion. People want to organize the move of God like Uzziah wanted to organize the ark of God, and we know how he ended (2 Samuel 6:6–7).

The point is, there is no need to fit the gospel into the idea of man’s world-conquest instinct, in which we begin to mimic the ways of the world, which seek domination through assertiveness rather than service, and who seek a method rather than humility and submission to the will of God.

Let God conquer your heart with the beauty of Jesus, rather than chasing fads in the name of teaching.

Paul said we need to grow up and not be tossed to and fro with every wind of teaching (Ephesians 4:14).

The new “knowledge” can make us feel intoxicated, feel special, but they divert our attention from Christ, in my opinion.

Those are clearly ways we are not holding on to the sufficiency of the scriptures (2 Timothy 3:16–17); rather, we are looking for what can be figuratively seen as the cucumber and onion of Egypt (Numbers 11:5).

Is that not us going back to the Tower of Babel (Genesis 11), desiring to set up a mountain for themselves?

And what do we have in those cycles? A lot of stories, but not the centrality of Christ, which the gospel is about.

Is it us thinking the gospel is boring and we need something else? Paul does not think so. He calls it the unfathomable riches of Christ (Ephesians 3:8).