R.C. Sproul

at Jesus preaching and His preaching about the kingdom, Jesus is preaching about Himself because the coming breakthrough of the kingdom of God and the crisis that is associated with it in the proclamation of Jesus is the crisis that's directly related to what?

His being there.

and His personal ministry and His redemptive task.

So He is the Messiah who is God's anointed King who now appears in history.

And so we could boil down the message of the kingdom of God by saying the good news that is being proclaimed is that the long-awaited Messiah, the long-awaited King after the seed of David has finally come into history to do His redemptive work.

So what I'm saying at this point is that the gospel of the kingdom is not a different gospel fundamentally from the gospel of Jesus Christ.

But when we go then to the epistles or even to the book of Acts and we look at the preaching, not of Jesus, but of the apostles,

Then we discern what again scholars call, making use of another Greek word, the kerygma, k-e-r-y-g-m-a, the kerygma.

When I was in college,

I was studying in a pre-ministerial program, and there was a kind of fraternity for pre-ministerial students, and this organization was called CARUX, K-A-R-U-X.

And that was because it was taken from the Greek word for preacher or preaching.

And so this word kerygma has to do with the preaching of the early church.

And if we look, for example, at the sermons that are recorded for us by the apostles in the book of Acts, Peter's speech at Pentecost, Stephen's speech, and so on, and find other examples of the apostolic preaching,

we see certain ideas or elements that are routinely proclaimed in the initial proclamation of the infant church.

And again, they focus on the person and work of Christ.

Now, not every one of these sermons contains every element of this basic outline of the pattern of Jesus' work.

but there is a recurring theme of certain elements of his activity that when we put them all together, we call it the kerygma.

Now, there's another reason why this term kerygma is important to our understanding of the early church, because the early church had another word that was important to their strategy and to their program, which was called didache.

In fact, there's a book from very early Christian history that's titled simply, The Didache.

And the didache comes from the same Greek word from which we get the English word didactic.