The May 2026 DMW’s Monthly Website Update

The May 2026 Website Update will be based on the N. T. Wright book Simply Jesus. I just finished reading Wright’s book for the second time. I was particularly impressed with the last chapter of the book, Chapter 15, titled: Jesus: Ruler of the World. What follows are chronological excerpts from Chapter 15 with my comments at the end.

Pg 207, “What on Earth does it mean, today, to say that Jesus is king, that he is Lord of the world? How can we say such a thing in our confused world?”

Pg 207, “When I said “what on earth” at the start of this chapter, I meant, of course, what Jesus meant in the Lord’s Prayer: “Thy kingdom come on earth as in heaven.” How do we even get to first base in thinking about this today?”

Pg 212, “The crucial factor in Jesus’s kingdom project picks up the crucial factor in God’s creation project. God intended to rule the world through human beings. Jesus picks up this principle, rescues it, and transforms it.”

Pg 212, “Humans are the vital ingredient in God’s kingdom project. When we ask about the way in which God wants to run the world and then focus on the sharper question of how Jesus now runs the world, we should expect, from the whole of Scripture, that the answer will have something to do with the delegation of God’s authority, of Jesus’s authority, to human beings.”

Pg 212, “Jesus rescues human beings in order that through them he may rule his world in the new way he always intended.”

Pg 213, “Nor was this simply pragmatic, as though God (or Jesus) wanted a bit of help, needed someone to whom certain tasks could be delegated. It has to do with something deep within the very being of God, the same thing that led him to create a world that was other than himself. One name for this something is love. Another is Trinity. Either way, deeply mysterious though it remains, we should recognize that when Jesus announced his intention to launch God’s kingdom at last, he did it in a way that involved and included other human beings. God works through Jesus; Jesus works through his followers. This is not accidental.”

Pg 213, “In God’s kingdom, humans get to reflect God at last into the world, in the way they were meant to. They become more fully what humans were meant to be. That is how God becomes king. That is how Jesus goes to work in the present time. Exactly as he always did.”

Pg 214, “How did Jesus himself see his mission during his public career? Jesus would answer to say: yes, the kingdom is indeed now being launched. He is indeed Israel’s king; he is therefore, indeed, the Lord of the world. But the way his kingdom is being implemented is, once more, through human beings.”

Pg 215, “But the thing that really matters, is the fact that through Jesus’s followers God is establishing his kingdom and the rule of Jesus himself on earth as in heaven.”

Pg 215, “…with Jesus joining heaven and earth together in his own person, the Holy Spirit, which anointed and equipped Jesus himself for his kingdom work, comes pouring out onto his followers, so that they become as it were an extension of that new Temple. Where they are, heaven and earth are joined together. Jesus is with them, his life is at work in and through them, and, whether in Jerusalem or out in the wider world, they are the place where the living God, the God who is reclaiming the world for his own, is alive and active and establishing his sovereign rule.”

Pg 217, “…the church, the community that hails Jesus as Lord and king, and feasts at his table celebrating his victorious death and resurrection, is considered as the “body of the Messiah.” This famous Pauline image is not a random “illustration.” It expresses Paul’s conviction that this is the way in which Jesus now exercises his rule in the world – through the church, which is his Body.”

Pg 219, “Just as God’s whole style, his chosen way of operating, reflects his generous love, sharing his rule with his human creatures, so the way in which those humans then have to behave if they are to be agents of Jesus’s lordship reflects in its turn the same sense of vulnerable, gentle, but powerful self-giving love.”

Pg 220, “It is because of this that the world has been changed by people like William Wilberforce, campaigning tirelessly to abolish slavery; by Desmond Tutu, working and praying not just to end apartheid, but to end it in such a way as to produce a reconciled, forgiving South Africa; by Cicely Saunders, starting a hospice for terminally ill patients ignored by the medical profession and launching a movement that has, within a generation, spread right around the globe.”

Pg 221, “The church is not supposed to be a society of perfect people doing great work. It’s a society of forgiven sinners repaying their unpayable debt of love by working for Jesus’s kingdom in every way they can, knowing themselves to be unworthy of the task.”

Pg 222, “The way in which Jesus exercises his sovereign lordship in the present time includes his strange, often secret, sovereignty over the nations and their rulers.

Pg 223, “…we ought not to be complacent about how “wonderfully” God is at work in the world outside the church. But we must give full weight to the difficult but important biblical vision of God’s sovereignty over the nations and his determination to shape their fortunes to serve his larger purposes.”

Pg 223, “…God’s principle of operation (his intention to run his world through human beings) applies just as much here as elsewhere. God wants the world to be ordered not chaotic. He intends to bring that order to the world through the work, the thought, the planning, and the wisdom of human beings. The Bible insists that this was a good and wise plan. This is so whether or not the human beings in question have any thought of God or any desire to serve him. If they have, so much the better, though that will by no means guarantee that all their decisions are either wise, good, or correct.”

Pg 223, “Likewise, if the rulers are not God-fearing, that does not mean they are not performing a task God wants to have performed.”

Pg 224, “…even when the rulers are wild and wicked, God can bend their imaginings to serve his purpose. The Bible tells many stories in which God seems to take charge and overrule the intentions of pagan monarchs.”

Pg 225, “So those who follow Jesus have, front and center within their vocation, the task of being the real “opposition.” This doesn’t mean, of course, that they must actually oppose everything that the official government tries to do. They must weigh it, sift it, hold it to account, affirm what can be affirmed, point out things that are lacking or not quite in focus, critique what needs critiquing, and denounce, on occasion, what needs denouncing.”

Pg 229, “We can sum it all up like this. We live in the period of Jesus’s sovereign rule over the world—a reign that has not yet been completed, since, as Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15:20-28, he must reign until “he has put all his enemies under his feet,” including death itself. But Paul is clear that we do not have to wait until the second coming to say that Jesus is already reigning. In fact, Paul in that passage says something we may not otherwise have guessed: the reign of Jesus, in its present mode, is strictly temporary. God the father has installed Jesus in power, to act on his behalf; but when the task is complete, “the son himself will be placed in proper order” under God the father, “so that God may be all in all.” …the Nicene Creed says of Jesus, that his kingdom “will have no end.” …But I stress this point in 1 Corinthians because it makes it very clear that the present age is indeed the age of the reign of Jesus the Messiah.”

Pg 230, “Jesus was himself both upstaging the power structures of his day and also calling them to account, then and there. That’s what his actions in the Temple were all about…The calling to account has, in other words, already begun—and will be completed at the second coming.”

Pg 230, “What the church does, in the power of the Spirit, is rooted in the achievement of Jesus and looks ahead to the final completion of his work. This is how Jesus is running the world in the present.”

Pg 230, “There are millions of things the church should be getting into that the rulers of the world either don’t bother about or don’t have the resources to support. Jesus has all kinds of projects up his sleeve and is simply waiting for faithful people to say their prayers, to read the signs of the times, and to get busy.”

My Comments:

N. T. Wright has been my favorite New Testament scholar and theologian for some years. This book of his, Simply Jesus, has a message that we do not often hear in our churches today. His Chapter 15, Jesus: Ruler of the World, that I have quoted above makes that clear. In summary, this is what I take away from Chapter 15:

Jesus is the ruler of the world today and he utilizes human beings to promote his rule. Wright gives three great examples of humans promoting the kingdom of God when he mentions William Wilberforce, Desmond Tutu and Cicely Saunders and their amazing accomplishments that promoted the kingdom of God. Jesus not only uses his followers but also world leaders who may or may not be his followers. Jesus also uses the church and the Body of Christ.

I am probably as guilty as the twelve Apostles in failing to initially understand what Jesus was up to. I assumed that Jesus was going to primarily use the power of God to promote the kingdom of God and not human beings. But I still wonder how things like the prophecy of the Gog Magog war in Ezekiel 38 & 39 fits. And how do Holy Spirit Revivals such as the Azusa Street Revival of 1906-1915 fit. But Wright does make it clear that the Holy Spirit has a huge role in equipping Jesus’s followers to establish his sovereign rule. I certainly have been praying for more Holy Spirit Revivals like the Asbury Kentucky University Revival of 2023 and the ongoing Unite US Movement that started at Auburn University in September 2023 and continues to spread to other university campuses.

In Jude 1:3 Jude says that the reason he was writing was to “appeal to you to contend for the faith.” Jude was contending with false teachers and seemed to be calling Jesus’s followers to take action to remove the false teachers from the church. How does that apply to today’s church? Are we to actively be confronting our culture to remove evil from among us? Most churches I am familiar with seem to want nothing to do with actively and effectively confronting our culture. Yet, I would think this would be high on Jesus’s priority list.

I am reminded of a quote I used in my new book from my good friend Derek: “It is a real failing of the church that we gather, we preach, we teach, we pray but we don’t do. We are not out doing things in the community as a church…”[1]

I pray each of us will strive to be doers of the word as it says in James 1:22: “But be doers of the word, and not hearer’s only, deceiving yourselves,”

Also, I suspect we have recently been seeing examples of world leaders, who are probably not followers of Jesus, but who are, nevertheless, carrying out his wishes.

I urge us all to pray that Jesus and the Holy Spirit equip us, the followers of Jesus, to find ways to help promote the kingdom of God by removing evil from around us and in other ways that Jesus points us to.

Jesus is the Ruler of the Earth, Now!! We are living in the “age of the reign of Jesus the Messiah!”[i]

[1] Bringing Heaven to Earth & The Intermediate Heaven. Douglas M Webb, 2025, page 66

[i] Simply Jesus, N. T. Wright, 2006, pg 229