In chapter three of When Heaven Invades Earth, Bill Johnson said the Sermon on the Mount was a treatise on the Kingdom, the “most famous sermon of all time.” In it, “Jesus reveals the attitudes that help His followers to access His unseen world.” He said this unseen world has influence over the visible world, and warned if Christians didn’t reach for this Kingdom, the realm of darkness was ready “to display its ability to influence.” But can Bill Johnson’s understanding of the Sermon on the Mount open our eyes and help us access this supposedly unseen world of Jesus?
Johnson said Jesus first declared the repentance message in Matthew 4:17, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” This supposedly brought the sick and diseased, the tormented and handicapped, people came from all over, and “Jesus healed them all.” After performing these miracles, Jesus gave the Sermon on the Mount.
Then Johnson reminded his readers the people had just seen Jesus heal sicknesses and perform deliverances. He suggested that instead of giving commands “on the new way of thinking” in His sermon, Jesus described the heart transformation they had just received. The Sermon on the Mount was where Jesus revealed the attitudes that helped His followers access His unseen world. He further said the Beatitudes were the lenses through which we see this Kingdom, as we changed the way we perceive things through ongoing repentance. Johnson said:
Why is this important recognize? Because many approach the teachings of Jesus as just another form of the Law. To most He just brought a new set of rules. Grace is different from the Law in that the favor comes before the obedience. Under grace the commandments of the Lord come fully equipped with the ability to perform them. . . to those who hear from the heart.
And we gain access to this grace through repentance. The heart of repentance was changing our way of thinking, filling our consciousness with the presence of His Kingdom. Repentance was not complete until it envisioned His Kingdom; and took on the mind of Christ revealed in those verses. “He could have put it this way: This is how the repentant mind looks.”
Perhaps trying to personalize the meaning of each Beatitude, Johnson paraphrased them in the second person and encouraged his readers to, “Examine the promised result of each new attitude.” But Johnson is building upon his connection between the Beatitudes and what he sees as repentance. Remember, he thinks the Beatitudes are the lenses through which his audience takes on the mind of Christ.
That which is unseen can only be realized through repentance. It was as though He said, “If you don’t change the way you perceive things, you’ll live your whole life thinking that what you see in the natural is the superior reality. Without changing the way you think you’ll never see the world that is right in front of you.
You have to be careful when listening to or reading Bill Johnson’s teachings. He uses concepts and words commonly understood to signify one thing in Christian theology (i.e., the Sermon on the Mount), but gives them a different meaning—sometimes slight, sometimes radical. Like the character Inigo Montoya in the movie, The Princess Bride, we need to say to him, “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.” Repentance and the Sermon on the Mount are two examples. See “Is Repentance All About Seeing the Kingdom?” for a critique of Bill Johnson’s sense of repentance and use of Matthew 4:17.
Let’s see whether Bill Johnson’s understanding of the Sermon on the Mount aligns with other teachings on it, or leaves us with a sense of being in the Twilight Zone of an alternate universe.
Kingdom Life in a Fallen World
In his book, The Sermon on the Mount: Kingdom Life in a Fallen World, Sinclair Ferguson said it was probably the best-known part of the entire Bible. Some of its expressions, like ‘do unto others’ or ‘the salt of the earth’ have become part of our everyday speech. For some people, “the sermon is ‘the heart of the gospel,’ and their whole philosophy of life is to ‘live by the Sermon on the Mount.’” He thought we had lost the balance and mixture of application and doctrine “that perfectly describes the character of his [Jesus’] teaching in the sermon.”
In his commentary on The Sermon on the Mount, Robert Guelich said it represented one of the most familiar sections of the New Testament, with the discourse on the Beatitudes, loving your enemies, the Lord’s Prayer, the Golden Rule and other topics. He went on to say that no other passage of Scripture has received the attention the Sermon on the Mount has. “So vast is the literature that a detailed history of interpretation has not been written.” Got Questions, a website and parachurch ministry that answers spiritually related questions, said if they were to summarize the Sermon on the Mount in a single sentence, it would be: “How to live a life that is dedicated to pleasing God, free from hypocrisy, full of love and grace, full of wisdom and discernment.”
Both Ferguson and Guelich noted Augustine was the first person to refer to Matthew 5-7 as the “Sermon on the Mount.” Augustine wrote a two-volume commentary on the sermon. Along with church fathers before him, he thought it was “the perfect measure of the Christian life” and was “filled with all the precepts by which the Christian life is formed.” Augustine said: “If anyone will piously and soberly consider the sermon which our Lord Jesus Christ spoke on the mount, as we read it in the Gospel according to Matthew, I think that he will find in it, so far as regards the highest morals, a perfect standard of the Christian life: and this we do not rashly venture to promise, but gather it from the very words of the Lord Himself.” Augustine, Ferguson and Guelich all saw the Sermon on the Mount as an integral part of the Gospel of Matthew.
Guelich said a popular view of Christianity was to live “according to the Sermon on the Mount.” This emphasis on ethics was further supported by referring to the Sermon on the Mount as the Christian Manifesto, the Christian Magna Carta, and Kingdom Ethics.
Ferguson saw the ethical message of the Sermon on the Mount as describing what it meant to repent and belong to the kingdom of heaven. It was a description of the lifestyle for those who belonged to that kingdom. Like Bill Johnson, he pointed to Matthew 4:17, saying the message of the Sermon on the Mount was: “This is what it means to repent and belong to the kingdom of heaven.” However, Ferguson further said:
But what is the kingdom of heaven, and how can it come so near? From the way in which the expression kingdom of heaven is interchanged with kingdom of God, these two expressions appear to mean exactly the same thing (compare Matt. 5:3 with Lk. 6:20). The kingdom is the rule or reign of God, the expression of his gracious sovereign will. To belong to the kingdom of God, then, is to belong to the people among whom the reign of God had already begun.
Jesus himself was the King in God’s kingdom. Wherever he reigned, the kingdom of heaven was already present. This was a staggering message to those Jews who first heard Jesus teach and preach. “He was claiming the long-hoped-for day, the day of the reign of God, was no longer confined to the future—it was now.” Jesus was preaching the arrival of the reign of God, promised by the Old Testament prophets (Isaiah 52:7; Micah 4:7).
Ferguson went on to say that in the context of the entirety of Matthew’s Gospel, we discover the chief theme is Jesus himself. In each part we learn a new facet of Jesus’ identity. The entire Gospel centers on who Jesus Christ is, what he says, and what he does. “The Sermon on the Mount should be understood in the light of this.” Living out the Sermon on the Mount can never be divorced from a right relationship with Jesus Christ.
Bill Johnson is wrong to say we are blind to the unseen world of the kingdom of heaven until we change the way we perceive things through ongoing repentance. Jesus himself is the King of heaven and whoever has seen Jesus has seen the Father (John 14:9). The Beatitudes are not lenses though which we can see into this hidden world. That’s Gnosticism, which leads us into an alternate universe and gives a different meaning to the Sermon on the Mount. It does not open our eyes to the abundant life hidden in the Kingdom realm. As Sinclair Ferguson said:
Living the Sermon on the Mount means, fundamentally, bowing to the authority of Jesus. It means coming to him, taking his yoke, and learning from him (Matt. 11:28-30). This means we must dispense with the myth (all too common) that we can have Christ as Saviour to begin the Christian life, and then at some later stage, make a full surrender to him as Lord. (p. 5, The Sermon on the Mount: Kingdom Life in a Fallen World)
