The Kingdom of God

Delivered September 18, 2011

2 Corinthians 5:12-17; Mark 1:14-15

I take suggestions for sermons. In fact for years I have devoted the whole summer to a series I have called “Summer Sermon Suggestions.” People give me their ideas for sermon topics or certain passages of scriptures, and I preach on them during the summer. I did not do it this summer, but probably next summer I will resume that practice. I may even do a Winter Sermon Suggestions! Anyway, this summer after one of my sermons a member of the congregation had a sermon suggestion. She said, “You can just leave us hanging, pastor. You need to follow up that sermon and preach on the Kingdom of God.” That stuck with me, and so I am going to preach some sermons on the Kingdom of God. The thought had already been going through my mind anyway, so I saw that suggestion as the Spirit of God confirming that I need to address this central concept of Jesus’ teaching.

The Kingdom of God was Jesus’ original message. The gospels tell us that right after his baptism (which was for Jesus a powerful spiritual experience and his call to ministry) and after his forty days in the wilderness (which was his time to integrate it all and prepare himself for ministry) then he appeared on the scene in Galilee as an itinerant preacher. His message was simple.  The Gospel of Mark says, “Jesus came to Galilee, preaching the gospel of the kingdom of God, and saying, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand. Repent, and believe in the gospel.”  This was Jesus’ original message. Before the church filled Christianity with creeds, rituals and ecclesiastical structures, there was the simple message of the Kingdom of God. That is what I want to talk about today.

If I am going to talk about the Kingdom of God, then I need to define the term. That is not easy to do because we 21^st century Americans do not know much about kingdoms. Back in Jesus’ day everyone knew about kings and kingdoms. There were lots of monarchies back then. There are not so many now. In the news you may read about King Abdullah of Jordan, and Queen Elizabeth of Great Britain, and Emperor Akihito of Japan, and there are others. But for the most part monarchies with real power (and not just figureheads) are part of the past. Our nation threw off the yoke of the English monarchy at the time of our revolution. We Americans have not had a king for 235 years. So we don’t really understand what it means to live in a kingdom. This fact makes it difficult to translate the term “Kingdom of God” in the way that is meaningful for us. Israel had always had a king over them from the time of King Saul. If it wasn’t a Jewish king ruling Israel, it was an Assyrian, Babylonian, Persian or Greek king. In Jesus’ lifetime they were under the Roman emperor, which was basically the same thing. But we Americans threw out the only king we ever had. We sometimes have presidents who think they are kings and act like kings, but we just vote them out.

We just don’t use the word kingdom any longer, nor have any real feel for what it means. I wish I could translate the phrase into some current concept. I have thought of using the word Reign of God or Realm of God, but those still have royal connotations. I thought about the Presence of God, but that really doesn’t capture it either. Probably the Power of God is better, but that seems so impersonal. Putting these two together comes closer: the Present Power of God or the Powerful Presence of God. That is as good as I can do. The Kingdom of God is God’s presence in power. Let’s now see what Jesus says about this. He says in our text for today, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand. Repent, and believe in the gospel.”  I will take this phrase by phrase.

I. First, “The time is fulfilled.” This communicates the present reality of the Kingdom of God. It deals with where the kingdom is in time. It is now. The time is fulfilled. The waiting is over. The time has come. Eugene Peterson’s translation of the verse puts it this way: "Time's up! God's kingdom is here."  There are passages in the NT that speak of the Kingdom of God as still in the future. The Lord’s Prayer teaches us to pray, “Thy kingdom come” as a prayer for the kingdom to appear in the future on earth. The kingdom is a complex concept with both present and future aspects.  You can’t deny that without distorting Jesus’ teaching. But often Jesus talked about the Kingdom of God as present now.

On one occasion Jesus was casting out demons. As usual the Pharisees were upset because Jesus obviously had great spiritual power, but he didn’t fit their idea of a godly man. So they decided Jesus must be evil and that he was casting out demons by the power of Satan. Jesus called that blasphemy against the Holy Spirit, the unforgivable sin (which is a whole different subject). He told them, “But if I cast out demons by the Spirit of God, surely the kingdom of God has come upon you.” Jesus was saying that the Kingdom of God had arrived. This is also true for us. The Kingdom of God is now. Of course there is a sense in which the Kingdom of God is yet to come. But in a real spiritual sense, the Kingdom of God is already… if we have eyes to see and ears to hear. This is a part of what Jesus meant by that badly misunderstood phrase “born again.” Jesus said to Nicodemus, “Unless you are born again you cannot see the Kingdom of God.” If we are born again, we can see the Kingdom of God. If you aren’t, then we don’t. The Kingdom of God is now.

II. Second, the Kingdom of God is here. “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand.”  What does it mean, “the kingdom of God is at hand?” “At hand” means literally within arm’s reach. You can reach out and touch it. It doesn’t mean that it is around the corner. It doesn’t mean that it is in Rome or Jerusalem or Tibet or India or in a monastery or some holy place. It is right here. In Luke 17 Jesus had a discussion with the Pharisees about the Kingdom of God. “²⁰ Now when He was asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God would come, He answered them and said, “The kingdom of God does not come with observation; ²¹ nor will they say, ‘See here!’ or ‘See there!’^[d] For indeed, the kingdom of God is within you.” That phrase “within you” can also be translated “in your midst.” Whether it is within us or around us, in either case it is here now. People who are only looking for the kingdom “out there” are missing it.  Those who are only waiting for the kingdom at some future date will miss the kingdom that is right under their noses.

This is an important teaching of Jesus and an important part of the Christian spiritual experience; but it has historically been downplayed. Christians have gotten caught up in future expectations of a dramatic coming kingdom or have been involved in trying to bring about the Kingdom of God on earth by changing society. Nothing is wrong with either of those. If you want to spend all your time looking for signs of the return of Jesus or working to bring about paradise on earth, go ahead. But if your heart and heart are completely buried in those pursuits, you will miss the Kingdom of God that is right here right now.

One of the traditional adjectives to describe God is “omnipresent” which means that God is present everywhere. We also describe God as eternal, which means transcending time.  God will not be more present in the future than he is right now. We don’t have to wait until we die to experience the Kingdom of Heaven (which was equivalent term Jesus used for the kingdom of God.) We can experience it here and now. This is a very practical aspect of the gospel of the Kingdom. Trying to decipher prophecies or looking for codes in the Bible to predict the date of the Second Coming of Jesus is impractical. You do not need to wait for the Kingdom to come. Christ is here now. That is what Jesus meant on the Mount of Olives when he said that some that where standing there that very day would not die before they saw the Kingdom of God coming in power. Jesus is here. He said, “I will be with you always, even until the end of the age.” The Kingdom of God is here now. We just need to have eyes to see and ears to hear. 

On one occasion Jesus quoted the prophet Isaiah saying,

“ ‘ Hearing you will hear and shall not understand,
      And seeing you will see and not perceive;
       ¹⁵ For the hearts of this people have grown dull.
      Their ears are hard of hearing,
      And their eyes they have closed,
      Lest they should see with their eyes and hear with their ears,
      Lest they should understand with their hearts and turn,
      So that I should^[a]heal them.’^{[b]  16} But then he added, “But blessed are your eyes for they see, and your ears for they hear.”

          The kingdom of God can be seen here and now. How?

III. Jesus said, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand. Repent, and believe in the gospel.”  Repent. This is another very badly misunderstood concept. It is used in Christianity nowadays almost exclusively as a ethical term meaning  to turn away from sin. That we are sorry we did something wrong. Once again, that is part of it. Repentance does have a moral component; but it is a secondary part, not the essential meaning of the word. The word repent that is used in the NT refers to a transformation of one’s mind. I normally try not bore you with the Greek terms that are found in the Bible, but here I will risk boring you. The word is metanoeō. The root of the word means “to understand, perceive, consider, think”. It does not have to do with our actions, but with our thinking. What we do ethically will flow from what we think. But the thinking comes first. The word literally means to think again, to rethink – to think beyond the boundaries.  Metanoeō is meta-thinking, it is thinking on an entirely new level, a different way – a transforming way of thinking.

Before repentance we see the world as the world. But by the grace of God working in our lives, we can see the world as the Kingdom of God here now. From childhood we are taught to see the world the way everyone sees it. Our brains are conditioned in a certain way. Even Christians, who are supposed to be new creatures in Christ, see with same old tired jaded eyes as everyone else. When we are in Christ everything is made new. We see with new eyes. We are new creatures, a new creation. When we are in Christ then the world is seen not just as the world, but as the Powerful Presence of God. The veil is removed. Everything is changed. We wake up to the presence of God that was here all along but which we were blind to. “Twas blind, but now I see,” as the hymn Amazing Grace says.

This is the difference between the spiritual life and worldly life. Between what the apostle Paul calls spiritual and carnal. In the worldly life whether you call yourself a Christian or not, then the world is just the world – filled with sin and suffering and death. In the light of the Spirit, the world is no longer the world. The world is seen as the thinnest of veils covering a spiritual reality that is shining with the presence of God. Elizabeth Barrett Browning writes these famous words: "Earth's crammed with heaven, And every common bush afire with God, But only he who sees takes off his shoes; The rest sit round and pluck blackberries." That is what I am talking about.

IV. The fourth aspect of Jesus’ message of the Kingdom of God is faith.  “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand. Repent, and believe in the gospel.” We have already talked about repent, now on to believe. This concept is also badly misunderstood. Sometimes I wish we could come up with a whole new vocabulary to describe the spiritual life. Good Christian words have been so badly distorted through misuse over the centuries that they can barely be used any more without being misunderstood. One of those is believe or faith. A belief is nowadays seen as an idea, a doctrine, an “article of faith” that we are expected to adhere to. That is not what it means. Sure there are doctrines. I am really a very traditional Christian doctrinally. But dogma is not what the gospel of the Kingdom is about.

Belief or faith (they are the same word in the NT) does not mean to accept theological statements based on religious authority. Absolutely not. Some people say that if the church teaches something or our religion teaches something then we should just take it on faith, even if you have a hard time really believing it. I disagree. I don’t think we should accept anything that we do not personally know to be true. Faith is not accepting something without evidence or in spite of evidence to the contrary. Faith is the evidence. The Book of Hebrews defines faith as “the evidence of things not seen.”  By that it means not physically seen. Faith is a different way of seeing. Faith is a way of knowing. It is a way of directly apprehending reality.

When Jesus says, “Repent and believe the gospel” he is not telling us to accept something just because he says it. He is inviting us to see what he sees. To rethink the world from his perspective – to know reality as he knows it. As the apostle Paul puts it “to have the mind of Christ.” “Have this mind in you which was also in Christ Jesus.” Jesus is inviting us into his world. He is inviting us to enter his kingdom, which is the Kingdom of God. And all we have to do is open our eyes to heaven, open our minds to Christ, and see with the eyes of faith. There is no better time than now. “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand. Repent, and believe in the gospel.”