The Kingdom of God is real. It is fact, not fiction.
The Kingdom of God is both process and climax. Already, but not yet.
Emmanuel, God with us in Jesus the Christ, announced the coming of the Kingdom. As a matter of fact, Jesus is the living presence of the Kingdom of God, the Kingdom of Heaven.
An unbelieving world says talk about the Kingdom of God is fantasy. An agnostic mind might acknowledge it is a kind of unrealizable idealism. What does the Bible reveal?
The Kingdom of God and the missio Dei
The Holy Tri-unity created a human community in God’s image – on purpose, for a purpose. The economy and ecology of the Kingdom were entrusted to this stewarding community. The Creator of the cosmos chose a garden as a representative location for the imaged community. Shalom was its status – wholeness, harmony. Collective responsibility to rule over all living things was the assigned task.
D.T. Niles described God’s initiatives: “The ‘Imago Dei’ is God’s foundation covenant with man. Now, it’s open to man to reap what God has sown. (Niles 1962:46).
Dallas Willard states that we were made to have dominion within an appropriate domain of reality. “In creating human beings God made them to rule, to reign, and to have dominion in a limited sphere.” (Willard 1998:21).
The Tempter appeared. Cunningly, he appealed to the eye, to the taste, and to pride. Humans yielded to the temptation to live beyond and outside the limited sphere for which they were designed. Douglas John Hall reminds us, “In the Jewish sense, the trouble with human unrighteousness and sin is not that it takes away from my personal fulfillment, but that it introduces ‘dividing walls of hostility’ between myself and my neighbor, myself and God who is the source ad ground of my life, and myself and creation.” (Hall 1990:55).
The Tempter’s promise that “you will not die” rings hollow. Relationships die. Walls of hostility become the grave markers.
The Biblical narrative then unfolds the drama of redemption and the transformative nature of the Kingdom of God.
The Abraham covenant identified the role of faith and obedience in bringing God’s blessing to panta ta ethne.
The Mosaic covenant established the ground rules for the collective community chosen to be a bridge people between God and all peoples.
The prophets were God’s megaphones articulating the concept of the Kingdom, even though the term itself is never used in Hebrew scripture. References to God as King of the earth and King of Israel occur often. The Prophets were constantly calling the Covenant Community back to shalom status and the principles of faithful bridging for which they were chosen.
Behind it all was the Word, always with God, always with God. The Word became flesh and dwelled among us. The Incarnation defined life. Jesus the Christ was life. Jesus announced the Kingdom. He was the Kingdom. That is fact. The Kingdom is here, already. Jesus lived it. Jesus set it in motion. Jesus empowered it.
Jesus held in counter-tension the reality of the Kingdom being present but not yet fully come. In Mark 1:15 and Matthew 4:25 Jesus preached the Kingdom as a present reality. In Matthew 25:31-46 He presents it in an eschatological future. In its present/future tense, the “message He gave was the Kingdom of God. It was the centre and circumference of all He taught and did.” (Jones 1940:53). The Kingdom always was. The Kingdom is coming. But, as E. Stanley Jones says so emphatically, “The essential thing to be burned into our thinking is the fact that the Kingdom is.”
Satan resisted the reality and presence of the Kingdom. He made high-sounding offers to Jesus in the wilderness. In an attempted replay of the first Eden, the Tempter approached Jesus through the eye, the taste and pride once again. As the Prince of the principalities and powers who have their own limited kingdoms, at the end of the day Satan could not get Jesus to exchange the real thing for a veneer. But the temptations were real, and a prototype of all the approaches the Tempter makes to us.
Whether through false offers, subtle influence, or naked intimidation, Satan tries to steal our attention and derail our commitment. We live in the same counter-tension that Jesus did. Dallas Willard reminds us that our own kingdom is simply the range of our effective will. We can choose to succumb to the lust of the eye, the lust of the flesh, and the pride of life. Or we can choose to follow the Christ in word and deed. Following Jesus calls for patience in the process.
Jesus vividly illustrated the process built into Kingdom growth: seed growing secretly (Mark 4:26-29); the wheat and the tares (Matthew 13:24-30); the mustard seed (Matthew 13:31-32); the leaven. (Matthew 13:33). But John the Baptist had a major question for Jesus in the light of slow and even invisible growth of the Kingdom from a human perspective: “Are you the one who was to come, or should we expect someone else?” Jesus’ response was, “The blind receive sight, the lame walk, those who have leprosy are cured, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the good news is preached to the poor. Blessed is the man who does not fall away on account of me.” The wise person is like the one who sold all in order to buy the field in which was found a great treasure, or to buy the one pearl of greater value than all others.
“An all-important fact in Jesus’ proclamation of the Kingdom was the recovery of the prophetic tension between history and eschatology in a new and even more dynamic form. In his person and mission, the Kingdom of God had come near in history in fulfillment of the prophetic hope; but it would yet come in eschatological consummation in the future at a time known only to God.” (Mar 13:32).
Aside from the book of Revelation, the rest of the New Testament does not use kingdom terms so much. Paul speaks passionately of the crucified and risen Lord. Those words are synonymous with the King and the Kingdom. The writer of Hebrews quotes Psalm 45 in describing the Son: “Your throne, O God, will last forever and ever, and righteousness will be the scepter of your Kingdom.”
The Kingdom has come. The Kingdom is coming.
The Role of the Church
Bishop Lesslie Newbigin states that if you don’t understand the Kingdom, it’s because you are facing the wrong direction. Turn around! Do a U-turn! It is only in the turning, the metanoia, that we are given the mind to understand what it means to become a citizen of the Kingdom of God. Citizens of the Kingdom comprise a community of Christ-followers. The community, the Church, is not the Kingdom.
Jesus relates to the Kingdom differently than he does to the Church. Jesus is the soul of the Church. Jesus is the Head of the Church, but he is not the Church. For those who have done the U-turn and centered their lives on the Christ, they join in the community called to be stewards of the good news that the King and the Kingdom has come to redeem, to restore a relationship with God, and to set in motion a transformation process for all creation.
The Church is the body of Christ planted among those who are still facing the wrong direction. Citizens of the Kingdom will never withdraw from the ‘pagani’ among whom they have been placed. They will not retreat from the struggle against the principalities and powers, nor will they withdraw into an isolated fellowship that hides its light and hordes its salt.
Paul’s appeal to the believers in Rome, and ultimately to all of us, was to offer ourselves as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God – which is our spiritual worship. And do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of our mind. (Romans 12:1-2). The words “conform” and “transformed” in Greek are present imperative tenses, suggesting repetitive action. In other words, we are not to keep on keeping on conforming to this world’s patterns, but we are to keep on keeping on being “metamorphed” into Christ’s likeness by the continuing renewal of the mind.
The continuing transformation process is necessary because of who we are personally, and corporately as the Church. George Eldon Ladd states the reason candidly, “The empirical Church has a twofold character. It is the people of the Kingdom, and yet it is not the ideal people, for it includes some who are actually not sons of the Kingdom. Thus entrance into the Kingdom means participation in the Church; but entrance into the Church is not necessarily synonymous with entrance into the Kingdom.
Paul urged the believers in Philipi to have the mind and attitude of Christ, “who being in very nature of God, did not consider that equality something to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself and became obedient to death – even death on a cross!” (Philippians 2:6-8).
Jesus taught His disciple to pray that the Kingdom would come and God’s will be done on earth as it is in heaven. “The purpose of God with human history is nothing less than to bring out of it..an eternal community of those who were once thought be just ‘ordinary human beings.’ Because of God’s purposes for it, this community will, in its way, pervade the entire created realm and share in the government of it. God’s precreation intention to have that community as a special dwelling place or home will be realized. He will be its prime sustainer and most glorious inhabitant.
The Church, then, is both sign and agent of the Kingdom of God. In apprenticing itself to Christ, the faith community is able to demonstrate the foretaste of a shalom-kind of wholeness totally unnatural to a self-centered society. The sign is always pointing to the Indweller and Sustainer of the quality of life it enjoys. As an agent of the Kingdom, the Church understands its role of servant involvement with persons, communities, systems and structures.
The Church has no mission of its own. It is servant to the missio Dei. The Church is actually the hermeneutic of the Gospel. The Church in action is the live interpreter of the Gospel. As diversely gifted steward, the Church in action is the corporate translator of the Bible. What an awesome opportunity is ours. The King has mad us to be ambassadors of reconciliation. An ambassador represents one king in the court of another.
In the role we have, we represent a King who can never be overthrown, and one to whom all earthly king will one day bow. Because of that, we cannot boast or embrace a triumphalistic attitude. We must represent our King in the disarming style that Jesus assumed while on earth among us – a servant.
Because the King we represent through the Church is about redeeming all of creation, we will be concerned about everything God is concerned about. How can we unleash the transforming qualities of the Kingdom to focus on the earth, the ocean worlds, the water tables, the air, local and global economies, healthy bodies, educated minds, justice, fairness, and humans created in the image of God?
What if an inquiring mind that was imprisoned in the cell of skepticism, doubt and lostness sent a representative to the Church to ask, “Do you represent the One who was to come, or should I look elsewhere?” Could we send back the same report that Jesus sent to John the Baptist? The blind receive their sight, the lame walk, those who have HIV/AIDS are cured, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the good news is preached to the poor, as well as to all those who have never even heard the Gospel for the first time?
Conclusion
The role of a transformer is to step down the massive amount of power flowing through a line so that it is usable for our needs. As servants of Jesus Christ, we are not only being transformed, but become servant transformers, channeling the mighty power of God for the appropriate application to the spiritual, emotional and physical needs of humankind.
To paraphrase Dallas Willard, as servants of God and the mission of God, we are in loving cooperation in a shared endeavor in which God’s aims are our aims. Willard relates five dimensions of our eternal life in The Kingdom Among Us: Confidence and reliance upon Jesus as the Son of Man appointed to save us; this confidence leads to a desire to be his apprentice in living in and from the Kingdom of God; the abundance of life realized through apprenticeship to Jesus leads to total obedience; obedience leads to, and then issues from the pervasive inner transformation of the heart and soul; and finally there is power to work the works of the Kingdom.
Who but God could ever think of such a partnership, much less dare to implement it through the likes of us? The rule of God in the realm of all creation chooses the Church as sign, agent, witness and custodian of the Kingdom!
“To him who loves us and has freed us from our sins by his blood, and has made us to be a kingdom and priests to serve his God and Father – to him be glory and power forever and ever! Amen.” Revelation 1:6