Sermon Tone Analysis

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The Kingdom of God

| To the next statement: Humanity |

The kingdom of God in the broadest sense is God's supreme sovereignty.

God’s reign is now manifest in the church and in the life of each believer who is submissive to his will.

The kingdom of God will be fully manifest over the whole world after the return of Jesus Christ when all things will become subject to it.

\\ (Psalms 2:6-9; 93:1-2; Luke 17:20-21; Daniel 2:44; Mark 1:14-15; 1 Corinthians 15:24-28; Revelation 11:15; 21:3, 22-27; 22:1-5)

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Psalm 2:6-9 - "I have installed my King on Zion, my holy hill."

:7 I will proclaim the decree of the LORD: He said to me, "You are my Son; today I have become your Father.

8 Ask of me, and I will make the nations your inheritance, the ends of the earth your possession.

9 You will rule them with an iron scepter; you will dash them to pieces like pottery."

Psalm 93:1-2 - The LORD reigns, he is robed in majesty; the LORD is robed in majesty and is armed with strength.

The world is firmly established; it cannot be moved.

2 Your throne was established long ago; you are from all eternity.

Luke 17:20-21 - Once, having been asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God would come, Jesus replied, "The kingdom of God does not come with your careful observation, 21 nor will people say, `Here it is,' or `There it is,' because the kingdom of God is within you."

Daniel 2:44 - In the time of those kings, the God of heaven will set up a kingdom that will never be destroyed, nor will it be left to another people.

It will crush all those kingdoms and bring them to an end, but it will itself endure forever.

Mark 1:14-15 - After John was put in prison, Jesus went into Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God.

1 Corinthians 15:24-28 - Then the end will come, when he hands over the kingdom to God the Father after he has destroyed all dominion, authority and power.

25 For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet.

26 The last enemy to be destroyed is death.

27 For he "has put everything under his feet."

Now when it says that "everything" has been put under him, it is clear that this does not include God himself, who put everything under Christ.

28 When he has done this, then the Son himself will be made subject to him who put everything under him, so that God may be all in all.

Revelation 11:15 - The seventh angel sounded his trumpet, and there were loud voices in heaven, which said: "The kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ, and he will reign for ever and ever."

Revelation 21:3 - And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, "Now the dwelling of God is with men, and he will live with them.

They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God.

Revelation 21:22-27 - I did not see a temple in the city, because the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are its temple.

23 The city does not need the sun or the moon to shine on it, for the glory of God gives it light, and the Lamb is its lamp.

24 The nations will walk by its light, and the kings of the earth will bring their splendor into it.

25 On no day will its gates ever be shut, for there will be no night there.

26 The glory and honor of the nations will be brought into it.

27 Nothing impure will ever enter it, nor will anyone who does what is shameful or deceitful, but only those whose names are written in the Lamb's book of life.

Revelation 22:1-5 - Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, as clear as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb 2 down the middle of the great street of the city.

On each side of the river stood the tree of life, bearing twelve crops of fruit, yielding its fruit every month.

And the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations.

3 No longer will there be any curse.

The throne of God and of the Lamb will be in the city, and his servants will serve him.

4 They will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads.

5 There will be no more night.

They will not need the light of a lamp or the light of the sun, for the Lord God will give them light.

And they will reign for ever and ever.

What is God’s Kingdom?

The kingdom of God is the major theme of Jesus’ teaching in the gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke.

This concept, expressed in various ways, had been a central part of Jewish religious aspirations for generations.

At the time of Jesus, it was popularly anticipated as a time when the promises of the Hebrew scriptures concerning the place of Israel in God’s plan would be fulfilled in a dramatic way: the hated Romans would once and for all be driven out of their land, and the people would enjoy a new period of political and religious freedom, and self-determination.

It is no wonder, then, that when Jesus emerged as a travelling prophet after his baptism and the temptations, and declared that ‘the time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand’ (Mark 1:15), people of all kinds showed great interest in what he had to say.

This was what they were waiting for: a new kingdom of God that would finally crush the old kingdom of Rome.

Moreover, they fully expected that they, the Jewish people, would have a prominent part in this coming kingdom under the leadership of their long-awaited Messiah.

From the very beginning of Israelite history, God had always been regarded as ‘king’ of the people (Psalms 96:10; 99:1; 146:10).

The Hebrew Bible declared that the whole world belonged to God, because God made it—and Israel as a nation belonged to God because God had rescued its ancestors from slavery in Egypt and led them to a new land.

When they wanted to appoint Saul as their own king a century or two later, some people opposed the move on the grounds that God was the only true king the nation should ever have (1 Samuel 8:1–18).

Subsequently, when David became king in Jerusalem, the two ideas were brought together: David and his successors were the rightful rulers of the nation, because God had chosen them (2 Samuel 7:1–17).

Their duty was to do God’s will, so that the kingdom would reflect the standards of God’s law.

In reality, things were rarely that simple.

As one king succeeded another, it was painfully obvious that many of them were interested only in power and self-fulfilment, and the earlier ideals gradually disappeared.

They certainly disappeared as practical politics, though they never quite vanished altogether, for they were transformed into a hope for the future: that at some time God would step in to put things right and establish a kingdom of justice and righteousness.

The prophet Zechariah was only one of many who fervently looked for that time to come, a day on which ‘the Lord will become king over all the earth’ (Zechariah 14:9).

By the time of Jesus, there was a widespread expectation that the arrival of the Messiah would herald the coming of this kingdom.

*The kingdom of God*

But what did Jesus mean in speaking of ‘the kingdom of God’?

Today, the notion of ‘kingdom’ most obviously denotes a state or territory that, if not actually ruled by a king, is nevertheless a political entity of some kind.

In the ancient world, things would have been no different, and there can be no doubt that it would have been perfectly understandable for Jesus’ contemporaries to conclude that he was announcing the establishment of a new state which, in contrast to the countries around, would somehow be ruled by God in person.

That idea is so obviously contrary to what Jesus taught about the kingdom of God that, right from the beginning, it is clear that he must have been using the phrase in some other way.

If Jesus wastalking about a new state, then he must have seen himself as the agent of a new political dynasty, in effect a Zealot.

Yet both his words and his actions seemed to deny that.

So what was Jesus really talking about?

Some Christians have concluded that, in spite of all the indications to the contrary, Jesus must have been mainly concerned with starting a society that was to be ruled by God, distinct from those ruled by ordinary mortals.

Many theologians of the Middle Ages, for example, followed St Augustine in identifying the kingdom of which Jesus spoke with the organized society they knew in the church.

Throughout the days of Christendom, the concept that the church was a legitimate successor to the Roman empire, with a political mandate to expand its own empire, motivated Western exploration of other parts of the world, and played its part in the emergence of colonialism.

Even today, it is not difficult to find Christian leaders who will speak as if ‘the kingdom’ is just another word for ‘the church’, while many more are prepared to talk of it as if it is a kind of political manifesto.

Here, we will suggest that Jesus’ use of the term ‘the kingdom of God’ cannot be limited to any of these things, but is in fact more comprehensive than all of them.

A good definition of it is ‘God’s way of doing things’ It begins from those values and standards that most adequately reflect God’s own character, though as Jesus expounds the significance of that, he inevitably provides insights into how all this might be applied in practical terms to different life situations.

That means that we can expect to find models for how discipleship might impact politics, economics, or other tangible social realities.

But these things do not exhaust the meaning of ‘God’s kingdom’, which is both wider and deeper than that: wider because it is a way of being that was to be applied to the whole of life, both private and public, and deeper because it would address not only material but also spiritual realities, giving those who committed themselves to it a fresh understanding of true freedom and justice, and the renewed experience of God’s presence in their lives.

*A new way of being*

There were already clues pointing in this direction in the actual words that Jesus probably used to articulate his teaching.

Though Jesus might well have been able to speak two or three languages, it is very likely that most of his teaching was given in Aramaic, for that was the language that most people in Palestine knew best.

The gospels were written in Greek, of course, like the rest of the New Testament, and we therefore have no direct record of the actual Aramaic words used by Jesus.

But even the Greek word that is translated into English as ‘kingdom’ (/basileia/), more often means the activity of a king rather than the territory over which a sovereign might rule.

The Aramaic word that most scholars think Jesus himself would have used (/malkutha/) certainly had that meaning.

So we are justified in supposing that Jesus was talking about what might be called ‘the kingship of God’, rather than ‘God’s kingdom’.

‘Kingship’ would be about God’s style, the way that God operates, and the example that God sets to others.

This helps to explain why Jesus was concerned more than anything else about the quality of human life, and the nature of meaningful relationships, rejecting attitudes of power and control in favour of love, acceptance and mutual service.

For him, these qualities were to characterize the life of his disciples because he perceived them as central to the person of God.

This helps to explain some of the apparently more difficult things that Jesus said.

For example, he told the Pharisees, ‘The kingdom of God does not come in such a way as to be seen … because the kingdom of God is within you’ (Luke 17:20, 21).

On another occasion he told his disciples, ‘whoever does not receive the kingdom of God like a child shall not enter it’ (Mark 10:15).

It would have been nonsensical to speak of a political territory existing in the lives of individual people: there is no sense in which a person could ‘receive’ a state, nor could it be ‘within them’.

But Jesus was saying that from the moment God is recognized as sovereign in someone’s life, then the ‘kingdom of God’ has really arrived.

He could say this kingdom was already ‘among’ his hearers, because he himself was there, and he was completely committed to exploring and putting into practice the values and standards that God represented.

In a similar way, Jesus compared ‘entering the kingdom’ to ‘entering into life’ (Mark 9:43–47).

Those people who ‘inherit the kingdom’ also ‘inherit eternal life’ (Matthew 25:34–46), and the gate leading to the kingdom is ‘the way that leads to life’ (Mark 10:17–23).

The well-known story of the son who ran away from home also emphasized the fact that to be a member of the kingdom is to share in God’s family life, and to experience God as a loving parent (Luke 15:11–32).

In the same way, Paul reminded his Christian readers in Corinth that ‘the kingdom of God does not consist in talk but in power’ (1 Corinthians 4:20), the empowerment of God that enables those who wish to change to live in ways that will truly reflect God’s ways of doing things.

At the same time, it would be wrong to understand the kingdom exclusively in terms of an individual relationship between people and God, for there are many statements in the gospels which show that Jesus regarded the kingdom of God not only as the inward rule of God in the lives of his followers but also as some kind of tangible reality.

For example, he spoke of people who would ‘come from east and west, and from north and south, and sit at table in the kingdom of God’ (Luke 13:29).

At the last supper Jesus told the disciples, ‘from now on I shall not drink of the fruit of the vine until the kingdom of God comes’ (Luke 22:18).

Matthew records him saying that his followers would ‘inherit the kingdom prepared … from the foundation of the world’ (Matthew 25:34).

Jesus seems, therefore, to have understood this idea of God’s kingdom in at least two ways: on the one hand, as God’s guidance in the lives of those who would be disciples, and on the other hand, as something that God would somehow display to the world at large.