The Dynamic Coming of the Kingdom of God in Creation
(John 6:39-54, Luke 22:22-30)
What is the Kingdom of God?
The coming and presence of the Kingdom of God was the central message of Jesus: His teaching was designed to show men the truth of the Kingdom of God and how they might enter the God’s Kingdom of God (Matt. 5:20; 7:21, 13:11). His mighty works proved that the Kingdom of God had come upon them (Matt. 12: 28). When He taught His followers to pray, at the center of that model prayer were the words, "Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven" (Matt. 6:10). On the eve of His death, He assured His disciples that He would share the happiness and the fellowship of the Kingdom with them (Luke 22:22-30). Jesus promised that He would appear again on the last day to bring the fulfillment of the Kingdom to those for whom it was prepared (Matt. 25:31, 34, John 6:39-54)
The term "Kingdom of God" occurs four times in Matthew (12:28; 19:24; 21:31; 21:43); Matthew actually prefers the term "Kingdom of heaven" which he uses over 20 times in his gospel referring to the Kingdom of God. Mark uses Kingdom of God fourteen times, Luke- thirty-two times , twice in the Gospel of John (3:3, 5), six times in Acts, eight times in Paul, and once in Revelation (12:10).
How can we define the “Kingdom of God” or the “Kingdom of Heaven”? Graeme Goldsworthy has summarized a definition of the Kingdom of God as "God's people in God's place under God's rule." (Gospel and Kingdom: A Christian Interpretation of the Old Testament, p. 53)
Anthony Hoekema has described God's Kingdom as "the reign of God dynamically active in human history through Jesus Christ, the purpose of which is the redemption of his people from sin and from demonic powers, and the final establishment of the new heavens and the new earth." (The Bible and the Future, p. 45.)
George Eldon Ladd notes that "The primary meaning of both the Hebrew word malkuth in the Old Testament and of the Greek word basileiain the New Testament is the rank, authority and sovereignty exercised by a king. A basileia may indeed be a realm over which a sovereign exercises his authority; and it may be the people who belong to that realm and over whom authority is exercised; but these are secondary and derived meanings. First of all, a kingdom is the authority to rule, the sovereignty of the king." (What is the Kingdom of God? (George Eldon Ladd; http://www.theopedia.com/kingdom-of-god)
In view of the entire Bible, The Kingdom of God is the dynamic rule of God which invades history in the person of Jesus. “The Word (of God, sent from God, who is very God) became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.” (John 1:14) The Kingdom of God is parallel to the salvation and power of God and of the authority of His Christ.
Secondly, the Kingdom of God is not of this world. It is other-worldly. In John 8:23, Jesus said: "You are from below; I am from above. You are of this world; I am not of this world.” The world is finite, as is all of creation since the fall of Adam and Eve into sin, but the Kingdom of God is infinite because the Creator Redeemer King is infinite. His sovereign rule knows no end.
Thirdly, the Kingdom of God is primarily the reign of God in the human life: His Kingdom is waited for, unshakable, heavenly and eternal; it is righteousness, peace and joy in the Holy Spirit, as Paul clearly states in Rom 14:17: “For the kingdom of God is not a matter of eating and drinking, but of righteousness, peace and joy in the Holy Spirit.” The Kingdom of God goes beyond the physical realm, but certainly includes the physical. We have become children of the Kingdom through a birth from above, even though we still live here on this earth in our bodies.
But we realize by faith that God’s Kingdom is not restricted by time and space. It is the reign of God in the human heart and life rather than geographical space. It is where one finds salvation and eternal life.
God’s Kingdom presence in this age is a mystery and restrictive: It is both present and future with a tension between the “ALREADY” and “NOT YET”. As children of the Kingdom of God, born again and becoming heirs of all of God’s Kingdom promises, we only now know “in part.” There may be many questions that we have concerning the “how” and “when” of God’s complete fulfillment of His promises, but we live and walk by faith. We have the indwelling power of the Holy Spirit to lead and guide us according to God’s written and infallible Word in order to live righteous and holy lives, and yet we have a sinful nature within which continues to battle against the new nature given from above.
“If we want to know what the kingdom of God is, we can find no better place to begin our inquiry than in Jesus’ own preaching. When we read what Jesus says in Matt 4:17 (From that time on Jesus began to preach, "Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is near,” however, we are immediately confronted with a challenge: Jesus (just like John the Baptist before Him) does not define the kingdom of God for us. Why not? The answer is obvious: His audience already knew (in part) what He meant. Jesus defining the kingdom for them would be like a preacher in America today spending 20 minutes in a sermon telling his audience what America is. There would be virtually no one hearing the sermon who would need that kind of information.
It is the same with John (the Baptist) and Jesus. They simply announce that the kingdom of God is “at hand” because they know that their audience knows what they are talking about…Those to whom John and Jesus preached also had some very serious misunderstandings about the nature of the kingdom of God, but they did at least know that there was such a thing, and that it was a very important biblical idea.
Prior to encountering Jesus’ preaching, where would His audience have learned about the kingdom of God? We must remember that Jesus is preaching to Israelites. The answer, then, must be that they had a basic idea of the kingdom of God from the Old Testament. …The Old Testament does not use the actual phrase “kingdom of God,” nonetheless, the fact that God is king is very important throughout the Old Testament. For this reason, Old Testament teaching on this theme is absolutely vital for making sense of what John and Jesus mean when they announce that “the kingdom of God is at hand.” (quoted from Ben Dunson: http://www.ligonier.org/blog/whatkingdomgod/?utm_source=feedblitz&utm_medium=FeedBlitzRss&utm_campaign=ligonierministriesblog)
God’s Kingship in the Old Testament
The concept of God’s Kingship is present throughout the Old Testament and understanding this is vital if we are going to make sense of Jesus’ preaching about the kingdom of God. Remember: Jesus simply announces that the kingdom is “at hand” (Matt 3:2), assuming that His hearers had some grasp of what He meant, even if He knew that they did not fully understand Him. What, then, does the Old Testament have to say about the kingdom of God? First we’ll examine the kingdom of God at creation, namely in the commission God gives to Adam to rule over the earth. The most important teaching on the kingdom in the Old Testament is that God is King, and the Old Testament spells this out in two main ways.
First, God is king over all of creation. As Psalm 10:16 says: “The LORD is king forever and ever; the nations perish from his land.” Or as King Jehoshaphat confesses in 2 Chronicles 20:6: “O Lord, God of our fathers, are you not God in heaven? You rule over all the kingdoms of the nations. In your hand are power and might, so that none is able to withstand you.” Or consider King Hezekiah’s exultation in Isaiah 37:16: “O Lord of hosts, God of Israel, enthroned above the cherubim, you are the God, you alone, of all the kingdoms of the earth; you have made heaven and earth.” (See also Psalms 93:1-2; 95:3-6; 96:10; 104; 136:1-9.) Simply put, God is the sovereign ruler, the King, of the universe.
Second, the Old Testament portrays God as king over Israel in a special way. In 1 Samuel 12 the prophet Samuel rebukes Israel for desiring a king that would be just like the greedy, self-serving kings of the nations surrounding Israel. While it was not wrong for Israel to desire a king, the reason driving Israel’s request was sinful. As Samuel says in 1 Sam 12:12-13: “The Lord sent Jerubbaal and Barak and Jephthah and Samuel and delivered you out of the hand of your enemies on every side, and you lived in safety. And when you saw that Nahash the king of the Ammonites came against you, you said to me, ‘No, but a king shall reign over us,’ when the Lord your God was your king.” Israel’s desire for a powerful earthly king was driven by fear and earthly-mindedness (see 1 Sam 8:4-9). God’s people failed to rest in the fact that God was their king, and that He would protect His covenant people. While it is true that God alone is the ultimate king of Israel and over all of creation, human kings have a key role to play in God’s kingdom.
In fact, God built human kingship into creation itself. In Genesis 1-2 Adam is clearly portrayed as a king. This is seen most clearly in the commission that God gives to Adam in Genesis 1:26-30 (and repeated in Gen 2:15-17):
Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.” Kingship is at the heart of the commission that God gives to Adam. First of all, God made man and woman in His own image so that human beings are like God as no other earthly creatures are. Many creatures have legs, arms, necks, mouths, etc., but human beings were created to reflect and reproduce God’s Holy character. They were made for this purpose; God created them as personal beings having rational intelligence and will. They are creative, and they were created to have rule or dominion as God’s vice-regents over His creation. Man is granted dominion over all animal life on the earth.
Verse 27 repeats the first part of verse 26: “So God created man in his own image,
in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.” Man was created with a soul or spirit-self-conscious and with a personal God-like capacity for knowledge, thought, and action. He was created morally upright, a quality which was lost in the Fall and not being restored until the new-birth in Christ. He had rule or dominion over his environment. He had a body through which he experienced reality, expressed himself and exercised dominion, and with that, he possessed a God-given capacity for eternal life.
The Fall would diminish and tarnish God’s image-bearers to the extent that all of the human race would be marred by sin: We remain image bearers “structurally but not functionally”: Now we are born in sin, slaves to sin, unable to exercise our own power to mirror God’s holiness like once before. The new birth from above, regeneration, begins the process of being redeemed and restored into God’s moral image as we live our lives and are being sanctified by His Spirit and Word, and when we are glorified after our earthly deaths we will finally be glorified. The image of Jesus as the Incarnate Son of God in his humanity is what we will become.
28 “And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” In addition, man is told to have many children in order to subdue the earth and take dominion over it.
29 And God said, “Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit. You shall have them for food. 30 And to every beast of the earth and to every bird of the heavens and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food.” And it was so.”
Altogether, Adam was “to rule over the whole world as a vice-regent or subordinate king underneath God, the true King over all. He was to spread God’s own dominion outside the boundaries of the ordered garden of Eden so that it branches out to the farthest reaches of creation. In this sense, God reigns over His creation in and through Adam. Adam, of course, failed to take dominion over the earth. Instead, he rebels against his own sovereign, the Lord God Almighty. Nonetheless, God does not abandon His intention to rule over the earth through a human king. (Dr. Ben C. Dunson, http://www.ligonier.org/blog/kingdom-god-old-testament-kingship-and-creation/)
Next week we’ll take a short study on how God continued His dynamic rule through the nation of Israel and the prophets. We have to be encouraged to look ahead; I leave you with the following verses. First, in 1 Cor. 15:22&45: “For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive. ‘Thus it is written, “The first man Adam became a living being”; the last Adam became a life-giving spirit.” This ties in specifically with the Gospel of John and the work of God the Father through Christ, the Son, and the Spirit of God to grant a new spiritual life from above.
Looking even further to Rev 11:15, where Jesus declares through John: “Then the seventh angel sounded; and there were loud voices in heaven, saying, "The kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of His Christ; and He will reign forever and ever."
OUTLINE
The Kingdom of God/Heaven defined:
1. Graeme Goldsworthy: "God's people in God's place under God's rule."
2. Anthony Hoekema: "The reign of God dynamically active in human history through Jesus Christ, the purpose of which is the redemption of his people from sin and from demonic powers, and the final establishment of the new heavens and the new earth." (The Bible and the Future, p. 45.)
3. George Eldon Ladd: "The primary meaning of both the Hebrew word malkuth in the Old Testament and of the Greek word basileiain the New Testament is the rank, authority and sovereignty exercised by a king. A basileia: A kingdom is the authority to rule, the sovereignty of the king."
I. The Kingdom of God is the dynamic rule of God which invades history in the person of Jesus.
(Matt. 5:20; 6:10, 7:21, 12: 28,13:11, 25:31, 34, Luke 22:22-30,12:10, Rev. 12:10)
A. It is parallel to the salvation and power of God and of the authority of His Christ.
B. It is not of this world. (John 8:23)
C. It is primarily the reign of God in the human life: waited for, unshakable, heavenly, eternal, righteousness, peace and joy in the Holy Spirit. (Rom 14:17)
D. It is the reign of God in the human heart and life rather than geographical space.
E. It is where one finds salvation and eternal life.
F. It’s presence in this age is a mystery and restrictive: It is both present and future with a tension between the “ALREADY” and “NOT YET”.
II. The Old Testament teaches God’s Kingship.
A. God is king over all of creation. (Psalm 10:16, 93:1-2; 95:3-6; 96:10; 104; 136:1-9)
B. God is king over Israel in a special way. (1 Samuel 12)
C. Adam was portrayed as a human king.
