Transcription
It was several years ago now, when I was teaching at Wheaton College in Illinois, that I was teaching a class in the life and teaching of Jesus. It was a semester course, had a lot of hours to it, and we had spent several of those early hours in the course on the gospels themselves, the nature of the gospels, and how they function and that kind of thing, before we moved to the ministry of Jesus himself.
And right about that point in the term, when we got to the ministry of Jesus—who Jesus is and what he's all about—uh, I handed out 3x5 cards, blank cards, to all of the uh students in that class. And I asked them to put on that card, in a word or in a phrase of not more than three words, what they felt would absolutely capture the essence of the teaching and Ministry of Jesus. That is, everything else fits in; what word or phrase would you use, new, that is absolutely essential to Jesus, without which you would miss him? The Latins had a word for it, the *sine qua non*, which roughly translated into English is "that without which you ain't got none of," okay? The *sine qua non*, the absolutely essential thing in the teaching of Jesus.
Forty students in the class; I only had three—three of them—give me the right answer. The largest single answer was "love." It's 1970, a year after Kent State in our country, uh, the year after what I'd call the college revolution had peaked at Kent State. We were starting a new era, but it wasn't—it was an era that still thought in terms of "Make Love Not War," and here were college students who had been born and raised in an Evangelical home; most of them had been to Sunday school all their lives. And when I ask them what is the absolutely essential word to capture the teaching and Ministry of Jesus, the majority of them gave me "love." You know how many times Jesus speaks about love in the first three Gospels, accepting the Gospel of John? You know how many? Two. It's all love: God, your neighbor as yourself, and love your enemies; that's it. That is the full extent of Jesus' teaching on love in the synoptic gospels.
I had some give me "forgiveness," and that's not too bad. I even had one student give me "justification by faith." I came to the conclusion that here was one college student who had all his or her life read Jesus through Pauline eyes. Justification by faith! Can you imagine? Only three gave me the correct answer, which is the kingdom of God. Then I asked myself, well, how could they have known it? Here they were, most of them from middle or upper-middle-class American homes, young people who were raised in a republic whose idea of kingdom belongs to either ancient history or some European countries; whose understanding of Jesus had been so thoroughly watered down during their years in the church that all they knew was that he patted the children on the head and talked about love and forgiveness and told nice stories. How could they possibly know that the absolutely essential thing in the teaching of Jesus was the kingdom of God? And especially when they do read the gospels, Jesus would come across to them in a way that was so radically foreign to their understanding of what a king ought to be like that it simply would have dissolved in their—in their thinking—that Jesus should have been all about the kingdom of God.
Let me begin our series by insisting to you that this is—is the essential thing; that if one misses this, you miss Jesus altogether. Oh, that doesn't mean you won't know a saying here and an idea here, but if you miss the kingdom of God and what that means, you will absolutely miss Jesus of Nazareth. That is the essential thing. Now, the evidence of that is thorough in the New Testament and the gospels themselves. Let us note first of all the—the summaries that our gospel writers give us of the ministry of Jesus. The one that we're going to use as our peg on which to hang our various thinking ideas in terms of coming to grips with this idea is the one found in Mark 1:14-15. Mark says, "Now after Jesus—I'm sorry—after John was put in prison, Jesus came into Galilee preaching the gospel of God"—perhaps means something like "the good news that comes from God"— "saying, 'The time is fulfilled, the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe the good news.'"
Now, Mark, you understand, is not suggesting that all Jesus did was come from Jordan into Galilee and went from synagogue to synagogue and simply repeated himself over and over again: "The time is fulfilled, the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe the good news. The time is fulfilled, the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe the good news." This is Mark's summary of the ministry and teaching of Jesus. Mark is saying, in this little word—if you were to take the whole of Jesus' teaching and the entirety of his ministry and put it in a capsule form—this is it. This is what Jesus was all about. He came into the synagogues in Galilee proclaiming this one single message: "The time is fulfilled, the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe the good news." And as we will see, it is clear that the central item is the central one—that is, the second item is the main point. "The time is fulfilled"—what time? The time for the kingdom of God to be at hand. And it is because the kingdom of God is at hand that we must repent, and we must believe the good news. What good news? The good news that the kingdom of God is at hand. Everything has to do with the—the kingdom of God is at hand. And for Mark, that is the summary of his whole Ministry; everything hinges on that.
Now, the same thing is true in the other gospels. Notice that Matthew, in two different places, summarizes the teaching of Jesus or summarizes the ministry of Jesus before he gives us some extensive teaching or Ministry. In fact, this is—this is what he's doing in both of these texts. One of them is in chapter 4, verse 23. This is Matthew's summary: "Now Jesus," Matthew says, "as he went about all Galilee teaching in their synagogues"—and he went about all Galilee teaching in their synagogues—"and preaching the gospel of the kingdom and healing every disease and every infirmity among the people." The same kind of summary begins a long section; it comes at the end of chapter 9; it's the next long section of Teaching Ministry of Jesus. In fact, if these had been done correctly, this would be the beginning of chapter 10, but it ends up in our division of verses and chapters as ver—as chapter 9, verse 35: "Jesus went about all the cities and villages teaching in their synagogues and preaching the gospel of the Kingdom." Now you understand that whenever the gospel writers summarize Jesus' Ministry, they do so in terms of the kingdom of God.
Now, the same thing is also true in terms of Jesus' own instructions. Remember, on two different occasions, Jesus sends out disciples ahead of him to sort of announce his coming as heralds along the way. One occasion, it's the sending out of 12 (Matthew 10:5 and following). After telling them where to go and where not to go, and in the process of telling them what to do and other things, he only tells them to say one thing and announce, as you go—I know the English translation says "preach," but that word "preach," the Greek verb *kerysso*, which is the noun *keryx* which means to herald, to—to announce—it's like they were going into the town, you know, "The kingdom of God is at hand." It's the great announcement that sounds crazy, but that's what the word means. It's the great proclamation. Okay, so my trumpet isn't any good, but you understand what I'm trying to get at. You understand that's the only thing he told them to say. He didn't tell them to go in and talk about the good news of sins forgiven, justification by faith. All he told them to do was to announce, "The kingdom of God is at hand." The same thing is true when Jesus sends out 72 other disciples—since 72 is almost certainly the correct original text in Luke's gospel, chapter 10—same kind of context: "Go your way, carry no purse, no bag," etc., etc. He tells them finally, down in verse 9: "Heal the sick in whatever city you come, and say to them, 'The kingdom of God has come present upon you.'" You notice how in most of these texts there's a junction of healing the sick, casting out demons, and the announcement that the kingdom of God has come present. But that's the proclamation.
Now, when you stop to think of your own understanding and hearing and remembering of Jesus, you remember that this is always on his lips. When you seek first things first, what do you seek? The kingdom and its righteousness. It's what his parables are all about. It's like a pearl of infinite value for which one will sell everything else in order to obtain it. Jesus speaks of the keys of the Kingdom, the mystery of the Kingdom. Everything about his ministry has to do with the urgency of the Kingdom. The kingdom of God is the crucial thing.
Now, having said that, let me be quick to add that probably there is nothing that is so thoroughly misunderstood in the teaching of Jesus than that particular word. In fact, it is—it is probably because we understand it so poorly that we do nothing with it at all, and we tend to have Jesus—or to reform Jesus—into Pauline terms and think of Jesus as—as coming with proclamations that are—have their key, for example, as forgiveness or love. And that's not to suggest that love and forgiveness are not there; all I'm trying to suggest is that you've got to understand that in the context of Jesus' announcement that the kingdom of God is at hand.
Now, in the time that we have in these evenings, we're going to try to come to grips with what that might mean. And since we can't go through the 14 hours of lecture that I give in my life of Jesus class, we'll try to bring that down into some kind of—I call—we'll try to hit the main points and find some pegs to peg some key ideas on. For me, the most convenient way to do that is to go to Mark's gospel and listen carefully to that little summary where Mark announces that the kingdom—that—that the time is fulfilled, the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe the good news.
Now let us begin with that first word: "The time is fulfilled." The moment you hear language like that, you have to understand that you're dealing with a broad biblical concept that can be put into the categories of promise and fulfillment. There has been promise, and there is now fulfillment. And the category promise and fulfillment is essentially a category that belongs to eschatology. Eschatology simply means having to do with the time of the end—that the promise has to do with the end. In fact, that's the Greek word *eschaton*, which translated into English means "End," capital E—the End. Everything is looking forward to the end, and the kingdom of God belongs to the category of a time that is being fulfilled. Now what that also means, therefore, is that whatever else the kingdom of God means, it is in some way related to Jewish Endtime expectations; or if I can put that in terms that we are more used to, in—we must understand the kingdom of God in terms of Jewish Messianic hopes. You understand the Messiah doesn't belong to the middle of history; he belongs to the end of history. The Messiah is coming at the end. From their expectations, they were not looking for the Messiah to come and then for there to be a future after him. Messiah was coming to bring an end to history, start a new age, but that's an age that belongs no longer within history; it belongs in a new category, the new age. So they're looking for the Messiah to come at the end. Now that's the kind of category in which that terminology must be fitted.
Now, for us to understand that, therefore, we have to go out—go back to the Old Testament just a bit and try a little to understand the nature of this hope by the time Jesus comes on the scene. And what I'm interested here now is not in a full-scale understanding of the Old Testament hope so much as I am to give us a—a quick overview of that Old Testament hope so that we can come to the point that John the Baptist steps on the scene and announces the nearness of the coming of God's rule.
Now, the place to begin, I suppose, is at the beginning, but let's—let's begin more in the middle—uh, with David. The reason for beginning with David is that everything finally focuses on David. The reason for that is a very simple one: one, David ruled during the time of Israel's greatest glory; and besides that, he was a kind of model for Israel in its life as to a person who was truly given to God, despite his sins. He is still the man who was given to God; he was God's King, God's King *par excellence*. And because he was that, after David and Solomon, you'll remember decline set in, and very soon after the time of Solomon, there grew up in Israel a hope for the future. We don't know how elaborate it was or anything else, except that there was a hope for the future, and that hope took shape in terms of David and his rule. In fact, uh, in fact, the Davidic kingdom of the past was now projected to the future, and idealized David became the ideal King. David's reign became the ideal time, and so the future was a future hope that God would do the David thing again in their midst. And they had good reason for that hope; they had been promised a great deal more than they were now experiencing as king after king didn't obey God, and as they went into civil war and spent a 200-300 year period of nothing but civil war and clashes between North and South, there grew up in Israel this concern that God should restore the fortunes of David in the future. And it's simply a hope for the future.
Now, the prophets came along and took up this hope and gave it a word—the title they gave this future hope is "the day of Yahweh," the day of the Lord. But they did an interesting thing to the concept of the day of the Lord. What the prophets announced is that the day of the Lord was, first of all, going to be a day of judgment. And not only was it going to be a day of judgment upon Israel's enemies, but it was also going to be a day of judgment upon Israel itself. The reason it was going to be a day of judgment upon Israel is because Israel, who were God's people, were refusing to act like God's people. Instead of pleading the cause of the oppressed, the widow and the orphan, they were oppressing the poor, the widow and the orphan. Instead of—and the reason they were to—to plead the cause of the poor and the oppressed is precisely because God was that way; he revealed himself all through the law as the God who himself would take care of the oppressed, the disenfranchised, the—the—the alien, the widow, the orphan—those people who are helpless on their own and need somebody else to plead their cause. God said, "I will do it, and therefore you must do it," and Israel had been called to that. And instead of doing that, they ripped the poor off; they built their houses and then grabbed the houses of their poor neighbors. Examples of which can be found in a variety of ways, including Ahab taking Naboth's vineyard, which was simply—that was the last straw, you remember that, finally brought God's judgment upon Naboth—I mean, upon—upon Ahab, because he oppressed this poor man by stealing his vineyard from him.
Besides the oppression of the poor, they were also full of idolatries of every kind, and they were also—and they go together—together deeply involved in all kinds of sexual immorality. Might do an interesting thing sometime if you were to go through the prophetic oracles, and in the prophetic oracles, the majority of them, there is usually an announcement either of salvation or judgment; and in the announcement of salvation or judgment, there is usually given a reason for it. If you were to go through and take some colored pencils sometime, just take a—a copy of your scriptures and color the various kinds of sins that become the reasons for God's judgment in the prophetic oracles, you'd be surprised at how different it would—it—it really is from the way you and I tend to think it is. The leading cause is—and I've not done this in terms of its totality, so I'm making some projections on the basis of a few places I've gone—but the leading sin is idolatry, but very close to it is the oppression of the poor; that's the biggie. And then very close to that is sexual immorality, and sexual immorality is almost always very closely tied to—to idolatry. So you find, for example, in the—in—in Amos—uh, such passages—this is where I need notes, then I could have it in front of me—but such passages as this one in Amos 2: "For three transgressions of Israel, for four I will not revoke the punishment, because they sell the righteous for silver and the needy for a pair of shoes; they trample the head of the poor into the dust of the earth and turn aside the way of the afflicted. A man and his father go to the same maiden, and my holy name is profaned; they lay down beside every altar upon garments taken in pledge." Now that last one brings all three of them together: they lay down on every altar—that means—means they commit adultery at every altar—and they do it on garments taken in pledge, and those garments are the pledges they've taken from the poor that the law clearly said they were to return before sundown because it was the only thing the poor had to wear, and instead they're using those garments to do hanky-panky at the altar of God. And this now is the announcement of God's judgment upon Israel.
Now, all through the prophets, you understand, the predominant motif of the prophets is judgment, and precisely because it is God's day, it is also going to be a day of salvation, but it is going to be a day of salvation for that righteous remnant who were doing his will, who were obeying the law. Now, in the process of this announcement, of course, of judgment and salvation, the character of the judgment was going to—to be justice above everything else, precisely because it was going to be God's day; his justice was finally going to take place among the people of God. And so the time—or God's day—would be characterized as a reign of righteousness and justice.
Now you understand, of course, that it happened suddenly, one day in their history. What none of them really believed, although the prophets announced it over and over again, judgment came, and it came in the form of the Babylonian captivity. Then, after 50-70 years in captivity, they were restored to the land, and it was in that restoration that a great number of them began to think in terms, "Well, we've experienced the judgment of God; this must now be the counterpart, the salvation of God." And they looked to that restoration to be the great fulfillment of the promises of hope, of God's salvation, of a time of justice and righteousness. They were looking for the desert to blossom like a rose and for the highway to be made through the straight—through the—through the mountain places, a straight path for their feet to walk on. That, as you well know your Old Testament history, the restoration, instead of being the great day of the Lord of Salvation, turned out to be one of the colossal disappointments in Israel's history. Instead of all the nations flowing up to Jerusalem, most of the Jews didn't even come home. Instead of it being a time of righteousness, a time in which everything would do better, they had to work all the harder to make things happen around Jerusalem. And in the process, great disappointment and gloom settled into Israel, so—so much so that the picture that you find in the Book of Malachi simply elaborates in some details the—the enormity of the despair that had finally settled in on Israel during this period.
Skip another couple hundred years—a time in which Israel is now no longer an independent state but has simply become a pawn between the warring states, gone from one to another to another to another without independent existence; and all the time remembering what the Old Testament prophets had told them about their own destiny. And it is into this kind of a picture, in the intertestamental period, that a group of writers come along whom we know as the Apocalyptists. And it is among the Apocalyptists that the hope for the future is kept alive. It is still the prophetic hope, the hope that God will finally act in their future, in their behalf, but now in the Apocalyptists, the hope takes some decidedly new forms in terms of language, and this is absolutely crucial to understanding Jesus, John the Baptist. The essential character of the apocalyptic expression of the hope for the future is that they had given up on God doing anything within history. All the way through the Old Testament, for the most part at least, and especially in the essential matter in the prophets, the hope for the future is still a hope that is within history—that is, they're looking for God to step on the scene and restore the fortunes of David in an historical sense. God's going to put a new David on the throne, and that David is going to rule in righteousness. In fact, the magnificent Psalm 2 and Psalm 72, it re—it reflects that understanding of a—a future king who is going to rule in righteousness and care for the orphans and do the things that God's righteous king would be expected to do. The Apocalyptists had given up on history. They had been down for so long that they were no longer looking for something to happen within the ordinary framework of history. What they looked for was God to step in from outside of history, as it were, and bring history to an end, conclude things, and usher in a brand new age.
It is out of this period, therefore, that the language arose that you and I meet all the time in the New Testament. It is the language of this age and the age to come. Now you recognize that kind of language; you don't find it in the Old Testament; it's simply not found there anywhere. It is thoroughgoing in the New Testament. Where that language comes from is this apocalyptic period where they begin to re-express the hope for the future in terms of this age and the age to come. This line is the end, and they are looking for the end in cataclysmic terms—what I call the great kaboom—the—the—the—the ultimate stepping in by God into history and just bringing it to a smashing conclusion, sometimes with a Messiah, sometimes without a Messiah. But the one constant thing in all of these documents from this period, these apocalyptic documents, is this—is this motif that this age is an evil age, and the reason we know it's evil is that things are all out of whack: the good guys are down, the bad guys are up; sin is everywhere; rebellion is to be found in the whole of human society; people are not serving God; they're idolaters; and especially the prevalence of sin, sickness—sin, I mean sickness—and—and demonic possession. All of this was evidence to them that this—whatever else it is—is Satan's age, and the righteous are just sort of hanging in there, waiting for God to bring this age to an end. And he was going to do it with this dramatic conclusion. Somehow it would be such a great—great momentous event that the whole world would recognize it when it occurred. To say it's expressed in a whole variety of ways: you find yourself in the—in the Apocalypse of—um—Moses, or the Ascension of—of Moses, and the—the people of Israel—God has done it in such a dramatic way that the people of Israel are suddenly transported in heaven, and they're over the balustrades of Heaven are mocking the sinners who are being cursed to Hell. Uh, that's probably the most dramatic expression we find, but all of these writers have the same kind of motif: a—a powerful—powerful act of God that simply going to bring a conclusion to this age. And of course, what they're looking for is the coming age, and the coming age is going to be the time in which God is going to rule.
Of course, therefore, it is in this kind of understanding that the language, the kingdom of God arises. It belongs to this understanding of things where Satan's age is going to be overtaken by God's rule. In fact, that's the proper translation for the word "heas," which we translate "the kingdom of God." It means the time of God's rule, God's Rule. Now, it is into this kind of Messianic hope, and may I say fervor, since this, this period, especially the, especially the post-Maban period, a lot, a great deal of hopes went into the Maban period in, in Israel's history. And once the Maccabees turned out to be like all of their predecessors, the Maccabees—what, 166, 165, as I tell my survey class—kings make horrible priests. You never want the king and the priest to have the same body, because when you've got clout and the king and God on your side, corruption is inevitable. You cannot have a king and a priest. Oh, you might have one, but his son isn't going to make it. That's exactly what happened to the Maccabees. So, by the third generation, the Maccabees were more corrupt than their predecessors who were ruling from the outside. So, even though they were independent, they no longer experienced that there was nothing in terms of God's rule or God's justice. And so, after the Maban period, this apocalyptic thing really intensified, and there is this tremendous fervor and hope and expectation that God would finally step on a scene and do his thing.
Now, it's into that kind of fervor, you understand, that there appeared in Israel, out in the desert, a wild figure of a man who had a strange suit of clothes and an even stranger diet, and he had a kind of singular announcement: "We're at the brink," he said, "we stand right here, it's about to happen. God's rule is about to overtake us. Are you ready? Are you prepared for the coming of the rule of righteousness?" He said, "Well, if you're not, repent, be baptized." Baptism was their way of identifying with John, saying, "He's right, I'm wrong, I'm a sinner, I'm not ready for the coming rule of God's righteousness, so I repent of my sins and I make myself ready in righteousness for the coming rule of righteousness." His announcement was basically an announcement of judgment. This point he fitted into the whole prophetic apocalyptic mold; the winnowing fork is in his hand, he's going to burn the chaff, gather the wheat.
Now, it's in this kind of context that Jesus of Nazareth came down from his home in Galilee and was baptized of John and identified with the John movement. You understand that's what he was doing; he was identifying with the movement of John the Baptist, and he submitted to John's baptism. And it's in that great event of his submitting to John's baptism that we're told the climactic event happened in Jesus' own life: there was a voice from heaven, and there was the rending of heaven and the coming of the dove, and that voice from heaven declared his Messianic Destiny, reaffirmed for him who he was and what he was about, and the coming of the dove, the symbol of the Holy Spirit, announced for him or and equipped him for the ministry that God had called him to, namely to set it in motion, to get this rule of God going.
Now, apparently immediately following this event in the river, Jesus spent some time with John the Baptist in his movement. We're told in John's gospel that he and his disciples baptized people, not with John, but as a baptistic movement alongside of John. At some crisis in Jesus' life, he abandoned the river and went into the synagogues of Galilee. Now, the unanimous witness of the gospels, or at least of the synoptic gospels, is that that crisis that caused Jesus to abandon the river and end up doing a radically different thing from John, where the people came out to him and he announced God's coming judgment—we're told that Jesus, after the arrest of John, came into the synagogues of Galilee and went from synagogue to synagogue seeking out the people and announcing a radically different message from John's. His message was the good news: "The good news, have you heard the good news? God's rule is at hand."
Now, probably the crisis event was in fact what happened to him at the desert where he had to sort out what took place in the river. Remember the voice from heaven said, "You are my son, the beloved one," language that is taken from Genesis 22 and from Psalm 2, language that reflects the fact that the Messiah is going to be God's triumphant King who's going to rule the nations with a rod of iron: "You are my son, the beloved one," and then the rest of the voice from heaven says, "and with you I am well pleased," language that is taken directly out of Isaiah 42:1. And Isaiah 42:1 is the first of four songs in Isaiah 42-53 that we know as the servant songs, where a mysterious figure known as the servant of Yahweh is going to suffer on behalf of the people of Israel, and finally the picture culminates in 53 where he suffers on their behalf for their sins. Now, we don't know what goes on in the inner workings of Jesus; that's not given to us in the New Testament, you understand. All we know are the great moments, but you can be sure that whatever else happened to him in that river was a dramatic moment in his life, and from that experience, at some point, I think probably a little later than immediately, he went into the desert to sort it out. And what he was doing in the desert, being tested by Satan, had to do with the two things that the voice from heaven had affirmed: one, his unique relationship to the Father as Son, and secondly, his Messianic Destiny as the suffering servant King. And you'll notice that the whole testing that goes on—we don't know what goes on for 40 days; all we're told is that Satan was out there giving him the business for 40 days—at the end of that 40-day period, all of this is intensified into three testings: "If you are Son of God, make bread out of stones," and you understand that the whole point of that testing is for him to, shall I say, for him to abuse the relationship of Father and Son as the Incarnate one, whether he would himself trust God or whether he would somehow use his relationship with God as Son, let that be the thing that made his earthly ministry what it was.
Don't know if it's ever occurred to you, but in all of the miracles of Jesus, he never performed one in his own behalf, not one. Always acts his acts of mercy on the behalf of others was limitless, but not once does he try to extricate himself in some miraculous way. Now he does in fact extricate himself, but there is no hint anywhere that he performed a miracle to do it. Now, whatever else that testing meant in the desert, it meant that then we're told that he left the desert and he's on his way up to Jerusalem—this is in Luke's gospel—and his way up to Jerusalem they come to a very high mountain, and Luke says that in a moment of time he let him see all the nations of the earth, and he says, "If you'll go the route of popular expectation, be Satan's kind of Messiah, conquer by sword and power, all the nations of the world will follow you." At some point you're going to have to come to grips with the essential difference between Jesus and Muhammad, you understand. You're going to have to come to grips with the essential difference between Jesus and Muhammad, and the reason you're going to have difficulty ever converting Muslims is they have gone the way of Satan, and the reason they've gone the way of Satan is because Satan has made it a very, very attractive picture: Power, Triumph, Glory, smashing heads, the holy war, do it Muhammad's way, and the whole world will follow if you conquer them. God took the risk, if you will, of going his own way, the risk of an Incarnation and a suffering servant who, instead of creaming his enemies, would die for them and win them over by love and grace. That's pretty risky business on God's part, and that's the only message you've got, you understand. That's the only thing you've got against the power of the sword; that doesn't look like much, but it's the only you've got, so don't lose that; that is the ultimate power of God. Paul says—if I can bring Paul in for a minute—that's the great testing, and Jesus says no to Satan; he's not going to go that route. And then finally takes him to the pinnacle of the temple, right up to Jerusalem, and certainly some of the thing that's going on there is, if you're going to be a Messiah and get a Messianic movement going, then where do you start the action? Well, in the holy city, of course. And how do you do it? With a big splash, a big display. No splash; throw yourself down from the pinnacle of the temple, God's angels will bear you up, get all the press photography out there, get the Jerusalem Times heralding all the rest of it; let's start a Messianic movement with power and miracle. And instead, Jesus says no to Satan, and we're told that from the event of John's arrest, Jesus came into the synagogues of Galilee and announced the good news, the good news, the good news.
Now, what is the good news? Well, the good news is, first of all, that the time is fulfilled, the time is fulfilled. And everything that Jesus is and did and said, in some way, was a proclamation that their hopes and expectations are coming to realization in his ministry. Now, that much I hope we can understand, and I've tried to do in 30 minutes what should take two and a half hours, you understand, but that's basically the outline of it. We've got to get on to the next phrase, because here's the cruncher for us, and I'm surely going to run out of time tonight, but that's all right, we'll just go four hours, and we'll break it wherever—four hours, you know, wherever each time breaks each evening. The biggest difficulty for us is with that second phrase, second clause: "The kingdom of God is at hand." Now, our problems stem from two things: one, we have a rather bad misunderstanding of the term "Kingdom." Now, I don't know if the other European languages we have here have the same difficulty English does; I think they do in general, but I'm not sure. Is that "la ro" did you something like that? Yeah, no, I can't pronounce it; I can just read it. And in German, the… yeah, des… huh, yes, that's okay. Now, in English, the word "kingdom" is loaded with some foreign matter. Okay, in English, the foreign matter is that whenever we hear that word, we almost invariably think in terms of a realm, a place. For us, that is a term that belongs to the category space, geography. Okay, a kingdom is what the Netherlands is, what—and I'm not sure now about all of my European geography because things are changing—is Norway still… yes, a kingdom is what Norway is; it's a place. Now, that thinking is what's going to do us in, because the kingdom of God is not a place to which we're going; it doesn't belong to the category of space essentially at all; it belongs to the category of time, and therefore it has to do with reign or rule, not realm. You'll notice when Jesus is asked about the kingdom, he's never asked "what," he's asked "when," and when he's asked "where," it doesn't mean "place," they mean "where do I see it in evidence?" Do you understand? It's a time when God rules. I'll give this next sentence slowly for the sake of those whose English is not a first language, but you'll catch the usage of the word "Kingdom" in this sentence. It is perfectly good English for us to say, "During the kingdom of George III, the American colonies revolted against the kingdom of England." Okay, perfectly good English: "During the kingdom of George III, the American colonies revolted against the kingdom of England." Now we can substitute "during the what of George III," the reign. You see, there's an England before and after George, but there's only one period of time that can be called the kingdom of George III, you understand. Now, what we're talking about—that is the essential matter in this language—the kingdom of God has to do with the time when God exercises his sovereign rule over the affairs of mankind, the time when God steps on the scene and ushers in his rule, his reign. And it is not essential that there be a place, although obviously that finally must come into focus, and there must be subjects in all of that, but it is essentially focusing upon the King and his rule. God's rule is what we're talking about, and that's one of our problems. The other problem is the one that probably has caused most people to just quit reading Jesus in terms of the kingdom of God, and this is the one that we're not going to have time to elaborate on enough tonight to conclude, unfortunately. This is why I need notes; they keep me in tow, you understand. I can spin off the top of my head for 10 hours, but I have to have notes in order to do this properly. But anyway, the other matter that is terribly confusing to most people, and for good reason, is that Jesus speaks of the Kingdom in two different ways. He speaks of it ambiguously. On the one hand, Jesus speaks of the Kingdom as a future event, but just as surely he also speaks of the Kingdom as a present reality.
Now, here is where ordinarily I would simply spend something close to a half hour to 45 minutes going through texts and showing you how crucial it is that we hear what Jesus is saying. Let me see if for just a moment I can categorize some texts for you. One of the large categories of texts that come under the idea of the kingdom of God is a future event, fits into the whole prophetic apocalyptic tradition, where in the future there is going to be a great day of God in which what I call the order of life is going to be reversed: the single significant text here is, "The first shall be last and the last shall be first," a great reversal. The people that think they're in, and the outside, the people that don't think they have a hope, end up inside. "Blessed are you who mourn, now for you shall be comforted. Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you shall be filled. Blessed are the poor, for they shall experience God's Kingdom." And likewise, of course, the other side of that in Luke's gospel in chapter 6 is a woe, or woe to you who are full now, you're going to experience hunger. There's going to be a great reversal. This topsy-turvy world is going to experience its right—upping—that's not English, but it's all right, you understand what I mean. You, I don't mean uprighting, because that would mean something else; it's got to be right up, you know, it's got to be put right. What's wrong has got to be eliminated, and what's right has to come in its place. The first shall be last, the last first. Sometimes this takes form, this takes expression in the form of the Messianic banquet. They were looking for a great day of feasting. You remember the motif from this morning about eating in the presence of God? They had made this an eschatological hope; they were looking for one great banquet in God's presence forever. They were going to eat at his table. Oh, that's part of even the Psalm that we were doing this morning, Psalm 23: "Thou preparest a table before me, and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life." That became a future hope in Israel of sitting at God's banquet. Have you ever noticed how many times they talk about eating in the kingdom in the New Testament? Maybe you've never noticed those texts, because that's the last thing you and I ever think about doing in the Kingdom. Remember Jesus is teaching one time and somebody in the crowd bursts out, and—think of this—here is one of the great, and it's a beatitude; it comes out in the form of blessed, you know, talk about being blessed; here is the person who's blessed: "Blessed is the person who gets to sit at table in the kingdom of God and eat bread." You imagine you doing that in the presence of Jesus? I mean, that is so foreign to our understanding of Jesus of Nazareth that when you read that text, you don't even know what's in the gospel. In fact, I would dare say that not one of you could locate that in the New Testament. Some of you are trying—Luke 14. Here is somebody in the crowd shouting out, talk about blessedness; here's the great blessed event: sitting at table in the Kingdom. Well, Jesus takes up that motif, and remember he says—and this is now in Matthew 11—he says, "They're going to come from east and west and do what? And sit at table in the kingdom of God, while the sons of the kingdom are thrown out," a great reversal. Jesus' parables of the banquet, of the feasting, of the, you know, all have to do with the same motif. It's picked up, in fact, in the Revelation as the marriage supper of the Lamb, the great eschatological banquet. You know, put that into Jesus' own context by the way, and that's why, that's why after Jesus feeds the 5,000 in, in John's gospel, it says they came to make him King. They saw in the feeding of the 5,000 the beginning of the great banquet, the great bread dole. Here is God's King. How do we know that it's God's King? Because he has taken these few loaves and fish and has fed the multitude. Surely this is the event of the end. They read that eschatologically. Jesus has to take the whole day to sort of get them off that, and finally he ends up with only 11, 12 on his hands at the very end of the day. It's one great Messianic day in Jesus' ministry, but it's the great reversal motif where those who don't expect to have anything end up eating at table in the Kingdom.
Well, there's all kinds of other sayings that have to do with being a future event. Let's take the sayings of readiness for the coming of the Son of Man: "You don't know the day nor the hour when the Son of Man comes." Clearly there's an event in the future that he calls the coming of the Son of Man. So, in fact, some radical German scholars have argued that that's the only time Jesus uses "Son of Man" authentically; that is, all other times are not Jesus, but the church reading back into Jesus, and that Jesus thought the Son of Man to be something, somebody different from himself. There's going to come a Son of Man who, in the future… I think that can be easily refuted in a scholarly way, and I'm not going to go into that, but the point is that there's a future coming of a Son of Man, of the Son of Man with the clouds of heaven, power and glory, still in the future. And then, of course, think of all those things that require watchfulness: "Watch, watch, watch, for you don't know the day nor the hour." Now, all of those sayings are sayings that have to do with the fact that for Jesus himself, the kingdom of God is still a future event. And now I'm stuck with what to do with this business, because I'm right in the middle of something and I've got one minute left on this tape, because what we need to say next that we'll not be able to elaborate on, but I've got to bring them together, and we'll start with this tomorrow night, is that just as surely as we have all these things—and by the way, in my course in Jesus I take one full hour to make this point, that for Jesus the kingdom was still a future event, and I all I do is go through texts and show how text after text after text shows that for Jesus himself it was still a future event—the problem is that there are equally, not as many, but equally as significant texts that tell us that for Jesus himself and his own ministry that great future event had already become a present reality. Already the poor are sitting at table with him, and Jesus says, "Now is a time not for fasting but for feasting, because the bridegroom is with them," sitting at table with the outcasts. Now, my problem is that there's so many texts, and my mind is running with all of them, and I'm not going to try to squeeze them in before the time is finished. So what I'm going to do is the worst imaginable thing: I'm going to cut it off right here, and we're going to pick it up tomorrow night right here. If somebody can remember what last text I gave, we'll go from here and show how that equally we must see that for Jesus it was a present reality, and then try to figure out how in the world we can square that, because everything hinges on our being able to do that, everything. It is absolutely essential to our understanding Jesus that we can put that somehow into some kind of tension and hold it together in some way. Well, the whole New Testament is finally predicated on our understanding that really everything in the New Testament… so we'll pick it up tomorrow evening at this point.