Kingdom Bible Study 23
We have
seen that the entire orientation of the Biblical writers, like the Jewish
people of the 1st century, was geared towards something that God was
going to do in this space/time universe. God was going to dramatically
intervene in this world, banish wickedness, and institute a reign of peace and
justice. Those who followed Jesus believed that this great event had already
begun in embryo through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Jesus had
fulfilled enough to act as the guarantee that He would come back and accomplish
the rest later.
That was the belief of the Biblical writers as
well as the early Christians. Like Joseph and Arimathea, they were “waiting for
the kingdom of God” (Luke 23:51), and not merely waiting, but earnestly looking
for it with eager expectation.[1]
In fact, the Biblical writers believed these events would occur within their
generation. However, as the centuries slipped by and nothing seemed to happen,
this forward-looking perspective was gradually lost. In The Passion of the
Western Mind, Richard Tarnas explains how the church gradually shifted from
expecting a physical kingdom of God to arise on the earth to thinking instead in
terms of a kingdom that found fulfilment in a heavenly or ‘spiritual’ sense.
Concurrently, under the influence of
Neoplatonic and Hellenic allegorical thought, Origen and Augustine reformulated
the Kingdom of Heaven in terms that were less literal and objective, and
instead more spiritual and subjective. For Origen, the genuine religious quest
was to experience the Kingdom of Heaven in one’s own soul – a metaphysical
rather than a historical transformation. Augustine’s view was similarly
Neoplatonic… Thus the Christian anticipation of an imminent end time was
substantially weakened and began to disappear as a dominant motivating force in
the religion…. Concern with the individual Christian’s relation to God and
interior spiritual condition replaced the earlier stress on the collective, the
universal and the objectively historical.[2]
For Origen
and Augustine, the prayer ‘Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as in
heaven,’ was not something that pointed towards a future culmination; rather,
God’s perfect will for the earth was fulfilled in this present age through the
church. As Origen put it, "In committing ourselves to [Christ], we can
become one spirit with Him, and thereby accomplish His will, in such wise that
it will be perfect on Earth as it is in Heaven."[3]
St. Augustine echoed this over realized eschatology when he wrote, “It would
not be inconsistent with the truth to understand the words, 'Thy will be done
on earth as it is in Heaven' to mean: 'in the Church as in our Lord Jesus
Christ himself…'[4] Furthermore,
in his City of God, Augustine argued that for those who believe in
Christ, the first resurrection has already occurred.
The
current tendency for Christians to think along similar lines hardly needs
elaboration. Unconsciously we think we are glorifying Christ’s work by saying
that He has already done everything there is to do, when we should be praying
fervently that He will come and finish the job He started! At this point I
remember an e-mail that my pastor received the other day. In this e-mail a
Christian brother wrote that because everything has already been accomplished
by Christ, there is nothing more to look forward to, and we should just sit
back and enjoy the victory.
While the majority of Christians do acknowledge
the necessity for an eschatological fulfilment of Biblical promises, all too
often they conceive these promises as things that will reach fruition in heaven
and have nothing to do with the very earth to which such promises are
addressed. When I speak about the kingdom of God to some Christians, they think
I am advocating a new version of the Christian religion - something which
sounds more akin to the theology of the Jehovah’s Witnesses than Biblical
Christianity.
Part of the problem arises from the Western
epidemic of assuming a division between the spiritual and the physical, so that
we instinctively interpret the spiritual promises of the Bible as necessarily
meaning something that must, almost by definition, be non-physical. This false
division between the physical and the spiritual is at the root of the popular
theology of today, with its assumption that the earth is unimportant to the
Lord. The corollary of this assumption, in many Christian circles at least, is
for the return of Christ to be entirely associated with the event of Christians
being taken away from the earth, rather than the time when Christians
will be given the power to help God restore the earth.
While it
is true that the good news of the kingdom, with its forward-looking emphasis,
offers a direct challenge to such trends of thinking, it is also true that this
gospel offers a challenge to an error that can occur in the opposite direction.
Just as one can place too little emphasis on the future fulfilment of the
Biblical promises, so it is possible to place too much emphasis on the future
kingdom of God at the exclusion of His present Kingship. The belief that
Jesus has been inaugurated King and that one day the entire world will bow
before His authority, carries with it the responsibility to live lives that
testify to this fact. For Christians, therefore, Jesus’ Kingship has as much to
do with the present as it does the future. It is this aspect that I would like
to explore further in the next section.
It has often
been said that the past is the key to understanding the present. From a
Biblical point of view, one might add that the future is equally a key to the
present. Throughout his writings, the Apostle Paul was at pains to show that
what we believe about the future affects how we behave in the next five
minutes. Thus, Paul never expounded eschatological doctrines for long without
lapsing into the practicalities of Christian charity, the latter being
intimately connected to the former. Hence, writing to Titus, Paul says,
“denying ungodliness and worldly lusts, we should live soberly, righteously,
and godly in the present age, looking for the blessed hope and glorious
appearing of our great God and Saviour Jesus Christ…” (Titus 2:12-13). In other
words, the hope of Christ’s appearing is intricately connected with such things
as denying worldly lusts and living righteously. Similarly, the climax of
Paul’s triumphant exposition of the resurrection in 1 Corinthians 15 is
entirely practical: “Therefore, my beloved brethren, be steadfast, immovable,
always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that your labour is not in
vain in the Lord” (1 Cor. 15:58; see also Romans 6:4-13 & James 1:18-19 for
a similar progression).
Why is our labour for the Lord
not in vain? Because there exists a natural continuity between all that is good
and pleasing to God in this age and the consummation of these things in the
kingdom age. As marriage culminates and incorporates into it all that was
present during the romance period of a relationship, so the coming age will
build on and incorporate into it all the acts of faith of all the saints
throughout history. Furthermore, as the thought of marriage bathes a
pre-marriage relationship in splendour and glory, so the expectation of the glory
to be revealed should light up and dignify the present age in the glory of His
coming. As Amy Carmichael put it, “I want to live in the light of the thought
of His coming, His triumph - the end of this present darkness, the glory of His
seen Presence. This bathes the present in radiance.”[5]
To use another example, the relation of the
coming kingdom to the good things of this present age is not like the relation
of a tree to a house built from its wood, but rather, like the relation of a
full grown tree to the seedling. The seedling is the church. Throughout his
writings, Paul speaks of the church as a kind of “pilot project” that, through
faith and good works, is meant to show the world what Christ’s Kingship is all
about. Seen in this way, our faith and good works is more than just a foretaste
of the kingdom, it is actually the seed from which the kingdom will grow. Think
about what happened when Jesus fed the multitude with five loaves and two
fishes (Mat. 14:13-21). Jesus did not feed the crowd until He first commanded
the disciples to give the people something to eat. It was when the disciples
came back with their five loaves and two fish that the Lord performed His
miracle from that supply.
This does not mean that the Lord cannot work
without us. To be sure, He can create ex nihilo whenever He chooses.
However, the pattern the Lord seems to prefer is that of building upon the
faith of His saints. He is looking for faith the size of a mustard seed that
can be germinated into the tree of His kingdom. He is looking for people who,
when they receive the message of the kingdom, do not just sit back and wait for
it to happen, but put faith into action and fervently pray for these things to
come to pass. Like Paul said to the Hebrews, we must strive “to lay hold
of the hope set before us” (Heb. 6:18).
This is a very different thing to thinking we
can build God’s kingdom by our own efforts. It would be easy for the theology
of these Bible studies, particularly with the emphasis on reigning with Christ,
to form the basis of a Christian political agenda. Let us not forget that God’s
kingdom is God’s kingdom, not our own. The paradigm of Satan’s empire is
the tower of Babel where man, by his own efforts, tries to reach up to God; the
paradigm of God’s empire is the new Jerusalem which reaches down to man from
above (Rev. 21:10). “Unless the Lord builds the house, they labour in vain who
build it…” (Ps. 127:1). The point is that until God’s kingdom breaks through
the dimensional boundary, exerting itself on earth as it is in heaven, fallen
man cannot transform the world through his own efforts. This is why all
attempts to establish theocratic governments have eventually ended in failure.
This does not mean that Christians should not
involve themselves in the arena of public life, even politics. On the contrary,
the idea that Christianity has to do with the private, personal life of an
individual and is detached from the concerns of public life and culture, is a
fallacy that goes back to the time of the Enlightenment. The Bible asserts that
in whatever sphere of life a Christian finds himself, whether it be private or
public, the Christian has a responsibility to come under the authority of
Christ. So if the Lord leads a person to become involved in a public or
political role, the emphasis should be entirely on one’s responsibility as a
Christian to image Jesus, not on the results or lack of results. The Lord is
not concerned with results, but with each person simply being faithful in
whatever realm of life He has placed them, whether it be art, mechanics,
garbage collecting, building houses or being the President of the United
States.
It all comes back to the concept of images.
Only by submitting every area of our dominion to the rule of Christ can we
effectively reflect His image back to the world. This has to be an active
thing, for being the King’s image is not simply a condition that exists
irrespective of what we do; rather, it is a vocation that we must either accept
or reject. Accepting this vocation means that in every breath we take, in every
task we perform, in every interaction we have with another human being, animal
or created thing, in every area where we exercise dominion, the underlying
question must always be: what does the kingship of Christ require? Whether we
are washing dirty dishes or getting up in the night to calm a crying baby, it
should all be done for the glory of Christ and His kingdom.
In this way, Christians can be gathering
tomorrow’s bread today. Though the culmination of Christ’s kingdom has not yet
arrived, those who have received and treasured the gospel of the kingdom, those
who have accepted their vocation as image bearers, have the privilege of living
now in the light of Christ’s kingship. Like the Israelites of old, we have the
privilege of proclaiming, through the testimony of our lives, what it means to
be a citizen of that kingdom now.
This includes not just the testimony of our
individual lives, but the corporate testimony of the new covenant community as
a whole. The New Testament offers a lot of teaching about interaction and
relationships within the church - teaching which is often overlooked in our age
of individualism. However, the New Testament teaching on church relationships
is not merely helpful advice for getting on better with each other any more
than the laws given to Israel was so that the nation would function better. On
the contrary, the New Testament teaching on church relationships, like the laws
given to Israel of old, are so that, as a community, we can be a cameo of the
future kingdom. We have already seen that the point of
the covenant was always that there would be a worldwide family of God through
which God’s blessings would flow to the rest of the world. Thus, the stress the New Testament puts on there being such
things as love, mutual accountability and a bearing of each other's burdens in
the church, as well as the mandates for church discipline, have an
eschatological (forward-looking) importance. These guidelines show the church how
to function as God’s covenant people corporately in order that the
firstfruits can become holy to the Lord (Rom. 11:16). Spiritually, this opens
up the way for the final harvest in which all the world will live by these same
standards. Therefore, to turn aside from our responsibilities to our brethren
in the church is to turn aside from our responsibilities to a world lost in
darkness.
A consequence of imaging Christ is that almost
inevitably the world will hate us. We are a ‘peculiar people’ (1 Pet. 2:9)
since the principles by which we live are foreign to the world’s mindset (1
Cor. 1:18-25). We must be willing to take a stand against wickedness and
injustice just as much as we are willing to feed the poor and befriend the lonely.
We must be willing to speak the truth, confront ungodliness and proclaim the
coming judgment , even when we know people will despise and reject us for it.
Even in our charitable acts people will despise
us. Although the world looks favourably on kindness to humanity, philanthropy,
charity, etc., it does not look favourably on those who practice such things
confessing Christ and confessing Christ as the only way. This comes across in
Acts 4 where it was not the healing of a lame man that made the Sanhedrin hate
Peter and John, it was because they said,
“let it be known to you all, and to all the
people of Israel, that by the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, whom you
crucified, whom God raised from the dead, by Him this man stands here before
you whole….Now is there salvation in any other, for there is no other name
under heaven given among men by which we must be saved” (Acts 4:10 & 12).
Things would have gone a lot smoother for Peter
and the early apostles if they had simply done their good works and left the
name of Jesus out of it. No one minds someone being healed, just as no one
today minds a Christian working to make the world a better place. It is when we
love our neighbor enough to tell him that without Jesus there is no salvation -
that is when people begin to hate us. Oswald Chambers pointed out that men have
vested interests which such things as kindness and philanthropy do not touch,
but which the Spirit of Jesus, testified to by human lips does touch, awakening
either indignation or repentance. Therefore, in everything we do it is
essential to do it confessing Christ. Even when this causes a negative reaction
it is essentially positive, for it shows that consciences are being touched -
it shows that we are being light.
Though I have said that our focus should not be
on results but on our own responsibility, at the same time we know that nothing
we do for God will ever be wasted, even if we have to wait for the kingdom to
see the fruit. It is this hope that we must keep ever before us, for though we
see sin, destruction, frustration and death, we know that there is a King who
is about to return and put the world to right. I like the way N. T. Wright,
describes the practical implications of this hope.
…the Christian hope…gives us a view of creation
which emphasizes the goodness of God’s world, and God’s intention to renew it.
It gives us, therefore, every possible incentive, or at least every Christian
incentive, to work for the renewal of God’s creation and for justice within God’s
creation. Not that we are building the kingdom by our own efforts. Let us not
lapse into that. Rather, what we are doing here and now is building for God’s
kingdom. It is what Paul speaks of in 1 Corinthians 3:10-15: there is
continuity between our present work and God’s future kingdom, even though the
former will have to pass through fire to attain the latter. It is also clearly
implied in 1 Corinthians 15:58: the conclusion of Paul’s enormous exposition of
the resurrection is not an outburst of joy at the glorious life to come, but a
sober exhortation to work for the kingdom in the present, because we know that
our work here and now is not in vain in the Lord. In other words, belief in the
resurrection, the other side, if need be, of a period of disembodied life in
the Lord (see 1 Corinthians 15:29), validates and so encourages present
Christian life, work and witness.[6]
Wim Rietkerk has some instructive words along a
similar line concerning the Christian’s responsibility. He is speaking in terms
of our work to heal the earth’s ecology, but the principle applies to any kind
of work.
…at his return, the Lord will
ask us, “What did you do with my creation to renew it?” Then he will multiply
our finite achievements into the promised total renewal. To use Paul’s image of
changing clothes in 1 Corinthians 15, he will take the tiny and weak threads
and weave them into new garments with which he will clothe the world. There is
a reason why the Holy Spirit is called the firstfruit of the new creation
(Romans 8:23).
So there is a challenging and important relationship
between the works we are called to do now in order to save nature - to purify
the water, to preserve the ozone layer, to plant trees instead of cutting them,
to care about safe forms of energy - and the future renewal of the earth. God
does not need our works to accomplish that; he could do it without us. But he
will use our work and he will certainly rebuke us if we have not produced the
work he expected. He will ask for them and he will make them the core of a
renewed world.
As Dr. W. Van Brugeen put it, “It is dangerous to
identify our cultural achievements with the kingdom of God, but we should say
that the kingdom of God is present in the signs that precede it. They are the milestones,
bricks, ingredients, the scaffolding of the coming empire, real foreshadowings
as demonstrations of the things to come.”[7]
It may not always be clear or visible exactly
how our works of faith will be the scaffolding by which God erects His kingdom.
However, this might occur in tangible ways: those who have fought against
pollution in this age may be put to work during the kingdom to heal the earth
from man’s abuses; those who have fought against abortion in this age may be
put to work during the kingdom in reconciling aborted children to their
mothers; those who have cultivated an interest in children and education during
this age may be put to work as teachers during the kingdom; those who have
developed mechanical skills during this age may be put to work in hundreds of
practical ways to help people in the kingdom.
Of course, the list could be practically
endless. The point is that everyone will have a unique part to play in God’s
kingdom. To say that God’s people will be made perfect by resurrection does not
mean that everyone will be complete. On the contrary, we will each be completed
by the uniqueness of each other, like the various instruments of an orchestra. [8]
By understanding this hope, every Christian’s
heart should be opened up towards unbelievers in a fresh way. After all, these
are the very people to whom we are meant to be a light and who, in the kingdom
age, we will lead to a knowledge of God. This gives enormous motivation for
telling people about Jesus now, for even when a person rejects the
message, we can pray that our words will lie as seeds to be germinated during
the kingdom.
Return to the First Works
In
emphasising the importance of Christian ‘work’ or the public nature of the
Christian’s responsibility, there is always a certain danger. The danger is to
become so focused on the public side of things that we neglect the more
immediate, and hence more important, responsibilities facing us in our own
homes, jobs and relationships. We probably all know or have heard of people who
neglect family in order to “serve the Lord.”
We can do
more to “{hasten} the coming of the day of God” (2 Peter 3:12) by serving the
difficult people God brings into our lives than by any amount of campaigns and
church work. As important as the latter things are, the most important
opportunities to image Christ occur in the thousands of pedestrian choices we
face daily: How do I treat the people who irritate me? Do I grumble when I have
to suffer? Am I willing to become as a servant to those around me? Am I willing
to give with no expectation of return? Have I accepted the way of the cross?
The Lord
wants each of us to become responsible in the tasks He sends our way, in order
that during the kingdom we can be given greater responsibilities (Mat. 25:21;
Luke 16:10). In my own life I know that so often I want to be faithful in big
jobs while failing to be faithful in the little opportunities to serve and love
those nearest home. It was on exactly these lines that Jesus approached the 1st
century Jews. Here were a people who wanted and expected to be part of God’s
kingdom, and Jesus took them at their word. Jesus showed his people the way to
inherit the earth in the kingdom. Stop focussing on the world’s problems and
start attending to the problems in your own life. Stop worrying about the speck
in your brother’s eye and attend to the plank in your own (Luke. 6:42).
It was this same message that had to be brought
to the church at Ephesus in the John’s Revelation (Rev. 2:1-7). Here were a
people faithful in works, labour and perseverance, a people who hated those who
were evil. Yet we are told, they had departed from their first love: “Remember
therefore from where you have fallen,” wrote the angel, “repent and do the
first works, or else I will come to you quickly and remove your lampstand from
its place…” (Rev. 2:5) What are the ‘first works’? The answer is given in
Jesus’ teaching. Though Jesus emphasized the importance of one’s relationship
with God, as encapsulated in the greatest commandment (Mat. 22:36-38), He
taught that it is through our relationships with our fellow man that we
demonstrate and outwork our love for God (Mat. 25:40; Mark 9:41). Hence, nearly
all of Christ’s moral teaching is concerned with relations among people. These
are the ‘first works’ because it is in this domain that we prepare ourselves
for the coming kingdom.
Thus, when the apostle John came to summarize
the Christian life in his first letter, the message is simultaneously the most
simple and the most difficult thing he could have said: love one another as
Jesus loved. Only by allowing the love of Jesus to flow through us can God’s
kingdom begin to grow and develop in our own hearts. Then, when the Kingdom
does begin to arise on the earth, may it already have been established in our
own hearts!
-------
…I believe God really has dived down into the bottom of
creation, and has come up bringing the whole redeemed nature on His shoulders.
The miracles that have already happened are, of course, as Scripture so often
says, the first fruits of that cosmic summer which is presently coming on.
Christ has risen, and so we shall rise. St. Peter for a few seconds walked on
the water; and the day will come when there will be a re-made universe,
infinitely obedient to the will of glorified and obedient men, when we can do
all things, when we shall be those gods that we are described as being in
Scripture. To be sure, it feels wintry enough still: but often in the very
early spring it feels like that. Two thousand years are only a day or two by this
scale. A man really ought to say, ‘The Resurrection happened two thousand years
ago’ in the same spirit in which he says, ‘I saw a crocus yesterday.’ Because
we know what is coming behind the crocus. The spring comes slowly down this
way; but the great thing is that the corner has been turned. There is, of
course, this difference, that in the natural spring the crocus cannot choose
whether it will respond or not. We can. We have the power either of
withstanding the spring, and sinking back into the cosmic winter, or of going
on into those ‘high mid-summer pomps’ in which our Leader, the Son of Man,
already dwells, and to which He is calling us. It remains with us to follow or
not, to die in this winter, or to go on into that spring and that summer.
—C. S. Lewis [9]
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[1] The Greek verb which describes Joseph of
Arimathea waiting for the Kingdom is prosdekomai
which, I am told, carries with it the force of earnestly looking towards
something with expectation.
[2]
Richard Tarnas, The Passion of the Western Mind (London: Pimlico,
1991), pp. 478-9.
[3] Origen, cited in Catechism of the Catholic Church (Doubleday, 1995), point 2825, p. 744.
[4] Augustine of Hippo, op. cit., point 2827, p. 745.
[5] Amy
Carmichael, Candles in the Dark: Letters to her friends (London, SPCK:
1981), p. 64.
[6]
Wright, New Heavens, New Earth, op. cit, p. 21.
[7] Wim
Rietkerk, The Future Great Planet Earth (Nivedit Good Books, 1989), pp.
29-30.
[8] See
the last Bible study of C. S. Lewis’ The Problem of Pain, only think in
terms of the renewed earth rather than heaven (The Problem of Pain, New
York: The Macmillan Company, 1962). The idea that glorification means becoming
a race of perfect automatons is a demonic idea. It is demonic because Satan,
not the Lord, is the one who attempts to erode individuality, diversity and
variety. The powers of darkness know nothing of unity, only uniformity. The
paradigm of true unity is the Trinity in which there is oneness in and through
particularity, or the family where all the members – each so different and
unique – contribute an invaluable part to the whole. In light of this, I think
it is a mistake to imagine that when God’s Kingdom is established on the earth
there will be only one mass culture or that the Lord will do away with nationhood.
On the contrary, Scripture strongly implies that the individual cultures are as
important to the Lord as an individual’s personality. Under Christ, each
culture will be cleansed of all sinfulness and thereby be able to blossom,
continually reaching new heights of creativity.
[9] From
‘The Grand Miracle’ in God in The Dock (Collins, Fount Paperbacks,
1971), pp.65-66.