The Kingdom of God: The Nature of the Kingdom by Dr Gordon Fee, Lesson 1a

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 move 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, I handed out three by five cards, blank cards, to all of the 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.

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 of them give me the right answer. The largest single answer was love. It's 1970, the year after Kent State.

In our country,.

The year after the what I'd call the college revolution had.

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 asked 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.

That's all. Love God, your neighbors, 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, and 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 is.

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 did 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.

Well, let me begin our series by insisting to you that this 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 thoroughgoing in the New Testament and the Gospels themselves. Let us note, first of all, 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 chapter 1 verses 14 -15. Mark says now after Jesus, I'm sorry, after John was arrested, 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 came 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 fact 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 what he's doing in both of these texts. One of them is in chapter 4 verse 23. This is Matthew's summary now. 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 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 verses 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 say preach, but that word preach, the Greek verb keruso, which is the noun kerux, which means to herald, 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, the 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 conjunction 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's 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 coming.

With.

Proclamations that 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 what 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 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 end, 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 end-time 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 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 begin more in the middle.

With David.

The reason for beginning with David is that everything finally focuses on David. The reason for that is a very simple 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 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,.

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 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 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 these go together, deeply involved in all kinds of sexual immorality, right?

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 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 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 idolatry. So you find, for example, in Amos, 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 and 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 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. That 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 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. But 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 the 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 mountain places, a straight path for their feet to walk on.

But 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 much so that the picture that you find in the book of Malachi simply elaborates in some details 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. Like the magnificent Psalm, Psalm 2 and Psalm 72. It reflects that understanding of 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.