Highlight: Biblical Prominence of The Kingdom of God

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You make a really interesting point when you say talk about eschatology because eschatology people tend to think is just about last things, but it isn't.

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Eschatology is about the direction of history. It's about the meaning of history as a whole.

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And the keynote of the Bible is often missed. I think you've touched on it, Jeff, but modern contemporary evangelicalism is basically caught up in what

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I would call gospel headlines. We have message fragments. Jesus died for your sins.

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Jesus loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life. Jesus wants to save you and take you to heaven and so on.

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And properly interpreted, there's nothing wrong in context with those statements.

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The problem is many Christians, increasingly a majority, and certainly the world into which we're bearing this message, doesn't know the backstory.

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Those message fragments come without any kind of framework. And the framework of scripture is the message of the kingdom of God.

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That is the keynote of the Bible. The prophetic witness of scripture is about the kingdom of God.

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The calling of the patriarchs, of the kings of Israel, of the prophets, is always in terms of the kingdom, the rule and the reign of God in the earth.

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And of course, the coming of Christ is about the king, the coming of the king, to establish his kingdom.

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And therefore, the New Testament speaks of the gospel of the kingdom, the gospel of the kingdom, basilea.

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In fact, the Bible talks, the New Testament speaks far more about the kingdom of God than it does about the church.

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Now, this might be a shock to some people because we've churchified the Christian faith. Most people believe in churchianity today, not

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Christianity, because they limit the reality of the gospel to the four walls of the church.

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But the Bible talks, the New Testament talks over 100 times about the kingdom of God, the basilea of God.

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The church has just mentioned a handful of times. That's not because the church, the ecclesia, is not important.

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The church, as the called out congregation, has a vital role in the kingdom of God in that as institutionally, anyway, we preach the word, we administer the sacraments, we exercise church discipline.

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But the function of the institutional church does not exhaust the biblical idea of the basilea of God, of the kingdom of God.

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And that is the keynote of scripture from Genesis to Revelation. It's about the rule and reign of God. Our first parents are called in the garden of God to rule and subdue and exercise dominion so that creation is turned into a

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God glorifying culture. And we know that they fell into ruin and rebellion and sin, and we talk about the fall, so we have creation fall.

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And then our first parents were given that kingly, priestly role to serve

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God, to work and to serve. And that role of the kingly priesthood is restored in us in the

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Lord Jesus Christ. So he is our prophet, priest, and king. He is the, in a sense, we could take the image of the garden, creation is

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God's garden. Christ, Christophany, the second person of the Godhead, walked with our first parents in the garden of God.

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We're given a hint of the restoration of the garden in Canaan when a people is called out to be a royal priesthood.

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That's what the book of Exodus tells us, that the Jews were called to be a royal priesthood, again, to serve the purposes of the kingdom of God.

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They failed, they rebelled, they're dispossessed. And then the king of kings comes, the truly obedient son, the true

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Israelite, the true gardener, comes to his garden. And he speaks about the reality of the gospel of the kingdom, the restoration of the kingdom of God.

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And from the garden of Gethsemane to the garden tomb at his resurrection, where he's mistaken for the gardener, the resurrected

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Lord, the firstborn from the dead, restores us as the head of a new race, as the new Adam, as the head of a new people, to our kingly, priestly calling in terms of the kingdom of God.

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So the whole of the Bible, Genesis to Revelation, Paradise Lost to Paradise Regained, the keynote is the kingdom of God.

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And I think what's happened is that we've lost all we've actually set aside, or at least don't fully appreciate today in the modern church, the significance of the basileia, the kingdom of God.

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We've replaced or we've conflated the church institute and the kingdom of God.

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And so that basically means that we say to ourselves, well, if the kingdom of God and church institute are basically the same, they're identical with one another, then the only place that Jesus Christ reigns is inside the walls of the institutional church.

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And so therefore, what's going on out there in politics, in law and education, in the arts, in business, in the economy, in medicine and all these things, that's just some separate realm of natural, of nature, where natural law and neutral common principles hold sway.

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But it's got nothing to do with Christ and his kingdom. I mean, yeah, God created it, sure. And in some abstract sense, he's sovereign over it at all.

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But in a real sense, Christ does not rule and reign there. His word does not have a bearing there because we have ecclesiasticized the word of God.

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The church, instead of being in service to the word in the world, makes the

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Bible in service simply to the church institute. So we end up imprisoning the word of God in the institutional life of the church, where eventually the world itself says, well, actually, even the church cannot have that word.

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So as we ecclesiasticize the Bible and the message of the gospel of the kingdom and conflate it with the church institute, we call forth the secularization of the world.

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We're responsible in large measure for it. Yes, because by imprisoning the word in the church, we call forth the secularization of every other area of life.

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And therefore we apostatize from the king of kings and the lord of lords. We actually are in rebellion against the command of the king, even in the church.