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KINGDOM COME

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If it were up to me (and I sleep just fine knowing it wasn’t), I’d rearrange the order of the Gospels. While I think it’s worth opening the “New Testament” with Matthew 1:1— “The book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the Son of David, the Son of Abraham”— it may have served us well to open with John 1’s mirror passage of Genesis 1. But perhaps most helpfully, we could’ve turned the page from Luke’s first book straight to his second, the Acts of the Apostles, and immediately collided with this conversation:

I wrote the first narrative, Theophilus, about all that Jesus began to do and teach until the day He was taken up, after He had given instructions through the Holy Spirit to the apostles He had chosen. After He had suffered, He also presented Himself alive to them by many convincing proofs, appearing to them over a period of forty days and speaking about the Kingdom of God.

While He was with them, He commanded them not to leave Jerusalem, but to wait for the Father’s promise. “Which,” He said, “you have heard Me speak about; for John baptized with water, but you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit in a few days.”

So when they had come together, they asked Him, “Lord, are You restoring the Kingdom to Israel at this time?”

He said to them, “It is not for you to know times or periods that the Father has set by His own authority. But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come on you, and you will be My witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.”

After He had said this, He was taken up as they were watching, and a cloud took Him out of their sight. While He was going, they were gazing into heaven, and suddenly two men in white clothes stood by them. They said, “Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking up into heaven? This same Jesus, who has been taken from you into heaven, will come in the same way that you have seen Him going into heaven.”[1]

This passage alone contains a few, I believe neglected, tenets:

  • Jesus spent the 40 days following His resurrection (1) proving His resurrection and (2) talking about the Kingdom of God

  • This produced an expectancy in the hearts of these first-century Jews, and “from the overflow of the heart”[2] this question poured from their lips: “Is it now You’ll restore the Kingdom to Israel?” (In general, we don’t just neglect this; theological tradition in Christian history has spent no small effort framing the apostles as asking this in error)

  • Angels gently poked at the apostles’ awe at Jesus’ Ascension: “Why are you amazed? He’s going to come back just like He left.” There’s a subtext here: “Just like the prophets said He will.”

So, the suffering of the “King of the Jews”[3] secured the Kingdom to the Jews[4] and in the meantime the bondservants of Jesus are commissioned to carry the message of the Great King from the City of the Great King to the nations.[5]

Luke’s opening passage in the book of Acts is critical for us to understand in order to know what to do with ourselves, as individuals and as a corporate Body[6] with a mandate. Paul, the Pharisee who spearheaded the Good News spreading as far and wide as possible in the century after these events took place, urged us Gentiles receiving this message to not be ignorant of its origin, lest our ignorance breed dangerous arrogance[7]— we either didn’t listen, or deliberately rejected his admonition. At this stage, we are in desperate need of clarity as to what the Kingdom is— and is not— lest we give ourselves to a pursuit and pageantry that will burn when He comes on the clouds in power and glory.[8]

The moment Gentiles began to dominate the Christian demographic, we began to deliberately divorce ourselves from the Judaic ethos of the faith. This was due in part to the mounting tensions between mainline Judaism and the controversies surrounding this new sect of “the Way,”[9] and in part to the controversy of Jerusalem saddling the Roman Empire that Gentile Christians wanted distance from, and, lastly, in sure part to the general antisemitism and anti Judaism within the Empire that colored, say, Roman Christian interpretation of the foundational texts. By the time Church Fathers gathered to root out heresies and identify core doctrines in our creeds, they had intentionally distanced Christendom from Jerusalem and Judaism. This was done deliberately, and to everyone’s detriment.

It put us in a compromised position when handling texts like John 18, as (unlike Romans 9-11, for example) it was difficult to ignore when it consistently cropped up in our liturgical calendar for Resurrection Sunday.

Then Pilate went back into the headquarters, summoned Jesus, and said to Him, “Are you the King of the Jews?”

Jesus answered, “Are you asking this on your own, or have others told you about Me?”

“I’m not a Jew, am I?” Pilate replied. “Your own nation and the chief priests handed You over to me. What have You done?”

“My Kingdom is not of this world,” said Jesus. “If My kingdom were of this world, My servants would fight, so that I wouldn’t be handed over to the Jews. But as it is, My Kingdom is not from here.”

“You are a king then?” Pilate asked.

“You say that I’m a king,” Jesus replied. “I was born for this, and I have come into the world for this: to testify to the truth. Everyone who is of the truth listens to My voice.”

“What is truth?” said Pilate.[10]

Not of this world. Because we cut off the actual “anchor of our souls”[11] that is God’s covenantal commitment to His holy hill,[12] we had to reimagine this idea as some kind of kumbaya-in-the-sky for all eternity, floating on clouds with harps to sing forever. Honestly, as long as we’re with Jesus, we’re winning. But He will not be in the harp-playing cloud party; heaven will not “hold Him back” forever.[13] Just as the men in white reminded the apostles moments after the Ascension, we must remind ourselves: He will come back just the way He left — on the clouds in power and glory, and His feet will stand on the Mount of Olives.[14]

His iron-clad commitment to keep His promises spares us the trouble of building His Kingdom without Him. As C.H. Spurgeon once said, it is quite difficult to have a Kingdom without the King present.[15] We are to bear witness of His Kingdom coming, but we’ll never establish it here without Him. The dominion mandate in the Garden was usurped by the one whose head Jesus will crush finally and forever, and “the kingdoms of this world [will] become the Kingdom of our Lord and His Christ, and He will reign forever and ever,” “gloriously.”[16]

Maranatha.

Stephanie Quick is a writer/producer serving with FAI. She cohosts The Better Beautiful podcast with Jeff Henderson. Browse her free music, films, and books in the FAI App and at stephaniequick.org.

 
 

Stephanie Quick