Imagine being a first-century Jew, waiting for the coming Messiah. You would likely have been taught one of four perspectives on how the Messiah would liberate your people.
Either you would firmly adhere to the Torah, believing as the Pharisees did that strict cultural and religious separation would bring God back to deliver his people. Or as the Sadducees, you would have compromised with the Romans, concluding assimilation and making peace with the politics of the day was the way to go.
If you were a Zealot, you espoused radical, physical, and political revolution.
If you were an Essene, you completely withdrew from society altogether, seeking to purify the Jewish faith from any trace of paganism.
In other words, you would have had set before (1) a Messiah is coming to overthrow the Roman government, whether from sheer political power or from you finally having been faithful enough to the Torah, or (2) there is no Messiah coming and you simply need to make peace with society around you and either assimilate or completely separate.
But then comes Jesus, saying “the Kingdom of God is at hand” (Mark 1:15).
And he doesn’t stop there. He goes on to announce that not only has the kingdom come at last to Israel, but the kingdom has come in himself (Luke 4:18, 21).
It’s easy to poke fun at these religious groups for missing the Messiah. But I hope you can see by now how the way they interpreted the Torah, and the expectations they had for what the restoration of the Kingdom of God would look like easily set them up to miss him.
And you likely would have missed Jesus too.
The way Jesus came and the way he laid forth the kingdom of God through his life is so startingly different than anything the Jews expected: it is the way of love and of suffering.
We as Westerners tend to look at the story of Jesus and notice the Cross. Jesus died for our sins and allows us to live in Heaven with God again. But to a Jew and the original audience of the scriptures, the most significant part of the story is Jesus’ arrival: the incarnation of God through Jesus Christ.
This is the moment everything broken is being made whole, everything sad is being undone.
But the way in which Jesus lives and the path he sets forth for his disciples is so different from what people expected.
Let’s take a closer look.
Jesus Shows That God Has Come to Dwell with Man
It’s important to remember, because the Gospel writers themselves seemed to find it important, that what the Scriptures tell of Jesus’s life should be understood as episodes taking place in the context of a much larger story. We don’t get every detail of the whole story. But we get the parts that are key to understanding the significance of Jesus’ arrival on earth.
Mark starts off with John the Baptist preparing the way for the Messiah. Matthew begins even further back, showing how Jesus’ ministry is rooted in the story of Israel begun in Abraham. Luke goes back further yet, all the way to Adam, showing that the good news about Jesus has significance for all mankind. Then John starts before creation: Jesus is the eternal, uncreated Word, present with God from the beginning.
It couldn’t be clearer that in this one man, Jesus of Nazareth, God hinges his whole drama.
There are three important aspects of Jesus as God in flesh that we want to look at: (1) his miraculous birth, (2) his baptism, and (3) his temptation.
Jesus is conceived, not by his (legal) earthly father (Joseph), but by the Holy Spirit’s power in the virgin Mary’s womb (Matt. 1:28-23; Luke 1:26-35). He’s born in the line of David. In fact, he shares the same birthplace: Bethlehem. These are significant because they fulfill prophesies of the Messiah (Is. 7:14; 2 Sam 7:12-16; Is. 11:1; Jer. 23:5-6).
He is emerging as the serpent crusher (Gen. 3:15).
Later we read of Jesus coming to John the Baptist for baptism. Unlike everyone else, Jesus did not need to be cleansed from sin. But in his baptism, Jesus identifies with the nation of Israel, personally taking on their mission to become the channel of God’s salvation to the nations (Matt. 3:14-15).
And then, before he begins his work, the Spirit leads Jesus into the wilderness to encounter Satan (Matthew 4:1-11; Mark 1:12-13).
To understand the magnitude of this, pause and reflect on the story we know thus far.
God said in the Garden there would be a serpent crusher that comes from the seed of Eve (Gen. 3:15). They don’t realize it’s going to be Jesus who comes thousands of years later. They simply think seed, offspring, child.
When Eve gives birth to Cain, they no doubt wonder if he is going to be the serpent crusher. But instead of crushing the serpent, he follows in the way of the serpent (Gen. 4:7-8).
The question the Scriptures set us up to ask is, “Who is this person who will crush the serpent’s head?”
And the story we have throughout the Old Testament is that man after man follows in the way of the serpent instead of crushing his head.
As we have seen, God remains faithful to his promise and sovereignly blesses the line of Noah, Shem, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Judah, kings of Judah, all the way to Jesus of Nazareth. This line is not blessed because they are perfect in following after the way of God. This line is blessed because God has blessed them.
We do see even in their brokenness, a tenderness and responsiveness to God instead of hardness and shamelessness as Cain, Ham, Esau, and so forth.
Even so, we have yet to see a man who rises up and refuses to bend to the way of the serpent. Until now, with Jesus in the wilderness.
Satan shows Jesus three different paths he might take as the Messiah: (1) the way of the populist, (2) the way of the wonder-worker, and (3) the way of the violent revolutionary.
Jesus chooses neither.
God has come to dwell with man and make a way for him to have relationship with humanity again, the relationship the serpent had broken.
But as we see in Jesus’ temptation, the serpent has lost its power.
Jesus Says the Kingdom of God Is at Hand
I referred to this earlier, but let’s look a little deeper at the significance of Jesus’ declaration that the kingdom of God is at hand.
First of all, Jesus is making a bold statement about himself. He is God and he is bringing God’s kingdom to earth. Secondly, where John the Baptist emphasized God’s judgment against sin, Jesus comes and announces a new era of peace. He’s bringing “good news” of “great joy” (Mark 1:14-15; Luke 2:10).
As Bartholomew and Goheen put it, “God is now acting in love and power through Jesus and by his Spirit to restore all of creation and all of human life to again live under the benevolent reign of God himself.”
In Jesus declaring the kingdom of God is at hand, we can lay aside our anxiety over sin and our efforts to conquer it on our own strength. There’s no need to fear or worry. God is becoming king again!
Jesus Invites Us to Give Whole-Life Allegiance to the Kingdom
For us today, we think of kingdoms in the political sense. I am a citizen of the United States of America “kingdom,” but I have lived three years of my life in the kingdom of Thailand. While I lived there, I did life as best I could the way Thai’s do life. I lived by their laws, not by American laws.
But to be a citizen in the kingdom of God means complete allegiance to his kingdom. Allegiance is not something you can take back at will. You are enslaved, in a sense, to the king you have given your allegiance to.
Jesus tells us that if we wish to come after him, we must deny ourselves, take up our cross, and follow him (Matt. 16:24). It demands one’s whole life. As a disciple of Jesus and a citizen of God’s Kingdom, everything I do—the way I think or the process in which I go about participating in this earthly world—is to be aligned with the values, behaviors, and processes of God’s Kingdom.
This affects the way I relate with others. It affects the career I choose, my involvement in politics and sports, or my use of entertainment.
There are no boundaries to God’s kingdom in a citizen’s life. You are not a citizen of his kingdom living under the authority of America. You are citizen of his kingdom living under his authority. There are no split allegiances.
Jesus Models How Citizens of God’s Kingdom Are to Live
Jesus did not find his energy or power from a place of position. In fact, it seems God is making a distinct point about positions of power by having Jesus born in a lowly stable. For Jesus, his source of power came from the Holy Spirit and from prayer (Mark 1:35; Luke 5:16, 6:12, Matt. 12:28).
What was this power for? Why did Jesus need divine power?
Because his purpose for being on earth was to help humanity live again as God designed—in the relationship with Yahweh that Adam and Eve experienced in Eden (Ro. 8:3-4; 2 Co. 5:14-15; John 8:32, 14:6-7).
This was not something he could do merely by setting up a new government regime. Jesus could not make humanity right with God by changing the political authority structures. After all, it was when God’s people had political power that they walked away from him.
The power of the Holy Spirit, which is the power Jesus lived by, is first and foremost power to give life (John 5:20-21) and change people’s lives (Ro. 8:11, 5:1-5).
But there is another aspect to this power from the Holy Spirit that Jesus tapped into through prayer which dove-tails with changing people’s lives to live as God designed. This power not only changes lives, but it empowers those lives to then do good works (Matt. 5:16; Eph. 2:10).
We are created for works that reflect the image of God, and in doing these works God is glorified.
I think it’s also important to note that these good works include works of miracles. Good works are not limited to miracles, but Jesus most certainly gave validity to his divine power through miraculous works (see Luke 11:20).
Furthermore, it was through his mighty works of expelling demons out of men and women that showed the spirit world as well as the physical world that the one who Jesus calls father and who he claims to have given him power is stronger than any other source of power in this world (Mark 1:21-28).
Jesus had come to destroy the work of the devil (1 John 3:8).
And then, Jesus gives this power to do all the works that he does (and more) to those who believe in him (John 14:12-14). This fundamentally shifts the position of a citizen of God’s kingdom in the spiritual realms.
Through his life, Jesus is transferring those who believe in him from the kingdom of darkness to the kingdom of light (Col. 1:9-14).
A few other characteristics we see modeled in the life of Jesus is that the mission of God’s kingdom will arouse opposition (Mark 2:1-12; Luke 5:17-26). In large part, this opposition comes as a result of religious leaders looking for God’s kingdom to take a different form than what Jesus introduces. Nevertheless, the mission of God’s kingdom calls into question the motivations of men’s pursuits, and that brings with it natural opposition.
Secondly, we see Jesus begin to gather a community (Mark 1:16-20, 2:13-14). This is the initial development of what will be called the church. This community is about more than merely the fact that God has designed us to do life in relationships. It has to do with Jesus gathering “the lost sheep of Israel,” which Ezekiel prophesied about in Ezekiel 37 and 39:23-29.
Unlike what many believe, when Jesus says he is sent to the lost sheep of Israel, he is not talking about a gathering of diasporic Jews to Palestine. Rather, he is talking about gathering the people to himself.[1]
With Jesus the people through the Spirit will share in the life of the kingdom.
This community that Jesus begins to gather during his life is God’s restorative work made manifest in creation.
Thirdly, Jesus welcomes into this community sinners and outcasts (Matt. 11:19; Luke 19:10). This community is not exclusively for the put together and popular. By welcoming sinners and outcasts, Jesus reveals that God looks at man’s heart, not the outside.
Fourthly, Jesus makes known that God’s kingdom transcends political and racial boundaries by traveling outside Galilee and through Gentile territory (John 4:1-26). Gentiles were non-ethnic Jews. According to Jewish expectations for God’s kingdom, it would not have been available to anyone but ethnic Jews. However, through his life, Jesus shows that God’s desire is for all of mankind to be made new (and made one) by his Holy Spirit (Eph. 3:5-7, 4:4-6).
Jesus Grows the Kingdom Through Discipleship
We’ve already looked at how Jesus broke Jewish expectations of the Messiah and how God would reestablish his kingdom on earth. But within the very framework Jesus lived his life is the fundamental truth that the mission of God’s kingdom (blessing all the earth with freedom from the serpent) is accomplished not through violent revolution, political persuasion, or societal separation; but through active discipleship of the people in this world (Matt. 10, 28:16-20).
The life of Jesus is the most climactic point in God’s divine drama, and we have only touched on a few aspects of it here. But when Jesus showed up and lived out his life, for the first time in history the world saw what God has intended all along.
Yes, the kingdom of God is at hand. It’s open to you and I today. Jesus has not only made the way straight, but he’s modeled it in such a way for us to mimic.
Let’s follow him, remembering that he is with us always, even to the end of the age (Matt. 28:20b).
What aspects of Jesus’ life jump out to you in a new way? You can share in the comments below.
[1] Bartholomew & Goheen, The Drama of Scripture (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2004), pp. 141-142
