At the core of Jesus’ teaching was the concept of God’s Kingdom. In fact, His call to His disciples was not about salvation but about the Kingdom.
“The time promised by God has come at last!” he announced. “The Kingdom of God is near! Repent of your sins and believe the Good News!” (Mark 1:15)
Jesus never directed people to ask Him into their hearts to avoid Hell. He never talked about “Four Spiritual Laws” or “Two Ways To Live.” The program of Jesus was very different to our modern religious industrial preaching.
So what does it mean to believe that the Kingdom of God is here?
Since the original sin of Adam and Eve, men and women have been under the reign of satan. We are born in sin and we live and die in sin, unless we turn to Jesus.
Satan has been in control of human beings for our entire history. Yet he is a fake ruler, an intruder, an impostor.
Jesus has come into the world as the true ruler, the real king. He is calling us to follow Him.
When I became an Australian citizen, I was required to swear allegiance to Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth II, who is Queen of Australia as well as of the U.K.
To become a citizen of heaven, you must swear allegiance to Jesus Christ.
To swear allegiance means that no other ruler will direct your loyalty. You promise to obey and to serve faithfully the Sovereign.
To be a citizen of God’s kingdom means that I will be faithful to Jesus, that I will obey Him and not allow any other person to direct my affections.
The word repent means to change our thinking so that we bring our thoughts and actions into alignment with God’s thoughts and actions. It means that I don’t live for myself any more but for Jesus.
To be a christian is much more than a religious experience, although it is that. It is more than a promise of eternal life, although it is that.
To be a christian means nothing less than complete surrender to King Jesus. He directs my thoughts, actions, and emotions. He has it all.
In 1 Corinthians 7, we read where Paul tells the Corinthians that they should not marry, although it’s not a sin if they do. Following Jesus means that I am prepared to let Him lead my relationships.
Everything has to be given over to Jesus, for the sake of a higher reward.
Jesus must be King over all my life, or else He is not King at all.
The choice is always between the real King and false kings:
The reasons why people hate Christ, Christians and Christianity are many, but a major factor in this hatred is the fact that Christ sets himself up as a king – the one and only real king – and challenges all other false claimants to the throne.
The chief challenger is of course self: the Christophobe hates the claims of Christ because it means they have to surrender their false pretences of being the centre of the universe, of being god. Human pride – and delusion – makes us think we are all there is, and we can call the shots.
But the all-powerful state – and those slavishly devoted to it – is another and related false kingdom that far too many worship. And the easiest way to pinpoint one very contemporary illustration of this is simply to look at how the state has treated Christianity during the COVID crisis.
In many places churches are STILL closed down, including here in Victoria. Yes, a handful of folks can gather inside, and a few more outside. But overwhelmingly it seems most folks – and incredibly, most Christians – have no problem with this at all! There is complete silence.
Never mind that plenty of church structures are built to hold hundreds, if not thousands of worshippers. But we are allowed only 10 inside. Really? Yet the shops are packed with shoppers, and so on. In Brisbane the other day 30,000 screaming fans could cram into a sporting arena to watch a football game, yet the churches remain basically off-limits.
The fact that so little protest about this has been heard by the Christian community demonstrates that for too many, they have another king. They are far more willing to slavishly go along with whatever the state says, even if it means allowing churches to be shut down indefinitely.
And this is a perennial problem. Religious folks have long put the state ahead of devotion to Christ. We see that happening all the time in the Gospels and the book of Acts. Consider what I just read again this morning. In Acts 17:1-9 we read about what happened when Paul and Silas were in Thessalonica.
Now when they had passed through Amphipolis and Apollonia, they came to Thessalonica, where there was a synagogue of the Jews. And Paul went in, as was his custom, and on three Sabbath days he reasoned with them from the Scriptures, explaining and proving that it was necessary for the Christ to suffer and to rise from the dead, and saying, “This Jesus, whom I proclaim to you, is the Christ.” And some of them were persuaded and joined Paul and Silas, as did a great many of the devout Greeks and not a few of the leading women. But the Jews were jealous, and taking some wicked men of the rabble, they formed a mob, set the city in an uproar, and attacked the house of Jason, seeking to bring them out to the crowd. And when they could not find them, they dragged Jason and some of the brothers before the city authorities, shouting, “These men who have turned the world upside down have come here also, and Jason has received them, and they are all acting against the decrees of Caesar, saying that there is another king, Jesus.” And the people and the city authorities were disturbed when they heard these things. And when they had taken money as security from Jason and the rest, they let them go.
While I have long emphasised what we find in verse 6 about the early believers ‘turning the world upside down,’ here I want to emphasise what is found in the next verse: “they are all acting against the decrees of Caesar, saying that there is another king, Jesus.”
Yep, because they said that Jesus is Lord, that meant that all other lords and all other gods are in fact false kings, false rulers. That is not to say that there is no place for human rulers and civil government – there is. But no human authority dares to set himself up against the one true God. That is idolatry of the highest order, and never ends well.
These things are not just found in the New Testament. The attempt to challenge God and throw off his rightful place of rule goes way back to the book of Genesis of course. Our first parents, Adam and Eve sought to do it – with disastrous consequences – and folks have been seeking to do it ever since.
In Genesis 11:1-9 for example we read about the Tower of Babel episode. This was another direct challenge to God and his rule. That did not end well either. Whenever people seek to become fully autonomous, rejecting the rightful rule of God, they always end up in big trouble.
Of interest, just hours ago I found a book I had been looking for for a while (that is one problem with having a large library). The book was released the year I was born, and is penned by the German Catholic philosopher Dietrich von Hildebrand (1889-1977). The volume is called The New Tower of Babel (Sophia Institute Press, 1953, 1994). Early on he says this:
The real conflict today is between Christianity on the one hand, and a thoroughly anti-Christian conception of life on the other. This struggle has reached a decisive stage and has become a radical clash between two worlds, embracing all domains of life and human existence. The liberal age was an age of compromise. Notwithstanding its anticlericalism and its contention against Christian doctrine in the religious and philosophical fields, it retained Christian elements in the moral, sociological, juridical, and cultural spheres. Our present age, however, reveals a consistent, anti-Christian conception in every domain of life on the part of the enemies of Christianity.
The mark of the present crisis is man’s attempt to free himself from his condition as a created being, to deny his metaphysical situation, and to disengage himself from all bonds with anything greater than himself. Modern man is attempting to build a new Tower of Babel.
The Message of Acts (Bible Speaks Today)by Array
Exactly so. The situation described in Acts 17 is simply more of the same. Let me offer some commentary on this. In his commentary I. Howard Marshall says this about the charge levelled at the disciples: “This is an apt description of the positive content of the gospel with its claim that Jesus is Lord (cf. 16:31); it indicates how the focus had shifted very naturally from the proclamation of the ‘kingdom’ in the ministry of Jesus to the proclamation of the ‘king’ in the evangelism of the early church.”
John Stott comments this way about the charge:
Since the emperor was sometimes called basileus (‘king’), as well as kaisar (‘emperor’), how could the attribution of basileus to Jesus (7) not be a treasonable offence? The ambiguity of Christian teaching in this area remains. On the one hand, as Christian people, we are called to be conscientious and law-abiding citizens, not revolutionaries. On the other hand, the kingship of Jesus has unavoidable political implications since, as his loyal subjects, we must refuse to give any other ruler or ideology the supreme homage and total obedience which are due to him alone.
I’ll leave N. T. Wright have the final word here:
Another king! Well, they really have got the message. Jesus is Lord and Caesar isn’t; the fundamental ‘decree’ or ‘dogma’ of Caesar is that he and he alone in the emperor….
So was Paul being a loyal Roman citizen, or wasn’t he? It all depends on what sort of a ‘king’ you think he thought Jesus really was. It is easy to quote Jesus’ famous saying, ‘My kingdom is not of this world’, but what John actually wrote was ‘My kingdom is not from this world’ (John 1 8.36), with the clear implication that, though derived of course from elsewhere, Jesus’ kingdom was definitely for this world. And it is easy to show that the charge Luke reports against Jesus, that he was claiming to be a king (Luke 23.2), was, like the other accusations hurled around at the time, at best deeply misleading.
But when we stand back from the present incident and look at the whole sweep of Acts as it unfolds before our eyes, we begin to see a pattern emerging, a pattern which will grow and swell until it leaves us . . . wondering what on earth happened next. In Acts 1—12 Jesus is hailed as Messiah, king of the Jews, until eventually the present king of the Jews tries to do something about it but is struck down for his pagan arrogance. Now, from Acts 13 onwards, Jesus is being hailed as ‘another king,’ ‘lord of the world’; but there already is a ‘lord of the world,’ and anyone who knows anything about tyrants, particularly ancient Roman ones, knows well that they don’t take kindly to rivals on the stage.
And they still don’t today. All the more reason for Christians to get their allegiances and loyalties right. As the state takes ever more powers for itself, the Christian will need to determine who it will ultimately serve. We need to decide now, before things get even worse.
Recently, while on youtube, I came across this fascinating video about enclaves.
An enclave is an area in a country that is governed by another country, an island within a nation’s borders. Although the video relates to Pakistani enclaves within India and vice versa, they pop up all over the place.
One of the weirdest enclaves is a railway line which belongs to Belgium but passes through Germany. A ribbon of land a few metres wide in Germany is Belgian territory. Either side of the railway is Germany.
An example closer to home is Jervis Bay on the NSW South Coast. Parts of that area are governed by NSW, but other parts are governed by the Jervis Bay Administrative Authority which, I think, is now an agency of the ACT Government.
Many enclaves are the results of historic anomalies. Sometimes a population of migrants may end up in a region of another country and become so dominant that they demand to be governed by their homeland. Sometimes extended wars result in population movements and the subsequent settlement terms require parts of the country to be ruled by their former enemy.
This all got me thinking about another enclave- God’s Kingdom.
The Kingdom of God exists wherever a person decides to follow Jesus. From that time on, they are subject to the laws of God’s kingdom rather than the culture of the people around. We are still obviously bound to obey our civil rulers, but only in as far as those laws do not contradict God’s rules. This was established early on in the church when Peter and John were ordered not to talk about Jesus, but they responded, “Do you think God wants us to obey you rather than Him? We cannot stop telling about everything we have seen and heard.” (Acts 4:19-20)
In most Western countries, there generally is not a huge area of disagreement between christians and government at the moment, because of our strong christian heritage.
One area that is changing is the whole attitude to sexuality and reproduction. In Australia, the Government legislated to allow same sex marriage. This was an area of great disagreement between churches and government. Christian ministers were given an exemption from discrimination law to allow them to marry only a man and a woman.
Most christians would say that it would be wrong for an unmarried couple to move in together or to engage in sexual intercourse before marriage. That is considered by many in the wider community to be an odd belief.
Most christians would believe that there is absolute truth, that morality and ethics are absolute, that we should live in obedience to God’s law. These ideas are all contrary to what many people believe.
So, increasingly christians are in a kind of enclave. The values of God’s Kingdom are very different to those of the world. Every day we need to decide whether we follow the ways of Jesus or the ways of the world.
The leak of millions of documents from a law firm in the Central American country of Panama has a lot of people worried. The company, Mossack Fonseca, specialises in helping clients set up companies in other countries.There is nothing illegal in that, of course, but it is possible that wealthy individuals have been breaking laws in their own nations by using these companies to avoid tax.
The interesting thing about this is that it shows how difficult it is to keep secrets in our modern technologically driven culture. It is not yet clear whether the leak was an inside job or whether hackers from outside the company illegally obtained the data.
There are people around who sincerely believe that there are people who have hidden, virtually unlimited power and are really the ones who control world events. Maybe we want to believe that in all the chaos and unpredictability of life that somebody somewhere is in control- whether it is the Illuminati, the Rosthschilds, the Queen (seriously).
There are huge problems with such theories, of course. While it may have been credible to believe that some secretive group in Europe or the United States controlled governments and economies when wealth was essentially concentrated in a handful of countries, the rise of China, India and other Asian nations has effectively spread wealth globally and makes such control unlikely.
Of course there is an organisation that spreads across all national borders. Maybe the Pope is the one who pulls the strings. The huge bureaucracy of the Catholic Church, its assets and its high ideals does suggest that it could be disciplined enough to control governments around the world. In fact during the Middle Ages it was the church that controlled princes and kings at least in Europe. Yet, as a world power the church seems particularly ineffective, at least in its signature issues such as abortion and same sex “marriage.”
No, to look at who really controls the world we have to look higher. No human organisation can pull the strings of human events.
God himself manages to walk a fine line between being sovereign and allowing people to have free will. He has a kingdom, but it is not like a worldly kingdom. This king seeks to rule by persuasion and allowing people to reap the consequences of their actions, both good and bad.
History is “His story”- God’s story in the world. From the time of creation, man’s first rejection of God, right through to Christ’s death on the cross clearing the way for reconciliation of people to God, it has all been about God’s love for the world.
Now we see something remarkable happening- an exponential growth all around the world of people who claim to follow Jesus. Some statisticians believe that the number of people becoming christians each day is more than twice the number of people who are born each day. Not only is God’s kingdom growing in numbers it is growing as a percentage of the world’s population.
Conspiracy theories are rooted in fear- fear that there is someone with hidden but unlimited power. But reality is rooted in faith- faith in the living God who loves us and has died for us, and really does have unlimited power.
New Life Narrabri 