Thy Kingdom Come

From that time Jesus began to preach, saying, Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand. -- Matthew 4:17

Before Jesus was baptized, His cousin, John the Baptist, came in the spirit and power of Elijah calling on his hearers to "repent for the kingdom heaven is at hand".  After the resurrection, Jesus gave instructions to His disciples and "to them he presented himself alive after his suffering by many proofs, appearing to them during forty days and speaking about the kingdom of God" (Acts 1:3 -- emphasis added).  Many of the parables we read relate to the kingdom, and Jesus spoke often about it, as if were vitally important. 

If a person didn't know better, he might get the impression that the whole of history, the Incarnation, the death, burial and resurrection of Christ and the establishment of the Church was intimately related to the kingdom of God.  Of course, that is silly since no one ever talks much about the kingdom.  No, the important doctrines have to do with whether or not we can dance and drink beer.  The kingdom is heaven or something.  It's all in the sweet by-and-by -- or maybe the sweet buy-and-buy.  Or maybe not.

A kingdom is a realm of dominion -- a place where a king has authority and rules by edict, statute and decree. A kingdom has subjects or citizens, those who are born into the realm and live under the king's rule.  There is no better system of government than a monarchy -- provided, of course, that the monarch is wise and good.  I believe I was first offended by a similar statement somewhere in Dune, but I have come to accept that it is true.  The reason we have turned from monarchies is because anyone wise enough and good enough to do the job probably has sense enough not to want it.  We are then left with the merely clever, the ambitious, the warped, the weak, the wicked, the greedy, the domineering, and the foolish -- but enough about Congress.

The first qualification for a king, having primacy even over wisdom and goodness, is that he love his kingdom and his subjects.  Though a monarch be foolish and vile by nature, if he truly loves his people and his land, when the weight of responsibility is laid upon him, he will strive to become wise and good.

We are citizens of the kingdom of heaven.  We travel through this strange land as pilgrims and adventurers, and, like Jake and Elwood, we are all on a mission from God because scattered across this world, sown like seeds upon the wind, there are others of the kingdom.  They are our brothers and sisters, separated at the first birth, destined to be reunited in a second one.  We all need to be found and told us who we are, to have the veil drawn back and to comprehend that our sense of unease and alienation makes sense for this world is not our home. Once we have come to recognize our citizenship in the kingdom, we realize that there are many more like ourselves to be found.

In those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan.  And when he came up out of the water, immediately he saw the heavens opening and the Spirit descending on him like a dove.  And a voice came from heaven, “You are my beloved Son; with you I am well pleased.”   The Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness.  And he was in the wilderness forty days, being tempted by Satan. And he was with the wild animals, and the angels were ministering to him.  -- Mark 1:9-13   

The Spirit immediately drove Him out into the wilderness.   This happened to Jesus after He was baptized and declared to be the Son of God.  Something similar happened to you and to me.  God said, "I am going to plant this child of mine in the world."  The Holy Spirit caught you up, and you were sown into a time and place, into a family and a situation that He chose for you.  For many of us, it was a period of being lost in the boonies.  It happens once in the flesh.  But then we are awakened, and, like Jesus, it happens again as we are born of the Spirit. 

I have been out here in the desolate places, harassed by the enemy and by the non-kingdom forces and entities that run wild in this world system.  But there are those who come around, messengers from my Father, to remind me who I am, to assure me that I have a purpose, that this wilderness is merely a trial that I must pass through.

The desert places will cleanse our vision and open the doors of our perception to the realities of the kingdom, putting us back in touch with our Lord.   And then we, too, become messengers, agents of awakening that the children of the kingdom might be born from above.   Everything is about the kingdom, about the restoration of God's sovereign rule over His own chosen ones. 

When the kingdom of this world has become the kingdom of our Lord and His Christ, how will that kingdom look and how will it operate? 

Fishing on Sunday

I tell you this, brothers: flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable. -- 1 Corinthians 15:50

This would seem to say that the kingdom of God is completely out of reach of flesh-and-blood, material entities.  Yet Jesus Himself spoke frequently of how we might strive to enter into the kingdom.  Both He and John the Baptist preached that “the kingdom of heaven is at hand”.  In the prayer He taught His disciples, we read, “Your kingdom come, Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”  Also when we read Christ’s parables of the Hidden Treasure and the Pearl of Great Price, the Lord is telling us that we must give up everything if we would gain the kingdom.  The very next parable in Matthew’s gospel describes the kingdom as a net cast into the sea that brings out fish of all kinds – large, small, acceptable and unacceptable.  It suggests that many are lured by the kingdom, but not all find a home therein. 

Though Paul is primarily addressing the death of believers and the necessity of a resurrection both of the Lord and of His saints, our transformation out of the flesh does not begin with physical death, for, “those who are in the flesh cannot please God.”   In order to be a part of the kingdom one must belong to Christ which can only happen if the Spirit of God dwells in us.  But if Christ is in you, although the body is dead because of sin, the Spirit is life because of righteousness.  If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit who dwells in you (Romans 8:8-11).  That is a new kind of life, a life that is eternal in its nature, not just its duration.  This mortal begins to put on immortality.  It's almost like being a little pregnant, but it is true.

In the same way and at the same point, our death to the flesh begins as we are drawn into the kingdom.  Maybe we should take a closer look at the Parable of the Dragnet:  Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a net that was thrown into the sea and gathered fish of every kind.  When it was full, men drew it ashore and sat down and sorted the good into containers but threw away the bad.  So it will be at the close of the age. The angels will come out and separate the evil from the righteous and throw them into the fiery furnace. In that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth (Matthew 13:47-50).  Normally we think of each fish as a person who is judged by God’s standard, i.e., Christ, to be worthy or unworthy of inclusion in the kingdom.  That is correct, but there is another way to look at it.  I caught, filleted, and deep-fried a couple of fish this past weekend.  They are, as animals, quite simple.  You could not construct a human being out of hundreds of fish – except, to some extent, by the process of a person digesting said fish.  We are far more than the sum of our parts; yet there are parts to us. 

When by His Spirit the Lord draws us into His kingdom, if we are willing to surrender ourselves completely to Him, He will sort through us like the fisherman opening his net.  Some of those seemingly alive parts of us -- “raw and wiggling” as Gollum prefers them – are acceptable while the Spirit must dispose of other parts.  He is separating "the evil from the righteous".  The flesh cannot enter in, and all that is flesh that must be consigned without mercy to the furnace of judgment.  Weeping and gnashing of teeth indeed is present there. 

How I have wailed over my weaknesses, often less because I could not overcome them than out of fear that I might lose them and lose, in the process, something I thought of as an essential part of my identity.  Have you ever said, “that’s just me”, or of another, “that’s just him” with regard to a foible or “eccentricity”?  It is a sacrifice to surrender those ugly, useless, worthless fish.     

Under the Law, God decreed that the fires of the altar might burn throughout the night for the burnt offering.  Those fires would, nevertheless, from time to time, need to be lit and fueled.  In the kingdom, the fire is never quenched.  There are flames always patiently waiting to consume the flesh we will sacrifice that we may pass clean through the gates.