The King’s Kingdom

Mark 1:14–15 ESV

Now after John was arrested, Jesus came into Galilee, proclaiming the gospel of God, and saying, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the gospel.”

Introduction

What is it that you’re known for? What topic makes people think of you? That thing you’re always talking about, or always relating to? Maybe it’s your work or a hobby or an interest. What’s that thing that if prompted you could talk about, without any preparation, for an hour? Like If you had to come up here and give a sermon, what’s that thing you’ve could just talk about for as long as you needed? The point is, it says a lot about a person whatever it is that they’re known for in this way.

And in this passage today we see what Jesus could not stop talking about: The Kingdom of God. Jesus talked about the Kingdom of God more than any other topic, hands down. It is the central focus and message of his ministry on earth; and in the Gospel of Mark the first words he utters are right here and they are about the Kingdom.

And that’s our Main Idea today— Jesus’ main idea is the Kingdom. Our outline is this: we’ll look at the reality of the Kingdom as one already here, then we’ll look at two implications or invitations of this Kingdom: repentance and belief in the Gospel.

The Kingdom is Here

The Gospel of Mark is able to summarize the whole scope of Jesus’ life and teaching in this single concept of “the Kingdom of God,” this Kingdom that is grounded by the good news of God, the Gospel. But look at the context here. Mark 1:14 “Now after John had been taken into custody, Jesus came into Galilee, preaching the gospel of God,” We’ve already been introduced to John the Baptist and his ministry and Mark alerts us of the danger he’s in. Of course, John’s arrest will ultimately lead to his execution at the hands of Herod, but Mark uses this to say something about Jesus’ ministry of preaching the Gospel. From the very beginning, from even before Jesus started preaching, the Gospel was getting people in trouble. Jesus proclaimed the Gospel in the midst of adversity and suffering, not in ease and comfort.

Jesus proclaimed His gospel and His kingdom in a world that was (and still is) hostile to it. He proclaimed a Kingdom not of this world, a Kingdom that opposes the forces of sin and the waves of human culture and society. And he was never ashamed or afraid to do so; though his cousin had been arrested, Jesus boldly began to proclaim the Kingdom.

And what is this Kingdom? It’s been simply defined as this: “The people of God, in the place of God, under the rule and reign of God.” Another scholar put it this way: God's Kingdom is "the reign of God active in humanity through Jesus Christ, the purpose of which is the redemption of his people from sin…and the final establishment of the new heavens and the new earth." God’s reign, that’s the Kingdom. Wherever there are people who have submitted themselves to the authority and Lordship of Jesus and His reign, that is the Kingdom of God.

The Kingdom of God is here for the King Himself has arrived. Jesus’ message is that in his own person and mission, in his work and message, God has invaded human history, triumphing over evil (we see the beginning of this last week as the King successfully resists temptation), though the final deliverance will occur at the end of the age.

And you hear in these definitions some tension. Even in the language Jesus uses: “The Kingdom of God is at hand,” some translations say, “the Kingdom of God is near.” What does that mean? Does it mean it’s still coming, that it’s not quite here yet? Or that it has already arrived. Someone asked me just that this week: so is the Kingdom here already (at hand!) or still near? The answer is YES. It is both. We call this the “already/not yet” Kingdom of God. We also should understand this in light of how Jesus starts this proclamation in saying “the time is fulfilled.” This moment, Jesus’ coming has changed things, the time is fulfilled, the Kingdom is here! But it is also not yet here. We look around at our lives today, at the world around us, we watch the news for more than fives minutes and we can pretty confidently say: this doesn’t seem like the Kingdom of God. The message of Jesus, in part, is this: His arrival on the scene and in human history brought the Kingdom of God, it is at hand! Yet it was not and still is not yet fully realized. There still exists things that we would definitively say do not belong in the Kingdom: suffering, sorrow, grief, pain, death, and even sin. Yet the Kingdom, the rule and reign of Christ Jesus has come and we’re told to receive it.

We’re invited to place ourselves under the authority of Christ as our King, to submit to Him and take our place as citizens of this Kingdom. The fullness of the Kingdom, God’s reign over all things and all creation is still to come and we do not enjoy the full benefits of the Kingdom now, but we do stand in the victory of that Kingdom today. Jesus points to this aspect of the Kingdom in his parables, like the Parable of the Mustard Seed, Matthew 13:31–32 “The kingdom of heaven is like a grain of mustard seed that a man took and sowed in his field. It is the smallest of all seeds, but when it has grown it is larger than all the garden plants and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and make nests in its branches.”” The Kingdom starts so small but grows and grows, overtaking everything else in the garden.

In Jesus, the Kingdom had arrived. It persists and grows in us by the Spirit. The trajectory is certain, the decisive victory has been made, we now are called to receive the Kingdom of God, to put ourselves under its authority, under the rule and reign of Christ in our lives. We need not fight to grow the Kingdom, God is taking care of that, we need to receive it ourselves and continually put more and more of our lives under its authority. And to modern ears, the idea of putting ourselves under someone else’s authority is countercultural, it’s no good. But Jesus’ Kingdom is good, he calls it good news, we’ll talk about why it’s good a little later.

If you were a first century Jewish member of Jesus’ community, you have hoped this ushering in of the Kingdom of God was one of military or political victory. A show of force, a huge victory over the empire of Rome! On their mind may have been passages like Isaiah 40:10: 10  “Behold, the Lord God comes with might and his arm rules for him.” Or Daniel 7:13-14

“…there came one like a son of man, and he came to the Ancient of Days and was presented before him. And to him was given dominion and glory and a kingdom, that all peoples, nations, and languages should serve him; his dominion is an everlasting dominion, which shall not pass away, and his kingdom one that shall not be destroyed.

But this is not what Jesus had in mind. It’s not to say that these prophets are wrong, but this is not how the Kingdom entered this world. These prophetic images point us to the full and complete Kingdom of God, something that we have even now to still hope in for the future. At His first coming, Jesus was closer to the suffering servant Messiah described in Isaiah 52-53. “How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him who proclaims the good news, the gospel.” And later of this servant: “He was despised and rejected by men…he has borne our grief and carried our sorrows…he was pierced for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities…We all like sheep have gone astray, but the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all.”

The remarkable thing about Jesus’ ministry is that in proclaiming the good news of God, the gospel of the Kingdom, he was also revealing himself as the one of whom these words were prophesied.

He takes this upon Himself that we might be saved, healed, redeemed, rescued from our sin. This is the good news of the Kingdom.

The reality of the Kingdom then has implications, two commands that Jesus gives in light of the Kingdom. Repent and believe!

Repent!

The first command Jesus gives is that we would repent! As we’ve said, the Kingdom of God is the reign of God over His people; it is not, therefore, a political Kingdom, but the changing of individual hearts and communities that come under His authority. The Kingdom, in one way, is the peaceful rule over the hearts that respond Jesus’ message. Therefore it makes sense that as soon as Jesus proclaims the Kingdom, he gives the invitation to repent.

Repent means to turn away from, to reverse course! To turn away from one thing and turn toward something else. Jesus is saying, turn away from the Kingdom of this world, turn away from the empty promises of this world, the empty promises of sin and the desires of our flesh. Those things only lead to death. He knows where life is, it is not found in the Kingdom of this world that is in bondage, ruled by sin, but rather life is found in his Kingdom. I can hear in this command the incredible mercy and compassion of our Lord.

I think of that moment in the gospel of Luke when Jesus weeps over Jerusalem; weeping over a city and a people who reject him and his kingdom, that they had given themselves over so to the Kingdoms of the world, rather than to the peace of Christ. Jesus looks at us and says: repent. Turn away from your old ways, turn away from your sin, turn away from those desires and idols you chase after day after day.

Turn away from those things that offer you false hope and false security. He’s saying, “turn away and instead find your hope and security in me and my Kingdom!” Turn away from sin that offers false and fleeting satisfaction, sin that destroys, and turn toward the Way of God which leads to life.

There’s another sense in which repent means, “to change one’s mind about something.” Change your heart and mind about what your life is, about to whom your life belongs, about which authority it is you submit to. Change your mind about these things. We live in a society today that is so resistant to this kind of repentance. Our culture is one in which the idea of changing your mind about something has become a rare occurrence. The pressure today is to dig into our ideas, our worldviews, dig into our convictions, now matter how wrong we might be or how much evidence is presented to the contrary. We won’t change our mind. Jesus says there is another way.

Part of what is important to understand about Jesus’ invitation to repent, is that this is not an invitation weighted with shame or condemnation. Our culture, social media, will turn on you if you change your mind about something or don’t think the right way. But there is no condemnation for those in Christ Jesus, that’s Romans 8. Elsewhere in Romans, Paul says that it is the kindness of God that is meant to lead us to repentance. Jesus’ command to repentance is a serious one, but it is not without the gentleness of our good shepherd, and it is not meant to be separated from the other command: to believe in the good news of the Gospel.

One of the interesting things about both of these commands is that, in the Greek, they are given in the “present, active, imperative” which is just a fancy way of saying: these are commands that are expected to be followed not once, but as an ongoing process. It’s like if your doctor says he’s worried about your heart and “you need to eat less salt and less saturated fats;” it’s not going to do a whole lot of good if you just do that at your next meal. That’s a command from your doctor that is expected to be a change in lifestyle.

This is not a single repentance, but rather a new condition of repentance for our lives, an ongoing commitment to turn away from the things of this world and instead turn to the Kingdom of Christ. And it is not a repentance of one area of our lives, rather a total allegiance to the Kingdom of God. I would also say that there is a recognition that this is an ongoing work in our lives by the Spirit, repentance and belief in the gospel is the lifelong project of the believer, to build our lives around Christ and come into His Kingdom.

Now this happened on Friday morning, I was driving here and in my neighborhood there was a jogger wearing a shirt that said: REPENT OR PERISH! Maybe she really just needed some extra motivation for running that day; but that is how our culture often hears that word, paired with a dire, alarming warning. I don’t want to downplay the seriousness of Jesus’ message; but he says repent and believe in the gospel. His is a gracious invitation.

Believe in the Gospel

We’ve already said that in announcing the Kingdom Jesus is proclaiming the gospel of God. The Gospel means simply, good news. The good news of Christ. The gospel encompasses both the message of Jesus as well as the life and work of Jesus, his sinless life, his sacrificial death, and his victorious resurrection. One way I’ve come to summarize the Gospel is this: “The Gospel is the good news of God for all those who believe, that though we were dead in our sins, we have been made alive in Christ because of His death and resurrection. Now we have peace with God, having been justified and adopted as children of God, we are transformed now by His Spirit and have the hope of eternal life with Him.”

We are saved! Saved from sin and death, brought into the Kingdom of light and life eternal! The gospel changes us completely. It’s not something we earn or work for, but something we receive, and believe in. It is good news to trust in and good news that should prompt in us a transformation. Tim Keller famously summarized the gospel like this, it’s two truths: “I am more sinful and flawed than I ever dared believe.” That’s a call to repent, but it is quickly followed by the second truth: “I am more accepted and loved than I ever dared hope.” Believe that! Repent and believe!

That command to believe in—remember it’s an ongoing command, something that we’re meant to continue on in—means to put our trust in, that we would trust the good news is true, that grace really is enough, that we really are accepted by God through Christ. And we’re meant to bring this trust to bear on every area of our lives. My salvation, my family, my security, my hopes and dreams, everything, continually growing in this trust and belief.

It is easy to think of the gospel as merely the first thing we believe in, but the good news is meant to change and transform us completely. In your bulletins I included a card with a framework from Tim Keller that really illustrates the way the Gospel of the Kingdom subverts our default worldview of religion that is focused on works-based righteousness, earning our salvation and our acceptance with God. We’re not going to read them all now. But I want you to take these with you, reflect on them this week. Where do you see yourself in the left column? Where are you already in the right column? The gospel is not something we work on, but it’s something we receive and believe; are we people who believe in the good news and rest in God’s grace rather than working for it? Does our obedience flow from our trust that we are accepted (that’s the first line) or are we still trying to earn our acceptance? Do we find meaning, security, happiness, and significance in the things of this world, or in the ultimate thing of the love of God (that’s the last line). Keep this in your car, stick on the fridge, consider where you’re at and what areas of your life God may be asking you to more fully believe in the Gospel.

Repent and believe! I want to close with this. There is a reality we exist in today that fights against so much of what we’ve heard today. The troubles and sorrows of this world, that which is not of the Kingdom of God works to break our belief and tempt us away. But God has been gracious to show us where this whole thing is headed and in this he gives us hope. In Revelation 7 we have a picture of the fullness of God’s Kingdom. John describes a scene in which the lamb of God (Jesus) is seated on the throne and all tribes and nations are worshipping Him. And then he says this: Rev. 7:15-17

Revelation 7:15–17 ESV

“Therefore they are before the throne of God, and serve him day and night in his temple; and he who sits on the throne will shelter them with his presence. They shall hunger no more, neither thirst anymore; the sun shall not strike them, nor any scorching heat. For the Lamb in the midst of the throne will be their shepherd, and he will guide them to springs of living water, and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.”

This is where we’re headed. This is the fullness of the Kingdom that Jesus began to proclaim here in Mark 1. This future scene of a Kingdom without sorrow or tears, this is what we can hope for now. Let us live in light of this hope, let us live totally changed by the good news of the Kingdom of God. This is where it’s all headed. Let’s repent and believe it now. Amen.