The Witness to the Kingdom

So far in this book our task has been to explore the thought-patterns and cultural assumptions that oppose a faithful Christian understanding in the modern west. In part one, we addressed modern Christianity’s soft endorsement of secular culture, our discontentment with contemporary church, and how this has left us like the rest of modern culture at large—desperately grasping for meaning and relevance while drowning in a sea of information. In part two, we began to explore a little of what the biblical Kingdom of God is and how it could be the antidote to the spiritual and existential sickness we find ourselves in today.

Our approach this far has been viewing the Kingdom in the negative—exploring the much of what it is not. This is not a counterproductive approach, as a true understanding of God’s rule and reign in the world requires much deconstructing of our inherited notions. But to continue a description of the Kingdom of God in the negative would be drastically misleading—as God’s Kingdom is the great positive to which everything else is a negative, mere spots of disease and pockets of rot which must either submit to healing or be cut out. In the following chapters, we will dig for the roots of the Kingdom of God in its Scriptural context, as something fulfilled in Christ and anchored in the peculiar history of God’s chosen people.

 

Approaching the Scripture

For the concept of the Kingdom of God involves, in a real sense, the total message of the Bible. Not only does it loom large in the teachings of Jesus; it is to be found, in one form or another, through the length and breadth of the Bible—at least if we may view it through the eyes of the New Testament Faith—from Abraham, who set out to seek “the city whose builder and maker is God” (Heb. 11:10; cf. Gen. 12:1ff.), until the New Testament closes with “the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God”(Rev. 21:2). To grasp what is meant by the Kingdom of God is to come very close to the heart of the Bible’s gospel of salvation.

–John Bright former professor of Hebrew and Old Testament interpretation at Union Theological Seminary (1940–1975))

 

In a holistic eschatology, the kingdom of God is a robust rather than thin concept. And, the person of Christ, rather than being a mystical reductive principle…is seen instead in the full reality of his holistic kingdom, bringing to completion the rich fullness of an inheritance that has been planned, promised, and proclaimed throughout the amazing story of Scripture.

— Craig A. Blaising – Coming Kingdom and Biblical Interpretation

The modern person who becomes curious about Christianity by listening to modern Christians might be unpleasantly surprised when she opens the Bible. Where in books, podcasts, and at church she has become familiar with an orderly list of doctrines which attach themselves to the title “Christian”, the Bible does not seem to share the same approach. If she had opened the Bible to fact-check the idea of God’s omniscience, she may be satisfied with her initial reading of the first few chapters of Genesis—though it may be just as likely the reading would multiply her questions in this category. If she powers through Genesis to gain a better knowledge of the Trinity, she’ll become further frustrated. Not only does the word not appear in the reading, the author seemed completely concerned with the idea—and where are the Christians? She could read the book from cover to cover and never find mention of half the words her Christian friends had taught her were essential to Christianity.

Would she be right to throw the book away in disgust? Of course not, and for a very simple reason: the Bible was not written to be read as a catalog or encyclopedia. The Scripture does not bend to our taste or expectations, but demands to be accepted on its own terms. What we find when we accept those terms is something very odd—a work of literature that’s equal parts story, biography, history, and poetry, jumbled together in a seemingly disorganized bundle. To those viewing it from a secular model of thought, nothing could be more ridiculous or irrelevant to reality. To really believe it from this perspective would require a level of intellectual suppression impossible to fully accomplish with the constant objections of the human conscious, though many try, and feel as though they may succeed this way. However, as we’ve already discussed, we are consciously rejecting this model. We’ve found it to be at best a paper facade for reality, and the real thing is either more wonderful or more awful than our imaginations within the broken model would allow us to believe.

We find ourselves on level ground, in a flat wasteland, facing possibly the strangest thing we’ve ever seen—something which inverts all our preconceived notions about normal life, purpose, and reality. Let’s revisit our analogy of the upside-down pyramid from chapter 4. This towering, inverted monolith is the Word of God, God’s reliable witness to the uncompromised fact of reality. You’ll remember approaching the place where the pyramid met the earth. Approaching the spot, you felt your skin might burn off in the intense heat, and when you finally made it through it was because of Jesus beckoning you onward. You remember the strength you felt, having all the irrelevancies of the world burned off your back, and now feeling the weight and heat of the Lord’s loving hand on your shoulder. You’ll remember looking up at the pyramid to find it was a whole world, teaming with life and variety, and how it was in being lifted up by Jesus that you realized you had been upside-down all along. This should be our experience reading the Scriptures, because they are inseparable from a true understanding of the Kingdom of God.

By this merit, the person who is introduced to Christianity in the systematized, categorical way is at a disadvantage toward grasping the Scripture on their own terms. Reading and understanding Scripture is upside-down and backwards to our normal way of analyzing and processing something real—and yet it is meant to be understood.

For reading Scripture to be possible, we must give up the driver’s seat and let the story itself take us for a ride. As much as we would like to be the ones in control, we are not authorities on reality, and what we are reading is the only authoritative account of reality on which to base our understanding of it. Scripture is God’s revealing of reality to mankind.

 

The Revelation of the Kingdom

Knowledge of the Kingdom of God comes from the revelation of God’s Word. While it would be easy to gloss over this statement as tidy church-jargon, it’s essential we grasp what this means. Logos tou Theos (λόγον τοῦ θεοῦ), the word or utterance of God. Have you ever taken time to really think about what that phrase alone means?

The phrase alone is good news powerful enough to dispel the dread and terror of our beleaguered existence. Even before we know what God is saying, the fact that He is saying anything at all is cause for relief. It means the ultimate authority in the universe is not the kind that would accidentally or purposefully send the earth hurling into the sun. Neither is he an impersonal force, quiet and indifferent to humanity. The ultimate being speaks to people. To speak at all is to condescend, to bridge a gap, to express oneself to another. It implies a shared basis, a shared plain of being, a natural overlap of two very separate and different beings meeting and discussing something intelligently. I use the word implies of course, because the Word of God is not the same as a conversation you might have with your neighbor. While reciprocation is anticipated on our part, the word is a word and not exclusively a dialogue. Insofar as the Word of God is the message or calling of God, there is little we can add to it to construct it, as we would in a typical conversation, each new idea adding another brick to the wall.

The Word informs the human situation with information we could not provide for ourselves. It is in this way that the Word of God is a grace, by being a revelation, just as it is a grace to stick your arm out in front of a blind man on the yellow line of a subway station—revealing to him his situation. The revealing of our situation is half the business of the Word of God, as the loving Creator faces a creation bent on self-destruction. The speaking of His Word is the revealing of His world, shamelessly contrasting whatever model of reality we’ve dreamed up to support our own kingdoms—and this is where the Word of God appears most like a conversation. A response is demanded for it to have been a meaningful word or utterance, and not just a sound. Seldom does God dictate the response for us—He calls, but does not hoist change upon us. It is for us to hear the truth and believe, to yield to it, to choose the red pill, to have the scales fall from our eyes.

Apokalupsis (Ἀποκάλυψις) is at the core of God’s message to mankind. It’s where we get the transliteration “Apocalypse” in english today, but it doesn’t explicitly have to do with the end of the world. It means uncovering, laying bear, or the revealing of things previously unknown. This does not only have to do with uncovering our situation as humans separated from God. It is not God’s mandate to simply “lay us bear” and reveal our incompleteness. This would be a half hearted gospel, more like cosmic taunting than redemption. God’s message to mankind is to reveal Himself as the One thing that can complete us. This reuniting, assimilating, coming to know and be known to God, is what we find in the Kingdom of God.

This mysterious, unpredictable, indescribable Kingdom of God is what the Scriptures tell us time and again is God’s good news to a desperate fallen humanity (Lk. 4:43; Acts 8:12; Mat. 9:35; Is. 52:7). But we cannot forget that this good news is more than just new information—in addition it is a new way of seeing. Revelation is different from discovery, the former being passed down from a knowledge beyond ourselves, the latter being grasped by our own senses. Even as I write about the Kingdom of God, I have to remind myself that it is not something I can satisfactorily describe or research. “Neither God nor his Word may be easily contained in a box for logical or scientific analysis. Both God and his Word have a sovereign unpredictability that defies rational, human understanding” (Marvin Wilson p.152). When I approach the topic of the Kingdom of God, I have to dismiss my domineering western categories of capture, dissection, and experimentation, and accept the revealing as it presents itself.

In fact, there is no other way to know the Kingdom of God than to see it as it presents itself. Any bending of the lens provided for us to see the Kingdom through will never serve to clarify the finished image. We mustn’t forget that it is a Word spoken to us, not an abstract idea which demands further articulation. Even if we made it our mission to cut through all the conundrum and mystery encasing the Kingdom of God, and really get down to the core substance of it, the tangible stuff of this otherworldly Kingdom of the heavens, we would be sorely disappointed. The most alien interruption ever to breach the borders of this blackened cocoon of reality appeared quite ordinarily as a human baby in first century Palestine.

This is where most curious moderns give up, because as they begin to peel away the hopelessly convoluted layers of the Kingdom of God in Scripture and in the writings of Christians since the second century, they are left with the very historical, very human person of Christ. This is the first and most essential concession we must make in submitting our understanding to the revelation of the Word of God which leads to knowledge of the Kingdom. We must, as Paul and Silas said to the Roman jailer, “Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved” (Acts 16:31).

The revealing of the Word of God which leads to experiential and cognitive understanding of our reunion with God in His rule and reign comes to us through the person of Christ—the Logos Himself (John 1:1). While scholars have tried to get at the core of this Logos through study of the so-called “historical Jesus”, or relegating their focus to the “Jesus of faith”, these attempts are diversions from, and tacit rejections of, the Jesus witnessed of by His followers—being both informed by history and the lens of faith. This is the presentation of the revelation which we have to accept or deny, warts and all, in the written testimony of the apostles. While we might prefer a more systematic or more aetherial or more historical presentation, this is not for us to decide. To pursue a different presentation is to only meet with frustration and ultimately compromise with a substandard “revelation”, or ramshackle model of reality borrowed from Christianity, which pales before the more ingenious creations of pagan society.

A holistic, healthy, and faithful grasp of reality can only come from accepting the revelation on it’s own terms, and those terms are the Word of God as it was spoken to mankind in Christ and those to whom He gave authority. In the writings of those men, we find a curious bent in perspective. They can hardly be compared with the great visionaries of our day, people who mix and combine old ideas with other old ideas to form a new idea—these men were catalyzed by some absolutely different source.

They were men driven, enticed, obsessed with an idea so powerful nothing could keep them from spreading it. They had little interest in harmonizing the reality of Christ to the reality they saw prior to the revelation. To them, all history had been a blind repetition of events whose only good and notable contributions were seen in movements of God preceding the arrival of His Kingdom. “Apart from Jesus’ history as the mighty Word in which God’s reconciling act was revealed, the apostles lacked all interest in any other aspect of His history. They ignored any reality that might have preceded this history of salvation and revelation. There was simply no such reality, therefore they could not know or be concerned with any such hypothetical reality.” (Karl Barth Evangelical Theology).

If we take it that mankind is, by nature, blind from birth and unable to see the very real inner workings of God’s world, then it would follow that human traditions of thought that have adapted to operate without revelation of reality would be hostile to true sight, as Paul lamments in 1 Corinthians 2:21–24,

For since in the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom did not come to know God, God was well-pleased through the foolishness of the message preached to save those who believe. For indeed Jews ask for signs and Greeks search for wisdom; but we preach Christ crucified, to Jews a stumbling block and to Gentiles foolishness, but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.

The Christian mind, under the revelation of God’s Word is free, in complete cleanness of conscience, to disregard the opposing witness of the world and its interpretation of reality. This is because we are living, not in a separate reality, but the only true reality. Moving from the wisdom of the “Jews and Greeks” (ergo, the common understanding of human civilization) into the wisdom of God is not a self-determined switch of mental perspective, it really is seeing and witnessing to a new reality—one we could neither have invented or dreamed of through our own creative faculties.

It is the reality of the Kingdom through and in Jesus Christ. There really are no better descriptors than these two biblical prepositions—through and in (2 Cor. 3:4; Jhn. 1:17; 2 Cor. 5:17; Rom. 6:11)—to describe the spiritual, physical, emotional, and interpersonal position of the believer in Christ. It is not the Kingdom-dweller’s job to compare notes with, who John calls, “earth dwellers” (Rev. 3:10), referring to those who hold to their models of reality in the face of the revelation of Jesus. We do not clarify God’s revelation by holding it up to every accusatory proposition the world throws at it, as if the Kingdom dweller and the earth dweller were all working on an equal playing field. Rather it is the Kingdom-dweller’s job to witness to the Kingdom, which is becoming day by day more the only reality we see, know and trust.

But how do we witness to the Kingdom? By expressing the revelation of God’s Word to those without access to the revelation—which is the irrefutable state of things post-revelation, by which I mean after Christ’s ascension. While it may be comforting to the modern imagination to assume God will reveal Himself to whoever He likes, He has undoubtedly given His servants responsibility to carry His Word to those without it, as Paul clarifies elsewhere, in a similar vein to 1 Corinthians 2,

For everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.

How are they to call on one they have not believed in? And how are they to believe in one they have not heard of? And how are they to hear without someone preaching to them (Rom. 10:13–14).

This was the primary task of the Apostles and those who came after them, to witness to and defend the integrity of the Word of God as it was revealed to them in words and teaching of Jesus Christ. It was their primary joy in life, as it was Christ’s, to proclaim the good news of the Kingdom of God. Where the church begins to slip from this initializing energy and joy in the following generations—and it is a critically often overlooked slip—is by falling short of the final step of the process, which is the actual proclaiming of the Kingdom of God. In the following centuries of church history, the dominant forces retain a strong interest in the Word of God but lose their ability to claim the revelation of it, because the fruit of the Kingdom of God, its ethics, interests, and counter-wordly habits and behaviors, are suspiciously absent. Only in small pockets here and there, among laymen, mystics, monastics, and scholars from the end of antiquity, through the middle ages, and into the modern day, do we see elements of the revealed Kingdom retained. These pockets of resistance will be more thoroughly explored in later chapters, but for now I’ve opened a few cans of worms which need a closer look.

In this chapter already I’ve made three glaring assumptions which are probably sticking in your brain as you read. These points are crucial for really grasping today the truth and validity of the biblical Kingdom of God. 1.) that it is possible, and right, to claim revelation from the Word of God today. 2.) that we actually see a different reality than “earth dwellers”. 3.) That Jesus Christ is Himself the revelation of the Word of God leading us into the Kingdom of God.

 

Can We Claim Revelation Today?

There is good reason why the subject of revelation has been one of the most contentious topics in Christian history. People claiming the special revealing of the Word of God have wreaked havoc on orthodoxy since the first tottering steps of the ancient church. This is illustrated vividly in the biblical epistles’ frequent appeals for churches to watch out for false teaching (2 Cor. 11:13; Phil. 3:2; 2 Tim. 4:15; 1 Cor. 6:9), and later in the various Gnostic heresies. It was understood from the beginning of the Church that, while the revelation of God is mysterious and difficult to comprehend, it is definite and deserving of our most diligent efforts to cognitively and experientially know.

In recent history, the stormy dialogue surrounding the topic of revelation, between Christians of various stripes—excluding the resurgences of Gnostic sects in recent years—has attached itself almost exclusively to the object of the Bible. Where one side takes more license in their interpretation of Scripture, the other accuses them of reckless liberalism, and while one side adheres to a literal reading, the other accuses them of staunch biblicism or “Bible-worship”. But both have typically held the Bible as a one-for-one synonym for the Word of God. As you can probably tell by my capitalization, I come from a tradition which holds that the Bible is the true and inspired Word of God, and in that regard I am in line with orthodox Christianity since the formation of the 66 book canon we have today. However, the more I speak with people in my same tradition on this topic, and the more I read Christian authors on the topic of biblical revelation, the more I begin to think there is a serious disconnect between what many people mean when they say the words “Bible” and “revelation” in the same breath.

The Bible is the Word of God just as the word “alpaca”, printed on this page in black and white, is itself a shaggy-haired, long necked, part-sheep-part-giraffe creature that lives in South America. If I had never seen an actual alpaca, or had one adequately described to me, the word written on the page could just as well be the code name of a secret stealth bomber, or the name of my Uber driver today. Without actual experience of the object, I could never make sense of the “Word”, and all my etymologies, interpretations, and speculations would be meaningless. Now, this is not to say that the Bible is not worth studying—I’ve dedicated a sizable percentage of my life to studying the Scriptures and it has led to a richer and more meaningful life than I could ever have wished to live without it—but the Bible is meaningless without its object: Jesus Christ.

It was held in common among the New Testament writers that the Word of God, which is the seed which grows into the revelation of God and His Kingdom, was and is the person of Jesus Christ. If Moses had never heard from or obeyed God, or if Peter had never met, lived with, and learned from Jesus, neither of them could have never written anything that would qualify as Scripture. It would be simply literature, philosophy, or at best myth. But they witnessed revelation, they walked with God and He spoke to them—in effect, they encountered a real, live alpaca.

I once heard a story about a man who lived in Jerusalem as a kind of walking tourist attraction. He had memorized every word of the Bible, knowing it inside-and-out. He knew it so well that you could name a verse at random and he could quote it word for word. The catch was, he didn’t believe a single word of it. He lived as a professed atheist without any conviction about the things he was saying. The point is, you can know the words, but never really encounter the Word of God—it is a seperate experience which comes into the reading.

The reading itself may be interesting, but it is just another book to anyone who has not accepted the revelation of Jesus Christ (2 Cor. 3:14–17). Contrary to other traditions which have used the Hebrew Scriptures, we come at it from the point of Jesus, and it is from this point that the rest of Scripture is genuine revelation. Revelation is more than just clever words or teaching, it is a window into another experiential reality unavailable to us on our own. Jesus Christ steps in as the bridge, the reconciler between a world of unity and completeness in God and a fragmented world of dark and meaningless paper realities—what the Scripture calls Hebel, or “vapor” (Ecc. 1:2, 12:8). Having confessed Jesus as Lord, we confess everything else as vapor, unstable and untrustworthy, and we consider those who still cling to it unstable and untrustworthy. We make this judgement call on the fact that we have received revelation in and through Jesus and are seeing reality just as He described it. However, we must not let the assumption sneak into our heads that we are able to ascend to the revelation of Christ through higher reasoning and rigorous scholarship. While this can be helpful, there will always be the irremovable essence of something fundamentally child-like—or to the uninitiate in the faith—something fundamentally foolish about this revelation, and if that essence ever fades then we have gone hopelessly astray from the truth Jesus taught. Faith, or devoted and child-like trust, in Jesus as our window and entryway into God’s true reality and life is the core of this revelation, as Emil Brunner says in The Mediator, 

This breaking-in of the eternal as an event in history is the proper concern of faith. Faith knows that it is anchored to that which transcends history because it is centered in the Mediator and therefore in the eternal self-movement of God. In fact, faith begins at the very point where historical perception reaches its outer limit. It understands revelation in terms of that incomprehensible movement of the living God which is manifest in the God-Man—Jesus, who is the Christ. (Brunner, The Mediator pp. 303–15)

Essentially, faith is only able to grasp the revelation of God’s “incomprehensible movement” through the person as Jesus Christ—a person both historical and beyond the merely historical. To hesitate at saying we can have true, authentic revelation today, while also claiming that we can know Jesus today is an oxymoron. In a similar tone to Paul in 1 Corinthians 15 I might say, if Christ does not reveal the Kingdom to us, even today, “then our preaching is vain, your faith also is vain” (v. 14). Christ does in fact reveal the Kingdom of God to us, and more than that, He reveals the way to enter in; and if we believe the Bible is a living book, still speaking to us today, then we must affirm with Brunner that Christ has given us a revelation which “transcends history”. But can we really say we see the revelation Jesus came to give us? Can we claim to see an actually different reality than the one understood by the “earth-dwellers”?

 

Do We See a Different Reality?

Can the average evangelical church-goer stand still and look at the chaotic and needy world and say along with Jesus, and without a quaver in their spirit, “I am not worried about my life, what I will eat or drink. My main priority is the Kingdom, and I’m going to trust God for the rest” (Mat. 6:25–33 par)? Jesus saw and bore witness to a reality where He could say something like this without shame or embarrassment, because it was true. Jesus didn’t give the sermon on the mount with His tongue in His cheek, He meant every word and expected those who heard Him to take it seriously as the very Word of God.

But the bottom line is, most believers do not see a different reality than their unbelieving neighbors. Nearly every event which occurs in our lives seems perfectly able to be categorized and processed by secular means, without the interference of Jesus’ Word—and if something occurs which slips outside our normal categories, we’re more than content to leave it be, or even cut it out of our lives. It may bother us, as it bothered the disciples, that Jesus did not come to instill some brick-and-mortar utopia, but opted to place His Spirit in the hearts of those who believe and follow Him—but as I stated before, the Word of God must be met on its own grounds, we are never the judge. The Kingdom is indeed invading, but not the kind of invasion that tramples its enemies, forges swords, and takes prisoners—this Kingdom loves enemies, beats swords into plowshares, and sets the prisoners free (Mat. 5:44; Isa. 2:4; Lik. 4:18); this inbreaking invasion of God can be overlooked for now, if we choose. God does not force the revelation upon us, which has been his modus operandi from the very beginning of His redemptive work with people, as C.S. Lewis aptly explains it in The Screwtape Letters, where a senior demon is tutoring his apprentice demon in deception,

You must have often wondered why the Enemy [God] does not make more use of His power to be sensibly present to human souls in any degree He chooses and at any moment. But you now see that the Irresistible and the Indisputable are the two weapons which the very nature of His scheme forbids Him to use. […] He will set them off with communications of His presence which, though faint, seem great to them, with emotional sweetness, and easy conquest over temptation. But He never allows this state of affairs to last long. (C.S. Lewis)

While Lewis covers one aspect of this lack of vision well, that being God’s limiting of His power from our senses, the other side of this effect is our own blindness to God. Jesus comes not only as a bringer of the Kingdom, but as the revealer of the Kingdom. He does not wrestle reality back into straightness, He opens people’s eyes to what God is already doing in His world. The gospel of Luke specifically centers around this theme of Christ revealing God’s rule and reign being done on earth as it is in heaven—which is the DNA of the Kingdom of God.

Shortly after returning from the temptation in the wilderness (Lk. 4:1–14), Jesus goes back to His hometown of Nazareth. There, like normal for a Jewish man, He goes to synagogue on the Sabbath and reads from the scroll of Isaiah, where He reads aloud, what is essentially Isaiah 61:1–2a, cutting short of where it says, “And the day of vengeance of our God” (Is. 61:2),

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,

because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor.

He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives

and the regaining of sight to the blind,

to set free those who are oppressed,

to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor. (Lk. 4:18–19).

Immediately after reading this, Jesus sat down and told them “Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing” (v. 21), and everyone was astonished that He spoke this way. The reason being because He was essentially saying that as He spoke this Scripture it was presently being fulfilled. The Scripture itself has to do with the Hebrew expectation of the rest of the Lord, the return to wholeness with God which brings Shalom, complete, harmonious peace with God. It’s the concept which gave birth to the practice of Sabbath and Jubilee in the Hebrew calendar. This kind of rest and harmony with God harkens all the way back to Eden, when mankind walked shameless with God in His active rule and reign. It’s this very thing which Christ did not only announce in the future—in the age to come—but in the now, with Himself as the vision of the Kingdom and the way of the Kingdom.

As followers of Jesus, we are meant to share this vision with Jesus in our daily life. While God may not be active and apparent to our naked eyes, we know our eyes are deceitful, viewing a deceived and darkened world under the thumb of the deceiver (Jhn. 8:44; cf. Gen. 3:4–5; Job 1:11; Rev. 3:9). Jesus is the “light of the world”, as John reminds us time and again in his writing, lighting up a dark world (Jhn. 8:12). What He does is really and truly unveil reality to us, not necessarily a new reality, so much as it is a new reality to us. Think about it. If you were given a new sense, like how some snakes can see in infrared, you would not be seeing objectively new things, but you would certainly be seeing more than you ever dreamed was already there. However, as you might already be thinking, many of us consider ourselves to be Christians but don’t actively experience this kind of ‘new sight’, or ‘sixth sense’ toward reality as we see it. There are many reasons for this, which I don’t have time to go into in this chapter, but I think the major contributing factor to our persistent spiritual blindness as Christians comes from not taking Jesus seriously at His word.

We are perfectly willing to call ourselves ‘Christians’, attend church, get baptized, and maybe even witness to unbelievers, but if we are not seriously intending to become like Jesus in mind and body, in our will and in our lifestyles, and thereby in our hearts and desires, then we are wasting our time with, what we’ve become fond of calling “Christianity”. True Christianity is life in step with Jesus, knowing His commands and following them, not out of fear, duty, or shame, but out of joy in our new life! This is what Scripture calls that sixth sense, that new way of being in and perceiving reality (Jhn. 3:3–21; 2 Cor. 5:17; Eph. 4:22–24). It is the ability to see the Kingdom of God, and negatively, to see the world properly. As we grow in our ability to see—and it is a process—we discover much of the world we thought mundane or lowly is actually teeming with the life of God, while things we used to esteem and find life-giving turn out to be dead and rotten. But the point of the matter here is, we become increasingly aware of the Kingdom of God as we increasingly draw near to Jesus—and we do that by following His teaching in our lives.

John 14:23 lays it out plainly in Jesus’ words, “If anyone loves Me, he will keep My word; and My Father will love him, and We will come to him and make Our abode with him”. When we obey Jesus’ teaching, we are participating in the healing of our own mangled and bloodied souls. Those who obey Jesus love Him, and in return not only Jesus loves but the Father loves us and they together make their “abode” with us. This is more than just a warm feeling while your praying, this is reentering Eden, this is turning the Fall narrative (Gen. 3) in on itself. As we grow in obedience and love to Jesus, we grow in our deep and foundational love with God; in effect, we become part of the Kingdom of God.

It’s difficult to talk about this topic briefly here, as it really is the core discussion this whole book is written around. What you should come away with here in this short section is our vision of God’s revelation of reality through the Kingdom of God is contingent upon our closeness to the person of Christ. Having our eyes opened to the Kingdom of God is a process, for many a life-long process, which we must actively participate in. God will not make it obvious, He wants us to seek Him—not because it’s all some kind of sick game, but because He wants us to become the kind of people who can live in the Kingdom of God with Jesus and really enjoy Him for eternity.

In seeking, we participate in rebuilding of our souls, in and through Christ. As Dallas Willard says in The Great Omission, “God is not pushy, for now in any case. He is not going to overwhelm you if you don’t want Him. He gives you the power to put Him out of your mind, and even if you want Him, you have to seek Him.” God, and therefore reality, is not the kind of thing that will reveal truth to you unsolicited. We have to fill our minds with Christ and let everything else slip to the periphery if we want to really know the truth and see reality honestly. We must let His light touch every part of our lives until there is nothing left that is not completely enraptured by the very thought of Jesus. It may seem a distant and crazy idea now, but once you have laid eyes on the Kingdom you’ll never feel more fulfilled than when you’re seeking it. This is what this book is about, and although the next chapters are dedicated to tracing the shape and function of the Kingdom of God throughout the story of Scripture, you may want to skip ahead to the next unit if this topic has piqued your interest. Admittedly it is impossible to go into it adequately here, and I do so more satisfactorily later on.

This leads us into our third and final assumption, that Jesus Christ is Himself the revelation of the Word of God leading us into the Kingdom of God. While certain traditions may see it as helplessly biased to start with Christ and read the rest of Scripture backward, I hold that a knowledge of Scripture which is not read through the lens of Christ is irredeemably warped. While it may be argued that this approach is a fallacy, putting the cart before the horse, this argument can be exposed to rest on the assumption that Jesus was both introducing a new religion contrary to that of the Hebrew Scriptures, and that such an event as Christ’s revealing of the Kingdom was not anticipated by the writers of the Hebrew Scripture—both assumptions are incorrect.

By Jesus’ own admission He did not come to eradicate the Law of Moses, nore it’s practice among God’s people (Mat. 5:17), He did not come under the banner of “Christianity”, in fact the first churches were frequently mistaken for synagogues and Christians were consistently lumped with the greater body of Jewish worshippers by ruling powers. The reason for this was because followers of Jesus did not consider themselves a divergent entity to Judaism. They saw themselves as the followers of true Judaism, under the direction and in the life of the Messiah God had spoken of through the prophets. Understandably they did not label themselves either racially or formally religiously, taking on the unassuming title of followers of “the Way” (Acts 9:2, 19:9, 19:23). This new identity did not primarily attach anyone to anything earthly, either nations, races, or cultures, but instead it linked human identity to the Vine, the Way, the bridge between us and life in the Kingdom of God. This is the kind of life that goes on being available to us today, and is available only through Jesus and His teaching. It’s from this perspective that I will continue in the following chapters to uncover the developing narrative of the Kingdom of God from page one of the Bible to the end, from Eden to Patmos. You may be surprised just how long the Kingdom of God has been staring you in the face in the Scriptures.