“The Kingdom of God - The Lord’s and Christ’s”

Tonight, let us ‘consider Jesus’ again, specifically in the sphere of the kingdom of God belonging to Christ and His reclamation of it.

For this, we will continue looking at the Scripture in John 12:44-50, as well as Isaiah 41:20. 

Our primary point of study these past two weeks has been about the foremost issue in religious circles today: that of the resistance to equating God with Jesus Christ alone.

The world’s view is an amalgamation of taking the best from all and molding it into one so that all reach God in his own way.

But God, through Isaiah, spoke to His own people and to the nations about worshipping objects of their own inventions.

And to each one, He held out His arms of reconciliation by promising to reveal Himself to them through His Servant Messiah, Jesus Christ.

So His Servant, when He came, clearly said: ‘He that believes in Me does not believe in Me but in Him that sent Me. And He that beholds Me beholds Him that did send Me.’ (Jn 12:44-45)

In other words, Jesus said He is the exact and perfect revelation of God, the perfect portrait of Him.

He made the invisible God become visible to men on Whom men can believe and worship.

To behold Him, to look at Him, is to behold God, to see God.

And Jesus went on to say, ‘I have come as a light for the world in order that everyone that believes in Me may not remain in darkness.’ (v 46)

God had said of the purpose of this revelation of Himself  centuries earlier, ‘‘That they may see, and know, and consider, and understand together, that the hand of the Lord hath done this, and the Holy One of Israel hath created it.’

So, a man could now step out of his own darkness and step into that blinding revelation of God in the face of Jesus Christ to see God.

But why did the Almighty God approach mankind as He did? 

That the nations are sought and even given this open door to see Him, that prodigal Israel could return, that salvation could be extended to all people is only true and possible because God’s Son is the only Messiah able. 

For - only in Him could the light of God’s kingdom come!

All too often, we forget the fact that His wondrous plan of redemption began in the heart of the Triune God, was extended to the earth from His heart, and was designed to reveal to man His heart.

And we forget that it is a heart of a powerful, mighty, astonishing love - that it is a heart of unexplainable, inexhaustible, flawless love that it manifests.

And that it was only Christ Who could hold the entire universe together to reveal that tremendous fact! None other is worthy!

Only Jesus, the Son of Man, was invested by God with all power and authority for the revelation of God’s dominion. None other can assert this uniqueness!

‘All things were created through Him and for Him. He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together.’

‘For in Him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily,...Who is the head of all rule and authority.’

The very Person of Jesus Christ showed Himself to be the cohesion of all things!

God not only ‘...wants all men to be saved...’, but He also wants all ‘...to come to a knowledge of the truth.’ (1 Tim 2:4)

And the truth is that ‘the kingdoms of this world are to become the kingdoms of the Lord, and of His Christ.’ 
(Rev 11:15) None other equates with God.

God’s desire for the nations was that the world be nothing less than, and nothing other than, the Lord’s Kingdom that is also Christ’s kingdom!

Daniel wrote that to the Son of Man shall be given ‘...
dominion, and glory, and a kingdom, that all people, nations, and languages, should serve Him: His dominion is an everlasting dominion, which shall not pass away, and His kingdom that which shall not be destroyed.’ (Dan 7:13-14)

There is no amalgamation in this! There are none who can add to Jesus Christ!

This is why God called the nations to a court hearing about the object of their worship!

This is why Christ challenged the non-believing about their conceptions of ‘God’ and how to reach Him!

Both needed correction. Both still need correction today!

Jesus’ sayings and teachings are the exact fulfillment of all the prophecies of old.

‘He revealed the actuality, the realization of what had been preached by the prophets long ago...’.

‘...This is the significance of His teachings: they bring home to all...that the past has been brought to fulfillment in the present...or, to put it in a Messianic way, the way in which the salvation of the kingdom has become an actual reality.’

For this reason God stood behind all the work of Christ for which God had sent Christ.

He and Jesus worked together as one - they were not different one from the other. This cannot be said of any other being who is presently matched with God!

So, when God looked upon the nations, He saw men entertaining terrifying notions of gods and their horrifying, deluding powers.

They believed in gods in every hill and valley, on every mountain top - gods breathing down their necks in the wind and in the lightning, in the sun’s rays, in the stars, in the whole heavens.  

To their minds, the whole atmosphere was demon-populated with legions of spiritual forces intent on destroying them with nothing good in mind for them.

It was this blight of sin upon men that moved the heart of God to approach the nations and to cure the disconnection.

Jesus, in His infinite perfection, is declared to be linked with His heavenly Father, one with Him, the only Eternal Son of Man of this revelation!

And when Jesus came to reveal God’s heart, to the scribe who seemed to grasp something of the depth and scope of God’s work, He said of him: ‘Thou art not far from the kingdom of God’. 

But - Jesus also saw how hostile many were.

He saw how ill-advised their expectations and ideas were.

So Christ offered Himself to order their misguided and ineffectual lives according to the divine mind.

He gave Himself so men’s destiny to be made into the stature of His image could be reached and so that God’s heart is complimented and His kingdom completed.

In His Messiah, the Christ, ‘the temple of God was opened in heaven.’ (Rev 11:19)

It is Jesus Who applied the new conditions necessary toward reclaiming, or redeeming, God’s kingdom upon earth.

He promised not to ‘judge’ the one who does not believe the fact of His divinity - the fact of revealing God’s heart of love to save.

He promised, instead, to give man ample opportunity to receive and believe and heed Him so that His people could come to completion in Him.

He spoke of the need of repentance as the way of entering His kingdom.

He explained the advantage and the benefit of it.

He showed, by example, the kind of life the citizens were expected to live in it.

And He gave those parts of the new spiritual conception the dynamic of His power to carry them onward.

How would He do that?

‘Everything in Him became ordered, orderly, and reliable!’

He took the truths of God’s rule and He dealt - and deals - personally with each man’s heart.

He dealt with the ‘inner man’. He implanted those truths into the heart to change it according to His likeness.

And it was the changed heart that gave the power to live so that those truths become the ‘now’ part of His kingdom.

And He explained how that rule would prepare them for that day of final judgment.  

Imagine what it must have been, and what it is now, in some cultures and religious circles today, to be battered about by merciless gods, as the ancients were, and by men, as we see in our day!

‘If we had nothing left to believe in except that at the heart of things there is a cynical power that makes mockery of men...’, then we - most certainly - would be ‘...of all men most miserable.’ 

We know there are times in our lives when this one conviction is all we have to hold on to.

When completely unexplainable things happen to us, when we experience much physical pain, or when our hearts break for one reason or another, or when we are bewildered, it makes a world of difference to be sure that - behind it, through it, and over it all - there is the secure hold of the powerful love of God through Jesus Christ. 

But, since Christ has opened up to us God’s kingdom and has shown men the reality of the Triune God into which our very hearts are encased, we know that life, in all of its trials, is bearable.

In the changed heart which is ‘Christ-in-us’, man can rest in the insulated cushion of God’s out-stretched, powerful arms?

It is of little wonder, then, that He promised not to ‘judge’ the one who does not believe that He came to save and to give him ample opportunity to receive and believe and heed Him. 

And it is, also, of little wonder that He was so implicit about the kind of persons entering His kingdom.

It will do well to remember that the day will come when the truth of what follows, in v 48 of Jn 12, is what makes man ripe for the final judgment.

‘He that rejecteth Me, and receiveth not My words, hath one that judgeth him: the word that I have spoken, the same shall judge him in the last day.’  

It would be very wise to make a serious study for yourself of those sayings and teachings of Jesus about the character of those excluded from the kingdom.

It probably can all be reduced to resistance and dissent to Christ and His standards of life in His kingdom.

That protest remains the recurring point, even to the blending together of the religious themes of our day.

The problem is that when this resistance becomes the hardened habit of life, humanity shrivels and remains in darkness about God and His Christ.

But, as the guard against this error that puts God and His Christ alongside of another, the Church comes into focus.

The Church is the network of solidarity that gives constant mutual support and correction in the light of Christ’s kingdom.  

We hear so much today of splits and of deviations and of heresies and of departures from the knowledge of God’s truth.    

But - take heart - for, in spite of such evil, God goes on to make the kingdoms of this world, His kingdom and the kingdom of His Christ.

It remains just as Jesus said in Mt 13:41 and 43.

‘The Son of Man shall send forth His angels, and they shall gather out of His kingdom all things that cause stumbling and all them that do iniquity.’

‘Then shall the righteous shine forth as the sun in the kingdom of their Father.’  

That is the assurance the Church has in its faith in Jesus Christ alone.

I will leave it here for tonight. May the Lord bless this to our hearts this week. 

Amen.