Seek First the Kingdom of God and His Righteousness

Fewer topics are as important as the kingdom of God. Fewer topics get more twisted and distorted than this one. I am writing about this topic now with a bit of fear and trepidation because I have seen how easily it’s been misunderstood, and who am I to muddy up what others with very good intentions and more intelligence than me have failed to elucidate?

This topic is important for missionaries to get right. We don’t want to go out and build our own little kingdoms on earth. We are ambassadors for an other-worldly kingdom, establishing embassies on earth, called churches, for God’s campaign to storm the gates of hell and steal away souls from the clutches of the evil one. And when we preach God’s kingdom, we must get it right.

How do we get this right? Well, first things first. How are we going to make sense of the kingdom of God? Immerse yourself in God’s word. Yes, there are tons of commentaries out there, but there is nothing like pure intake from the natural source of living water. Sure, you’ll be bringing your own preconceived notions to your reading, and you’ll have biases and blind spots that you don’t know about. But with all simplicity and integrity of heart, commit yourself to being as open and as malleable as possible. The Spirit of God will use the Word of God to change you. Trust God to use his means to transform you.

With that in mind, I then offer two helpful guardrails, to keep us from falling off into the ditch on either side of biblical thinking about the kingdom.  It’s clear from Jesus’ interaction with the Jews that they had one idea of what the kingdom meant, and it looked very different than what Jesus was teaching them. It’s also clear from history that the church hasn’t done such a hot job of getting this right either. So, here are my two guardrails, and they both have to do with our understanding of the end times.

1. Watch out for an over-realized eschatology.

That’s a big term that means that our thinking and expectations are too far into the future. We don’t rightly situate ourselves between the first and second coming of Christ, and we expect that the kingdom is here more than it already is. The kingdom of this world has not yet become the kingdom of our Christ. When Jesus returns, all will be made right. Perfect justice and peace will come. But now, as we await his return, we should not expect everything to look like heaven. One way that this over-realized eschatology can show itself in our thinking and our missions is too much emphasis on the universal church. We like to think about that time when every knee will bow, and every tongue will confess. We like to imagine that our churches now will be completely multicultural and look like the throne room multitudes from every tribe and nation in worship in Revelation 5 and 7. While those scenes should certainly motivate us and drive much of our activity now to produce churches that look more and more like that, we need to get our heads back down to reality and remember that the local church has not yet been swallowed up into that one body in worship around the throne. The necessary reality of life lived before the return of Christ is God’s intention to use a whole bunch of small local churches spreading out all over the globe, preaching the gospel to their unique languages and cultures. And over-realized eschatology can see missionaries downplay the importance and necessity of local churches. People can talk about the church as the universal church, and fellowship, accountability and missions all coming from that larger body. But the fact of the matter is that a perfectly unified single entity church is not God’s design right now. God has specific purposes for local churches right now as they each seek to obey the Great Commission.

2. Watch out for an under-realized eschatology.

That’s a big term that means that our thinking and expectations are too far in the past. We don’t rightly situate ourselves between the first and second coming of Christ, and we think about kingdom in terms of the nation of Israel. God’s old covenant with Israel was not meant to last. It was meant to fade away into something far better, where the Spirit would dwell inside every believer as embassies of believers in churches would shine the light of God spreading out all over the earth, rather than in one place where God made his presence to dwell. A great change has occurred with the coming of Jesus in the flesh. The fullness of time has come and the tutor that led us to Christ is no longer needed. We are to learn from Israel, but we are not to become like Israel. We must appreciate the distinct reality of the New Covenant that is more than simply the dissolution and replacement of specific cultic and civil mandates. An under-realized eschatology also does not appreciate the uniqueness of the local church, but this error downplays the church in a different way. Now, you might see Christians pining for a Christian kingdom on this earth, made in the image of the nation of Israel. Such a longing fails to appreciate the value of the church as it currently is. This is a very attractive position, because we care about our nation and the culture around us. We rightly mourn the degradation of righteousness in society. Yes, we seek the good of the nation while we live here, but we are citizens of heaven. We are promised that the nations of this earth will rage against the Son and all the children of God. Hope is only found in the renewal of our hearts and the people of God in the church through faith in Jesus Christ. One day our faith will be turned to sight when Jesus returns. And only on that day will all the nations be judged and subjugated to the King of Kings.

This is obviously not a comprehensive explanation of these ideas, but it is a basic framework. We are prone to fall into the ditches on either side of our eschatology. We are in the end times. Jesus has declared that his kingdom has come, and all those who have faith in him enter into that kingdom now. The task of global missions is going into all the world and preaching the gospel of the kingdom of God, persuading others to be reconciled to God, and seeing God transfer them from the kingdom of darkness to the kingdom of His beloved Son. The kingdom has been inaugurated, and the king sits on the throne. Yet, all of his enemies are not yet put under his feet. We wait for the day when he returns, and with the breath of his mouth he defeats every last foe raised against him. With patience and trembling we wait for that day, praying “Come, Lord Jesus and make peace with a final judgment.” Until that day, we invest ourselves into the outposts of his kingdom here on earth, the local church.