Category: Advent

Merry Christmas from Jay and Rhonda.

We join you in celebrating the newborn King of Christmas, our Savior Jesus Christ.  But let’s not end the celebration with the babe in the manger.  On this journey over the past 20 days, we have visited as a cause for celebration just a few highlights of what the Savior King came to accomplish in ushering in His kingdom into our lives.  If you have believed His gospel message … you are now, yes now, in the here and now, a citizen of the kingdom of God.

“But our citizenship is in heaven, and from it we await a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, who will transform our lowly body to be like his glorious body, by the power that enables him even to subject all things to himself” (Philippians 3:20-21).  Our spiritual citizenship already exists in the kingdom of heaven.  But we wait patiently for our earth-suit, our physical body, to be redeemed as well.  That final redemption is coming, coming on the wings of our Lord as He returns for a second time.  So we wait in anticipation and whisper, “Come Lord Jesus!”

“And I saw heaven opened, and behold, a white horse, and He who sat on it is called Faithful and True, and in righteousness He judges and wages war.  His eyes are a flame of fire, and on His head are many diadems … He is clothed with a robe dipped in blood, and His name is called The Word of God.  And the armies which are in heaven, clothed in fine linen, white and clean, were following Him on white horses … And on His robe and on His thigh He has a name written, “KING OF KINGS, AND LORD OF LORDS.” (Revelation 19:11-16).

“Now the salvation, and the power, and the kingdom of our God and the authority of His Christ have come” (Revelation 12:10).

“The kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of His Christ; and He will reign forever and ever” (Revelation 11:15).

Yes, come Lord Jesus.  Yes, reign Lord Jesus.  Until that day, based on all that Christ did FOR US and all that He did TO US, we reign in this life.  “For if by the transgression of the one, death reigned through the one, much more those who receive the abundance of grace and of the gift of righteousness will reign in life through the One, Jesus Christ” (Roman 5:17).

The Apostle Paul wrote, “Giving thanks to the Father, who has qualified us to share in the inheritance of the saints in light.  For He delivered us from the domain of darkness, and transferred us to the kingdom of His beloved Son.” (Colossians 1:12-13).  When we believe the gospel message of Jesus Christ by faith, we enter into the kingdom of God; right here, right now.

“[He] qualified us.”  We have a right to be here.  We have our papers, if you will.  We have the qualifications, in Christ, to be here in the new kingdom.  “He delivered us.”  He rescued us.  He saved us from the penalty and ongoing power of sin.  “[He] transferred us.”  We have been transferred to a new kingdom.  We have left the kingdom of darkness, the kingdom of Satan, and arrived at our new home in the kingdom of “His beloved Son.”  We have not had a new wing added to our old house.  We have been plucked from our old habitation and dropped into an entirely new castle of our King.  We have a new home in the kingdom of God.

God has placed inside us a longing for home.  By God’s grace and revelation, we have found our way back home.  It was a longing the Old Testament saints felt as well.

“By faith Abraham lived as an alien in the land of promise, as in a foreign land, dwelling in tents with Isaac and Jacob, fellow heirs of the same promise; for he was looking for the city which has foundations, whose architect and builder is God” (Hebrews 11:9-10).  Abraham longed for his true home.  But the way home was waiting to be fulfilled in Jesus.  “And all these, having gained approval through their faith, did not receive what was promised, because God had provided something better for us, so that apart from us they would not be made perfect” (Hebrews 11:39-40).

 That “something better” is Jesus.  We have truly found our way home in His kingdom.

We enter the kingdom of God by faith.  We often think those who saw Jesus in person must have had an easier time embracing Him than those of us who came after and must come to Him by faith; not having seen, heard, or touched Him in the flesh.  But the faith requirement was just as real for Jesus’ contemporaries as it is for us.  We require faith because we did not see Jesus in the flesh.  They require faith for the very reason they did see Jesus in the flesh.

Look at this exchange in John chapter 6.  “Jesus said to them, ‘I am the bread of life; he who comes to Me shall not hunger, and he who believes in Me will never thirst…For I have come down from heaven…’  The Jews therefore were grumbling about Him, because He said, ‘I am the bread that came down from heaven.’ And they were saying, ‘Is this not Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know?  How does He now say, “I have come down out of heaven”?’ “ (John 6:35,38,41-42).

Their faith requirement was to overcome the fact that they knew Jesus’ beginnings, or so they thought.  Jesus is making the basic proclamation, teaching the crowds in John chapters 5 and 6 and announced loudly at the feast in chapter 7, that He is indeed the giver of eternal life, the Messiah come down from heaven.  To the Jews this makes no sense.  The Messiah will come explosively and with power.  “We know where you came from Jesus.  You are the child born to Joseph and Mary of Nazareth.”  Besides knowing Jesus as a child, they also were sure that “the Christ is not going to come from Galilee, is He?” (John 7:41).  They knew where Jesus grew up among the common citizens of Nazareth.  In the Jewish mind, to quote the late Keith Green, “Messiahs don’t grow up from little boys.”

The entry on “faith” in The Zondervan Pictorial Bible Dictionary sums up well the first century faith requirement.  “A principal reason for the word faith appearing so often in the New Testament is the New Testament claim that the promised Messiah had finally come, and to the bewilderment of many, the form of the fulfillment did not obviously correspond to the Messianic promise.  It required a real act of faith to believe that Jesus of Nazareth was the promised Messiah.  It was not long before ‘to believe’ meant to become a Christian.  In the New Testament, faith therefore becomes supreme of all human acts and experiences.”

I believe one reason Jesus public appearances following His resurrection were so rare, at least in what we have documented, is because we too have a faith requirement to enter His kingdom just like the first century believers.  “To believe” is to enter the kingdom of God by faith.  Faith that Jesus of Nazareth was the Christ, the Anointed One, the Messiah, and faith that His finished work on the cross, confirmed by His resurrection, paid the price for our sin.  We enter the kingdom of God by faith.

This framework of how Jesus did and did not fit the expectations of His first-century audience and how Jesus, the secret king, set up His secret kingdom brings so much depth to our own understanding of Jesus’ words, actions, and events of the Gospels.  And it explains the reaction to Him that sometimes puzzles us.  The Jews tried to interpret the coming of the Messiah with a distinctively Old Testament mindset.  Of course, this makes sense to us now as this was the revelation they had.  And it was God’s revelation.

Throughout the Scriptures, God’s revelation is always true, but not always complete.  We cringe at the idea of God’s revelation being progressive.  We don’t want to hear anything that may alter our understanding of our eternal God; the same yesterday, today, and forever.  Please understand the difference.  The character and attributes of God have never changed and will never change.  He is without beginning and without end, always the holy and unique God of creation.  There is nothing progressive about God’s character or attributes.  But His revelation is progressive.

At the time of Christ, most Jews – scholars included – were totally unprepared for Who was coming and the manner in which He came.  They expected the Messiah to arrive explosively and carry out His judgment and restoration immediately.  The arrival of the Messiah would be the clear demarcation between the old age and the new age (See upper chart below).  Both a casual or detailed reading of the Old Testament fit this picture.

Given the advantage of hindsight regarding our Lord Jesus Christ and the explanation of the New Testament writers, we see that the Old Testament was actually announcing two comings.  At His first coming, Jesus came to usher in the kingdom of God through His death on a cross providing the way for us to be saved from our sins and to become citizens of God’s kingdom.  Salvation was the plan for Jesus’ first coming.  And as we learned from the parable of the wheat and the weeds, God’s kingdom and the kingdom of Satan now exist together here upon the earth (See lower chart below).  Judgment was not the goal of Jesus’ first coming which He made clear in both word and action.

Jesus’ second coming will finally usher in the Great and Awesome Day of the Lord.  And Jesus will fulfill all the Old Testament prophesies regarding vengeance, judgment, and His righteousness covering the earth.  Satan’s kingdom will be brought to an end and God’s kingdom, currently underground if you will, will become public in dramatic fashion and will continue forever.  The secret king will be worshipped by all and take His rightful place on a public throne.

The miracle of the resurrection is the cornerstone of our faith and without it we are of most men to be pitied (I Corinthians 15:19).  Its publicity, however, is the opposite of the Palm Sunday drama.  The drama of the resurrection is that it was witnessed by very few people.  It was basically a private event.  Have you ever thought about that?  We, including the Apostle Paul in I Corinthians 15, like to use eyewitness testimony to support our claim that Jesus did indeed rise from the dead, as we should.  And Jesus did make enough public appearances to provide a foundation for our faith.  But think about the numbers.  The best Paul can come up with at one time is 500?  Yes, 500.

Where are the appearances before 5000?  What about an appearance in the temple, a place where Jesus had regularly addressed the crowds just a week earlier?  Would that have been helpful?  Where are the appearances before the skeptics, the Pharisees, and the rulers?  For some reason, following His resurrection, Jesus took His kingdom almost completely underground.  Have you ever thought about that?  So many public appearances in Jesus’ former life, and then very few after His resurrection.

So to summarize the timeline of events surrounding the announcement of the coming of the kingdom, we have the following:

• Jesus’ early ministry:  announced the arrival of the kingdom of God.
• Jesus’ earthly ministry:  public, but downplayed the King title.
• Palm Sunday:  public, and embraced the King title.
• Death:  public place of execution, witnessed by many.
• Resurrection:  private, witnessed by very few people.
• Ascension:  Very private, by invitation only.  And poof, Jesus was gone, back to heaven.

And this is where we live today; citizens of a secret kingdom.  But secret does not mean powerless.  Remember the kingdom of God is within us.  And the same power that raised Christ from the dead infuses the citizens of His kingdom.  It really is a kingdom not of this world.  It is a kingdom that is largely invisible to this world.  At the same time, it is a kingdom of supernatural citizens whose true home is somewhere else; citizens who truly are “in the world but not of it.”