After John’s arrest, Jesus went to the Galilee preaching God’s gospel, saying this:
“The time has come, and God’s Kingdom has been put in reach. Repent! Trust the gospel!” —Jesus, Mark 1.14-15 KWL
The gospel of Christ Jesus is summed up in verse 15:
Yet most folks who supposedly preach the gospel, don’t preach that. Instead they preach on the sacrificial death of Jesus, and how he saved us, and claim that’s the gospel. It’s not. It’s how Jesus achieved the Kingdom—it’s how he put it in reach. It’s only a part of the gospel; it’s the part that explains why God would bother to give us sinners his Kingdom in the first place. Being forgiven, saved, and given abundant grace, is definitely good news. But it is not the good news that Jesus preached. The Kingdom—and all it entails—is.
Why isn’t the Kingdom preached? Two reasons, both based on the two things Jesus said after stating what the gospel is.
No repentance.
The handy thing about being saved by grace, as it is preached in many of our churches, is that we don’t really have to repent to do it.
Oh, we practice what the culture calls repentance: We feel bad. We feel sorry for our sins; sorry for the fact we’re miserable sinners. We feel awful about our messed-up lifestyles and really wish Jesus would fix them. We might even cry a little. Or a lot.
But to repent, following the Christian definition, is to not do that again. It’s to change your mind, to turn away from your previous thinking and previous practices. It’s to change your lifestyle—in this instance, to replace it with a Kingdom lifestyle.
Well, Christians don‘t do that. We don’t change our lifestyles. Instead we slap a coat of Christianese paint over it. Instead of “evil rock music,” we listen to “positive, encouraging, safe-for-the-whole-family” Christian pop. Instead of freaky non-marital sex that takes the partner for granted, we have freaky marital sex that takes the spouse for granted. Instead of abusing alcohol, we abuse energy drinks. Or we appear to do all those things for our church friends, and hide our otherwise pagan lifestyles from them. We don’t change. Why bother? We’re saved by grace, and expect to get the Kingdom anyway. Even though we’ll be totally unprepared for it.
After all, if repentance is nothing more than feeling bad, well, we’ve done that. So we needn’t do more. We’re saved by grace, not works, so let’s do no works.
Nope, this attitude looks nothing like what Jesus teaches. But that’s Christianity as it is practiced.
No trusting the gospel.
The gospel is that the Kingdom is in reach. If we trusted this gospel, we wouldn’t just live like Jesus is returning today to set it up; we’d live like he doesn’t need to return it today to set it up, ’cause we could get started in anticipation of him, like wedding planners getting the reception room ready before the groom arrives.
We don’t do that either. The Kingdom, in many Christians’ minds, won’t come till Jesus returns, and if the Left Behind folks are to be believed, that day will always be seven years from now. ’Cause in their timeline, all the Christians are supposed to vanish in a secret Rapture, and Jesus returns seven years later. So since we haven’t disappeared yet, of course the Kingdom isn’t coming anytime soon. Seven years away is so far. (Plus, during those seven years, the Antichrist is gonna run amok, so why set anything up when he’ll just pull it all down?)
For others, the Kingdom has been pushed off into the neverland of “heaven,” and we’ll only encounter it after we die. Either way, it’s not in reach. Christians don’t live in expectation or preparation of it. We don’t reform because we don’t believe we’ve anything to reform for.
Internal now, external later.
Part of the problem is the word “kingdom.” People still think of it in terms of an earthly kingdom—an imposed order, forced upon us by a king whose word is law, and who will enforce it one way or another. Many Christians seriously do think that once the Kingdom arrives in its fullness, God will fix us: We won’t sin anymore because God will rewire us, reprogram us, lobotomize us, so we automatically do good. Part of our free will is going to be extracted so that we can’t sin. Then, thanks to Jesus’s heavenly mind control, we’ll live forever, happy and content… because we’ll never know to be otherwise.
None of this idea is biblical. The only thing God intends to extract from us is our natural tendency to sin, meaning we—like the first humans before they sinned—won’t automatically do the self-centered thing. But free will means we’re always going to have the ability to obey God or not. The difference is that we, exactly like Jesus, will never choose to disobey. We’ll obey, because we immediately recognize the value in it.
This is why the Kingdom is within us. It’s not an imposed order. It’s an embraced order. If everyone chooses to obey the law, you don’t need police to enforce the law. In the same way, the Kingdom works because the people in it choose to live like God instructs. And the Kingdom can work now if people now choose to live like God instructs, regardless of whether Jesus is physically present among us.
Christians don’t get this. We’re surrounded by human institutions, and far too used to imposed order. In our churches, we have rules, and consequences if people break them. In our nation, we try to pass laws that reflect God’s order—with, again, consequences of people break them. We assume it pleases God to impose this order on others, and “return our country to its traditional values,” because people won’t be breaking God’s laws, and isn’t that what God wants most?
No. God wants internal change. Lawlessness is only a symptom. Imposed order only treats that symptom. It doesn’t cure it. It is a false solution. It is, contrary to popular belief, not God’s way; not in the slightest. It is the devil’s way.
Imposed order produces hypocrites, who hide their lawlessness yet still practice it. It encourages people to seek power rather than God. It encourages control, not submission. It seeks mastery, not the Master. There is no “think again” necessary when a Kingdom is imposed upon us; we are discouraged from thinking, because thinking might cause real change, and a revolution. Those of us who do think are encouraged to bottle it, stifle it, keep it “personal” and “private” in a way that affects and offends no one, and become just as much a hypocrite as those who seek power—for even though on the inside we seek God, on the outside we conform.
While Jesus wants a revolution, he still wants it to be internal, not political. And an internal revolution will leak out of us, and begin to affect the world around us—not in ways that seize power, but in ways that surrender power to God, and in so doing point others to him. The Kingdom recognizes the King that we do not enthrone by force: He already has the Kingdom, and there is nothing more for us to do but serve him.
That’s the gospel. Repent. Trust it.