the gospel of the kingdom

“Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.”

John the Baptist first, and then Jesus Christ Himself both speak these exact words in the first few chapters of the Gospel of Matthew. Jesus goes on to refer to the kingdom of heaven some four dozen times throughout His ministry as recorded by Matthew. It’s the primary focus of His teachings. Matthew 4:23 says, “Jesus was going throughout all Galilee, teaching in their synagogues and proclaiming the gospel of the kingdom, and healing every kind of disease and every kind of sickness among the people.”

As I follow this thread through the book, highlighting each use of the phrase “kingdom of heaven” or related terminology, I wonder: Where did this all begin? What does He mean, “the kingdom of heaven”? What is its gospel?

Of course, I know the Sunday school answers to these questions. I could give you a few verse references that define the Gospel from Paul’s letters, for example. But far too often we fill in the spaces between the lines with our Sunday school knowledge instead of the rich backdrop that Scripture itself provides. So I ask—how did we arrive at Matthew 4 from the pathway of 39 books of the Hebrew Scriptures? What would Jesus’ contemporary Jewish listeners (who had never been to Sunday school) have heard when He said “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand”? John and Jesus didn’t pull this phrase out of thin air—it must have a context.

Matthew gives us a clue into that context when he introduces John the Baptist:

Now in those days John the Baptist came, preaching in the wilderness of Judea, saying, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” For this is the one referred to by Isaiah the prophet when he said,

“The voice of one crying in the wilderness,
‘Make ready the way of the Lord,
Make His paths straight!’”

Matthew 3:1-3

The prophetic quotation comes from Isaiah chapter 40 and is what rabbinic teaching would have called a “remez”—a hint. The quote contains only Isaiah 40:3, but it is intended to guide us to a much broader passage, possibly even the entire sixth scroll of Isaiah (which would encompass chapters 40-48). So let’s pull back from verse 3 for a wider view:

“Comfort, O comfort My people,” says your God.
“Speak kindly to Jerusalem;
And call out to her, that her warfare has ended,
That her iniquity has been removed,
That she has received of the Lord’s hand
Double for all her sins.”

A voice is calling,
“Clear the way for the Lord in the wilderness;
Make smooth in the desert a highway for our God.
“Let every valley be lifted up,
And every mountain and hill be made low;
And let the rough ground become a plain,
And the rugged terrain a broad valley;
Then the glory of the Lord will be revealed,
And all flesh will see it together;
For the mouth of the Lord has spoken.”
A voice says, “Call out.”
Then he answered, “What shall I call out?”

Isaiah 40:1-6

The poem paints us a picture. Can you see it? Watch! The very earth is smoothing the way for a mighty King’s arrival. The valleys rise and the mountains flatten so that the path for His royal procession may be clear. A voice urges—“Call out!” But what’s the announcement? What is the news?

Get yourself up on a high mountain,
O Zion, bearer of good news,
Lift up your voice mightily,
O Jerusalem, bearer of good news;
Lift it up, do not fear.
Say to the cities of Judah,
“Here is your God!”
Behold, the Lord God will come with might,
With His arm ruling for Him.
Behold, His reward is with Him
And His recompense before Him.
Like a shepherd He will tend His flock,
In His arm He will gather the lambs
And carry them in His bosom;
He will gently lead the nursing ewes.

Isaiah 40:9-11

There it is—the good news, the gospel of the kingdom, the source of John the Baptist’s cry for repentance: “Here is your God!” Here is the King! He is returning to His domain, to the kingdom that has been shattered by the enemy, and taking it back from its foes. He is rescuing His people from their imprisonment—their “iniquity has been removed” (Isaiah 40:2) and “The people who walk in darkness will see a great light” (Isaiah 9:2a).

How lovely on the mountains
Are the feet of him who brings good news,
Who announces peace
And brings good news of happiness,
Who announces salvation,
And says to Zion, “Your God reigns!”
Listen! Your watchmen lift up their voices,
They shout joyfully together;
For they will see with their own eyes
When the Lord restores Zion.
Break forth, shout joyfully together,
You waste places of Jerusalem;
For the Lord has comforted His people,
He has redeemed Jerusalem.
The Lord has bared His holy arm
In the sight of all the nations,
That all the ends of the earth may see
The salvation of our God.

Isaiah 52:7-9

Your God reigns—source of salvation, author of restoration, pursuer of redemption.

He is mighty. He is sovereign. He is generous. He is gentle. He is holy.

He is coming.

The King is coming. This is the good news. And there is only one appropriate response to His imminent enthronement: Repent.

When John the Baptist and the Lord Jesus Christ preach, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand,” they aren’t handing out tickets to paradise or get-out-of-hell-free cards. They aren’t even calling for the overthrow of Rome and the return to Israel’s golden age, which is what the Jewish people desperately hoped. Instead, they are announcing that the God of the Universe has come to reclaim the world from the clutches of death, and summoning each and every soul to declare an allegiance.

It’s an invitation to become a citizen of a different country, to be adopted into the Royal Family, to claim an undeserved inheritance of eternal life.

In this kingdom, it is the helpless who are most powerful, the meek who are richest, the hated who are blessed. In this kingdom, “the wolf will dwell with the lamb, and the leopard will lie down with the young goat, and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little boy will lead them” (Isaiah 11:6). In this kingdom, “the last shall be first, and the first last” (Matthew 20:16), and “whoever wishes to become great among you shall be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you shall be your slave” (Matthew 20:26-27).

This kingdom has been won by a King whose crown was made of thorns—who was raised up not on a throne, but on a cross. He was a Prince who came to be a servant. The Creator of all life who came to die.

Friends, I have good news: Your God reigns! The King has come, and He is coming again. He has won back His kingdom, and He is returning to rule over it. It looks nothing like the kingdoms of this world, but it is the kingdom our souls hunger for. We are all welcome in. We must only repent, exchanging our trust and allegiance to ourselves for trust and allegiance to the King, and receiving His forgiveness for our sins.

the kingdom of heaven

For most of my life I’ve had dreams that were far larger than my actual potential. Dreams of becoming a famous author, a renowned photographer, a household-name Bible teacher—for as long as I can remember I’ve wanted to be somebody.

The older I get, the smaller and closer to home my dreams become. I think this is due in equal parts to becoming more realistic, more complacent, and more self-aware. I used to be able to conjure up an imaginary version of myself who enjoyed the apparent glamour of doing a nationwide book tour for my New York Times bestseller, but now, exactly nothing sounds appealing about becoming a glorified traveling salesman whose product is me.

As I continually learn from God, watching Him so slowly and patiently do the work of a Farmer cultivating earth’s harvest, the dreams that once seemed so pressing lose their urgency, along with some of their shine. In their place, a fascination with the glorious mundane takes root—and the small spaces where the first rumblings of world-change always begin, person by person, moment by moment, surrender by surrender.

I asked Sam a few weeks ago, “Do you think it’s dumb if my dream job is just to go back to work at Spuds part-time?” It wasn’t so very long ago that the thought of being satisfied with such a small position in life would have been preposterous to me. But doing the manual work of sorting produce and stocking freight, peppered with cheerful interactions with customers, showed me a little of what I think God intended when He designed work as a good and necessary part of human existence. He made us to work, and to glorify Him in the very doing of it, so that it matters little what kind of work it actually is—big or small, grand or humble, meaningful or mundane. It can nourish the soul and magnify the Creator and bear witness of Him to others, regardless.

And the same can be said for the up-and-down, meaningful-as-well-as-mundane work that is child-rearing, though I feel plenty of words have already been spent on this topic, so I don’t know how much I need add. Only sometimes raising a baby feels like racing on a hamster wheel, where the days are made up of three-hour cycles of sleep-feed-play and the weeks stretch out long and changeless, even though the baby is changing invisibly every day. This, too, is the slow and patient work of the kingdom—the tiniest seed, but with the mightiest potential.

I suppose the hardest part of it all is wondering if I can still have a voice from such a small stage. Does anything I write or create really matter if it comes only from the boring “normal,” instead of the grand? I know there are plenty of “Instagram influencers” who have built their whole brand on sharing the boring normal, but it’s just that—a brand. It’s not real normal, blotted with tears of frustration and gapped by voids of loneliness which no filter can conceal. I don’t want to produce fodder for the ever-starving content machine of social media “mom culture.” That isn’t me at all. But I worry that there aren’t many other options for me now that I’ve had a baby. It’s hard enough to build credibility with a broad audience in the Bible teaching realm as a woman—let alone as a mom.

I remember wondering, before Clara was born, if she’d change me into someone completely different from the self I knew. She has, and she hasn’t.

She has certainly helped me along this journey toward the goodness of small-but-deep work. She’s given me an appreciation for how slowly and graciously God does His work, too. She reminds me that “The kingdom of heaven is like a treasure hidden in the field, which a man found and hid again; and from joy over it he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field” (Matthew 13:44). There is a treasure in this that is real and lasting and worth every sacrifice, even when to others it just looks like any old field.

But she hasn’t fundamentally altered the person God made me, the person who is a student and a teacher and longs to help others learn who He is through His Word. My days look different now, but the ultimate goal doesn’t, and I pray every day that God will allow Clara’s little soul to be the firstfruits of the calling.

Then some children were brought to Him so that He might lay His hands on them and pray; and the disciples rebuked them. But Jesus said, “Let the children alone, and do not hinder them from coming to Me; for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these.” After laying His hands on them, He departed from there.

Matthew 19:13-15

learn from Me

I recently interacted with someone in a Facebook group who said she’d just started attending a Christian church and was loving it, but didn’t know how she felt about the idea that one’s eternal future is decided by whether or not one declares Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior. In her words, “That’s not the god I want to believe in.”

I don’t think a Facebook group full of strangers is necessarily an effective place to get into theology and apologetics, but I did briefly point her to John 14:6 and what Jesus declared about Himself: “I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father but through Me.” I was immediately advised by a group moderator to “tread lightly.”

If you don’t tend to frequent the areas that Millennials and Gen-Zs congregate, I want to let you know that this is one of the major frontlines of spiritual warfare right now. In these trenches, truth is always expected to “tread lightly” while the emotions and ego are massaged by deception. It is an incredibly complex and dangerous situation, where the Enemy delights to turn truth into evil and lies into goodness.

I find in these trenches that the name of Jesus is very welcome, but the actions and words of Jesus as presented by Scripture are not. “Jesus” has come to mean anything that makes everyone feel good about their decisions and affirmed in their beliefs, even when those decisions are sins and those beliefs are lies.

The Jesus of Scripture, from all I can gather, was not known for treading lightly.

And yet I’m sympathetic to what brought us to battle here. A generation that has been battered by a hell-centric and fear-based theology will tend to swing hard to the other end of the pendulum, instead of seeking out a more whole and healing knowledge of who God is. When you’ve been taught that the goal is merely to avoid punishment, it’s difficult to take up the yoke of Christ and make relationship with Him the objective instead. It’s hard to fathom moving closer to a God you’ve been subconsciously conditioned to believe is angry and vindictive, even though it’s only in knowing who He really is, in all His glory—not the often-oversimplified and reactionary version of Him we’ve learned from others—that we find rest.

That brief interaction on Facebook left me with many questions. What would Jesus have said to her? Would He have tread lightly, knowing better than I how fragile her soul might be? Would He have been direct, knowing better than I how to wield the Sword of the Spirit in a spiritual war? Christ spoke of Himself as “gentle and lowly,” and yet He never diluted the truth. He was deeply compassionate toward the deceived, the broken, and the suffering but unapologetically harsh toward deceivers and perpetrators.

These questions brought me to Matthew 11:28-30:

“Come to Me, all who are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest. Take My yoke upon you and learn from Me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For My yoke is easy and My burden is light.”

It’s the phrase “learn from Me” that I keep coming back to. I want to learn from Him—how to be like Him in this world that consistently rejects Him. How to respond to questions like the one in that Facebook group. How to discern where gentleness is called for and where only the sharp truth will do.

And I want to point anyone who questions whether He is the God they want to believe in to these verses, too. I want to beg them—learn from Him! Let Him teach you who He is. Let Him show you. Don’t take any one pastor’s word for it, don’t go to Facebook or YouTube for the answers. Go to Him. He is gentle. He is humble. In Him, there is rest.

It doesn’t mean it’s easy. It doesn’t mean you will agree with His truth or find His character palatable. And as I’ve written before, you are free to choose not to follow—we all get to pick where our allegiance lies. We can create a god of our own choosing (which usually looks a whole lot like us), or we can follow the God whose name is “I AM THAT I AM,” or better translated, “I Will Be What I Will Be” (Exodus 3:14).

Even in Jesus’ inviting words from Matthew 11, He uses a quotation from another part of the Bible that gives us a subtle reminder that this “easy” yoke is not easy because it’s like one we would choose for ourselves. “You will find rest for your souls” is a reference to Jeremiah 6:16, which reads,

Thus says the Lord,
“Stand by the ways and see and ask for the ancient paths,
Where the good way is, and walk in it;
And you will find rest for your souls.
But they said, ‘We will not walk in it.’”

The yoke of Christ is the yoke of obedience. It is the yoke of submission, surrender to the Lordship of God. It’s easy and light because this “good way” is the only path toward true rest, not because it demands nothing from us.

And like the Israelites of old, we do have a choice. We can say, “We will not walk in it.” We are free to tell God, “You’re not the God I want to believe in.” It is our choice, and God is not codependent—He won’t force us into a relationship with Him or shift His own character to make us comfortable in it.

In some ways, I’m glad the culture has reached a point where so many people are honest enough to say out loud, “That’s not the God I want to believe in”—because this is far from the first generation that has sought after a god of its own choosing. This has been the story of humanity from the very beginning, only some us have hidden our idolatry better than others, coloring it over with Bible verses to make it pass for true faith—often deceiving even ourselves. When God is not quite showing up the way we’d prefer, we are all apt to throw our gold into the melting pot, pull out a golden calf, and say, “This is your god, O Israel, who brought you up from the land of Egypt” (Exodus 32:4b).

If we would be useful to the Father in this moment of the spiritual war, we must be certain that we are learning from Him—that we know Him for who He is. It will require incredible discernment, solid spiritual armor, and the highly skilled use of our Sword to do battle well. We must ensure that our highest pursuit is relationship with the One True God, because there are counterfeits being advertised everywhere.

And we must remember that our fight is not against flesh and blood. The Millennials, the Gen-Zs, the people who are honestly telling us “I don’t know if I can follow that God” are not the enemy. They are prisoners of the “spiritual forces of wickedness,” and they deserve our compassion, our love, our grace, and our commitment to the truth.

For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the powers, against the world forces of this darkness, against the spiritual forces of wickedness in the heavenly places.

Ephesians 6:12

Jesus invites us to learn from Him as He walks with the Father in “the good way.” He calls us, paradoxically, to do spiritual battle by seeking spiritual rest. Let’s go to Him, learn from Him, and come to know this One called “I Will Be What I Will Be.”

Whatever comes to pass on the frontlines of this battle, we know He wins the war.

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WANT TO LEARN MORE ABOUT WHO GOD IS?

The best place to go is to the Word. The Bible is the story of who God is, and who God is changes everything for you and me.

To that end, I have a couple resources that may help you get started in your journey through the Bible:

• The Bible180 Challenge is an opportunity to read through the Bible in 180 days, according to a thorough chronological schedule. You get a day of rest each week as well as an email offering accountability, support, and the very best study resources I’ve found to help you understand what you read. You can also use the Bible180 Challenge Journal to help you focus, stay on track, and build good study habits!

• Bedrock: A Foundation for Independent Biblical Study is a comprehensive textbook/workbook that will teach you how to dig DEEP into each of the seven types of Biblical literature. It’s a great next step for anyone who feels ready to surpass the typical milk of sermons and Bible studies, and desires to learn how to serve themselves on the meat. Find it on Amazon.