Schreiner / Ortlund The Kingdom of God and the Glory of the Cross

1. Auflage 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4335-5826-9
Verlag: Crossway
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 160 Seiten

Reihe: Short Studies in Biblical Theology

'The kingdom of heaven is like a grain of mustard seed that a man took and sowed in his field. It is the smallest of all seeds, but when it has grown it is larger than all the garden plants and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and make nests in its branches.' -Matthew 13:31-32 When Jesus began his ministry, he announced that the kingdom of God was at hand. But many modern-day Christians don't really understand what the kingdom of God is or how it relates to the message of the gospel. Defining kingdom as the King's power over the King's people in the King's place, Patrick Schreiner investigates the key events, prophecies, and passages of Scripture that highlight the important theme of kingdom across the storyline of the Bible-helping readers see how the mission of Jesus and the coming of the kingdom fit together. Part of the Short Studies in Biblical Theology series.

Patrick Schreiner (PhD, The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary) is associate professor of New Testament and biblical theology and endowed chair at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Kansas City, Missouri. He is the author of The Kingdom of God and the Glory of the Cross; Matthew, Disciple and Scribe; The Ascension of Christ; and The Visual Word.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Schreiner, Patrick

Ortlund, Dane

Leseproben

Introduction

The Importance of the Kingdom

“What is the kingdom of God?”

The student leaned back and looked at me. I paused, fumbled around, then tossed out some words, but I ended my little incoherent bluster by saying that we would find out as we continued to study Matthew. This was back in college. My ministry director had asked me to lead a Bible study for students over the summer. I decided we would study Matthew. I had never studied Matthew before, and a tinge of trepidation ran down my spine, because the Epistles were my comfort zone. I knew the learning curve was going to be steep.

Although my life up to this moment had been filled with good Bible teaching, I felt misplaced in a foreign land when I came to the language of kingdom. I knew the basics of the gospel message, but I could not figure out how the kingdom of God related to it or why Jesus spoke so often of it. My view of the good news had been abstracted, and I had overlooked the narrative that stood beside and underneath the glorious doctrines of Christianity.

As I began to study the kingdom, I grasped that it was the thread that stitched the entire canon together. How could I have missed it? Why wasn’t the concept clear to me before? The Bible is most fundamentally a narrative, and the kingdom of God is the thematic framework for that narrative.

Similarly, when many modern-day Christians come to kingdom language in the Bible, they have a hard time knowing what it is. Jesus never directly explains it; he never gives a definition, and the Gospel writers never record the crowds or disciples asking what it is. There seems to be an implicit assumption that everyone knows what the kingdom is.

Furthermore, kingdom language is pervasive in the Gospels, and the concept is strewn through the rest of the Bible. Jesus begins his ministry by announcing that the kingdom of God is at hand (Mark 1:15), and the Gospel writers encapsulate Jesus’s ministry in the phrase “the gospel of the kingdom” (Matt. 4:23). Jesus’s relentless focus on the kingdom provoked Gordon Fee to say:

You cannot know anything about Jesus, anything, if you miss the kingdom of God. . . . You are zero on Jesus if you don’t understand this term. I’m sorry to say it that strongly, but this is the great failure of evangelical Christianity. We have had Jesus without the kingdom of God, and therefore have literally done Jesus in.1

So rather than being a “zero on Jesus,” many have attempted to get their arms around this idea of the kingdom. Unfortunately, the term has become the buzzword for everyone’s pet issue. Since the kingdom is nowhere defined, people pour in their own meaning.

Some have equated it with heaven and said that Jesus was saying, in so many words, “The kingdom is the place you go when you die.” Others have understood kingdom as referring to the church. From their perspective, Jesus announced the beginning of the age of the church.2 In this conception, the kingdom and the church are synonymous. Still others have seen the kingdom of God as simply ethics. Jesus’s announcement is a call to social action. The kingdom thus becomes a term that denotes good deeds. Humankind builds the kingdom of God as it “works for the ideal social order and endeavors to solve the problems of poverty, sickness, labor relations, social inequalities, and race relations.”3

Evangelicals, in particular, have been prone to reduce the kingdom to God’s rule, power, or sovereignty.4 George Eldon Ladd disseminated this view in his numerous works on the kingdom, arguing that the dynamic rule is the primary meaning.5 In more popular evangelical circles the kingdom becomes a euphemism for the rule of God in one’s heart. The kingdom thus coils into an inward, subjective mechanism, a secret power that enters the human soul and lays hold of it.

Regrettably, the defining characteristic of the kingdom in evangelicalism has been abstracted, and the time has come to restore the kingdom to its concrete nature. All the definitions above suffer from reductionism. They take a part of the whole and place it in the center. So how can we define the kingdom?

The Kingdom Tree

Since we never get a textbook definition of the kingdom in the Bible, some help in understanding the kingdom can be found in examining one of the images that the Scriptures regularly associate with the kingdom: a tree. The Bible begins and ends with the figure of a tree. Genesis speaks of the tree of life that springs from the ground at the voice of the Lord and the forbidden tree of good and evil (Gen. 2:9). Watering these trees are the rivers that flow out of the garden. At the end of Scripture, the tree of life rises again, positioned within the holy city that has twelve gates, high walls, and a river running through it. Revelation describes the tree as having leaves that heal the nations (Rev. 22:2).

But the tree imagery does not merely bracket the Scriptures; it tracks its way through the entire Bible. In the Old Testament, King Nebuchadnezzar dreams about a tree that grows strong, and its top reaches the heavens so that all nations can see it (Dan. 4:10–12). Daniel interprets the dream for Nebuchadnezzar, explaining to him that the tree is a symbol of his kingdom, which will be taken away from him.

The great prophet Isaiah also speaks of a tree, yet this tree has been reduced to a stump. From this stump of Jesse comes forth a branch (Isa. 11:1). King David pronounces that those who rely on the word of God are like a tree that grows and flourishes (Ps. 1:3). In the Gospels Jesus regularly compares the kingdom to a tree (Matt. 13:31; Mark 4:31–32).

One particular tree alters the skyline of the Gospels. Just as the tree was the undoing of Adam and Eve in the garden, so the cross ends Jesus’s life. He hangs upon this tree for the world to mock and sneer. This tree secures the nails that pierce his hands and feet. Rome, the Jewish leaders, and Satan assume that Jesus’s kingdom has been conquered by nailing Jesus to the cross, yet in a scandalous twist, this tree becomes the King’s greatest victory.

There drapes the sign that declares, “This is Jesus, the King of the Jews” (Matt. 27:37). The defeat of Adam and Eve is the victory of God; the Serpent’s sting is Christ’s great victory. The tree shaped like a cross is the fulcrum of God summing up all things in heaven and on earth. It is positioned vertically, and Jesus’s hands stretch out horizontally, harmonizing north, south, east, and west through Jesus’s disfigured body.6 The tree is, as Revelation portrays it, healing for the nations.

The tree in the Scriptures thus becomes representative of the concept of which Jesus speaks so often: the kingdom. If the tree is a symbol for the kingdom throughout the Scriptures, then what does it teach us about the nature of the kingdom?

First, the image of the tree in Scripture communicates power, rule, or sovereignty. Large trees symbolize power and strength. The tree in the garden promises life. If Adam and Eve were to eat from it, they would be like God. Nebuchadnezzar’s tree, in a similar way, reaches up to the heavens and is visible to the whole world. In Revelation, there is a city with high walls, and the tree stands in the middle of this city as a symbol of power and strength.

Second, the tree usually has some relationship or connection with people. The tree of Nebuchadnezzar has creatures resting beneath its branches, with Nebuchadnezzar as the head representative of the people. In Isaiah, the branch shooting forth from the stump is quickly identified with a person (Isa. 11:2). The leaves of the tree in Revelation heal the nations. The tree in Psalm 1 is also a metaphor for a person.

Third, the image of the tree always implies the idea of place.7 The tree is placed in the garden. The tree in Daniel is placed where the whole world can see the top of it. In Revelation the tree is in the center of the city. Now, this tree imagery throughout Scripture may just be that—tree imagery. But this symbol can and should be instructive for us.

Defining the Kingdom

So, expanding beyond the abstract notion of the kingdom as mere sovereignty, I will use the following definition of the kingdom in this study: The kingdom is the King’s power over the King’s people in the King’s place.8 These three realities (power, people, place) interrelate, and although they can be distinguished, they never can be separated.9 They are like strands of a rope tightly twisted together.

Some might object, “Shouldn’t power be primary, because without rule or authority people and place cannot come into being?” But the same can be said for all three. Kings rule over places and people. Power is empty without people and...