Kingdom Advancing

By Trevor Grizzle and Clifton R. Clarke

For decades, the kingdom of God has remained one of the dominant and most important themes in theology and biblical studies. The kingdom of God is no passive, abstract construct, or static movement. God's rule and reign stretch to the farthest bounds of the earth--reaching and encompassing humankind wherever they may be found and bringing them under the lordship of Christ. It is this aggressive march of the kingdom that inspired the title of this book. While engaging a readership of persons with interests and differing levels of formal academic training, Kingdom Advancing targets theological students, local pastors, and laypersons who wish to broaden and deepen their biblical and theological understanding of God's rule in the world. To that end the writing and contents are neither pedantic nor elementary but are pitched at an accessible wavelength and frequency. The reader will find the contents to be theologically and biblically balanced.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Release date: Jun 22, 2023
• ISBN: 9781666769586

Trevor Grizzle

Trevor Grizzle is professor of New Testament at the Graduate School of Theology and Ministry at Oral Roberts University in Tulsa, Oklahoma. He is author of Church Aflame, a commentary on the book of Acts (2001) and Ephesians in the Pentecostal Commentary Series (2013).

Book preview

Introduction

For much of recorded human history, monarchs and kingdoms have played a significant role in governing and shaping civilization. Whether ancient or modern, they parade an aura of enchanting mystique, bewitching majesty, and mythical fantasy. Any thought or picture of them conjures up pomp, pageantry, and exotic beauty—antiquated and ancient—yet invariably mesmerizingly arresting appeal.

Born in a country that is part of the British Commonwealth, I have always been fascinated by anything to do with royalty (especially British royalty)—the royal family, the royal palace, museums, artifacts, and history of the kingdom. As I write this piece, Queen Elizabeth II’s Platinum Jubilee is in full stride. London is teeming with hordes of people celebrating the occasion. Unable to be physically present, I feast on curated documentaries, talk shows, and daily full-length newscasts on various TV channels. Some say the death of Her Majesty will be the end of an era. Perish the thought!

As a professor of New Testament, I have read extensively on the kingdom of God. I had never, however, written or presented scholarly papers on the topic until 2008 when I was invited to present at a Kingdom Symposium in Texas. That occasion fueled my interest and expanded my knowledge, as for the succeeding twelve years I became a featured speaker tasked with researching and presenting on an assigned topic pertinent to the kingdom of God. The idea of writing a monograph did not cross my mind even after thirteen years of scholarly presentations. Kingdom Advancing is the fruit of the encouragement of colleagues in the academy who read several of the papers I have written. Because of the random nature of the topics assigned, the chapters are not presented sequentially. The arrangement is more logical.

Among the many important facts that I have learned about kingdoms over the years is what the British historian, Arnold Toynbee, has said of civilizations: they are born and they die; they rise and they fall. The Roman Empire, said to be the longest-lasting empire in all of recorded history (over one thousand years), was no exception. Nor will any kingdom present or yet to come last forever!

Yet, the Bible speaks of a kingdom that is eternal, which will never fade and never fall. Daniel had a rare glimpse of this eternal kingdom and its king:

In my vision at night I looked, and there before me was One like a son of man, coming with the clouds of heaven. He approached the Ancient of Days and was led into his presence. He was given authority, glory and sovereign power; all nations and peoples of every language worshiped him. His dominion is an everlasting dominion that will not pass away, and his kingdom is one that will never be destroyed (Dan

7

:

13

–

14

).

This multidimensional kingdom of God permeates the pages of the Older and Newer Testaments and encompasses the past, present, and future. It began after the Fall of Adam and Eve, impinges on the present, and is anticipated in the future. The kingdom of God is essentially God’s effort since the Fall to redeem and restore fallen humankind and creation.

Most books on the kingdom of God seemingly engage the subject from one of two polarities: First, there is the technical, scholarly, and abstract—which does not bring the reality of the kingdom to bear on the issues of the world. The second type is uncritical, shallow, and rudimentary and often adopts a spiritual, insular, and myopic view of God’s reign. It is hoped that Kingdom Advancing offers a balanced and biblical theology of the kingdom of God that is illuminating, engaging, and relevant, and will stimulate further reading and research on the topic.

The first chapter of the book examines the nature of the kingdom of God in the Older and Newer Testaments, the second its culture and call. While the term kingdom of God per se does not occur in the OT, the concept of God as King laces through it. The NT view of the kingdom of God streams from that of the OT, including the realized and futuristic, political and spiritual, aspects of God’s reign—the latter given special emphasis.

Howard Snyder cautions that since God’s reign remains a mystery in several senses, presenting six antithetical points of tension as proof, no monolithic Kingdom theology can be built around any single pole. Understanding the kingdom of God as both present and future, at once human and divine action, including human history and culture, yet a reality which in some sense is experienced by faith, can be challenging. And yet, it is vital that these binary distinctions or polarities be maintained.¹ Snyder concludes, A biblically faithful and biblically useful theology of the kingdom will in some way maintain and live with these tensions.²

Wrongly termed the 400 Silent Years, Paul Tillich says of the Intertestamental period, This period developed in Judaism ideas and attitudes which deeply influenced the Apostolic Age, i.e., Jesus, the apostles, and the writers of the New Testament, etc.³ The era produced the Apocrypha, Septuagint, and Dead Sea Scrolls—literature that reveals God’s activity in the life and culture of the Jewish people. The approach to doctrine during the period was evolutionary and developmental, at times resulting in varying theories on any given biblical belief. Human search for truth in the murky twilight light of progressive revelation, however, surrendered to God’s floodlight of doctrinal certainty, buds of truth coming to full flower in the NT.

Though emerging from the womb of Judaism and sharing certain ethical and theological beliefs with it, Christianity’s belief in Jesus as uniquely God’s son and only Savior of the world put it at odds with both the Jewish and Roman worlds.

Two communities of faith are associated with Abraham in Scripture—one naturally, the other spiritually: Israel and the Church. They often share the same biblical monikers and descriptors. As Israel was related and belonged to God in a very special sense, so the Church is uniquely related and belongs to God/Christ. NT Kingdom believers exemplify this special sense of belonging. They constitute a community Christ created for himself, and they dwell under God’s kingly reign. This kingly reign of God over a Kingdom people is explored in chapter 4.

The threefold office of Christ as prophet, priest, and king, termed by Millard Erickson as His functions of revealing, ruling, and reconciling,⁴ and discussed below in chapter 5, is not unrelated to the topic of the kingdom of God. In the OT, three types of leaders appointed to distinct roles were each anointed with oil to signify their ordination to leadership in Israel: the prophet, priest, and king. Two of these functions/ offices were occasionally united in the same person. For instance, Moses was both priest and prophet and David prophet and king. Notably, Samuel functioned as prophet, priest, and judge.

Jesus alone as the anointed one, however, united the offices of prophet, priest, and king in himself (Heb 1:1–4). Reformed thinkers, perceiving the connection between the anointing of prophets, priests, and kings in the OT and the meaning of the title Christ as God’s anointed one, generally emphasize Jesus’ threefold office. As prophet, Jesus is God’s anointed messenger sent by God to proclaim God’s Word. The writer of Hebrews says that in the past, God spoke through the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son (1:2). As priest, He was and is a bridge between God and humankind and has made purification for sins (Heb 1:3). A king is a person with supreme authority to rule over a people or territory. The Jewish people centered their hope in a coming Messiah-King who would one day make them prosperous and great again. Jesus was that anticipated Messiah-King who came not only to restore the glories and fortunes of David’s kingdom, but also to establish a kingdom of which He is King.

The chapters on the faith and discipleship of kingdom residents speak existentially to both a need and a concern in the contemporary Church. Faith is the currency of the kingdom of God. It is the capital by which its citizens live and its blessings appropriated. Mindful that the NT speaks of different kinds of faith, I want to underscore that miracle-believing faith is that of which I speak. This kind of faith was a priority in the ministry of Jesus and the apostles and by which they performed miracles. But for token occurrences, this has been disparaged and jettisoned by Western Christianity. Christians must be ever mindful that though God has ordained faith as one of the means by which He accomplishes His will, faith never guarantees a desired outcome. Faith releases the will of God; it does not create it.

Compared to leaders of other world religions, Jesus lived a relatively short life. For example, Gautama Buddha died at eighty, Confucius at seventy-two, and Mohammed at sixty-two. Jesus, however, died at approximately thirty-three. He lived with an awareness of the brevity of his life. For that reason (and more) He made disciple-making and discipleship a priority.

Discussed in chapters 6 and 7 are at least four things that are indispensable to disciple-making and discipleship: the teacher, the student, the curriculum, and the goal of learning. In all these, Jesus was unconventional and non-conformist. As teacher, unlike the rabbis, He was not married to traditions and conventional methods, and His teaching was compelling and infused with authority. Rabbis never invited a student to become a disciple; the student sought out and petitioned the rabbi to be his tutor (cf. Luke 9:57–62). Further, rabbis chose only the brightest and best students in whom to invest. Contrastingly, Jesus called His disciples, most of whom were simple fishermen, to be with Him (Mark 3:14).

For rabbis, the Law constituted the primary curriculum for teaching and learning. Not so with Jesus. He embodied the core and content of every lesson He taught, and the twelve disciples were called into an intimate relationship with Him, which entailed taking His yoke and learning of Him (Matt 11:28–29) so they might be his witnesses . . . to the ends of the earth (Acts 1:8). Whereas Jewish rabbis trained their disciples to become rabbis, Jesus rather trained His disciples to be bearers of the gospel to the world.

There is a proliferation of viewpoints not only about the kingdom of God, but about the King himself. Some of these differences, explored under Kingdom in Conflict, begin with the Gospels’ fourfold portrayal of Jesus in which Matthew depicts Jesus as King, Mark as Servant, Luke as the perfect Man, and John as God. Although each portrait highlights a particular aspect of the person and function of Jesus, all four images must be kept together. Theological distortion or misrepresentation will result if they are pitted against each other or if one is overemphasized to the exclusion of the others.

The kingdom of God is not limited to eschatological and spiritual matters. Rather, it encompasses all of life—spiritual and secular, social and political. In Kingdom Advancing, I consider the intersection of the kingdom of God with politics and the poor. Jesus would not have been crucified had He steered clear of politics. His very use of Kingdom language was political. He became a marked man once He began to speak against economic injustice; abuse of political power; exploitation of the poor; and systems that promote inequality, poverty, and social and cultural exclusion. Consonant with the revelation of God in the OT, Jesus exhibited a divine bias toward the poor and antipathy toward the rich. This was not because He loved the poor and hated the rich. Rather, it was because He stood (and stands) in solidarity with the poor against the oppression and injustice that the rich often perpetrated against them. His concern for the poor should inform the Church’s ministry and use of its resources. Ministry to the poor is intrinsic to the Church’s mission in the world and arises out of the missio Dei (mission of God), whose ultimate goal is universal shalom/soteria.

No topic is more relevant today, yet potentially more explosive and polarizing, than gender and sexual identity. A tectonic cultural shift has taken place in thinking and living in Western civilization over the last fifty years. The change has been gradual but seismic in its impact upon shaping perceptions, values, and ethics. Behaviors once thought unacceptable are now validated and given legal legitimacy. With this new worldview have come the depreciation or repudiation of the Scriptures, a belittling of traditional Christian thinking and living, and a redefinition of marriage and the traditional family. I deal with this subject in chapter 13.

English Congregational minister and hymn writer, Isaac Watts, has couched in elegant poetry the boundless, universal, and timeless duration of the reign of God: Jesus shall reign where’er the sun does its successive journeys run, his kingdom stretch from shore to shore, till moons shall wax and wane no more. The contemporary church, like the early church, can ill afford to forget this characterization of the Kingdom and its role in making it a reality in the world. I speak to that concern in the chapter on Gentiles and Globalization.

Compared to most of the Church’s leadership, Paul was quick to understand the implications and the Church’s task in the universal vision of the multicultural, multiethnic, multilingual, and multiracial community that emerged at Pentecost. Today, Christianity must remain engaged in and adapt to the multiplex and multidimensional phenomenon of an increasingly complex interrelatedness of our globalized world on multiple levels. It is an incontrovertible and inescapable reality that Christianity’s axis has shifted southward. Once the aorta to missionary activity in the non-Western world, the West has progressively become secularized, post-Christian, and neo-pagan. Most Christians around the world bearing a darkened complexion are now non-Western. Increased immigration of non-Westerners into Europe and the United States has resulted in reverse mission, a flow of Christians and missionaries from the global South to the global North.

This migration has not only transnationalized the Christian faith and globalized churches, but it has redefined the terms mission and missionary. No longer does either term solely describe a Christian ambassador from the West and the activity in which he or she is engaged in a foreign country. Missionaries from the global South have invaded the global North and have brought with them a virile strain of evangelical Christianity that is spawning eddies of revival in countries where the light of the gospel shone with a feeble glow. What is more, we must not fail to see the mission field that is now at our doorstep, in our neighborhoods, where countless immigrants are now residing in search of the American dream. Western Christ followers must capture the global picture of what God is doing in kingdom expansion around the world and make every effort to embrace and promote it.

—Trevor Grizzle, PhD

1

. Snyder, Models of the Kingdom,

16

.

2

. Snyder, Models of the Kingdom,

16

.

3

. Tillich, Intertestamental Period, n.p.

4

. Erickson, Christian Theology,

781

. See pp.

780

–

797

for the full discussion.

Chapter 1

The Kingdom of God

When God created the world, He declared it very good. Sin, sickness, suffering, disease, death, and all human and cosmic woes are intrusions into God’s good creation that have resulted from the first human couple’s yielding to Satan’s temptation. With the Fall of Adam and Eve, Satan became a rogue king on earth, claiming stolen authority and subjecting humankind and all creation to his reign, dominion, or lordship. The kingdom of God is essentially God’s effort since the Fall to redeem and restore His fallen creation.

Kingdom in the Old Testament

The term kingdom of God per se does not appear in the Older Testament (OT).⁵ A single reference to kingdom of the LORD⁶ occurs in 1 Chronicles 28:5. However, the concept of God as king is everywhere present, and many allusions are made to his kingdom (e.g., Ps 103:19; Dan 4:3) and thy kingdom (1 Chron 29:11).

In the OT, a king’s reign is usually dated by the phrase, "in the year of his/this malkuth, meaning in the year of his/this reign (cf. 1 Chron 26:31; Dan 1:1). A king ascends the throne and receives a kingdom—the authority to rule. Ideas of power, might, glory, and dominion are all associated with the concept. Applied to God, the term kingdom or kingship" (Heb. malkuth, Gk. basileia) almost always refers to His dominion or rule as a king, only rarely to the domain or realm of his authority.

Although Israel always saw God as exercising authority over all the nations of the earth, that covenant nation’s existence was characterized by uncertainties, paradox, and repeated unpleasant vicissitudes; therefore, God’s promised blessings were never fully realized. This fixed Israel’s gaze on a brighter tomorrow when God would act decisively (reign) on their behalf, destroy their enemies, and bring deliverance and a better day. Some of the prophets anticipated such a day (Isa 24:23; Jer 46:18; Zeph 3:15; Zech 14:9).

Kingdom of God in the Newer Testament

The Newer Testament (NT) understanding of kingdom of God springs from that of the OT, the realized and futuristic, political and spiritual aspects of God’s reign given adjusted emphasis. Soon after His baptism, Jesus embarked upon a ministry of preaching, teaching, and healing in Galilee—the central theme of which was the kingdom of God.

Jesus went throughout Galilee, teaching in their synagogues, preaching the good news of the kingdom, and healing every disease and sickness among the people (Matt

4

:

23

).

After John was put in prison, Jesus went into Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God. The time has come, he said. The kingdom of God is near. Repent and believe the good news (Mark

1

:

14

–

15

; see also Luke

4

:

14

–

21

).

By preaching, Jesus announced the message of the kingdom of God; by teaching, He explained its meaning and character; by healing and miracles, He demonstrated its presence and power in the world. The kingdom of God was the principal cause for which Jesus lived and died. Appearing over one hundred times in the NT, the kingdom of God was the last topic of discussion Jesus had with His disciples before His ascension (Acts 1:3). Additionally, Luke concludes Acts with Paul preaching the kingdom of God and teaching the things which concern the Lord Jesus Christ during his two year confinement in Rome (Acts 28:31, NKJV).

Designation

The idea kingdom of God threads through Older Testament, Rabbinic, and Newer Testament theology, and echoes the cry of the heart of God’s people for a new day—a day of deliverance anticipated in yom Yahweh (the Day of the Lord). Though God is still in charge, sin has subjected the present world order to Satan and evil forces (2 Cor 4:4) actively working against the purposes of God. In the temptation of Jesus, the devil showed Him all the kingdoms of the world in an instant, saying, I will give you all their authority and splendor, for it has been given to me, and I can give it to anyone I want to. So if you worship me, it will all be yours (Luke 4:6–7). Satan is called the ruler of this world (John 12:31; 14:30; 16:11) whose aim is to steal, kill, and destroy (10:10).

The present order, therefore, needs redemption, which is the theme of God’s salvific activity that begins with the Protoevangelium (Gen 3:15) and runs throughout the OT. It is also the driving message of the kingdom of God and the mission of Jesus and His followers. The history of the kingdom of God is one of human redemption. As Satan’s rule is universal, so Christ’s regal authority will ultimately encompass the entire creation in the coming age. There will be new heavens and a new earth in which no sin or rebellion exists but where righteousness alone dwells and God’s will is done (2 Pet 3:13). Satan will be cast into the lake of fire, death and Hades will be destroyed (Rev 20:10–15), the curse will be lifted from the earth, and God will reign with His people forever (22:3–5).

Derivation

The idea kingdom of God originates from the Hebrew malkuth Yahweh and the Greek hẽ basileia tou theou. It is anchored in the Jewish hope that a day of divine visitation is coming when God will rid the world of evil and establish His perfect rule on earth.

Definition

The concept, kingdom of God, describes the sovereign rule or reign of God, God’s kingship (RSV), or the exercise of God’s kingly power. John Stott defines it as the gracious rule of God through Christ and by the Spirit in the lives of his people, bringing a free salvation and demanding a radical obedience.⁷ The people and place under the control of a king (e.g., The United Kingdom) is a less common meaning. The Scriptures invariably place the emphasis on God as king. So, for example, the kingdom of God is near means God is taking over as king. To enter the kingdom of God means to come under God’s rule or to accept Him as king. God’s Kingdom cannot be properly understood under the concept of the British monarchy and its empire building. In the words of A. M. Hunter,

The kingdom of God is not a matter of human organization, or another name for the evolutionary process, or some Christian socialist’s earthly paradise. . . . It is a power breaking into this world from the beyond, through the direct action of the living God. It is God in Christ invading history for us men [sic] and for our salvation.⁸

To show deference to the divine name, Matthew, targeting a Jewish audience, generally uses kingdom of heaven (thirty-two times), but kingdom of God only four times. Luke employs "kingdom of