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April 13 - May 10, 2024
When we see Jesus as he is, we must turn away or else shamelessly adore him. That must be kept in mind for any authentic understanding of the power of Christian faith.
(Matt. 7:29). Scribes, expert scholars, teach by citing others. But Jesus was, in effect, saying, “Just watch me and see that what I say is true. See for yourself that the rule of God has come among ordinary human beings.”
Küng
On being a Christian
When we receive God’s gift of life by relying on Christ, we find that God comes to act with us as we rely on him in our actions. That explains why Jesus said that the least in the kingdom of the heavens are greater than John the Baptist—not, of course, greater in themselves, but as a greater power works along with them. The “greater” is not inherent, a matter of our own substance, but relational.
C. S. Lewis
Mere Christianity
“The real Son of God is at your side. He is beginning to turn you into the same kind of thing as Himself. He is beginning, so to speak, to ‘inject’ His kind of life and thought, His Zoe [life], into you; beginning to turn the tin soldier into a live man. The part of you that does not like it is the part that is still tin.”
“the icon of the unseeable God” (Col. 1:15). Today we might say photo or snapshot instead of icon. He was the “exact picture” or “precise representation of God’s substance” (Heb. 1:3).
John Calvin remarked
Golden Booklet of the True Christian Life
We are, all of us, never-ceasing spiritual beings with a unique eternal calling to count for good in God’s great universe.
Our “kingdom” is simply the range of our effective will.
In creating human beings God made them to rule, to reign, to have dominion in a limited sphere. Only so can they be persons.
Any being that has say over nothing at all is no person.
The sense of having some degree of control over things is now recognized as a vital factor in both mental and physical health and can make the difference between life and death in those who are seriously ill.
Closer to the Light
We are meant to exercise our “rule” only in union with God, as he acts with us. He intended to be our constant companion or coworker in the creative enterprise of life on earth. That is what his love for
us means in practical terms.
If
we
are faithful to him here, we learn his cooperative fai...
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t...
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Frank Laubach
Practicing His Presence
constant conscious interface with God.
God’s own “kingdom,” or “rule,” is the range of his effective will, where what he wants done is done.
The Greatness of the Kingdom
Psalms 145–150.
that kingdom has existed from the moment of creation and will never end (Ps. 145:13; Dan. 7:14). It cannot be “shaken” (Heb. 12:27f.)
and is totally good. It has never been in trouble and never will be.
the social and political realm, along with the individual heart, is the only place in all of creation where the kingdom of God, or his effective will, is currently permitted to be absent. That realm is the “on earth” of the Lord’s Prayer that is opposed to the “in heaven” where God’s will is, simply, done.
It is the realm of what is cut out “by hands,” opposed to the kingdom “cut out without hands” of Daniel, chapter 2.
If we attend to what he actually said, it becomes clear that his gospel concerned only the new accessibility of the kingdom to humanity through himself.
The “gospel” of the Old Testament, if you wish, was simply “Our God reigns!” (Isa. 52:7; Pss. 96, 97, 99). Everyone knew that.
It was the cry of deliverance as Israel emerged from Egypt through the Red Sea (Exod. 15:18). It was understood by all that “God caused His glorious arm to go at the right hand of Moses” (Isa. 63:12). That “arm” was, simply, God’s rule in action.
So when Jesus directs us to pray, “Thy kingdom come,” he does not mean we should pray for it to come into existence. Rather, we pray for it to take over at all points in the personal, social, and political order where it is now excluded: “On earth as it is in heaven.” With this prayer we are invokin...
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His intent is for us to learn to mesh our kingdom with the kingdoms of others.
Love of neighbor, rightly understood, will make this happen. But we can only love adequately by taking as our primary aim the integration of our rule with God’s.
seek first the kingdom, or ru...
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Only as we find that kingdom and settle into it can we human beings all reign, or rule, together with God. We will then enjoy individualized “reigns” with neither isolation nor conflict. This is the ideal of h...
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“Creation eagerly awaits the revealing of God’s child...
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Jesus came among us to show and teach the life for which we were made. He came very gently, opened access to the governance of God with him, and set afoot a conspiracy of freedom in truth among human beings.
Caught up in his active rule, our deeds become an element in God’s eternal history. They are what God and we do together, making us part of his life and him a part of ours.
by taking the title Son of man, he staked his claim to be all that the human being was originally supposed to be—and surely much more.
“the representative man” or the “federal head” of humanity.
he inducts us into the eternal kind of life that flows through himself. He does this first by bringing that life to bear upon our needs, and then by diffusing it throughout our deeds—deeds done with expectation that he and his Father will act with and in our actions.
not.
So Reat Salvation, The Gospel of the Kingdom, The Kingdom of Heaven in the 20th Century
the term eggiken—usually translated as “is at hand” or “has drawn nigh” in such passages as Matt. 3:2; 4:17; 10:7; Mark 1:15; and Luke 10:9, 11—is a verb form indicating a past and completed action. It is best translated simply “has come.”20
Parables of the Kingdom
The reality of God’s rule, and all of the instrumentalities it involves, is present in action and available with and through the person of Jesus. That is Jesus’ gospel.
this kingdom is not something to be “accepted” now and enjoyed later, but something to be entered now (Matt. 5:20; 18:3; John 3:3, 5). It is something that already has flesh-and-blood citizens (John 18:36; Phil. 3:20) who have been transformed into it (Col. 1:13) and are fellow workers in it (Col. 4:11).
“righteousness and peace and joy” of a type that only occurs “through the energizing of the Holy Spirit” (Rom. 14:17).
(John 18:36). It is, as Jesus said, constantly in the midst of human life (Luke 17:21; cf. Deut. 7:21). Indeed, it means that it is more real and more present than any human arrangement could ever possibly be. In
Those who have been touched by forgiveness and new life and have thus entered into God’s rule become, like Jesus, bearers of that rule.
“If I by the finger of God expel demons from people, then it is the Kingdom of God that has come upon you” (Luke 11:20). It came in his person and acted in his actions. This was not an entirely new phenomenon in biblical events. When the Egyptian magicians in Pharaoh’s court saw what happened at the word of Moses, they acknowledged, “This is the finger of God” (Exod. 8:19). And the Ten Commandments were said to have been inscribed in stone by the finger of God (Exod. 31:18). But the divine co-action was to be true for Jesus’ trainees, or apprentices, also.
As they went they were to heal the sick and announce that “the
