Lenten Devotion – Day Three

Friday, February 20, 2015

Today’s Scripture Reading: Mark 1:14-15
“Now after John was arrested, Jesus came to Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God, and saying, "The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news." (Mark 1:14-15)

“Think of (the Kingdom) like the sun. As it peeks through on a cloudy day, we do not say the sun has grown. We say, 'The sun has broken through.' Our view of the sun has changed, or obstacles to the sun have been removed, but we have not changed the sun.” ― Kevin DeYoung, What is the Mission of the Church?: Making sense of social justice, Shalom and the Great Commission

  Jesus made the Kingdom of God or Heaven central in His ministry and his messages to his disciples and others. Jesus spoke of the Kingdom of God most frequently in telling a parable. So what is the Kingdom of God, basically the “kingdom of God refers to the reign of God or the sovereign ruling of God over His creation.

  Giving an exact definition to what the Kingdom of God is, is difficult, because you can only in part understand it with our intellect, it is best experienced as something that comes near to us. It is helpful to first understood what Jesus did not mean by the Kingdom of God.

· He was not speaking of a geographical area such as the Holy Land or the Temple.
· He was not speaking of a political entity such as the nation of Israel or the Sanhedrin.
· He was not speaking of a group of people, such as, His disciples or the church.

Rather, the kingdom of God is God’s ruling.

· It is the sovereign reign of God.
· This rule is independent of all geographical areas or political entities.
· It is true that the rule of God implies a people to be ruled, and Jesus called upon people to enter the kingdom.
· The kingdom itself should be distinguished from the people who enter it.

  Exactly what is this kingdom or reign of God, that Jesus so routinely announces? All the synoptic Gospels convey the sense that the reign of God has a certain indefinable quality in Jesus’ own teaching. Always a mystery yet an open secret, it was best passed on by way of parables, whose intent was to reveal and to hide in the same breath.

  A definitive answer to the question, what is the kingdom or reign of God? Cannot be given. But we can at least catch some of its contours by listening to the Old Testament’s prophetic forecasts of the coming day of God and the prophets’ expectations of God’s intended future for the world.

  In the 1980s, philosopher Arthur Holmes summarized that prophetic vision as shalom. It envisions a world characterized by peace, justice, and celebration. Shalom, the overarching vision of the future, means “peace,” but not merely peace as in the cessation of hostilities. Instead, shalom envisions the full prosperity of the people of God living under the covenant of God’s demanding care and compassionate rule. In the prophetic vision, peace such as this comes hand-in-hand with justice. Without justice, there can be no real peace, and without peace, no real justice. Indeed, only in a social world full of a peace grounded injustice can there come the full expression of joy and celebration.

  Paul provides a brief note about the character of the kingdom of God, when writing about diverse opinions on dietary practices, he comments, “for the kingdom of God is not food and drink, but righteousness [justice] and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit” (Romans 14:17).

  In this announcement of Jesus in our scripture selection today also states that the Kingdom of God is contained within our need to repent. Now repentance is not so easy sometimes we think. We are very apt confuse two things-sorrow for the consequences of sin, and sorrow for sin. The Greek word, for repent, literally means a change of mind.

  Jesus states that repentance is needed in order to understand and believe the good news, when we repent then we will have the knowledge and the experience of having the kingdom come near to us.

  When we make a change of mind and repent and turn to Jesus’ way of seeing the world then we can believe in the good news. “Believe,” says Jesus, “in the good news." To believe in the good news simply means to take Jesus at his word, to believe that God is the kind of God that Jesus told us about, to believe that God so loves the world that he will make any sacrifice to bring us back to himself, to believe that what sounds too good to be true is really true.

Today’s Lectionary Readings
Morning: Psalms 22; 148
Evening: Psalms 105; 130
Deut. 7:12–16
Titus 2:1–15
John 1:35–42