Revealing the Kingdom of Jesus – Mark 1:14-15

The Gospel preached by Jesus of Nazareth was that the Kingdom of God was close at hand. This is to say, that God’s conspiracy to take back his world from Satan, sin, and death has begun in the person of Jesus. In response, we are invited to rethink what is possible and risk for what could be.

Have you given up on trying to heal the world?

Maybe we’ve given up because we’ve been let down or we’ve just grown old enough to recognize our way of doing things is not going to get the job done.

What if you were to learn that we are being invited into a conspiracy that will radically reshape the universe?

The Gospel Jesus preached.
For many of us, this description of a conspiracy to restore our broken world is nothing like “the Gospel” that we learned in Sunday school. To answer the question, “what is the gospel” the best place to begin is with the gospel Jesus preached.

“From that time Jesus began to preach, saying, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” – Matthew 4:17 (ESV)

“And this gospel of the kingdom will be proclaimed throughout the whole world as a testimony to all nations, and then the end will come.” – Matthew 24:14 (ESV)

“I must preach the good news of the kingdom of God to the other towns as well; for I was sent for this purpose.” – Luke 4:43 (ESV)

“Now after John was arrested, Jesus came into Galilee, proclaiming the gospel of God, and saying, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the gospel.” – Mark 1:14–15 (ESV)

Jesus came into Galilee, proclaiming the gospel [euangelion] of God.” (v. 14)

70 years prior to Jesus’ birth, Caesar Augustus unified a divided Rome into what would be known as the Roman Empire. The Emperor became known as “Son of God”, “Lord”, “Savior”, and “Prince of Peace” In fact, one ancient inscription reads;

“The birthday of the God (Caesar Augustus) was the beginning for the world of the glad tidings [good news] that have come through men through him.”

A euangelion in the ancient world was a royal announcement about a king and a kingdom.

Jesus says, “The time is fulfilled…”;

The Old Testament, its prophesies and predictions, are about to come to pass.

“The Kingdom of God….” [the Kingdom of Heaven in the gospel of Matthew]

1: the range of God’s effective will.

2: Or as Jesus’ definition goes it is the space in which “God’s will is done on Earth as it is in heaven.”

Many will translate it as the “reign of God” because it communicates something more active for the English hearer.

The Kingdom pervades all parts of life and it is a Kingdom that is utterly unlike the kingdoms of the world.

"We are built to live in the kingdom of God. It is our natural habitat." – Dallas Willard

“…the kingdom of God is at hand”
God’s conspiracy to take back his world from Satan, sin, and death has begun in the person of Jesus. His method for overthrowing the powers is not military force or political coercion– it is suffering love.

“Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb 2 through the middle of the street of the city; also, on either side of the river, the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, yielding its fruit each month. The leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations. 3 No longer will there be anything accursed, but the throne of God and of the Lamb will be in it, and his servants will worship him. 4 They will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads. 5 And night will be no more. They will need no light of lamp or sun, for the Lord God will be their light, and they will reign forever and ever.” – Revelation 22:1-5

The good news is that the one true God has now taken charge of the world, in and through Jesus and his death and resurrection. The ancient hopes have indeed been fulfilled, but in a way nobody imagined. God’s plan to put the world right has finally been launched. The ancient sickness that had crippled the whole world, and humans with it, has been cured at last, so that new life can rise up in its place. Life has come to life and is pouring out like a mighty river into the world, in the form of a new power, the power of love. The good news was, and is, that all this has happened in and through Jesus; that one day it will happen, completely and utterly, to all creation; and that we humans, every single one of us, whoever we are, can be caught up in that transformation here and now. This is the Christian Gospel. Do not allow yourself to be fobbed off with anything else.” – NT Wright, Simply Good News

We will only discover how to follow the way of suffering love if we heed Jesus’ instructions to “repent and believe”. (v.15)

Repentance as is used by Jesus is an invitation to ‘rethink everything.”

Belief in Christ is an act of allegiance; an allegiance that leads us to do things strange to this culture for the sake of the Kingdom.

Repentance is to rethink what is possible and belief is to risk for what could be.