Perspectives Week 3... Your Kingdom Come

Perspectives Week 3… Your Kingdom Come

In the world “kingdom” describes a geographical area, or people belonging to such. In the Biblical sense “Kingdom” is the right to rule. Therefore the “Kingdom of God” is the exercise of God’s kingship, and His right to rule based on His might, power, and glory. The Old Testament perspective held by Hebrews then and now was that their Messiah would come as a ruler and a leader and establish his Kingdom of peace and power. With Jesus’ life and death we have been given a new perspective. This new perspective shows that the Messiah will come twice, once to break Satan’s power and a second time to destroy his kingdom. During the period in between, we (the church) have been entrusted with the task of undoing Satan’s works and carrying out Christ’s mission of bringing the church to all nations. This new perspective also shows that our Savior did not come as a “power over” ruler and leader, but to humbly come from “power under” by serving others. This brought a whole new dynamic to the Kingdom in which the first would be last, and the least would be greatest. This was a new concept to the disciples, and it took them a while to get it.

Matthew 24 lists signs of Christ’s return, then ends with verse 14; Matthew 24:14 "This gospel of the kingdom shall be preached in the whole world as a testimony to all the nations, and then the end will come.” Again, this reiterates my point from several posts ago that Christ is not coming back until we have “preached” to “all the nations”. So He will not come back and establish His Kingdom until we have done our job.

Our Perspectives course breaks up the nations into people groups. I will define these more in later posts. There are 35,000 people groups in the world, they are characterized and/or divided by linguistic, socio-economic, national and ethnic divisions. It looks at people groups as a group through which the Gospel can easily spread without barriers. Barriers would constitute a new people group and possibly require a different missionary approach, church, and so on. A people group is reached when there is a church in place which can “finish the job”, or continue to spread and grow to the rest of its people group. On that note, missions exist for the purpose of bringing back our King.

Shannon