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A Sermon from
Valley Covenant Church
Eugene, Oregon
by Pastor Steve Bilynskyj

Copyright © 2012 by Stephen S. Bilynskyj

Mark 1:12-15
“Kingdom Begins”
January 15, 2012 - Second Sunday after Epiphany

         “What did you do today?” we asked the family of our future son-in-law as we talked with them over Skype on Christmas Day. “We listened to the Queen,” was their answer. It’s traditional for the monarch of the United Kingdom to give a Christmas address to the “Commonwealth.” So as good Canadians, they tuned in to hear what Queen Elizabeth had to say to all her “subjects.”

         Our family chuckled to ourselves at the quaintness of the thought of having a queen and caring enough to listen to her on Christmas. It seemed like something out of a story, a vestige of an era long gone.

         Like most Americans, though we may have a little fascination with British royalty, we can’t really conceive of what it would be like to live under a king or queen. There’s a two hundred and fifty year prejudice in our country against the whole idea of monarchy. It’s not democratic. It’s elitist. It’s hopelessly old-fashioned.

         Yet the whole story of the Bible is the creation and growth of the kingdom of God on earth. The establishment of God’s kingdom is what the Old Testament looks toward. And the arrival of that kingdom is the message which the New Testament celebrates. We might want to sit down and consider how our American political bias against being ruled fits with the biblical picture that God’s entire plan is to be our King.

         The kingdom of God is the key to our text this morning. When Jesus starts preaching for the first time in verse 15, the very first thing out of His mouth is the kingdom: “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near.” That phrase “kingdom of God” appears in all four Gospels and Jesus talks about the kingdom 104 times. God’s reign in this world is at the center of what Jesus thought and taught.

         We tend to think of “Gospel,” of the Good News, as the announcement of God’s grace and forgiveness. But when we read “good news” twice here at the beginning of Mark it’s at the end of verse 14 and the end of verse 15 as the frame for what Jesus has to say about the kingdom of God. When Mark said Jesus came “proclaiming the good news of God,” he meant the good news about the kingdom of God. When Jesus said, “repent, and believe the good news,” He meant the good news about God’s kingdom.

         It’s a strange declaration, if you think about it. “The kingdom of God has come near.” A “kingdom” seems more like a place you go to than what comes to you. What did Jesus mean when He proclaimed “The kingdom of God has come near.”? If a kingdom is a place, it’s something like saying “Get ready. Thailand is arriving tomorrow. Bulgaria will be here the day after.” It doesn’t seem to make sense. It feels like a category mistake, as philosophers like to say.

         Canada is part of Elizabeth’s kingdom. She is the Queen of Canada. Her face is on their coins and they sit down and listen to her on Christmas day. She has some figurative role in their government. That’s why they have a prime minister instead of a president. But Elizabeth is Queen of Canada because Canadians want it that way. They like their connection to a sovereign on the other side of the ocean. She is their queen because they choose to acknowledge her.

         The kingdom of God is a little like Elizabeth’s kingdom in Canada. Though God has the power to force anyone to obey Him, He chooses to reign in and through people who accept His sovereignty by their own choice. Elizabet is Queen of England, Queen of the United Kingdom, but she is also Queen of Canada because Canadian people choose to be loyal to her. So the kingdom of Elizabeth II exists in Canada. Likewise the kingdom of God exists wherever people are loyal to and obey God.

         Human sin, however, means that no one truly remains loyal and obeys God completely. Down through time, the kingdom of God was never fully and wholly present in our world. We acknowledge God, like Canadians acknowledge Elizabeth, but when it comes down to daily life the reign of God affects us less than the reign of Elizabeth affects Canadians. We do as we please, rather than what God wants.

         Which all means that Jesus’ announcement in verse 15 that “the kingdom of God has come near” has to mean at least this: someone is doing exactly and wholly what God wants. Someone is giving total allegiance to God and obeying His every command. For the first time in history, God has at least one completely loyal subject.

         That loyal subject of God is Jesus Himself. When Jesus preached the arrival of God’s kingdom, He meant His own arrival. The church father Origen talked about Jesus as the autobasileia, which in Greek means literally, the “self kingdom.” For us that might imply ruling our own selves, but what Origen meant is that Jesus was the “kingdom in Himself.” Where He was, there was the kingdom, because wherever Jesus was, there was the one place on earth where God was truly sovereign, truly King.

         Jesus’ obedience to God as King is clear in verse 12, to go back to the beginning of our text. Mark writes that the Spirit “drove him out into the wilderness.” When Matthew and Luke told it, they chose a gentler word. They said the Spirit “led” Jesus out into the wilderness. But Mark makes it stronger. Jesus let Himself be driven into the wilderness by God’s Spirit. It’s the same word used in verse 34 when Mark talks about Jesus “casting out” demons. The Spirit threw Jesus out where God wanted Him in the wilderness.

         Being in the wilderness connects Jesus with the beginning of God’s kingdom in the Old Testament. Where did God start making His kingdom? Where did God give people His law and start teaching them to obey Him? In the wilderness, as the people of Israel were guided by Moses for forty years before finally entering the place which would become the kingdom of Israel. Jesus in the wilderness for forty days reminds us of those forty years.

         Some of you know how Matthew and Luke tell the story at this point. Jesus is tested by Satan with three different temptations. They all turn on whether Jesus will obey and worship God or instead take care of Himself and give His loyalty to someone besides God. It’s very much about whether God will be King over Jesus. Yet Mark leaves all that out, cuts the story down to the bare bones, simply saying Jesus was “tempted by Satan.”

         Mark is showing us that the kingdom of God begins right in the middle of opposition. Whenever someone begins to truly obey and serve God, there is going to be struggle and hardship. That’s why he puts in something next that Matthew and Luke left out, “and he was with the wild beasts.”

         A few Bible scholars have suggested that Jesus being with the wild beasts is a pretty picture. Harken back to Adam with the animals, naming them just after creation. It’s the peaceable kingdom described in Isaiah 11, where wolf and leopard and lion co-exist gently with other animals and with human beings. But that doesn’t really fit. This is a tough time for Jesus. He’s not frolicking with wild animals like Mowgli in “The Jungle Book.”

         No, Mark likely wrote his gospel during the reign of the emperor Nero. Think about what was happening to Christians during that time. When those first readers heard that Jesus was with the wild beasts, what would have come to their minds? That’s right, they would have pictured the arena where some of their Christians friends and relatives were torn apart by lions and bears and other beasts in front of crowds of blood-thirsty spectators.

         Only a few decades later, during the reign of Trajan, another anti-Christian emperor, Ignatius, the bishop of Antioch, would write about his own coming death, “I am God’s wheat, ground fine by the lion’s teeth to be made purest bread for Christ.” Ignatius died in the arena at Rome torn apart by wild animals in 107 A.D.

         That’s what Mark wants his readers to hear. “Yes, this kingdom you are part of has enemies. You may suffer for your obedience to God.” That why verse 14 just mentions in passing that Jesus started preaching right “after John was arrested.” Spiritual enemies and worldly enemies surround God’s kingdom from the beginning. Those who want to obey God will be tried by their own internal temptations and by those who resist the goodness that God wants to bring into the world.

         If we seek to be part of God’s kingdom, if we join Jesus in wanting to obey God, we’re going to meet Satan and the wild beasts. You may know stories of famous pastors who’ve been brought low by temptations to which they succumbed: Gordon MacDonald, Frank Tillapaugh, Ted Haggard, and others. I’ve known personally several not so famous, but truly gifted and good pastors who have been ruined by failing to resist Satan when they were tempted.

         Count on it. Seriously try to do what God wants and you will be tested with all sorts of temptations to do what God does not want. Try getting up early to pray and when your alarm goes off you will feel more tired than you ever have before. Try giving up some bad habit and its grip on you will seem stronger than it ever was. It’s part of how God formed Jesus’ own character and it’s how He forms our characters. His Spirit drives us into testing and temptation so that we can learn to rely on Him more completely, give ourselves more thoroughly and truly to His kingdom.

         Count on it. Seriously try to do what God wants and you will be opposed by forces and people who do not want what God wants. Again, try to give up that bad habit and you may find friends or family who urge you to keep doing it. Try to help someone in need and you will bump into people who tell you your generosity is stupid. Wild beasts come in many forms. For our brothers and sisters in other parts of the world, they still appear as physical persecution. God grows His kingdom in us right in the middle of that sort of opposition. That’s just where the kingdom began in Jesus.

         Mark wrote the bare minimum Gospel. Everything is cut down to the essentials. So the next phrase in verse 13 is vital as we think about the opposition we face in God’s kingdom: “and the angels waited on him.” Jesus faced all that opposition, Satan, the wild animals, evil king Herod who arrested and ultimately executed John the Baptist. But “the angels waited on him.” Jesus was sustained by spiritual help God provided.

         You can go off the deep end thinking about angels too much, but it’s not good to completely forget that God has His messengers at work in this world. In Canada, the Queen’s presence and sovereignty is exercised by a governor general and ten lieutenant governors, one in each province. The Queen seldom appears within Canadian borders, but her influence is felt partly by the work of her governors. God’s influence in this world and in our lives is felt by the ministry of His angels, just as Jesus felt it there in the wilderness.

         As Psalm 139 told us this morning, there is no place we go where we are not in God’s presence. When you give your life to Christ and pledge your allegiance to the kingdom of God, you are never really alone. The Holy Spirit is leading you, even driving you where God wants you to go. As you meet opposition, encounter the devil or the wild beasts, the angels of God are with you, attending you, caring for you, supporting you along the way, just as they did for Jesus.

         I invite you this morning to live in God’s kingdom. His kingdom on earth began and was foreshadowed by all that happened among His people in the Old Testament. We heard a sample of that in our Old Testament reading from I Samuel 3. Eli counseled the boy Samuel to respond to God, saying, “Speak Lord, for your servant is listening.” But the kingdom of God really began in all its fullness when Jesus came among us and for the first time lived as we were meant to live, lived in perfect and loving service to God the King. The beginning of that kingdom in Jesus is the Good News of our faith.

         The kingdom of God begins to be in you and me when we do exactly what Jesus says at the end of our text, “repent and believe the good news.” That good news is that by the faithful life of Jesus the kingdom is here and that by believing in Him, you and I may be a part of it. The kingdom comes alive in us when we turn away from doing our own will and by faith in Jesus Christ start to do God’s will. The kingdom of God is present when we remember what Paul reminded us of in I Corinthians 6: We don’t belong to ourselves. We are “bought with a price.” We belong to God and to His service.

         We chuckled at our daughter’s future in-laws’ attention to the Queen on Christmas, but they told us that it was a very Christian message and that we ought to listen to it or read it. So we did. And they were right.

         On Christmas Day Queen Elizabeth II acknowledged that “For many, this Christmas will not be easy.” She mentioned armed forces deployed around the world, bereavement and loneliness, and the difficult times the world in general is facing. And then she said,

“Jesus was born into a world full of fear. The angels came to frightened shepherds with hope in their voices: ‘Fear not,’ they urged, ‘we bring you tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. For unto you is born this day in the City of David a Savior who is Christ the Lord.’”

         Then the Queen said, “Although we are capable of great acts of kindness, history teaches us that we sometimes need saving from ourselves—from our recklessness or our greed.” Then she talked about the importance of forgiveness and that the Savior brought us God’s forgiveness. Nearing the end she quoted lines from “O Little Town of Bethlehem.”

         O Holy Child of Bethlehem
         Descend to us we pray.
         Cast out our sin and enter in.
         Be born in us today.

And concluding she said, “It is my prayer that on this Christmas day we might all find room in our lives for the message of the angels and for the love of God through Christ our Lord.”

         You could do a lot worse than to listen to the Queen of Canada, of the United Kingdom, of the British Commonwealth. Even more, we could do much worse than to listen to our heavenly King and enter into His kingdom. It’s my prayer that we all might believe the good news Jesus brings us. May He who is the Kingdom Himself be born in us so that His kingdom can begin once more in our lives.

         Amen.

Valley Covenant Church
Eugene/Springfield, Oregon
Copyright © 2012 by Stephen S. Bilynskyj

 
Last updated January 22, 2012