through both of them. One was on the wheat and the tears the other’s on these three generations. I didn’t intend for
them to kind of have so much overlap but as I was writing them I realized all these topics are interrelated here. Uh
but this afternoon I want to talk about we have a Q&A coming up after this. I want to talk about uh the talk is
entitled the perfect storm. And if we could ask our um
there we are the perfect storm. Thank you very much. So uh this topic is about the kingdom of God and um we are
citizens of God’s kingdom. So um uh if you uh if you have a passport other than
the US, could you just raise your hand? That’s pretty impressive. If you have
two passports other than the US, please raise your hand. All right. Right. There’s my wife’s hand
going up there. Um, if you are a citizen of four countries, raise your hand.
Was actually my son should be raising his hand. Um, British, Irish, American, and Russian. And so, um, I got three,
British, Irish, and American. And so, um, uh, citizenship is important. When
you travel around the world, you realize how important that passport really is. And there are some countries that are a
curse, their passports to their citizens. There was a time where if you had an Ethiopian passport, you wouldn’t
you couldn’t travel anywhere in the world. Nobody wanted you because they were afraid you weren’t going to go back because of the famine in the mid1 1980s.
And there are some countries even today like North Korea and Iran where it’s almost impossible to get on a plane to
go anywhere because nobody wants you. They assume you’re just going to stay wherever you go. You’re going to claim political asylum. So your citizenship is
really important and knowing which city, which country or nation you’re a citizen of is really important because you
represent that citizen that that nation or that kingdom as you go around the world. So we’re going to talk this afternoon. The talk is entitled the
perfect storm. It’s about the the um the kingdom of God as announced by Jesus and
the principles it stands for. So invite you to bow your heads with me and we’ll open with a word of prayer. Our dear
heavenly father, we thank you for the beauty of this Sabbath day. Father, we thank you for the sun that is shining
outside and we thank you for the fellowship and the warmth we’ve enjoyed in here. Lord, as we share these moments
together now, I pray that your Holy Spirit will speak through me and for me. I ask that you’ll speak to each of our
hearts that as we hear about these principles of the kingdom of God that we’ll apply them in our lives. In Jesus’
name we pray. Amen. So, um to start out here, this is our journey today. We talk about the Jewish
gale and the Roman storm, then the divine huracan. So that’s the three stages we’re going to go through today
as we do this uh this reflection on the the kingdom of God. So um does anybody
remember the story about the Andrea Gale in 1991? Few of you are nodding your heads there.
So there was a fishing vessel called the Andrea Gale. It’s a true story. She was 500 miles east of Gloucester,
Massachusetts, way out in the Atlantic. and she didn’t realize it at the time,
but she was about to sail into The Perfect Storm. In fact, they later made a movie about this incident called The
Perfect Storm. And what happened was there was a cold front moving along the Canadian border and that sent a strong
disturbance down into the Atlantic off the coast of New England. And at the same time, there was a high pressure
system building over the maritime provinces of southeast Canada. And this combination produced uh a low pressure
system called the Halloween nor easter. Now to add gasoline to the fire, hurricane Grace arrived from the
Atlantic and you had these three storm systems coming face to face in the
northeast Atlantic with immeasurable energy to create what may be called only the perfect storm. The forces of nature
converged on this boat here, the Andrea Gale, and it reduced the boat to matchwood. Only light debris was ever
find. This was the origin of the movie The Perfect Storm. And The Perfect Storm
maybe, Do I have another picture of it there? No, I don’t. The Perfect Storm really is a metaphor for the triumphal
entry of Jesus into Jerusalem in Luke chapter 19. There were already two elements at play when Jesus arrived in
Jerusalem. There was the Jewish gale and there was the Roman storm. But it was the tri it was the triumphal entry of
Jesus turned the gale and the storm into the perfect storm that we now call the kingdom of God. So today we’re going to
look at the Jewish Gale, what was happening among in the Jewish people. We’re going to look at the Roman storm, what the Romans were thinking and doing.
And then we’re going to look at what the arrival of Jesus on that triumphal entry into Jerusalem, what that meant for the
kingdom of God. So we start out with the Jewish gale. Now the Jews believed uh in
a forward-looking esquetology. That is the Jews did not look to the past for an ideal golden era. The Jews were looking
to the future because they expected the coming of a messiah figure. And the coming Messiah was going to make all
things right. And the coming Messiah was going to make the Jewish people the rulers of the world. And Jerusalem would
be capital of that world government. They looked forward to a time when a Messiah would give peace and justice and
global dominion for the people of God. Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, Moses and David were safely in the past. But the
Jewish people were not looking in the rearview mirror. They were looking forward in their esquetology. They were looking for something to come their way
at some point in the future. And when Jesus announced in Nazareth his um his
the announcement of his ministry in Luke chapter 4, we call it the Nazareth manifesto. Um Jesus read from Isaiah 61
1-3. And Jesus only read the bit in red on the screen. And this caused immense
anger in the congregation. And you have to ask yourself, why was why was this the synagogue of Nazareth, why were they
so angry when Jesus read this portion here? And the portion it reads this, you’re familiar with it. It says, “The
spirit of the Lord God is upon me because the Lord has anointed me to proclaim good news to the oppressed, to
bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, uh to release the prisoners, and to proclaim proclaim
the year of the Lord’s favor.” And so when Jesus gets to that this point in the reading of Isaiah 61, he he rolls
back the scroll and he hands it back to the synagogue official and he says, “This day this is fulfilled in your
hearing.” And the the the the audience was mad at him. They wanted to kill him. They wanted to stone him. And then to
add insult to injury, Jesus goes on and quotes two stories, Non and the widow of
Zarapath, who are both Gentiles who were blessed by God, who saved them from death by starvation or leprosy. And the
Jewish audience was furious. They wanted to kill Jesus on the spot. So why were they so upset that Jesus finished the
reading here? Well, the answer is that what Jesus missed is the next bit of the
chapter. The next bit of Isaiah 61 says, “Strangers shall stand and feed your
flocks. Foreigners shall till your land and dress your vines. You shall be
called priests of the Lord who shall be named ministers of our God. You shall enjoy the wealth of the nations, and in
their riches you shall glory. Because their shame was double, and dishonor was proclaimed as their lot. Therefore, they
shall possess a double portion. Everlasting joy shall be theirs.”
And the Jewish people thought of Isaiah 61 in this passage here, verses 5-7,
said that strangers will be your shepherds, that the Gentiles will look after your animals for you, that
foreigners will till your land and dress your vine, but you will be called priests, you’ll be called ministers,
you’ll enjoy the wealth of the nations, and in the riches of the Gentiles, you’re going to glory. And so, this
passage was for many Jews at the time of Christ. It was a promise that one day the Jews would be the top nation and all
the gentile nations, the the non-Jews, they were going to serve the Jews as their servants and do nothing
but build the wealth of the Jewish people. So when Jesus stopped his reading of Isaiah 61 and said, “Now this
has been fulfilled in your hearing and they didn’t see it that they were now the masters of the world.” And when
Jesus used two examples, the widow of Zarapath and Non as examples of those
who are blessed by God rather than Jewish characters going to be blessed by God. This was Jesus upending the Jewish
expectations of a Messiah figure who was going to give them global domination. And they were so upset with him that
they wanted to drag him out of the synagogue and throw him off the cliff there in the city of Nazareth.
So the Jews expected that God would return as king. There’s a
there’s verses on the screen there. Malachi 3:1, “The Lord whom you seek will suddenly come to his temple.”
That’s Yahweh. Jehovah whom you seek will suddenly come to his temple. Isaiah 45, the glory of Yahweh or Jehovah will
be revealed, and all people shall see it together. Isaiah 52:8, “Your sentinels shall lift up their voices. Together
they sing for joy, for in plain sight they see the return of Yahweh or Jehovah
to where? To Zion. So they’re expecting that Jehovah is going to come to Zion,
which is Jerusalem. They’re expecting that God will arrive in Jerusalem and that’s going to be the moment that’s
going to set them free from foreign oppression. The Jews had this idea that the arrival
of Jehovah in as king in Jerusalem would follow the Exodus pattern. There was going to be the idea there’s a wicked
tyrant, a chosen leader, the victory of God over the tyrant, a rescue through a sacrifice, a new way of life, the
presence of God in their midst, the promised land, and global domination. It was expected that God would be the king,
and this would all revolve around the temple of Jerusalem. And as was shared with us in our um in our um children’s
story today, a bit about Judas Mcabeas um there were many Messiah figures who
arose in the time of Christ claiming that they were the Messiah and they were going to be the fulfillment of the
Jewish messianic expectations. We start out with Judas the Hammer or Judah the Hammer or Judas Makabas. So when
Antiochus Epiphanies um the the Seucid king from Syria when he desecrated the
temple in 167 BC he dedicated it to the Greek god’s use and he tried to force
the Greek the Jews to eat pork and many of the Pharisees refused and over 800
were crucified outside the walls of Jerusalem because they wouldn’t eat the pork and they wouldn’t engage in pagan
sacrifices. So the Pharisees were the popular heroes in the minds of many Jews at the time of Christ. They’d laid down
their lives for fidelity to the law of God. And in response to this, Judas
Makabe launched a three-year guerilla campaign and he forced the Seucids to withdraw from Jerusalem and from Israel
and from Judah. When Judas Makabe sent Jerusalem in triumph, he cleansed the temple in 164 BC, parading around with
his followers, singing songs and waving palm branches. All of the key elements of the Jewish messianic expectations
were present. a wicked tyrant, a a brave um leader risking all, the fighting of a
key battle, the cleansing of the temple, setting Israel free from pagan oppression to worship God. And so Judas
Mcabeas established the Hasminian royal house, which ended up with becoming so corrupt that the Pharisees came into
being as a political party to try and force obedience to the law of God. Then you see on the screen there, there’s a
couple of other of those uh messianic pretenders at the time of Christ. There was a guy called um Judas of Galile
Judas of Galilee. He was around at the the birth of Christ. He was referred to by Galiel in Acts chapter 5:36-38.
Then you have Theudas who led a group of men into the wilderness and he claimed the power to divide the river Jordan and
like um Elijah he smoked the river with his mo with his um cloak. But unlike the story of Elijah, the river Jordan did
not pass and divide in two. So he was captured by the Romans and he was eventually beheaded. And um then you
have who else is up there? Dossios the Samaritan in the mid-1st century AD would referred to him brief briefly. And
then you have Simon Barokba and the Barba revolt in 132 to 135 AD. Now it’s
interesting the prophetic timetable here. How long did Jeremiah say that Israel’s people will be in captivity?
How many years? 70 years. And we with hindsight apply the 70 years
to the 70 years in Babylon. But at the time of Christ, the Jews were applying the 70 years to the time of
foreign oppression in Jerusalem. And the first great revolt against Rome took place in AD66,
which was exactly 70 years after the establishment of direct Roman rule over Jerusalem. They waited the 70 years.
Then they rose in rebellion against the Roman Empire. And a guy called Simon Barora was the leader. He gained popular
support in Jerusalem and he issued a proclamation freeing all the slaves. He imposed martial law in Jerusalem and he
executed the suspected traitors. He what he also did was he burnt the temple
records and all of the debts disappeared in that
flame and all of the mortgages disappeared in that smoke and everybody who’d had a contract where they were
forced to sell their children into slavery or they forced to sell their land to the wealthy to pay off their taxes. All of those accumulated
contracts over the centuries were burnt in the fire in Jerusalem. And Theodudas at a stroke brought everybody down to
economic ground zero. Nobody could prove anything. Everybody simply owned the land that they happened to live on. Uh
his hopes were all too familiar. He wanted to defeat the wicked enemy to liberate the temple and establish the
kingdom of God. And the armies of Rome closed in in AD66. And in the final
battle for the temple in AD70, he appeared in a white robe with a purple edge on it on the edge of the temple.
But he was captured. He was sent to Rome and he was executed. There were other unsuccessful Jewish revolts in AD 115 AD
117 in Egypt and Cyprus. When Hadrien became the emperor in 117 AD, his
anti-Jewish policies instigated further revolts. He banned circumcision among
the Jews, which we find hard to imagine, but he banned circumcision among the Jews and he turns Jerusalem into a pagan
city. He banned the Jews from ever setting foot in Jerusalem and he renamed the city of Jerusalem Alia Capolina.
And then when Simon Barkba raised the revol the banner of revolt in 132 AD that was again almost 70 years after the
destruction of the temple in AD.70 he was supported by a rabbi um called Rabbi
Aka and the the phrase barba refers to the son of a star and so they said that
the prophecy of numbers 24:17 that a star shall come out of Jacob and a scepter shall rise out of Israel that he
was a fulfillment of that particular messianic prophecy and the Jews started issuing coins dated year 1, year 2, year
three, year four with a picture of the temple on them and the Jews believed that Simon Garbaca was the Messiah. War
broke out once again. The Romans crushed the rebellion. Simon Barba and Rabbi Aka
were both killed. And so it takes little imagination to understand the significance of when Christ was
crucified, Pontius Pilate nailed a placard over his head on the cross which
said Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews. Now here on the screen it says I NR I which is um shorthand for Yesus
Nazareth Reinus Rex Udorum that’s Latin Jesus of Nazareth king of the Jews I NR
I but Pilate wrote it in multiple languages so everybody could understand exactly what he was saying. Pilate
understood the significance of the placard over the head of Jesus as did the Jewish religious leaders. Pilate was
saying that Jesus was just another failed claimment to the position of Messiah. He prom he pretended that his
arrival in Jerusalem was like the arrival of Jehovah in his temple and it would signify the liberation of God’s
people. But now Jesus was dead just like all the other pretenders to the Jewish throne. So that was the Jewish gale. The
the Jewish people were constantly engaging in uprisings with false messiahs. They were reapplying prophetic
interpretation to themselves. The 70 years of Jeremiah were applied to the the rise in AD66 against Rome and in 132
AD against Rome. But each time those uprisings were crushed by the Roman armies. And what about the Romans in
this picture? Well, the Romans had a different esquetology. The Romans believed they looked backwards. The the
Jews looked forward to a messiah. The Romans, they celebrated a mythical golden age in the past. And the Romans
were trying to recreate the golden era of the past. And they believed that that history could be measured by m metals
that declined in value. Just like Daniel chapter 2, the statue of the the head of gold and the arms of silver and the
thighs of brass and legs of iron and so forth. So the Romans looked back with their writers at a mythical golden age
in the past and every time um uh there was a new era in Roman history, they would celebrate it as they were
returning to the golden era of their past. So the Romans were not looking forward to a messiah like the Jews. They
were looking back to a mythical golden age when things were right in Rome. And so the goal of the emperors was to
recreate the mythical golden age of the past. And in 63 BC, the Roman general
Pompei conquered Jerusalem. He was invited by the waring um factions of the
Hasminian kingdom, that’s a Jewish royal house, to arbitrate between their competing claims to power. And rather
than arbitrating among them, he simply conquered Jerusalem, took the Hasminian kingdom apart and integrated Judea into
the Roman Empire. And uh Pompei was a a an ally of Caesar, but they eventually
fell out and uh in uh Julius Caesar conquered about the same time he
conquered Gaul and Spain. That’s France and Spain. And he amassed incredible wealth and power. And at the end of his
at the end of his time as a general, because in those days the Senate gave you authority over the the armies for a
period of time. At the end of his time as a general, the the Senate told Caesar, “Relining control of your armies
and returned to the Senate as a as a simple civilian.” But Julius Caesar didn’t want to. He tasted power. So he
marched his armies into into Italy. And there was a law in in in Italy that that
no general could bring his armies into Italy. And there was a river in the north of Italy called the Rubicon. You’ve heard of the Rubicon? And Julius
Caesar knew that if he marched his armies over the Rubicon River, he was entering the Roman heartland and he
would be declared a criminal by the Senate. But he he marched his arm, he crossed the Rubicon. It was like a it
was an irreversible step. You might say was burning the bridges and he marched on Rome and he became the dominant power
in Rome. He was elected dictator for life. The word dictator is means one who
speaks. So ro Juliuses was elected dictator for life and the traditionalists were outraged about
this. So on the eyides of March in March 1544 BC they assassinated Julius Caesar
on the floor of the Senate in Rome. Now there was a bloody civil war took place. Um on one side there was Mark Anthony
and Cleopatra. On the other side was Caesar’s adopted son Octavian. Well Octavian won and he became the first
emperor Augustus Caesar. And he proclaimed that Julius Caesar was a god. And therefore, Augustus Caesar was son
of the divine Julius or in shorthand Augustus Caesar was the son of god and
he was the emperor at the time of the birth of Christ. Now the arrival of the emperor into a city was hailed um as
good news. The word was awangelon and but it was always in the plural. Whenever an emperor had a birthday,
whenever an emperor won a battle, whenever he came to town, the heralds would announce the good news of the coming of the emperor.
And the gospel talks about the good news of the birth of the coming of Jesus Christ, the son of God. And when Mark
announces that Jesus is coming as the son of God and his birth is announced as the good news, it was a direct
competition with the cult of Rome and the position and power of the Roman emperor. And so the propagandists sang
the the praises of Augustus Caesar. They told the thousand-year story of Rome as a long narrative that reached its climax
at last. They said that the golden age that had started a thousand years ago had had now begun again with the birth
of a divine child known as Augustus through whom peace and prosperity would spread to the whole world. Virgil wrote
of the emperor Augustus. He wrote Novous Ordo seclorum. Does that ring a bell with anybody? It means a new order of
the ages. Now, that’s on your dollar bills. That’s on your dollar bills. That the
arrival of Augustus was a divine child going to bring about peace and order
throughout the known world. And the US founding fathers, they put this on the great seal of the US making the
astonishing claim that history turned its vital corner not with the birth of Augustus Caesar or Jesus Christ, but
with the birth and constitution of the United States of America. Now, Rome needed peace in the Middle East. Why?
Because Egypt supplied grain to much of the Eastern Mediterranean, including to Rome itself. Egypt was the granary of
the Mediterranean. So, peace and stability were all important for the Roman governors in Syria and Libya and
around to Palestine and up into modern day Syria. Those governors, their job was to keep the peace, to suppress
violent uprisings, to collect the taxes, and administer justice. And so the Romans did this with brutal efficiency
and they were very cruel in the way they did it. And so you have the Jewish gale on the one hand you have the Jewish
expectations of a messiah and they keep rising up in in support of this pretender to be the Messiah or that man
who claimed to be the Messiah. And on the other hand, you’ve got the Roman Empire which is claiming at the time of
Christ that the Augustus is the divine son of God and his birth and his arrival
at the throne is ushering in the golden era of human history. And so you have these two competing forces. The Romans
are saying we will establish the new world order, literally the new world order and it’s going to be peace and
prosperity for all humanity under Roman control. And you’ve got the Jewish expectations of a messiah figure and
they keep on pushing back against the Romans and there’s constant fighting going on back and forth before the time
of Christ, during the life of Christ and for 100 years afterwards. So you have the Jewish sto uh gale and the Roman
storm pushing hard on each other. They were always in collision. And then Jesus does something which is designed to
designed to make the to make these um tensions come to a fever pitch. He does
the triumphal entry into Jerusalem. Just before his crucifixion, Zechariah 9
says this, verses 9 and 16. Rejoice greatly, O daughter Zion. Shout aloud, O
daughter Jerusalem. Behold, your king comes to you, triumphant and victorious is he, humble and riding on a donkey, on
a colt, the fo of a donkey. On that day, the Lord their God will save them, for
they are the flock of his people, for like the jewels of a crown, they shall shine on his land.” End quote. So when
Jesus rode into Jerusalem on that term, Palm Sunday, as we now call it, one week
before his crucifixion or just less than a week before his crucifixion, this was a calculated event.
Was he the arrival of Yahweh coming to his city of Zion? If he was, this was the fulfillment of
the Jewish messianic expectations. If he was the arrival of Yahweh, the
king of the Jews and the Messiah, he was also setting up a direct confrontation with Roman authorities because they
claimed that Augustus was the son of God. And they claimed that with Augustus there was arrival of a new world order
that would guarantee peace and stability for the world under the dominion of Rome. So the triumphal entry was no
random event. It was calculated to make people pause and consider and make a
decision. Who exactly was riding into Jerusalem on triumphant on that
triumphal entry? Was it just a man from Nazareth? Was it the Messiah? Was it
Jehovah God from the Old Testament who’s coming to Zion? Who exactly was riding into Jerusalem on the back of a donkey?
And so we come to the divine hurac that clashed with the Jewish gale and the
Roman storm. And we start out by looking at the announcement of the kingdom of Christ, the kingdom of God in Luke 4.
And uh we’re familiar with this passage. This is called the Nazareth manifesto. Says when Jesus came to Nazareth is at
the beginning of his ministry where he had been brought up, he went to the synagogue on the Sabbath day as was his custom. He stood up to read and the
scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to him. He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written. Then we
read what we read before. The spirit of the Lord is upon me because he has anointed me to bring good news to the
poor. He sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor. The text goes on to say, “And he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to
the attendant, and sat down. The eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed upon him. Then he began to say to them,
“Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your in your hearing.” And the
audience was mad with him and they wanted to kill him for what he just said
because in so doing he denied their expectations of Jewish dominance and the Jews owning all the wealth of the
nations and all the nations being the shepherds and the slave boys of the Jewish people. He dashed their hopes of
global domination and he was also challenging Rome’s expectations that
they would also dominate around the world. So this was the announcement of the
kingdom of God. Jesus goes on to say in Mark 1:15, he says, “The time is
fulfilled. The kingdom of God has come near. Repent and believe the good news.”
And so the first word that Jesus says in relation to the kingdom of God is we need to repent.
That entry into the kingdom of God is conditional upon repentance. It’s not conditional upon birth. You’re not born
into the kingdom of God. You enter the kingdom of God at some point in your life when you turn away from sin and you
turn to God. And so Jesus says, “We repent and we believe in the Elwangelion. That is the good news.” And
then he goes when he in Luke 11 when the when the Pharisees accuse him of of um casting out spirits by beelub Jesus says
to them, “If it is by God’s finger that I cast out demons, then God’s kingdom has come upon you.” And this wasn’t
happening in a vacuum. When Jesus spoke about himself inaugurating the kingdom of God, everybody was watching. The
Romans were watching. Herod Antipass was watching. The corrupt ruling Sadducees
in Jerusalem were watching. The conservative Pharisees were watching. The deep state lawyers and scribes were
watching. The violent zealots were watching. The common people were watching. All had their expectations and
their fears for what the kingdom of God would mean for them. Everybody was watching what Jesus when Jesus spoke
these words. And when he says the kingdom of God is at hand, people were asking, “Does this mean
violent war? Does this mean revolution? What does this mean? Is our world going
to be turned upside down because of the arrival of the kingdom of God?” Now, most politicians have a well- definfined
platform. Yes. Most politicians, you look at their website and it says, “I stand for X, Y,
and Z.” They’ve got policies on taxation, on the border, on immigration, on economic policy, on various social
policies. Most politicians have a well-defined platform. And Jesus also
had a platform, but it wasn’t what the Jews or the Romans were actually expecting. The first thing that we
notice about the kingdom of God is that it’s filled with healings. When when the kingdom of God comes to
town, we realize that justice is about putting things right in the world. We understand that. But this starts at the
individual level. There’s no point in putting the world right if the people in it are still broken. So that means
broken bodies need to be healed. The paralytics, they’re forgiven and they walk again. The epileptics have their
demons cast out of them. The demonized are freed. People with horrible skin diseases are cured. The lepers are
cleansed. A servant is restored from the point of death. An old woman is cured with a high fever. The blind can see.
The deaf can hear. The mute can speak. A little girl already technically dead is raised from the dead. A dead boy who’s
already been carried to his funeral is raised from his funeral bed. An old woman is cured with a persistent hemorrhage. Young and old, men and
women, Jewish and Gentile. Wherever the kingdom of God in the person of Jesus comes into contact with disease, that
disease is healed. God’s kingdom represents healings for the human race. Somebody should say amen to that.
Someone say amen. Then there’s also celebrations. We don’t think of politicians promising celebrations. But
Jesus was just as home just at home in parties as he was in synagogues. He was
used to celebrating the fact that God was reaching out redemptively to save all the wrong people. Jesus spent time
with tax collectors with with traitors and prostitutes in their parties. He was, as the Pharisees said, a friend of
sinners. They meant it as a curse. It’s the best name Jesus could have had. He was a friend of sinners. That means he’s
a friend of me and he’s a friend of you here today. He was a friend of the social outcasts and celebrations and
healings go together in the gospel. Matthew understands his own calling in Mark Matthew 9 in the midst of a series
of stories about healings. And we know that there is rejoicing in heaven in Luke 15 over every sinner that turns
back to God when sinners and God are reconciled and then there are celebrations on earth and there are
celebrations in heaven above. And we sometimes think we know Christianity as a religion is very dur sour, very somber
minded. No, there’s celebration when somebody receives eternal life. I mean, how would you celebrate if somebody if
you got if you go home from church and there’s a letter in the mail from some long-lost relative and you’ve just
received $10 million as a bequest? Okay, I don’t see any unhappy people in
the audience right now. And when you receive eternal life, how much more should be the celebrations
and forgiveness for your past, when you if you’re a felon in America, that record is on your record your entire
life? Yes. Unless you get a presidential pardon, which isn’t very often. But um
if you’re a felon, that record stays with you your entire life. The victims may have forgiven you, but that record
follows you till the day you die. But when Jesus came to town, the past
was wiped out and people were promised eternal life. It’s no wonder there was celebrations when the kingdom of God
arrived in those towns, those broken homes of those social outcasts in Jerusalem. And then there was
forgiveness. How often do politicians talk about forgiveness?
Not very often. They talk about vengeance. They don’t talk about forgiveness. It’s easy for a politician
to go to war. It’s very hard for politicians to make peace. If you invade
my country, if you invade an inch of my territory on the other side of the world, we’re going to go to war with
you. You think, really? Why are we doing this? There’s nothing more than national pride. And it takes courage for
politicians to seek reconciliation. In in Northern Ireland, my my grandmother was from Northern Ireland in
Belfast and we had what we euphemistically called the Troubles in the 1960s, ‘7s, and ‘ 80s. It was
basically a low-level civil war between Protestants and and and Catholics. The Protestants wanted to stay with the
British state and the Catholics wanted to join the Irish Republic in the south. And both sides had their paramilitary
kill squads and they were killing each other off. Low-level killings happening every week between the Protestants and
the Catholics. They were killing each other every week in these these death squads. And uh that was the environment
in the 60s, 70s, and 80s. A lot of people died in what we call the troubles. We don’t call it a civil war,
but it was a low-level civil war. And one day, um there was there was a bombing went off in a town called Armar
in the north of Ireland. And that there was a Catholic father lost his little three or four year old daughter. She had blown up in the bombing. Uh the IRA, it
was the Catholics, they put a a bomb into a trash basket and it blew up and the girl got killed and it was a lot of
carnage there. And the BBC interviewed him just hours later live on the nine o’clock news and he offered full
forgiveness to the killers. It was an astonishing moment. And it that moment of forgiveness changed the
whole dynamic of the conflict. And people realize it doesn’t have to be
like this. We can transcend our political differences. If our children are being slaughtered in the streets
because we can’t agree on who we pay our taxes to, we’ve got a problem.
And so after the Armar bombing, both the Protestants and the Catholics, their leaders, they met. It was facilitated by
Senator Mitchell and Bill Clinton. And they eventually signed what we now known as the Good Friday Peace Agreement.
And the Protestant leader and the Catholic leader were both men who had
been that their men had been killing the other side for years.
and they signed a peace agreement and they agreed that they would share power
that both sides would share in government and they agreed to reforms to the police and so forth and so forth.
They won the Nobel Prize for peace for that peace agreement. And today in
Ireland, nobody wants to go back to the troubles. There’s been a peace dividend. When the war stopped, the economy
started growing again and people don’t want to go back. But both those men had death threats from their own supporters.
Like, how dare you make peace? Like, war has its own economy. We’re making war. We’re making money off of this war. How
dare you bring peace to our country? How dare you stop the killing? How dare you stop the radicalization of our young
men? And those two men were brave. And even though they were sworn enemies politically, they shook hands and made
peace. And it takes real courage to do that. And they spent the rest of their lives basically in fear of being killed
by radicals on their own sides. You know, when the kingdom of God comes
to town, it brings forgiveness. Forgiveness is a kind of healing, a
spiritual healing that removes the most significant burdens in life that will otherwise crush and you. And
forgiveness affects the whole community. After um apartheite in South Africa,
Desmond Tutu, the archbishop there, chaired what was called the Commission for Truth and Reconciliation South
Africa. And the slogan was this, no future without forgiveness. And they would call in all the men who’
done the terrible things in apartheite. And there were people on both sides, people who were terrorists as they call
them or freedom fighters. And there were people on the police side. They’d all done terrible, terrible things. And the
rule was this. If you stood in the peace and reconciliation committ commission and you told all horrors about what you
done, you would be forgiven. No criminal charges. And the opportunity was given to everybody who had blood on their
hands to come forward and say, “This is what I did. Now we’re asking for forgiveness.
And though that kind of forgiveness transforms a nation here in America, you
know, after that killing in in the Carolina with that racial killing, nine African-Americans were killed and the
family stood out afterwards and they forgave the killer. And when you see Erica Kirk forgilling forgiving the
killer of her husband at that memorial service just the other day, that offer of forgiveness, it lowers the
temperature in the whole nation and it makes us realize there is a better way than just cycles of violence. There is
there has to be a break in the cycle of violence. And the kingdom of God promotes forgiveness within families,
within homes, within marriages and within nations. If there is no future without forgiveness, as Desmond Tutu
said, then forgiveness will actually transform your heart and your home, your family and your marriage today. Feuds
and civil wars and ancient grudges, they will fester for centuries. But it’s only through forgiveness that families and
cons and societies can be reconciled and finds new hope and new love. And in Mark
chapter 2 1 12, the case of the paralytic who’s lowered down through the roof, it’s a scandalous story because in
Jewish thinking, where did forgiveness normally take place? Yes. Well, they had to go to the temple
to make their sacrifice. If you wanted a forgiveness from God,
you had to go to Jerusalem and offer your sacrifice and you would be forgiven. But Jesus says to the man,
they say, he says, “Son,” he says, “you sins have forgiven you.” And that young paralytic doesn’t have to go to
Jerusalem to find forgiveness. In the presence of Jesus, he finds forgiveness. So this is forgiveness apart from the
temple. Without any ordained priests, without any sacrifices, who does Jesus
think he is? Jehovah himself. The temple, the successor to the tabernacle,
was the place where God dwelt among his people, where God’s presence connects or
intersected with the people of Israel. But now in the presence of Jesus, we see that uh it is in Jesus that God and man
come together. That mankind can find forgiveness without the need to go to a physical temple in Jerusalem. And
because of this forgiveness, because of these healings, because of the celebrations over salvation, we have
hearts transformed in the kingdom of God. Part of the agenda of the kingdom of God is to see transformed hearts. In
Mark chapter 7 1-23, you have the question of um washing of hands and ritual cleanliness. What you can eat,
how you eat it. This was a major part of the Jewish religion. And the Makabian martyrs in the time of the Makabian
revolt, they were tortured and martyed for not eating pork. Yet Jesus turns the
question of cleanliness away from what you physically eat to the matter of the heart and the need for heart transformation. Forgiveness,
celebration, and healings combine not just to remove guilt and provide physical healing, but they also renew
the the whole person from the inside out. So when Jehovah comes to his people, when the kingdom of God is
inaugurated, it’s fundamentally different to every other kingdom on planet earth. Most earthly kingdoms or
empires promise peace and prosperity. Pax Romana, Pax Britannica, Pax
Americana. But in order to give um peace and security to the top the people at the top of the pyramid they often have
to bring in justice and suffering to multitudes of other people. The kingdom of God though comes through
the suffering injustice and death visited upon Jesus and his death ushers
in peace, reconciliation, forgiveness, transformed hearts and celebrations on
earth and in heaven for all who receive him. And what exactly is Jesus saying about his his own role in this kingdom?
Well, actually Jesus’ role in the kingdom of heaven, kingdom of God directly affects time, space, and
matter. See, most of us today have a very secular understanding of time, space, and matter. Our sense of sacred
space is almost gone as Westerners. This is the house of God, but as a
general rule, it is often treated in an irreverent manner. Would you agree? Yes, but this is the
only sacred space that we know of in our western Christian experiences. This building here, but it is often treated
in in an in an irreverent manner. We barely reverence our church sanctuaries. We have legal and worldview clashes with
indigenous groups who view their land as sacred in a way that transcends legal title. What about time?
Well, most Christians, I’m talking about Adventists now, but most Christians want Sunday worship to finish early so they
can be watching the NFL by noon. That’s true.
And so, remember the Sabbath day? And they say, “We’re going to Sabbath now.” They turn it into a verb, but you need
to finish by 11:30, pastor. 11:30 because we need to get to the NFL game.
And as Adventists, we celebrate the 4th of July, do we?
Yes. But most of us work on Good Friday.
And do we not see any contradiction in this? Do we celebrate what happened on Calvary? Do we take time off on the most
sacred moments in human history? No. We celebrate Black Friday and and Thanksgiving and July the 4th.
But we don’t celebrate or really respect in any way, shape, or form the death of Christ, even as Adventists. Now the
Catholics they they they celebrate the 4th of July. They celebrate um Good Friday and so forth because we don’t
want to be associated with Catholics when put as much distance between us and them as possible. I understand we we don’t celebrate these things but in all
honesty if we can celebrate the birth of a nation why can’t we celebrate the salvation of humanity?
And so we’ve we’ve lost our sense of sacred space. We’re losing our sense of
sacred time and the boundaries of the Sabbath are constantly eroding under
cultural pressures and new norms. So if I go to Britain
in England, if you walk along the by a river or the beach on a Sabbath, you can
take your shoes off in your black Sabbath suit and take your socks off and you can paddle just in your feet up to
your ankles. And if you go to Norway, you can kind of wade in the water. And
if you go to Germany, you just dive in in your swimsuit. And everybody’s honoring the Sabbath in their own way.
Okay? And if you go to England, we have potlucks. And if you go to Germany, you go out to the restaurant for your Sabbath meal. I’m just saying this is
what they do. I don’t agree with it. But what you learn as you travel around the world is that Adventists have widely
varying expectation, understandings of how we honor the Sabbath day. So our sense of of sacred space is eroding. Our
sense of sacred time is eroding. What about matter? To most of us today,
matter is just stuff. Our homes and our garages grown with unwanted stuff. Yes, we put stuff into
storage. We put stuff into boxes. Most of us forget what’s in storage and 10
years later, we pick it up, realize we really didn’t need it at all, and we throw it out. So, when when you’re paying for storage, you’re just paying
for the gestation before it goes down the toilet. To most of us, matter is just stuff. If
we can use it or make something of it, fine. If not, we dump it. To us in the west, matter has no intrinsic value,
only functional value. But when Jesus came, he asks us to to to reimagine what
time, space, and matter really should be in the as in the eyes of God. And the first thing we talk about is space
itself. Now, for centuries, map makers had placed Jerusalem at the
middle of the earth. It wasn’t just in Jewish maps, but all the way through the Middle Ages. the Catholic maps, the maps
of the crusaders, all the way through to the Reformation. Maps in history placed Jerusalem at the center of planet Earth.
For the ancient Jews, Jerusalem was the holiest spot on earth. It was where God had promised to dwell. It was where his
shikina glory had come to rest. But didn’t God also dwell in heaven? So, the temple was the place where heaven and
earth met? Heaven and earth were not distant, but they interlocked. They intersect to each other in the temple of
Jerusalem. By the time of Jesus, things were not going well in the temple of Jerusalem. It was the center of the
Jewish banking, taxation, and IRS system. All land deeds and debt records were stored there. It was where the
national extremes of wealth and poverty were recorded and enforced. The temple coin was used to gouge worshippers um
who came from a long distance away. It was the center of violent national revolution. Judas Makabe, Simon Barura,
and Simon Barba all fought battles to control Jerusalem. But Jesus, the prince
of peace, wept over Jerusalem, a city of violent revolution, saying, “If you, if only you, had known that on this day the
things that make for peace.” But it was a violent, violent city. So just as Jesus announced the kingdom of God, the
place where healings take place, where forgiveness is experienced, where celebrations happen and hearts are
renewed, that place is no longer the temple of Jerusalem, but it’s wherever Jesus is.
You don’t need to go to the temple of Jerusalem to experience these blessings of the kingdom of God. As you read
follow the stories of Jesus through the gospels, Jesus is replacing the temple as the place where God and man meet.
After cleansing the temple, Jesus refers to himself as the temple. He said, “Destroy this temple in three days and I
will raise it up again.” And so Jesus redefineses sacred space. And instead of
sacred space being the temple of Jerusalem and that’s the place where God and man meet and find forgiveness, Jesus
uh through his ministry says, “No, I am the one in in whom God and man meet. I am that sacred space from now on. You
don’t need to go to the temple of Jerusalem. If the temple of Jerusalem is destroyed, don’t worry about it because I am the one in whom man and man and God
meet together.” Then you have time. If the temple was the space where God’s
sphere and the human sphere met, the Sabbath was the time when God’s time met human time. And Sabbath was to time what
the temple was to space. The Sabbath was an integral part of the wider spiritual calendar that involved the seventh year
of agricultural rest and the year of Jubilee. That was a once-in-lifetime experience to be that everyone was
supposed to experience and to be blessed by at least once in their life. The Jews knew how to keep the Sabbath and the
needs of the sick and the second the and the dying were secondary to the rules for the Sabbath. They believed if only
one person kept the Sabbath perfectly then the Messiah would come. And Jesus came as the Lord of the
Sabbath. He said the time is fulfilled. Yahweh is in is in control. His kingdom has
arrived on earth as in heaven. And the Sabbath has a new meaning. Yes, the Sabbath celebrates creation as in Exodus
20. Yes, it celebrates livery from sin and slavery as in Deuteronomy 5, but it now celebrates God’s victory over Satan
in the lives of the followers of Christ. Jesus said in Luke 13, “And isn’t it right that this daughter of Abraham tied
up by Satan for these 18 years should be untied from her chains on the Sabbath day.” Miracle after miracle takes place
on the Sabbath day, scandalizing the leaders but delighting the people and challenged by the leaders, Jesus
replied, “My father is working and I also am working.” in John 5. So Mark
2:27-28, Jesus lists a a key spiritual principle
for us today, he says, um, in this story here, there was a man with a withered arm, and Jesus said to them, “Is it
lawful to do good or to do harm on the Sabbath to save life or to kill? But they were silent. He looked around at
them with anger.” He was grieved at their hardness of heart and said to the man, “Stretch out your hand.” He
stretched it out, and his hand was restored. In this passage here, Jesus teaches us
that people were not made for Sabbath rules, but the Sabbath was instituted to bless humanity and enhance our
collective well-being. And he he teaches this on his authority as the son of man, who is also the Lord of the Sabbath. God
had instituted Sabbath at creation. And now the son of man presumes authority over the Sabbath and all of creation and
models for us what it is to keep the Sabbath. In Mark 3 1-6, the story of the healing of the man with a withered hand
on the Sabbath, Jesus asks a question. Is it lawful to do good or to do harm on
the Sabbath? The first half of the question refers to the healing of the handicapped man. And for Jesus, human
suffering poses a moral imperative. Where good needs to be done, there can be no neutrality. And a failure to do
good is to perpetuate evil. It is therefore not simply permissible to heal on the Sabbath. it is morally right to
heal on the Sabbath. And in verse five, the authorities response to the man’s
suffering is silence. And Jesus said unto them,
I go back to where it is. He was grieved at their hardness of
heart and said to the man, “Stretch out your hand.” He stretched it out and his hand was restored. The authorities were
silent in the face of human suffering. For them, true religion consists of theological correctness, ceremonial
purity, and fulfilling legal requirements. And Jesus is grieved at the hardness of these religious leaders
hearts. The test of all theology is not whether it’s in eternally consistent,
but how it responds to the weakest and most vulnerable members of your society. As God commands the Israelites
particularly to care for the widows, the orphans, and the aliens within their midst. So Jesus now responds to human
suffering. A litmus test of true religion is not how brilliant you are or how many books you’ve written, but it’s
how you respond to those who are suffering around you. And Jesus demonstrated that the Sabbath is to be a
day not for what we won’t do or can’t do, but it is a day divinely set apart
by God for the lifting of burdens, the easing of suffering, setting Satan’s captives free, and bringing glory to
God. So when you plan your Sabbath, because um in the Old Testament, you
make a Sabbath in the Song of Solomon, the verb is to make a Sabbath. It’s like you make a Thanksgiving celebration or
you make a wedding or you make a a wedding uh birthday celebration. When you make a Sabbath and you plan for the
Sabbath, ask yourself, are we lifting burdens? Are we easing suffering? Are we
setting Satan’s captives free? Are we bringing glory to God? Are we bringing joy into the hearts of those this world
has forgotten? It’s a good litmus test for honoring the Sabbath day. Honoring the Sabbath day is
not just what you won’t do, what you can’t do. It’s not just about where you won’t go, what you won’t buy, what you
won’t watch. It’s it’s about God’s positive blessings flowing through you to a suffering world.
And then it comes to matter. Western minds have been trained in the reductionist scientific method and
schools of biology, astronomy, but botony and so forth. We know how to chop
things into smaller and smaller pieces. Yes. Any any of you sat through a biology class at school and then they
say this is a flower and this is this part of the flower is called this and these are the petals and these are the bits in the middle and you had to take
it apart bit by bit. Yes, remember that we’re used to taking things apart and the more we take it apart the less you
have of what was originally there and eventually you’ve taken the whole thing apart into such small detail that
there’s nothing left of what you started with. And you start with a beautiful rose, you end up with just a few scraps
of red and green lying on in front of you in in the laboratory there. But Jesus did not bring a reductionist
scientific methods to the kingdom of God. Jesus thinks about the nature very differently because the world of matter,
no less in the world of space and time was made by God to display his power,
his glory, and his beauty. We find this theme throughout the Old Testament prophets. Habac 2:14 says this. The
earth, it should say that.
It should say that. Well, let me read it for you here. This matter isn’t working properly. So,
it says, “The earth will be filled with the glory of with the knowledge of the glory of Jehovah as the waters cover the
sea.” Psalm 19:1, the heavens declare the the glory of God. And so in the Old
Testament, you have this idea throughout the Old Testament prophets and the Psalms that nature is designed to to to
manifest and to radiate the character and the goodness of God. It’s not just a tree. That tree tells us something about
our creator. It’s not just the stars at night that there by random. They are there to sing forth night after night um
a testimony to our father’s greatness and his glory. And it’s not just a fish you’re looking at or or a green um field
or whatever it is. Everything in nature um was created to display and manifest and teach about God’s glory and his
character and his power and his might. And so when Jesus announces the kingdom of God that it’s come close, physical
matter is now transformed into what God originally intended it to be. You have five loaves and two fishes, and 5,000
people eat their fill from five loaves and two fishes. Professional fishermen achieve record catches when no fish are
otherwise available. The raging storms on Galilee are now stilled. Jesus now walks on water and so does Peter. The
lepers are healed. Fish have coins in their mouths. Jesus materializes through a wall to his mystified disciples. The
dead are raised. And then there is the resurrection itself. that when the kingdom of God comes to town, physical
matter now sings and tells of the glory of God. It’s not just something physical that’s sitting there. Physical matter,
the universe, the created world around us is is a is a is an object lesson. It’s a mirror. It’s a window into God’s
character and his beauty and his love and his might. And so Jehovah manifests his glory by asserting his sovereign
rights over matter. He fills matter with his glory in the gospels and allows matter to reflect the love of God, his
generosity, his compassion, his power, his glory and his desire to make things new again. And we catch a glimpse into
the inherent goodness of God’s created material material creation when Jehovah appears in Jesus, the person of Jesus,
and pushes back the forces of sin and Satan and allows the material world to truly reflect the character of God. Now,
we don’t see this very often these days, but the gospels teach us that when the kingdom of God comes to town, physical
matter does things that don’t make any sense, but it manifests and it tells the glory of God. That God’s glory is
manifest through if Peter can walk on water. And if a fish can be found with a temple tax in its mouth and so forth,
that the physical world now speaks forth of the glory of God. It’s not just the heavens speak of the glory of God. the
trees and the forests and the valleys and the mountains and the rocks, they all speak forth of the glory of God. And
if we were to go for a walk in nature this evening or tomorrow um as Christians, we’re not just looking at how beautiful it is. We’re asking, what
does this tell us about the character of God? Physical nature is transformed when the
kingdom of God comes to town. Just as Jesus cleansed the temple and set free Satan’s captives on the on the Sabbath,
so he was also transfigured before his disciples in Matthew 17. Jesus is not just the place where God’s world and
man’s world meet. He is not just the one in whom God’s time and our time meet. He’s also the one in whom God’s matter,
his new creation transforms our fallen bodies and our fallen minds. If the kingdom of God comes into my life, it
means that I’m a new creation. I am a material being. I’m made mostly of water
and a few random chemicals and bits of whatever is in me.
Not too much salad. But I’m I’m a material creation. But the
promise is that if I’m in Christ, I am a new creation. That the kingdom of God transforms who I am. It transforms me
from the inside out. And so time, space, and matter are all transformed when the kingdom of God comes to t comes to town.
All those who in Christ are empowered to become a new creation today and ultimately with a promise that we’ll
dwell in a new heavens and a new earth where we’ll worship God from Sabbath to Sabbath in the new Jerusalem. Time,
space, and matter are all promised in the new heavens and the new earth. And it affects every aspect of our being
today. We all dwell in time, space, and matter. And when the kingdom of God comes in the person of Jesus, all of
those things, time, space, and matter, are transformed. And we experience that transformation now as a kingdom of
grace. And we look forward to the kingdom of glory when everything is made new again.
So what do we say in conclusion here this afternoon? Well, it is in Jesus
that God and man can meet. That is transformed space. Not the temple of Jerusalem, in Jesus Christ. That is why
we ask our heavenly father for things in the name of Jesus. It is in Jesus that
God delivers the captives of Satan on the Sabbath. The Sabbath is now transforms time. It’s a time for God’s
goodness to flow through this congregation to those around this congregation. And it is in Jesus that
God brings about a new creation for this fallen world. We become a new creation. We are transformed matter. And we today
by God’s grace are citizens of that kingdom. We’re citizens of that kingdom. It
doesn’t matter whether you have an Irish passport like me or a Russian passport like my wife or a British passport like
my mother or American passport like anybody else here. We have we have other passports here today. These things are
really neither here nor there. It just determines where you’re going to pay your taxes and where you’re going to die. Really doesn’t make you any happier
or sadder the passport you carry in your pocket. But we are citizens of God’s kingdom.
I want to encourage you and challenge you today to uphold the principles of God’s kingdom over and above all earthly
kingdoms. Amen. When we were baptized, we pledged allegiance to the kingdom of God, not to
any earthly kingdom. We’re to be the best possible citizens whichever nation we live in on this in this world. But our ultimate loyalty is
to the kingdom of God and to no other kingdom. It is in Jesus that God and man
meet, transformed space. It’s in Jesus that God delivers the captives of Satan on the Sabbath. That’s transformed time.
And when we’re in Christ, we become a new creation. We are transformed matter. our lives radiate the the love and the
grace of our heavenly father. So my prayer for us is that when the kingdom of God arrives in our home,
whatever storms or gales already going on there and everybody has some kind of storm going on in their life. When Jesus
made his triumph entry into Jerusalem, there was already a collision between the Jewish gale and the Roman storm.
Whenever whenever the kingdom of God arrives in your home, we’re not looking for the perfect storm.
We’re looking for the presence of the Prince of Peace that all those gales and all those huracans and all those storms
can be put to bed once and for all and we can experience the pass the peace that passes all human understanding. So
I want to encourage you today. It is in Jesus that we it is through Jesus we enter the kingdom of God. It is the
teachings of Jesus that teach us how to live in the kingdom of God. And Jesus promises to make us a new creation as
long as we are in his kingdom. And uh he promises to transform our understanding of time, space, and matter so that when
people see us, they see a manifestation of our heavenly father. So I want to challenge you today, live
by the principles of the kingdom of God. And if you want to know what the kingdom of God looks like, read the four gospels
time and again, and you’ll see what the kingdom of God means in practice, and you’ll see what it means to live for the
kingdom of God here in 2025 in Idaho. May God bless us as we live out these
principles of the kingdom of God and may people see in our lives that the King of Kings and Lord of Lords and the and the
leader of the kingdom of God is supreme in our own lives as well. So may God bless us as we live out these principles
in our lives here in Boise, Idaho.