The Kingdom of God is Near

Scripture — Mark 1:14-15 (NRSV)

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.”

Devotion

In yesterday’s Life for Leaders devotion, we began a close reading of the summary in Mark 1:15 of the good news preached by Jesus. We saw that Jesus proclaimed that the time of God’s salvation announced by the Old Testament prophets had come. The time was fulfilled.

After announcing that God’s time had finally come, Jesus announced the “good news of God” in a few words: “The kingdom of God has come near” (1:15). What did Jesus mean? What is the kingdom of God? How can what Jesus proclaimed be good news for us today?

When we hear the word “kingdom,” we tend to think of a place over which a king rules. But, in Aramaic, the primary language of Jesus, the word mallku, which could mean “kingdom,” pointed not so much to the place of royal rule as to that rule itself. Where we read “kingdom” in Mark, we might substitute “rule” or “reign” or “sovereign authority.” This means when Jesus was saying, “The malku of God has come near,” he was pointing to the coming of God’s authority and power. He was fulfilling the role of the messenger of Isaiah 52:7: “How beautiful on the mountains are the feet of those who bring good news, who proclaim peace, who bring good tidings, who proclaim salvation, who say to Zion, ‘Your God reigns!’” (Of course, as it turns out, Jesus was much more than just the messenger of the kingdom. He was the one through whom the reign of God has come to earth.)

Years ago, I used to think that Jesus’s announcement of the kingdom being near meant something like, “You can go to heaven after you die.” Though I still believe in eternal life beyond this life, now I realize that I had missed Jesus’s primary meaning when he spoke of the kingdom of God. Though his good news did relate to what happens after death, it also had everything to do with this life and this world. In Jesus, God was beginning to reign on earth in a new way, in fulfillment of Old Testament prophecy. Under God’s sovereign authority, righteousness would triumph over injustice and multifaceted peace would fill the earth.

Through Christ, you and I can live today under the reign of God, however incompletely. When we seek God’s agenda for our lives, when we work for God’s purposes and glory, when we bow before God in worship and offer our daily work to God as worship, we are experiencing the kingdom of God. God is reigning over us and making the kingdom present on earth through us.

Find all Life for Leaders devotions here. Explore what the Bible has to say about work at the High Calling archive, hosted by the unique website of our partners, the Theology of Work Project. Reflection on today’s Life for Leaders theme can be found here: Is the Kingdom of God Part of My Daily Life?.