“Long live the King!” is a phrase rich with historical significance, symbolizing loyalty, continuity, and the enduring nature of monarchy. Its roots appear to trace back to 15th-century France in the declaration “Le roi est mort, vive le roi!”. “The King is dead, long live the King!” is a proclamation that marked both the death of a reigning monarch and the immediate succession of the next. Over time, the phrase found its place in English tradition and thus, “Long live the Queen!” The king (or queen) was kinda a big deal, I guess.
Recent blog posts have responded to the elusive and lingering question, “What is the Kingdom of God that was central to Jesus’ gospel message?” Why is it so hard for us to wrap our heads around and understand? We have slowly been working through scripture in an attempt to get a 30,000-foot view of God’s activity related to his kingdom and his subjects, starting with Almost Getting It back in November 2024.
Over the past months, I have had many conversations with people who, like me, have come to the realization that Jesus’ primary message was indeed about the Kingdom of God, but with the lingering question of what the kingdom actually is. As mentioned previously, I’ve been wrestling with the question for several decades. Part of this blog journey is my own attempts to articulate what the kingdom is (and what it is not, by the way).
For the last couple of months, I’ve begun to wonder if we have been asking the wrong question. We want to know what the kingdom itself is. I don’t know if it’s a Western thing or a human thing, but I suspect tunnel vision results in asking wrong questions. As I ponder Jesus’ interactions with his disciples, it seems like that was an issue for them, too – asking the wrong questions. So ponder this…
Are we more captivated by the characteristics of the kingdom than by the character of the One who reigns?
We want to know stuff about the kingdom – what it is, where it is, its relation to heaven (or vice versa), etc. We are interested in the characteristics of the kingdom. A place. What if we were to focus our attention on the character of the King himself? It’s this very wonderment that led me to create The Parable of the Benevolent King. I was attempting to describe a kingdom that reflected the character of the king. In the process, the characteristics of the kingdom became evident.
I suspect that when the Israelites met Yahweh at Mount Sinai, they were discovering the character of the God who rescued them from oppression and slavery. In the theophany, they discovered his holy presence on the mountain. The gods they knew about in Egypt were tied to time and place and a bit inept.
Try to imagine what they experienced…
16 On the morning of the third day there was thunder and lightning, with a thick cloud over the mountain, and a very loud trumpet blast. Everyone in the camp trembled. 17 Then Moses led the people out of the camp to meet with God, and they stood at the foot of the mountain. 18 Mount Sinai was covered with smoke, because the Lord descended on it in fire. The smoke billowed up from it like smoke from a furnace, and the whole mountain[a] trembled violently. 19 As the sound of the trumpet grew louder and louder, Moses spoke and the voice of God answered him. (Exodus 19:16-19)
This awesome experience was followed by Him delivering a set of commandments given for the people, His subjects. Starting with the Ten, we usually view these commands as precepts on how the people were to live in the presence of a holy God. There is certainly something to that. But what if we also looked at the commands as a revelation of God’s character to a people who knew nothing of his character? Think about it. As we watch world leaders issue “commands,” don’t their directives tend to reveal their character?
Through the Ten Commandments, the people discovered that Yahweh is the only true God, not tied to time and space (Exodus 20). This God did not require images because He created them as his image bearers, as we discussed in an earlier post.
But God didn’t stop with the Ten Commandments. He instituted an additional set of commands (see Exodus 20-23). Like the bottom of the order of the first Ten, these additional couple of dozen commands are mostly related to how his image-bearers were to relate to each other. We might call them social justice laws. They talk about how servants were to be treated, about fair trade, about the treatment of widows and orphans, about how foreigners were to be treated, about justice and mercy, etc. In fact, the NIV translation’s heading for a section of these additional commands is “Laws of Justice and Mercy.”
Can you see how the commands reveal the character of the King?
So again I wonder, is our attention drawn to the discovery of the characteristics of the kingdom rather than the character of the King? Maybe Dallas Willard had that figured out when he said…
Jesus put a face on the Kingdom of God*
* Willard, D. (2024). The scandal of the kingdom : how the parables of Jesus revolutionize life with God. Zondervan Books.
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