When Jesus commenced his public ministry it was with the words “The Kingdom of God has come near. Repent and believe the good news” (Mark 1:15) and from that moment the Kingdom of God was the central message in all his ministry: The parables were often introduced as illustrations of the Kingdom, he taught the disciples to pray for the coming of the Kingdom, he sent them out to proclaim the Kingdom (Luke, 9:2), he promised them they soon would see the Kingdom come in power and during the forty days between his resurrection and ascension ‘he spoke about the Kingdom of God’ to the disciples (Acts 1:3).
After Pentecost and the outpouring of the Spirit upon the disciples, they began their public ministry as commissioned by Jesus. However, it seems as if the message of the kingdom had disappeared or at least been relegated to lesser prominence. In his great speech at Pentecost, Peter did not mention the kingdom of God even once, nor in the Temple after the healing of the lame man nor in front of the Jewish council. Actually, the kingdom of God is not mentioned in any of the speeches in in chapters 2-5 in Acts, nor is it a dominant theme in the early church’s proclamation through out Acts.
So what did they proclaim? Luke sums it up in Acts 5:42: ‘…they never stopped teaching and proclaiming the good news that Jesus is the Messiah.’ They proclaimed Jesus! They proclaimed the death, and especially, the resurrection of Jesus and called people to repent and believe in him.
What happened to the kingdom? Surely, as they continued the ministry of Jesus they should also continue proclaiming his message about the kingdom of God? Had they misunderstood something or were they confused? Had all the speaking in strange languages caused the message to get lost in translation?
No, quite the opposite! The unique message of Jesus was not the kingdom of God as such, but that the kingdom of God now is here in power – that is through the coming of Jesus. Whereas Jesus literally embodied that message, the disciples pointed to him and proclaimed that Jesus is the king and through him, and only through him, does the kingdom come.
The disciples understood that without Jesus, there is no kingdom. That only through proclaiming his name and as people respond to him, can the kingdom come. Jesus is the king, and you cannot have the kingdom without accepting the reign of the king. So the disciples proclaimed the kingship of Jesus, they proclaimed Jesus and him as ‘the only name, by which we can be saved.’ (Acts 4:12)
We, as the first disciples, are called to proclaim Jesus and lift his name up. He is our Saviour, our healer, and our righteousness. He is the only way to the Father, there is salvation in no one, but him and only as he is acknowledged as king, can the kingdom come. As John Stott once said:
"'…the kingdom of God in the New Testament is a fundamentally Christological concept, and as such it may be said to exist only where Jesus Christ is consciously acknowledged as Lord' although 'the righteous standards of the kingdom….may to some extent spill over into the world as a result of Christian influence"
While we want to be ‘kingdom people’, we first and foremost need to be ‘Jesus people’. As we consciously and passionately follow and worship Jesus, he will form us into a kingdom community of people, as it happened with the early church. While the kingdom was not that explicit in their proclamation, the kingdom was, however, very present in their life together. As the kingdom was embodied in Jesus, so, after receiving the Holy Spirit, the church embodied the kingdom before a watching world. They became what the English missiologist Lesslie Newbigin called a ‘sign, witness and foretaste’, a living illustration of the kingdom of God, that overflows into a world that desperately need the ‘shalom’ of the Kingdom, the peace, righteousness and joy in the Holy Spirit that Paul mentions in Romans 14:17.
As Charles Wesley wrote, “we have no other argument and we need no other plea” or in the words of Paul: “What we preach is not ourselves, but Jesus Christ as Lord…” (2. Cor. 4:5a). If we proclaim Jesus and the salvation that is only found in him, when we ‘love him supremely all of days’ and lift his name up in all we do, then he will draw people unto himself. As they, together with us, acknowledge him as Lord and King, as we all continually accept his reign over our lives, and as we, by the power of the presence and power of the Holy Spirit are formed into a living and dynamic fellowship, then the kingdom will be manifested in and through us as a community of the King.