Word of Salvation – Vol.51 No.19 – May 2007

 

Repent! God’s Kingdom is Near!

 

A Sermon by Rev John De Jongh on Matthew 4:12-17

Scripture Reading:  Isaiah 8:1-4; 8:18-9:7

Suggested Singing:  BoW 15; 332; Rej 282; 483

 

Brothers and Sisters in Christ.

Imagine a relay race for a minute. The runners are spread out around the track waiting for their turn. The first runner carries a baton. And then the gun goes off – he’s off like a shot. And he runs until he reaches the second runner. The baton gets passed on. And then it’s that runner’s race until he passes it on again, and again, until the last runner is over the finish line.

That relay race is an analogy of what’s happening in this passage. John the Baptist was preparing the way for Jesus and the kingdom of God by preaching and baptising at the Jordan River. We see in the previous chapter how Jesus came to him to be baptised too, received the Holy Spirit in preparation for his ministry, and then was led into the desert to be tested.

If you go to John’s gospel you see that Jesus almost bides his time for a while. He goes back to Galilee for a bit, you find him saying to his mother at the wedding in Cana that his time hasn’t come yet. Then he heads back to Jerusalem for the Passover. And then takes up a baptising ministry like John the Baptist’s, through his first disciples, and in the same general area as John. He’s like David before the death of King Saul – he’s waiting for something – he’s waiting for the baton to be passed on.

And then when he hears that John has been put in prison he knows that it has. John has had the opportunity to call people into God’s kingdom taken away from him. Jesus knows that it’s been passed on to him. He holds the baton now and the race is his.

Point 1 – Jesus moves back home

The first thing Jesus does is head back to Galilee. For a while now he’s been baptising in the south, in Judea. But as soon as he hears about John he heads back to Galilee in the north, where he grew up.

But why? The baton’s been passed on to him, and the first thing he does is leave the place where repentant sinners have been coming to be baptised and heads to a completely different area.

One reason why he might have done that was to get away from the heat. If you flick in your Bibles to Matthew 14, you find that Herod arrested John because John had been saying that it wasn’t lawful for Herod to take his brother’s wife as his own. Herod was ready to kill John for it. And so there’s the chance that Jesus wants to get out of harm’s way.

But did Jesus have to worry about that sort of thing. Wasn’t he God? Wasn’t he immune to having to worry about those kind of things?

Yes of course Jesus was fully God. But he wasn’t immune from human worries, for he was also fully human. He was human, living as one of us in the world we live in. You see from his temptation in the desert that he wouldn’t use his Messianic power to turn stones into bread just because he was hungry. And you see time after time in the gospels that Jesus avoids hostility. He doesn’t expect God to protect him from it. He doesn’t protect himself miraculously from it. He does what we would do – he avoids it. And so in chapter 2 already, his family escaped to Egypt when Herod was out to kill him. In chapter 12 he withdraws from the Pharisees who are out to kill him. And he keeps avoiding trouble until the time for his crucifixion has come.

What Jesus is really doing is keeping the balance between God’s sovereignty and his human mandate to be responsible. In that way he is a model for us, too. We can trust that everything is in God’s hands. Whatever circumstances and difficulties come our way, we can trust that God is with us. We can find our final confidence, security and comfort in knowing that. After all, what is our only comfort in life and in death? That we belong to Jesus, and that not a hair can fall from our head without the will of our Father in heaven.

On the other hand we still need to be responsible for our actions. We can’t step out into the street in front of a bus and trust that God in his sovereignty will protect us from harm. We can’t be stupid and expect God to save us from the consequences. We can’t be irresponsible and expect not to pay for it. We can’t do the wrong thing and expect not to be held accountable. We can’t sin and expect not to pay for it. God is in complete control, but we still need to be responsible in our attitudes, decisions, and actions as well.

As we go on we see that now Jesus moves from where he grew up in sleepy little insignificant Nazareth, to bustling, busy Capernaum on the lake.

And again, we’re not completely sure why, but one good reason would be to increase his audience. He’s about to begin his ministry in earnest, you don’t do that in a sleepy backwater with hardly anyone to talk to. You go to where the people are, where you’ll have an audience.

And that’s something we need to do, too. 2000 years down the track, we’re the ones carrying this baton, running this race. We’re the ones Jesus has delegated to bring people into the kingdom. But we’re not going to do it by only mingling in our small group of Christian friends. And generally non-Christians aren’t going to come to us asking for the gospel. If we’re going to do it we have to do what Jesus did and increase our audience. We need to go where the people are. We need to be willing to rub shoulders with non-Christians. It means having some non-Christian friends who we can share the gospel with.

And for many of us, that’s the people we work with, the people we play with, our neighbours – they’re our mission field – the non-Christians that we most naturally connect with. And if we don’t have a ready-made mission field like that, then we need to be creative and ask how we can find one. It might be as easy as getting involved in something in the community for an hour a week that we’re interested in, that involves other people – a craft, a sport, some recreation we enjoy, some pastime. But taking that step might open up for us a whole new mission field. It’s something we can do something about this week. It could mean the difference between God using us in saving others, or not.

Point 2 – Fulfilling Old Testament Scripture

When Jesus heads back to Galilee and starts his public ministry there, at first sight it might seem like a strange thing to do. Surely it would raise questions about how could he possibly be the Messiah. We saw a few weeks ago that people asked if anything good could come out of Nazareth, that insignificant little place with a partly Gentile population. Folk living there were held in contempt by your average Jew. And actually, that was how the whole of Galilee was seen generally. Galilee was the buffer zone between Israel and the rest of the world. When invaders had moved in, in the past, Galilee was the place they hit first.

And so over the past centuries the population there had gone through a few ebbs and flows, with some Jews regularly moving out and Gentiles moving in – it meant that Galilee had this mixed Jewish/Gentile population and just wasn’t quite Kosher. How could the Messiah possibly come out of there? Surely he’d come out of Jerusalem.

Perhaps because this seems so contrary to what his readers might have expected, Matthew gives us good reason to look to Galilee for the Messiah. As he’s done in the chapters before this one, he quotes from the Old Testament, this time from Isaiah 9. The context in Isaiah 9 is Israel facing enemies. Assyria has been conquering everything in its path, heading toward Israel from the north. Israel is expecting a day soon that will be filled with darkness, distress, and death as the Assyrian army arrives on their doorstep. And of course Galilee, again, will be first hit.

Even worse than that, Israel is experiencing a spiritual darkness. In this time of crisis, they’re not turning to God for help, but to the dead. Isaiah 8 talks about people consulting mediums and spiritists. God asks, “Shouldn’t people inquire of their God? Why consult the dead on behalf of the living? To the law and the testimony! If they don’t speak according to this word, they have no light of dawn.”

But then in Chapter 9 of Isaiah comes the promise that Matthew quotes here. In time, out of this land of darkness, distress and the shadow of death, a light will appear. If you contrast the darkness of Isaiah 8 and 9 with this light, you realise that it will mean things like joy and life and salvation. Then in verse 6 of Isaiah 9 you realise it will be a person: “For to us a child is born, to us a son is given, and the government will be on his shoulders. And he will be called Wonderful Counsellor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.”

Matthew is telling us that Jesus is this person! Maybe Galilee didn’t have the greatest reputation in Jesus’ day. Maybe historically it had been a land of distress and death. Maybe it was a land of spiritual darkness. But God is the God who brings light out of darkness. He did it at creation in the beginning, and he’s doing it again with his New Creation.

Later in the Bible, this symbolism is fulfilled in Revelation 21 and the New Jerusalem when John says, “The city does not need the sun or the moon to shine on it, for the glory of God gives it light, and the Lamb is its lamp.”

Point 3 – Repent, for God’s kingdom is near!

Now, looking at verse 17, you can’t mistake the fact that Jesus has picked up the baton from John the Baptist and is running the same race. The message he preaches is exactly the same as John’s: “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is near.”

God’s kingdom isn’t far from us. We don’t have to somehow get into heaven to find it. We don’t have to wait until we die to get in. It’s near us – it’s here all around us, and we can enter it right now.

If you’re looking for checkpoints and customs officers and boom gates, you’re not going to find them. If you’re waiting for a visa to come in the mail, you’ll be waiting a long time. No country can claim to be God’s kingdom – it’s just not an earthly kingdom like that – it’s a spiritual kingdom. In fact, wherever you find a Christian, God’s kingdom is there. When the first person in a new area is saved, then God’s kingdom has just established a new outpost.

Jesus tells us how to enter his kingdom. The way to enter it is to repent from the old way of sin. The way to enter is to realise that we’ve been committed to the wrong king, trusted in the wrong things, been committed to the wrong way of life, been citizens of the wrong kingdom. What we need to do is commit ourselves to King Jesus, put our trust in him as our King and Saviour, commit ourselves to living his way, be citizens of his kingdom. And even though the details of all that aren’t spelt out for us here, you can go to the next few chapters to find them.

The Sermon on the Mount is really King Jesus’ inaugural speech. As he comes into office he lays out the privileges of being a citizen in his kingdom, and the obligations, and how Jewish legalism got it wrong. His question to us is: Would we like these benefits, are we willing to make these sacrifices, are we ready to go his way instead of any alternative that might come our way. And as we accept all of that and press the spiritual ‘I agree’ button, we enter his kingdom. We still have a long way to go before we plumb the depths, but we’ve taken our first steps into his kingdom. We’re his citizens. And God’s kingdom is our eternal home.

Conclusion – Share the message with others!

The kingdom of God is the only spiritual kingdom worth belonging to. Jesus is king. Anyone else who tries to set himself up as the ultimate king is a fake.

The way to enter is to turn from whatever other way we might be taking and take the way Jesus spells out in places like the Sermon on the Mount.

And part of our job now is to run with the same baton Jesus carried during his ministry and bring the gospel to others, challenge them to repent from their sin, and enter his kingdom.

Amen.