Of Great Trees, Birds and Huge Mountains
A central concern for every Christian must be the Kingdom of God and its coming. The reason we know this to be the case is our Lord's instruction that it be the first (therefore, highest priority) thing we pray for. After the expression of praise to the Name of God we are commanded in the Lord's prayer to ask God that His Kingdom would come. We are also told what this means: we are to pray that the will of God be done on earth as it is done in heaven.
“Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done on earth, as it is in heaven” is a synonymous parallelism: the second request is a synonymous rephrasing of the first. Thus, we are to pray first and foremost for the christianisation of the earth, by which we are to understand the whole earth becoming obedient to the will of God, even as heaven is obedient to His will and His Christ.
If we are to pray for this as our highest and first concern—more important than our daily bread and forgiveness of sin (or, more accurately, we should see daily provision and forgiveness of sin as constituent parts of the coming of the Kingdom)—then it follows that we ought to have a clear and biblical understanding of what we are praying for. Historically, the Church has never formally defined confessionally what the coming of the Kingdom upon earth actually means, but it works with two general constructs.
The first is the Augustinian construct which sees the coming of the Kingdom of God upon earth to be delimited and very restricted prior to the Final Advent of our Lord. It is primarily limited to the salvation of individual souls. In the Augustinian construct, the petition “thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven” is essentially a prayer for the Final Advent to occur.
The second is what we have called the Reformational construct (which is not a precise term, because there are many descendants of the Reformation in our day that are very comfortable with the Augustinian construct). The Reformational construct teaches that the first petition of the Lord's Prayer is requiring us to believe, and therefore pray in faith, that the Great Commission will be successful prior to the Final Advent. Not only will the Gospel be preached to all nations, but it will be done so fruitfully and successfully, such that the vast majority of the human race will not only become Christians, but will be christianised, in the sense of not only taught, but actually walking in the commandments of our Lord. All world's kingdoms will become Christendom.
So far the two constructs. Our issue now is which is correct. To answer that question we need to consider other passages of Scripture.
Firstly, there are a group of passages which address the relative size and growth of the Kingdom of God. Now the issue of growth is importance. In the Augustinian construct the Kingdom of God does not grow upon earth, but in heaven only (as departed souls go to join the saints in glory). Daniel's revelation to King Nebuchadnezzar is significant. Four kingdoms (of which Nebuchadnezzar's was the first) would come; then in the days of the fourth kingdom, the God of heaven would set up a kingdom in opposition to the kingdom of man (symbolised in the king's dream by the kingdoms being in the form of a giant man). This Kingdom of God would not be made by men. (Daniel 2:45). It would be a stone cut (by God) out of the mountains: it would crush the kingdom of man.
In the king's dream the stone (or God's Kingdom) increased in size as it crushed the kingdom of man, until it filled the whole earth (Daniel 2:35). It is the concept of the kingdom increasing and growing in influence and power to dominate all else that is relevant to our discussion. In the Augustinian construct the Kingdom does not grow upon earth; it is imposed completely and finally upon earth from heaven.
In Matthew 13:31—33 our Lord presents two parables of the Kingdom. Both indicate that the Kingdom has a very small, insignificant start, but that it is growing to become not only large and significant, but it changes everything. The first is the parable of the mustard seed. He emphasizes its smallness and insignificance: “the kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed—the smallest seed of all—but it grows to be larger than all other plants, becoming a strong tree. The tree becomes so strong and significant that the birds of the air come and nest in it.
The reference to birds is a clear allusion to Ezekiel 17:23 where Ezekiel prophesies the establishment of a “new tree” in Israel. Birds resting in branches is an image which conveys not only size and strength, but power, influence, sustenance, and care. For example, when Ezekiel describes the grandeur and power of Assyria, he compares it to a cedar, loftier than all the trees of the field. “All the birds of the heavens nested in its boughs; and under its branches all the beasts of the field gave birth, and all great nations lived under its shade . . .” (Ezekiel 31:6)
Or, again, the image of the tree is used with respect to the greatness of Babylon under Nebuchadnezzar. The king is described by means of the image of a tree: “. . . there was a tree in the midst of the earth . . . (it) grew large and became strong, and its height reached to the sky; it was visible to the end of the whole earth. . . . The beasts of the field found shade under it, the birds of the sky dwelt in its branches, and all living creatures fed themselves from it . . .” (Daniel 4:10—12)
The imagery is vivid. Jesus uses the same images. But its use in this parable is pregnant with fulfillment. Nebuchadnezzar was prodigiously great and influenced all other nations in the ancient near-eastern world of his day. He was succeeded by three kingdoms of similar ilk. But our Lord is setting up a kingdom upon earth in His day which will not only break these kingdoms (which is really one), but take over from them. Their global influence would be supplanted by the power and influence of the Kingdom of God. But note: the Kingdom does not spring into the world full and complete. It begins small, then grows until it becomes the greatest and the most pre-eminent in power and influence, as Daniel declared.
Thus, Jesus' parable of the Kingdom being like a mustard seed which grows to a great tree in which the birds come to nest has to be understood as the growing influence and increasing power of the Kingdom of God upon earth to where it becomes far greater than the power and influence of Nebuchadnezzar and his empire.
Then there is the parable of the leaven—another parable to explain what the Kingdom of God is like (Matthew 13: 33). The woman puts the yeast into three pecks of flour—but the end result is that all the flour is leavened. Nothing remains untouched, uninfluenced, unchanged. But leavening is a process: the Kingdom of God insinuates itself into the world, influencing and touching and transforming everything.
Now, if we put these parables alongside the command to pray, “Thy Kingdom come . . .on earth” we can have only one possible conclusion: the Kingdom will start very small and insignificantly, but it will progress and grow in the earth until it dominates everything, prior to the Final Advent. Otherwise the growth and increase of the smallest of seeds into a great tree, and the small amount of leaven that is hid changing and transforming the whole over time has no meaning or referent in these parables.
Finally, there are many promises of God that the Kingdom of God will be vast and globally significant and influential in this age. We are told that the descendants of Abraham—that is, the true heirs of Abraham—will be so numerous that they will be beyond number, as numerous as the stars in the sky (Genesis 15:5) and the sand on the seashore (Genesis 22:17). The Church will be built by Christ to become so powerful and influential that it will possess the gates of Hell itself (Matthew 16:18). The Kingdom of God, once established, will call and attract all the nations of the earth (Isaiah 2:1-4).
The Kingdom will become so powerful and influential that blessing upon blessing will fall upon mankind that it will be a de-facto new heavens and a new earth. (Isaiah 65:17—25). Now when people hear references to a new heavens and a new earth they usually think that the text is referring to the Final Advent. But in this case, it is clearly not. In Isaiah's vision we are clearly still operating within human history as we know it. Life will be lengthened amazingly, so that one who dies at one hundred years old will be considered a youth and struck down in an untimely fashion. But, people will still be dying eventually. Mothers will still be labouring in childbirth; houses will be being built; farms are still being worked; crops are still being harvested—and so forth. None of these physical, social, and cultural aspects will exist after the Final Advent. The text is clearly making promises which refer to human history and the prosperity of the Kingdom before the Final Advent, when these things will be no more. But the contrast to life as we know it now will be so great that it will be as a new earth.
So, we believe that the Reformational construct of the coming of the Kingdom is biblical. We believe that the reason the Augustinian construct is so prevalent and has been so influential and powerful has less to do with the Scriptures, and far more to do with the newspapers. In other words, historical reality is so nonconforming to the glory and power of the Kingdom of God upon earth, that there must be another explanation. But we forget that the essence of faith is to believe what is not now seen. Abraham was justified through believing God when the Lord told him that his descendants would be more numerous than the sand on the seashore—yet at the time he was told, he was as good as dead and had no child. Faith believes God. It does not allow the newspaper or present experience to be more authoritative than God's Word.
In our next post we will consider how the Kingdom actually comes upon the earth—its means, processes, and methods—and whether it comes by faith and faithfulness or by human artifice.
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