The Importance of the Kingdom of God — John D. Martin — Ep. 096

Hello everybody, welcome back to another episode of Anabaptist Perspectives. I'm here with John D. Martin. We're in Shippensburg, Pennsylvania. And, um, yeah, first question, like, right off the bat, we're just going to jump right into it. This is about, you know, the Kingdom of God and what that looks like in our thought processes as Anabaptists. You've been a vocal apologist, I guess you could say, of Anabaptism. Have you ever had a point when you question your place in this tradition? Well, I would say I struggled to find a place in the tradition because the preaching that I would have heard growing up was what I would characterize as basically an evangelical Protestant message.

And we were told that we were the same as other Protestants theologically, but we had two distinctive doctrines: nonconformity and nonresistance. It was very easy to think that that was sort of an add-on, except for the nonresistance. But the nonconformity in the church I grew up in was built sort of as something that was superfluous and sort of an add-on. And so it was easy to think of myself as an evangelical. I didn't really understand even what Anabaptist was. I knew a couple of Anabaptist names. I had never been introduced to their concepts, what they believed, and what their concept of salvation was. That all came later in my life. I questioned almost from the beginning, as a teenager struggling going to secular university, you know, why am I an Anabaptist rather than a Mennonite?

The word Anabaptist wasn't used much. Why am I a Mennonite rather than these evangelicals that I met, for instance, in the secular university who had a very wonderful testimony? So there was sort of a crisis of my identity all through my teenage years and into my early 20s. So this episode, we're thinking Kingdom of God. And, you know, we realize that's, you know, pretty broad and nuanced, and there's a lot of angles to it. But can you just give us an introduction? What do you mean when you talk about the Kingdom of God? Well, first of all, the word Kingdom suggests a society of people. I would have grown up with a very individualistic concept of the gospel, that it's all about me.

It's all about me getting to heaven. But the Kingdom is the idea of a society. And if you go back into the beginnings of the Bible, you find that God always wanted a people, not just individuals. When he called out Abraham, he said, "I'm going to make of you a great nation." And if you go through the Old Testament, he makes great promises how they're going to be greater than the other nations, and they're going to demonstrate things that the other nations did not have. God was going to make them the greatest. He was going to make them the highest. They were going to be a testimony. The Queen of Sheba came. She saw that.

She said that. So God has always wanted a people. In the Old Testament, he wanted a people who demonstrate what a nation looked like, whose God is the Lord. He wanted people to see a corporate expression of what a people looks like, whose God is the Lord. And so then you come over into the, well, you can go through the Old Testament, see the tremendous promises he made to that nation, which I've just alluded to. Then you come to the New Testament, and you find that Jesus introduces his ministry by saying, "Repent, not if you want to go to heaven," although that's true.

He says, "Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand." And then a couple of verses later, it says, "He went through all the cities of Galilee preaching the gospel of the kingdom." And we have the term Kingdom of God or gospel of the kingdom used probably 125 times in the gospels. And I don't think Jesus used terms carelessly. If he focused on the gospel of the kingdom, which is what he always called his gospel when he gave it its content, then he wasn't just speaking meaninglessly. He meant a kingdom. Yeah, I find that as you go through the teachings of Jesus, the kingdom is a very strong emphasis. The Kingdom parables, you have the Sermon on the Mount that begins, "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven."

Kingdom is referenced down through that. You have the Lord's Prayer, you know, "Thy kingdom come, thy will be done." You have all through the gospels, you have this emphasis on the kingdom. And so then when you come finally to the end of Jesus' life in Acts chapter one, the last 40 days, if you turn there, you will find that he spent those 40 days teaching things concerning the kingdom. I find that very interesting that he's talking about the kingdom right up to the end. And then you go into the book of Acts, you find Philip going down to Samaria. What's he preaching? He's preaching the gospel of the kingdom. We could look up all these references.

You come to the Apostle Paul. He spends what, two years at Ephesus, Acts 19. He spends all their time preaching the gospel of the kingdom. You get to the book of Acts. The elders of Israel come to meet him there in Rome, and he presents the kingdom of God to them. At the end of the book, the very last verses, Paul is in his own hired house preaching to everybody who came to him the kingdom of God. So.

Wow. Okay. So this is like a thread, basically. You're through all of the, yeah. Okay. It begins in Acts 19, Exodus 19, where God says through Moses, "This nation shall be to me a kingdom of priests." And I want to emphasize that our expression of the kingdom is not the absolute kingdom of God. That is coming later. This is a mediatorial kingdom. You get to Acts, for instance, the church is not the absolute kingdom because he says Jesus has to wash the church by the water of the word and make it holy. Well, the absolute kingdom won't need any of that.

Yeah. So this kingdom is not perfect. It's a mediatorial kingdom where we are mediating God's absolute kingdom by demonstrating a society of people who show the character of God to show what the world would look like, what the original society would have been, and what Jesus made possible so that we can demonstrate now what the whole world would look like if everybody obeyed the king. The scriptures that come to mind are the many scriptures that promised in the Old Testament to this people who were demonstrating the kingdom as a nation. You come into Jesus' teachings, you find laced through all the gospels, like I said, about 125 times this concept of the kingdom of God or the gospel of the kingdom.

And it's interesting in the parable of the sower, when Jesus talked about the seed, if you ask most people what the seed is, they'd say the word of God. And that's true. In some of the other gospels, it says that. But in Matthew, it says it's the word of the kingdom.

Okay. Whoa. I had never thought of that, actually. Well, and then you go over to the parable of the tares, and he calls the seed the children of the kingdom. So you just can't escape it. Anyway, then you get to Peter, and Peter says, "Ye are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, a holy nation." He's talking now about the church, "a peculiar people that you should show forth the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light." So he wants a corporate demonstration of a very special corporate body of people. In fact, when you look at the epistles, there's nothing much said in the epistles about going to heaven when you die.

I mean, you'd get the impression. There's a good point. You'd get the impression that the whole gospel is about getting us ready to go to heaven. Well, the emphasis is more getting heaven to earth. Yeah. Demonstrating heaven on earth won't be perfect, but it will be credible because we'll live in repentance when we fail. But the whole emphasis, and so people on the billboard calls often say to me, "What's the difference between evangelicalism and Anabaptism or what you believe?" And my standard answer to them is, "Well, the gospel that you normally hear is focused on getting people to heaven. Anabaptism, if it's really understood, was all about getting heaven to earth, like we pray in the Lord's Prayer, 'Thy kingdom come, thy will be done in earth as it is in heaven.'" Those are the scriptures I think about.

Those are the concepts I think about when I think about the kingdom. So you've explained some of how you think about it, you know, different Bible passages and so forth. You know, how has the Anabaptist tradition had a unique worldview, I guess, in acknowledging the kingdom of God? Like, how do we actually live that out, I guess? Well, there's something that was very strange about Mennonitism, as I knew it growing up. There was always this stronger emphasis than any other group had on the church and community. I mean, you and I both grew up with that. Just a strong emphasis on the importance of the church, the importance of the community. But then the preaching was about a save-me gospel.

So there was just a real disconnect there. So then why do we have all this emphasis on the community if it's also just about me getting to heaven? It's like trying to have both, I guess, the individualism and the community. Well, I guess the church was to get you ready to go to heaven, which there's some truth to that. The people who belong to the kingdom here, of course, are going to be the people who go to heaven. And the whole thing of going to heaven is interesting to me because in the book of Revelation, if you turn to 21, it doesn't talk about us leaving this project that God had with earth and humanity.

It pictures a new earth. It pictures the Holy Jerusalem coming down. And then it makes this remarkable statement. It says, "Behold, the dwelling of God is with men." It doesn't say the dwelling of men is with God. It says the dwelling of God is with men. So as N.T. Wright has so beautifully pointed out, God never intends to abandon this project related to earth and humanity. He's going to bring it finally to its fulfillment, and there will be a fulfillment on an earth, a new earth, and his dwelling will be with men, as he wanted from the very beginning. This just ties the whole Old Testament and New Testament together. And of course, N.T. Wright goes on to say that the problem with modern Christianity is that he calls it the gospel of the empty cloak.

It has the first couple of chapters of Matthew, and it has the last couple of chapters. It has the first couple of chapters of Luke. It has the last couple of chapters. Let me read it to you. It comes right from the Apostles' Creed, which was, as far as I'm concerned, an early presentation of the gospel without the gospel of the kingdom. "I believe in God, the Father Almighty, creator of heaven and earth. I believe in Jesus Christ, his only son, our Lord. He was conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit and born of the Virgin Mary." Now listen to this. "He suffered under Pontius Pilate."

Right there is most of the gospel completely missing. And I find it interesting that at the end of those chapters, John 17, those chapters that are missing near the end, Jesus says before he went to the cross, "I have finished the work which you gave us me to do." Now, if you say to most people, "What's the finished work of Christ?" They'll say what he did on the cross. And that's true. But there was a finished work before that. And that was a demonstration of the kingdom and the life that he was calling us to in that kingdom. So there's just so many interesting things about this. In fact, you look at all the early church creeds, none of them say anything about the kingdom except, I think, the creed of Constantinople.

And then it places it as the kingdom in the future. Nothing about the kingdom here and now. So it's my understanding that the church lost this concept very early. And it became an individualistic save-me gospel. And that's basically what you hear. In fact, when I taught high school, I would ask my Bible class at the beginning to take a piece of paper and write on it why they were Christians. They always said, "So I don't go to hell. So I go to heaven." I don't think I ever had a student, and I'm assuming this is what they distilled from what they had been hearing growing up. I don't think I ever had a student say, "I'm a Christian because I want to be part of God's kingdom and express that here on this earth."

I don't think I ever heard that from any student, which is sort of a testimony to the fact that that's what our gospel was focused on. And I would like to see that change because here's a young person who's struggling with present realities and needing a present purpose for life. But the only purpose he's given is way at the end, probably 50 years later for most of them. And he's supposed to live his whole life with a goal way out there, where if we preach the kingdom, that gives him a present concept of reality that he can live in today and face all his struggles and be motivated to overcome those struggles. So I think this is a very crucial thing that we finally recapture the kingdom of God as the concept of the gospel.

Like as in a present reality too. Yes. I don't know if I'd ever quite thought of it that way, like how we typically think of the gospel is something way out there where we actually start, I don't know, quote, "reaping the benefits from" instead of right here, right now, present. And most people lose out. I mean, that's a goal too far in the future. There's nothing that captures our imagination for the present. I don't know if I've ever thought of it that way before. Well, I mean, obviously, I've done a lot of thinking about the kingdom. And I think the kingdom was, I think the kingdom in our circles was really lost in the last generation in the 1900s, the last century, because you had dispensationalism that came in that put the kingdom in the future.

You had revivalistic, evangelistic preaching wanting to get people saved. And the main message was, "You need to get saved so you can go to heaven." So it was heaven-hell preaching. You had the gospel song, which we sang all about how wonderful and glorious it will be to get saved and go to heaven and enjoy heaven forever. That's the songs we were singing. Very few songs about the kingdom. Very few songs focused on the reality of Christ's kingdom here and now. So I think between dispensationalism, revivalistic, evangelistic preaching, and gospel singing, the focus got shifted to the future and not the present. Yeah. Wow. Now, that's not saying that there was anything wrong with the basic messages.

I mean, we have in hell our realities. I want to make that clear. We do believe in those realities. And we believe it's a prepared people that are going to spend eternity with God. No, we don't believe in dispensationalism. I'm sorry.

A whole nother can of worms right there. I want that on the record. We're not dispensationalists. We're living in the kingdom of God now. But that could really reorient a way a church and a people would operate. It's things, this is something we can invest in right now, things we can be building the kingdom right now. Oh, it revolutionizes people's concept of the church. That's amazing. Yeah. If the church is the apple of God's eye and it is the thing we are to seek first, then we don't mess around. And we don't split churches except under most extraordinary circumstances.

And we pour our whole heart into making that church the spotless church that God wants it to be, the society that demonstrates the ideals, what the whole world would look like if everybody obeyed the king. This is a tremendous concept. When I give this to people who call in on the billboard and I'm giving my concept of what the gospel is all about, very frequently they say, "If I had heard that growing up, I would still be a Christian." But I did not like the scare tactics that the church used to motivate people spiritually. And I got turned off by that. And yeah, this is a very appealing message. Yeah, the scare tactics thing. I mean, that has bothered me for a while.

Like where it's just like, "Let's try to scare everybody into becoming a Christian." And keep scaring them. Yeah, and keep scaring them. If you dare leave, you know, and that, ooh, it doesn't seem sustainable. Yeah. This is a unique concept from our heritage because, like I said, during the Reformation, nobody was talking about this except the Anabaptists. And since that, I really thought hard and I couldn't think of any other groups except Anabaptist-related groups.

This is a unique concept. And it has such appeal because down deep in our hearts, we carry those ideals, what society should be like. It should be a society where there's equity. It should be a society where people, there's not the rich and the poor. Things are shared.

In fact, that's the appeal that Bernie Sanders has. And the reason he has such tremendous appeal is because that is the eternity we carry in our hearts. God gave us, he hardwired us with those ideals. And when people hear those, they gravitate to them. Every day when I talk about this, people say, "I like that. That's fabulous." And then I say to them, "Well, there have been many attempts to have a society like that. They all turn into nightmares for one reason.

This will not work until something is done about selfishness." We are basically selfish. And to me, selfishness is just a synonym for sin. It's just those are the same thing. And if you don't, if there's nothing done about selfishness, selfishness destroys the ideal. It destroys all of our ideals. And it turns into a nightmare like you see every time socialism is tried. And Jesus is the only solution to selfishness. So when I give the gospel of the kingdom, I know I'm talking to something that resonates down in the heart of my hearer.

There's an ideal there that they're reaching out for. And this resonates. So this is a tremendous way to present the gospel. And it answers a lot of questions. I mean, for instance, a person calls me and says, "I'm gay. Can I go to heaven?" And I say, "Well, now let's think about this. Jesus didn't really focus so much on getting people to heaven. He focused on getting heaven to earth. And then I give all of this. Then I give God's ideal. He created male and female to be one flesh. I say Jesus repeated that in Matthew 19. Do you think that this fits that ideal?" Well, I guess not.

Well, then that's why Paul says in 1 Corinthians 6, 9, and 10, a long list of things that cannot be part of his kingdom. This is one of them. But then it says in verse 11, "But such were some of you. But you are washed, you're sanctified, and you're justified." So Paul is saying that all of you can become part of Christ's kingdom because he's going to change you and make you into those ideals. It doesn't matter almost what subject people bring up to me. I can find a context of the kingdom that gives that tremendous meaning. I would like to think what would have happened had this gospel been taken to the far reaches of the earth.

Jesus said that he's going to go preach the gospel to all these different cities because he said, "There too am I sent to preach the gospel of the kingdom." So he was sent. And then it says, "This gospel of the kingdom shall be preached to the ends of the earth, and then the end shall come." Has the gospel of the kingdom been preached? Jesus is describing the kingdom in all of his teachings, especially the Sermon on the Mount. And I try to think when the gospel was taken to Russia a thousand years ago, suppose that gospel had included that it's wrong to kill. Suppose that gospel had included it's wrong to accumulate wealth for yourself.

Suppose that had been the Christianity that the Russian people had gotten. Would Marxism have ever had any message for them? See, the problem with the gospel is it has often been taken without most of those teachings. In fact, you can be a member of some of the most conservative Bible-believing churches, and you can be divorced and remarried. You can just begin to eat away at the very basic building block of this society. You can swear oaths, which means that your yes now doesn't mean yes and your no doesn't mean no. You have to have two standards for honesty.

You can go to war and kill. You can pretty well disobey all the kingdom teachings because you don't really think the kingdom is the subject. The subject is getting to heaven. So what you do is you take all those things and you rationalize that Jesus didn't really mean what he said. You can go to heaven if you do these things.

Wow. Oh, wow. This gospel of the kingdom. It pictures the holistic goal that God has for the gospel. Like the whole package. It's a beautiful society where marriages are permanent. People's yes means yes. Their no means no. They don't commit violence. They're meek people. They're gentle people. They may hurt people by the things they say because the things they say people find hurtful. But they don't say them in hurtful ways. Okay? You have a society of people where marriages are permanent. People are honest. They are gentle and kind. If the gospel had been presented the way it should have been, people would say of the Christians, "Look, when they come to your community, they'll probably create a revolution of your whole concept of life, but they won't hurt anybody.

They are absolutely harmless. They will do nothing but bless you. You might not like their message. You may stone them to death. You may hate them for what they represent, but they're not going to hurt. They're not going to intentionally do any hurt to anybody. They are non-violent." And then the whole thing of economic equality, which unfortunately the Anabaptists still have a lot of progress to make there. But put that all together. Look at what kind of society that would be. And we're to go and establish little outposts of that all over the world so that everybody has a chance to see the lost ideal for man, the lost ideal for society, and they have the opportunity to join it.

We are to demonstrate the kingdom wherever we go. And I think missionaries, perhaps in spite of that save me gospel, maybe do a pretty good job of demonstrating to people. You have these missionaries all living together. And if they live the way they're supposed to, they demonstrate the kingdom. So I don't want to write everybody else off.

I think a lot of times people's life ends up being better than their theology. So I'm going to say there are a lot of people that have preached the gospel and have actually preached some of these concepts. They maybe didn't come together too well. And they maybe didn't fit the theology that they claimed to believe. So the gospel did get preached. But I think, you know, where the gospel goes without the gospel of the kingdom, especially non-resistance, then war breaks out and these converts take up weapons and kill people. Rwanda was touted as the most Christian country in the world four years before the genocides. The Hutus and the Tutsis were both Christian tribes. You had it in Lebanon.

You had it in North Ireland. Yeah. Where you take the gospel without the gospel of the peace, you have this horrible record that the church has to its account, the Crusades, the Inquisition, the conquest of the Native Americans, the enslavement of the Blacks, the wars to end that slavery, the conquest of Latin America under the sign of the cross. I mean, I hear this every day. If we could just get rid of Christianity, we could get rid of most of the atrocities that have happened. Of course, then I tell them, "Well, no, wait a minute. Let's talk about atheism."

A hundred million people died in Russia and China. So anyway, that puts that in perspective. But still, the church has this tremendously black record because it did not preach the gospel of the kingdom. So it's my passion that we would get this gospel taught. And then I think people would have a real passion and love for the church. And they would think twice before they create some unnecessary problem. And they would work hard to keep people reconciled, that this picture gets rounded out and beautifully presented. But as it is, people treat the church however. If I disagree, I go off somewhere else. I get up a faction of people and we split the church. And all this stuff is done sort of with impunity because they really don't understand that God is watching this.

Ephesians 1 calls it his inheritance. We're always talking about our inheritance. The church is his inheritance. Oh, wow. And he's looking at that just like you'd look at any inheritance. What's the potential here? He sees the potential of Shippensburg Christian Fellowship. And he's jealously wanting that potential to be realized. And that's why Paul's saying, "I'm praying that your eyes would be opened, that you would see what God sees in the church." And then he ends with that fabulous verse. And I remember the first time it hit me, I thought I was going to levitate and fly off into the air. I mean, it talks about all the wonderful power of Christ rising from the dead and all that.

And it says, "And it put all things under his feet and gave him to be the head over all things to the church, which is his body, the fullness of him who filleth all in all." You don't experience all of divinity by yourself. Sure, we have the Holy Spirit. And sure, Christ in a sense dwells within. But the fullness of God is in the church. But if we ever understood that, we would work, I think, with much more passion to realize the potential of God's kingdom in the church. You know, we often quote that verse, "He is able to do abundantly, exceedingly above all that we ask or think according to the power that worketh in."

Listen, us, not me. To him be glory in the church. I never hear that verse quoted. Yeah. That's the verse that follows. So the exceeding abundantly great things he wants to do is not in me. It's in the church. And so I hope our listeners understand that if we could ever get back to this concept, it would inspire within us a passion for the church like we're probably not going to have unless we have this concept.

That's a start here. Yeah. That's fantastic. Thank you so much for sharing. Yeah. It's my favorite subject.

And it shows. This is great. Yeah. I really appreciate you taking the time. Well, it's my privilege.