A Bird’s Eye View of God’s Kingdom

Luke 3:4

Imagine a world where righteousness and goodness dominated.  Imagine a world where there is no injustice.  Imagine a world where everyone is treated fairly.  Imagine a world where no court ever renders a wrong verdict, or an undeserved sentence.  Imagine a world where what is true and what is good and what is right and what is noble marks society, commerce, education, and everything else.  Imagine a world where there is pervasive, total, lasting peace, where there's the absolute absence of war and conflict.  Imagine a world where joy abounds, where health is widespread, where people live healthy and strong for hundreds of years.

Imagine a world where a lion and a lamb lie down together.  Imagine a world where children can play with snakes because they don’t bite and aren’t poisonous.  Imagine a world where a bear and a cow can walk together led by a child.  Imagine a world where food is plentiful and there are no bills, stresses, or worries.

And imagine a world ruled by one perfect person who knows everything there is to know in the universe, natural and supernatural, observable and non-observable.  Imagine a world ruled by one perfect omnipotent, omniscient God in human form who is mediating that rule through glorified, perfected people who are His agents and they carry out His will and His purpose everywhere.  Imagine a world where all sin, all iniquity and all transgression is dealt with instantly and firmly.

You are not picturing some imaginary world.  You are thinking about the approaching earthly kingdom of Jesus Christ.  Everything I just said is promised in the Scriptures.  In fact, all that I have said to you is taken from the Old Testament, where God promised that someday Messiah would come and establish His kingdom.  His throne would be in Jerusalem.  He would reign from the nation Israel over the entire world.  This is how history ends.  It began with amazing precision as God created the entire universe in six twenty-four-hour days.  God knew exactly what He was doing when He set the whole thing into motion.  God also upholds and sustains and works out His perfect plan as history unfolds minute by minute.  And the ending of the story has already been written with the same precision as the beginning.  History is not meandering at a random pace, trying to find its way to some meaningful conclusion, nor are we left to figure out how to end it all or how to make peace in this world.  The whole story has been prewritten and human history will end when Jesus Christ comes to Earth to establish His kingdom over the entire world.

The character of that kingdom is described again and again throughout the Old Testament, as well as certain New Testament passages.  We are looking for the coming of Jesus Christ and the establishment of His earthly kingdom. Look what God promised to David…

2 Samuel 7:12

¹² And when thy days be fulfilled, and thou shalt sleep with thy fathers, I will set up thy seed after thee, which shall proceed out of thy bowels, and I will establish his kingdom.

God tells David that out of his loins would come the Messiah, who would build a kingdom way beyond David's kingdom, way beyond Solomon's kingdom, way beyond anybody's kingdom and it would be a kingdom that would be established forever.  That is the great promise of Messiah's kingdom, an eternal kingdom.

Psalms 2:6

⁶ Yet have I set my king upon my holy hill of Zion.

Psalms 2:7

⁷ I will declare the decree: the LORD hath said unto me, Thou art my Son; this day have I begotten thee.

Psalms 2:8

⁸ Ask of me, and I shall give thee the heathen for thine inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the earth for thy possession.

So, God will install His Son as King. 

In other words, this is a sovereign rule of God's Son who is set on God's throne in Jerusalem. 

Isaiah 2:2-4

² And it shall come to pass in the last days, that the mountain of the LORD's house shall be established…and he will teach us of his ways, and we will walk in his paths: for out of Zion shall go forth the law, and the word of the LORD from Jerusalem. ⁴ And he shall judge among the nations, and shall rebuke many people: and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.

God will establish His King in Israel on Mount Zion where the house of the Lord is, the temple. There He will rule and there He will establish a peace that pervades permanently across the face of the earth. 

Jeremiah 23:5-6

⁵ Behold, the days come, saith the LORD, that I will raise unto David a righteous Branch, and a King shall reign and prosper, and shall execute judgment and justice in the earth. ⁶ In his days Judah shall be saved, and Israel shall dwell safely: and this is his name whereby he shall be called, THE LORD OUR RIGHTEOUSNESS.

That's why the genealogy of Luke [Mary] and the genealogy of Matthew [Joseph] take the line of Jesus all the way back to King David. 

Daniel 2:44

⁴⁴ And in the days of these kings shall the God of heaven set up a kingdom, which shall never be destroyed: and the kingdom shall not be left to other people, but it shall break in pieces and consume all these kingdoms, and it shall stand for ever.

History ends with the establishment of an eternal kingdom in which God rules through the Messiah who, in the next verse, is called "A stone cut out without hands," a reference to His virgin birth. And He crushes all other empires, according to verse 45, and establishes His eternal kingdom. You find the same promise in other prophets, Hosea chapter 3, Joel chapter 3, and many other places.

Where is history going?  History is moving toward this great climactic end, when the Messiah, the Lord Jesus Christ, the promised King, the Son of God, comes to earth to establish His kingdom and to bring back paradise that was lost in the Fall of Man.  It does not end in a puff of smoke.  It does not end in a holocaust generated by man.  It doesn't end any other way than the way God says it will end, and that is when the King Himself comes and establishes His glorious kingdom on the earth and according to Revelation 20, it will last for a thousand years.  And when it is over, the universe as we know it will disintegrate, it will be uncreated and God will instantaneously create in its place the new heaven and the new earth which will last forever.  This is the flow of human history.

It will be a kingdom without a congress.  It will not be a democracy. It will not be a republic. There won't be discussions. There won't be committees.  Everything will be perfectly disseminated from an absolutely perfect monarch [so much for no kings day] who knows everything there is to know.  And He will pass down His rule through glorified and perfected saints who come back to reign with Him, as well as through the nation Israel to the world. 

The curse is lifted. Isaiah 11, Isaiah 30, Isaiah 35 [first part shows the lifting of the curse.]

Joel chapter 2, verses 21 to 27, says there will be abundant provision for everyone.  There will be a flourishing of growth.  Things will begin to grow like they did once in the Garden of Eden.  Jerusalem is going to split.  God is going to send a river flowing into that desert and it's going turn it into the Garden of Eden again. The world is going to change dramatically.  And that may not only happen in Jerusalem, but other places in the world as God renovates the earth and it begins to produce in ways that perhaps will approximate the way it was even before the Fall in Eden.  There will be abundant provision everywhere on the face of the earth.

And there will be health.  People will live hundreds and hundreds of years.  The prophet said that if somebody dies at a hundred years, they die as a baby.  Isaiah 29:18, Isaiah 33:24, again Isaiah 35, Isaiah 65, Isaiah chapter 30 says there will be a high birth rate. So, it will be again like a pre-flood condition. It will be like it was when the curse of sin hadn't so dramatically affected life.  We'll live long lives and it will be productive.  That's why you can have a few people going into the kingdom. Just a few believers will survive the tribulation and enter into the kingdom, but they'll populate in a thousand years, they'll populate the earth in an incredibly explosive and exponential way.  That’s how it happened in the beginning, growing from Adam and Eve to a populated world at the flood, just 1600 years later. And that world was violent and had to contend with disease. That world wasn’t spread out like ours today. Likely just one continent before the face of the globe changed tectonically. Now we have many nations spread all over the world.

Which nation will be in the limelight? The focal point of human history isn't going to be Europe, it's not going to be the United States, the focal point of the world history is going to be the Middle East, Israel, the city of Jerusalem.  That's where history is going.  And at the very end, all the nations of the world, according to the prophets of the Bible, and Revelation, are all going to gather to the land of Israel and they're going to come against Israel to try to destroy the Jewish people.

That is a satanic ploy because Satan ever and always wants to thwart the purposes of God, right?  He tried to commit genocide using the Egyptians, throwing the baby males to the crocodiles. He tried to destroy the people of Israel by intermarriage after they came back from the captivity.  He tried to destroy the messianic line and it got down to just one person in the times of Athaliah, the daughter of King Ahab and Jezebel.  He tried to kill them using Haman’s plot, which was thwarted by Queen Esther. Another time the Assyrians had all Israel surrounded by their army of 185,000, but God sent an angel who slaughtered the entire enemy. Satan tried to destroy the Messiah when He was born, when he had all of the babies around Bethlehem slaughtered under two years of age.  He tried to destroy the messianic purposes of Jesus by taking Him up into a high mountain and tempting Him and if He would have yielded Himself to Satan and violated the purposes and the plan of God.  He would have been disobedient and He would have been disqualified.  He tries every way he can.  He tried genocide against the Jews with Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler.  He wants Iran to nuke them into oblivion today. He wants to wipe out the people of Israel so that God can't finish His plan, save the people of Israel, and give them the promised messianic kingdom.

In the end it is the Antichrist who leads the coalition of world forces against Jerusalem.  Why?  Because he wants to wipe out Jerusalem; he wants to wipe out any vestiges of the worship of the true and living God in order that he alone may be God.  It's at that point that the Lord comes at the Battle of Armageddon when they're coming against the people of God. Then, Jesus Christ appears because God always protects His people. Christ comes and destroys the nations.  You can read the whole thing in Revelation chapter 19.

But let’s read it elsewhere…Zechariah 14:1-11

Now think of our study in Luke.  Here comes John the Baptizer and what's his message?  "Messiah's coming! Repent! Make sure your sins are forgiven so you're ready when Messiah comes so we can receive His kingdom."  That's John's message.  They had been waiting so long for this.  They had been oppressed by the Babylonians, they had been oppressed by the Medo-Persians.  They had been oppressed even by the nations around them after they came back from their captivity.  They had been oppressed by the Greeks.  They were currently being oppressed by the Romans.  Their land was desecrated by Gentile occupation.  They desperately wanted the Messiah to come.  They had waited for centuries for the Messiah to come. 

Last time we saw Isaiah 40 about building a highway for God. Now the Holy Spirit led Luke to record that John fulfills it all in Luke 3:4-5.

If a king was going to come to a town or a village, he would send a herald or a forerunner ahead a few months and say you've got to get ready, the king is coming, you've got to make the road ready so he can come with ease and dignity to your city.  That's what John did.  He said the King is coming, Messiah's coming, you've got to get ready - so you need to repent.

You've got to take the crooked places and straighten them out.  That's the word skolios, from which we get scoliosis, which is a curvature, the devious, the deceitful.

Then the King arrived, right on time, predicted to the day by Daniel’s 70 weeks. And then He arrived…

Matthew 4:17

¹⁷ From that time Jesus began to preach, and to say, Repent: for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.

He came to earth to live for us a perfect life we can’t live ourselves, to die a substitutionary death so we don’t have to. And on the third day He rose from the grave as the firstfruits…the prototype for death conquering. And you know what follows the prototype?  Mass production!

Today, we’re still preparing for that kingdom. History isn’t as long as we tend to think. We live in a time of great privilege, and it’s exciting to watch it unfold, whether from the earth or above. And if you’re saved, you’re whisked away at the rapture, taken to heaven, glorified, spared the wrath of the tribulation, and then return in the sky on white horses behind our king, who wins Armageddon with just a word, casts Satan into hell, sits on the throne of David in Jerusalem on the Temple Mount, and ushers in His kingdom, with you and I serving in His administration.

It’s a good time to be a child of God. If you aren’t, it’s a good time to say yes to His offer of salvation, and join the winning side!