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A Guide to Biblical Theology - Lesson 8

Common Theological Themes in the Synoptic Gospels

Common themes in the synoptic Gospels are the "kingdom of God," and a shift from the "old covenant" to the "new covenant." The ultimate question Jesus asks is will we choose to be a part of his kingdom?

Taught by a Team
A Guide to Biblical Theology
Lesson 8
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Common Theological Themes in the Synoptic Gospels

I. Overview of Two Important Approaches for Studying the Theological Themes of the Gospels

a. Study the Themes that Matthew, Mark and Luke (Synoptics) have in Common

b. Study the Distinctive Themes in the Synoptics and in the Gospel of John.

II. Common theological themes that are characteristic of the synoptic Gospels

a. The "Kingdom of God," also Referred to as the "Kingdom of Heaven."

1. The Kingdom of God has Arrived and also Remains Future

i. John the Baptist

ii. Jesus' Message of the Kingdom of God

b. The God of the Kingdom

c. Jesus Uses Parables to Illustrate that the Mystery of the Kingdom is that it has Arrived but not without Irresistible Force.

d. Some Parables Describe an Emphasis on Forgiveness and Grace

e. Shift in the Dominant Thinking about Uncleanness vs. Holiness

f. Cost of Discipleship

g. Final Judgment

III. Shift from the Old Covenant to the New Covenant

a. In the OT, Five Dominant Features of God's Role as the King of the Universe

b. Jesus' Distinctives in the Synoptic Gospels

c. Calling Twelve Apostles

d. "New" or "Renewed" Israel

e. Claims of Jesus' Teachings being Anti-Semitic are Baseless

f. Relationship between the "Kingdom" and the "Church"

g. Jesus' Ethical Teaching Requires a Gathered Community Extending into Time

h. George Ladd's Concluding Five Points


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  • How to think about and interpret the Old Testament

  • How to explain in 30 seconds the contents and message of the Bible in a way that is meaningful and informative.

  • The order of the books in Hebrew Bibles is different from the English Old Testament because of the criteria used when putting them together.

  • The order of the books in the Hebrew Bible helps us understand God's covenant.

  • The twelve books in the Writings are divided into two groups of six. The first six books are about covenant life. The latter six books are about life in exile.

  • When the books of the Old Testament are ordered according to canon and covenant, they also correspond to the order of the books in the New Testament.

  • There is thematic organization through the Old Testament canon and massive correspondence to the arrangement of the books in the New Testament.

  • Common themes in the synoptic Gospels are the "kingdom of God," and a shift from the "old covenant" to the "new covenant." The ultimate question Jesus asks is will we choose to be a part of his kingdom?

  • A description of the teachings of Jesus, showing they were in contrast to what was promoted in the culture, as well as how there was continuity to the teachings of the Torah.

  • Jesus claimed to be God by the titles he used to refer to himself, by what he said and did, and by dying and then coming back to life. The Gospels record that the evidence for the divinity of Jesus was so overwhelming, that even Jews who had a strong tradition in worshiping one God who is a spirit, were compelled to worship Jesus as God, even though he was a man.

  • The Gospel of Mark focuses on Jesus as miracle worker, prophet and suffering servant. Matthew focuses on Jesus as the Jewish Messiah. The Gospel of Matthew includes much of Mark's material as well as some accounts that are unique to Matthew.

  • The Gospel of Luke has much in common with the Gospels of Mark and Matthew. Luke emphasizes Jesus' compassion for people who were outcasts and writes as a historian, with attention to detail.

  • John is the most unique of the four Gospels. He emphasizes that Jesus is both fully God and fully man. "Belief" is a key word for John because it means more to him than just mental assent.

  • Two of the themes Paul emphasizes throughout his epistles are the glory of God in Christ and God being magnified in Christ. Paul preaches to both Jews and Gentiles and emphasizes these truths in a way that each group can understand. He also explains God's call on his life and the authority God has given him to preach the gospel.

  • The core idea of sin is refusing to honor and praise God. This is in contrast to the central theme in Paul's theology, which is knowing God in Christ. Jesus calls us to acknowledge him as Lord by our words and actions.

  • The resurrection and ascension of Jesus demonstrated that Jesus is Lord. Philippians 2:6-11 and Colossians 1:15-20 are passages that teach that Jesus is both fully man and fully God. Justification means that God declares the wicked to be righteous. God provides salvation as a free gift so He is exalted because of what He has done.

  • Election excludes works as a reason for God choosing you. God's calling always results in salvation. God's calling is a tremendous example of his love for you. Paul encourages people to live the Christian life by being filled with the Holy Spirit and to act out of a motivation of love. He addresses baptism, the Lord's Supper, leaders in the church, church discipline and the resurrection. He also emphasizes the importance of persevering to the end.

As opposed the Systematic Theology, Biblical Theology asks the question of what a particular book, or group of books, teach on different topics, showing emphases of the different parts of Scripture.

Please click on the Charts link under Downloads to access the chart that Dr. Van Pelt refers to in his lectures.

Dr. Craig Blomberg
A Guide to Biblical Theology
bt201-08
Common Theological Themes in the Synoptic Gospels
Lesson Transcript

 

This is tape 1 for the series on the Theology of the New Testament Gospels.

I. Overview of Two Important Approaches for Studying the Theological Themes of the Gospels.

There are two important approaches that need to be taken when studying the major themes and theological emphases of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.  This is the only place in the New Testament (indeed in the whole Bible) where we find four overlapping accounts of many of the same events, characters and period of time in God's history of salvation with this world.  So, we may look, on the one hand, for what are the dominant or pervasive themes across the four gospels.  Or, on the other hand, we may highlight what is distinctive to each of the four.  Each of these approaches has its place.

a. Study the Themes that Matthew, Mark and Luke (Synoptics) have in Common

It is further complicated by the fact of the three synoptic gospels: Matthew, Mark and Luke.  These are called synoptic gospels because one can place them in parallel columns, more often than not, where two or three deal with the same event and thus create a synopsis: literally "a together look".  The synoptic gospels are more similar than different while John, compared to any or all of the synoptics, is more different than similar.  Thus, one can comparatively readily find those details that are dominant or characteristic of the synoptic gospels as a group, but they will not necessarily also include either the dominant or the distinctive features of the gospel of John.  What we propose to do therefore is to begin looking at the characteristic or dominant or pervasive themes in the synoptic gospels as a unit.

Also, there is growing appreciation, after a period of intense scholarly skepticism, that at least the broad contours or main emphases of the synoptic gospels can indeed be trusted historically as putting us in touch with the true Jesus of Nazareth.  We will thus take a period of time in these six lectures to look at the synoptic gospels and what they present about Jesus and others around Him from a theological vantage point as a unit.  Then we will go back through the three, looking for particularly distinctive but still prominent emphases that set Matthew, Mark or Luke off from the others.  This will, in part, answer the question of why they felt the need to write a gospel if indeed there were others being written at roughly the same time.

b. Study the Distinctive Themes in the Synoptics and in the Gospel of John.

Finally we will turn to the gospel of John and take it in its integrity, in its current literary form, and see what appears both dominant and distinctive that has not already been treated in our previous conversations. 

II. Common theological themes that are characteristic of the synoptic Gospels

So we begin with what is common and characteristic in Matthew, Mark and Luke. 

a. The "Kingdom of God," also Referred to as the "Kingdom of Heaven."

Little disagreement among scholars of all theological traditions would result if we said the logical place to begin, and indeed the central theme in the teaching of Jesus as presented in the synoptics, involves the kingdom of God (sometimes also referred to as the kingdom of heaven).  These expressions appear 104 times by my count in the synoptic gospels.  They appear only 5 times (and then only in 3 verses and then only in 2 contexts) in the gospel of John, 7 times in Acts, 13 in Paul, 3 in Hebrews, 1 in James, 1 in Peter and 6 in the book of Revelation.

What is the kingdom of God?  The Greek term is basileia, no doubt translating a concept already known in Hebrew and Aramaic.  The Hebrew equivalent is malcouth, for example.  It can and has been translated as God's reign or rule or power or even dominion.  That is to say, it is unlike the use of the word kingdom in English.  We use it today in expressions to describe modern sociopolitical divisions: we can speak of the kingdom of Jordan (the country to the east of the Jordan River in the Middle East) or the kingdom of Syria (to the north of Israel).  But in the ancient Greek and Hebrew, and particularly in the concept of speaking of God or heaven, kingdom was much more a power than a place.  It was more a reign rather than a realm.  We might therefore speak of it today more as God's kingship or His kingly rule.

1. The Kingdom of God has Arrived and also Remains Future

What do Jesus and the gospel writers have to say about this kingdom that appears so often, more often than any other individual theme, in the synoptic gospels.  There is a complex mixture of statements which, at first glance, appear to affirm both that the kingdom is present or has arrived with the teaching and ministry of Jesus and that the kingdom remains future, to arrive only with Christ's second coming.  Not surprisingly, different schools of thought have developed among scholars over the past centuries.

There is what has often been called the futurist or consistent eschatological school of thought.  This is associated classically at the turn of the 19th to the 20th century with that great theologian, organist and medical missionary, Albert Schweitzer.  It was to focus almost exclusively on the future dimension of the kingdom, but to see the heart of Jesus' teaching as announcing that the future was so imminent or near or at hand that it would be breaking into human history in all its fullness – perhaps even during Jesus' lifetime.  And if not during that period of time, as events to the crucifixion drew near made plain it would not, then at the very latest within the generation of many of Jesus' first followers.  Schweitzer's famous, but sad, conclusion, therefore, was that Jesus turned out to be mistaken.

At the opposite end of the spectrum is a school of thought that has been known as present or realized eschatology or interpretation of the kingdom.  This focuses so much attention on the present arrival of the kingdom in Jesus' ministry and teaching, in his death and resurrection, that it can appear to leave little or no room for some supernatural apocalyptic intervention of God in Christ at what has popularly come to be known as the second coming.  The prominent English scholar C.H.Dodd in the middle of the 20th century is particularly well known for tirelessly promoting this perspective.

As scholarship progressed, it became increasingly clear that it was not a matter of pitting present against future, but of affirming both at the same time.  Joachim Jeremias, in the 1940s and for 30 years beyond that, wrote prolifically about eschatology in the process of being realized.  The American Evangelical, George Eldon Ladd (for many years a professor at Fuller Seminary until his death in 1982), popularized this for the English speaking world.  The slogan that the kingdom is "already but not yet", both present and future, or inaugurated (to borrow a term claimed by Werner Georg Kümmell in Germany) is the perspective that dominates scholarly understanding of the gospels today.

i. John the Baptist

But what do the texts say in detail?  How is this perspective defended?  In fact, the synoptics begin talking about the kingdom and related concepts already with that famous forerunner of Jesus, John the Baptist.  Matthew 3:2 and 4:17, Matthew's headlines first over John's ministry and then over Jesus' ministry, use the identical words in his original Greek.  The message of each of these men was: "Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near."  Matthew, as the most Jewish Christian of the gospels, regularly, though not exclusively, uses the euphemism kingdom of heaven rather than kingdom of God.  He probably does this to avoid overusing the divine name, which was seen as uniquely sacred.

John the Baptist, of course, was a prophet, at least as he styled himself and as many people came to accept him.  This suggests that the prophecy, which many Jews believed had come to an end for a temporary period of time with the last of the Old Testament writing prophets Malachi, was now being renewed.  Intertestamental Jewish religion had increasingly focused on obedience to the law (or Torah) and to wisdom or proverbial type of literature for guidance for daily living.  But there was also an important body of intertestamental Jewish thought that did continue to hold out apocalyptic hope for God's prophets reappearing and ushering in the messianic age and bringing a liberator for God's people.  John is the first in over 400 years to emerge claiming to be bringing the fulfillment of those very hopes.

He therefore calls on all of Israel to repent and to symbolize and testify to that repentance through baptism in water.  Immersion in pools of ritual purification characterized priestly washing rituals.  Also, at the monastic community at Qumran on the shores of the Dead Sea there were daily ritual washings of the group of Jewish Essenes that populated that site.  And indeed, it is possible that Jewish proselytes (that is, Gentiles converting to Judaism) were already being immersed in water as an initiation rite.  Nevertheless, John is the first to insist that all Israel must demonstrate their repentance and symbolize it in this fashion.

Indeed, he does so even as he predicts the coming of one who would do more than merely baptize in water, but baptize with the Holy Spirit and with fire.  This is a reference to both the cleansing and purging effects of the Spirit in those who responded with repentance, but in judgment for those who rejected the Spirit's overtures.  The repentance that John spoke so centrally of is based on the Greek metanoia or the verb metanoeo.  This undoubtedly reflects the underlying Hebrew concept so often behind that Greek term in the Greek Old Testament, the Septuagint, the verb shub.  This means much more than a change of mind, the standard Greek meaning of the term.   It means a change of behavior, turning around – likening the moral transformation of the individual to 180 degree about-face in one's travel.

John also predicted that there would be one he called the coming one, ho erchomenos in Greek, who would perform this additional two-part baptism.  Although that term seems innocuous enough in English, Psalm 118:26 and 40:7, already at Qumran, were understood in a messianic sense where they spoke of one who was to come.  And so John may well have intended this meaning with this title for the one who will turn out to be Jesus of Nazareth.

Not long after John's ministry of baptism is under way, Jesus bursts on the scene as well.  He identifies and puts His stamp of approval of John's message and ministry by submitting to baptism Himself – even though Matthew, particularly in his account, makes it clear that He does not need to repent of personal sin.  But He could well be identifying with the sins of His nation and of His people.

ii. Jesus' Message of the Kingdom of God

This brings us to consider Jesus' message of the kingdom of God in considerably greater detail than our brief overview of John's.  Israel indeed, in the first century, was very much aware of what could be called its corporate plight.  Individual Jews no doubt had varying degrees of awareness and willingness to repent of personal sin.  But what was an inescapable reality for first century life, even in Israel, to say nothing of the Diaspora (the other countries into which Jews had historically been dispersed), was that they were not living as free people in an independent nation, fully able to govern themselves and implement and live according to their God-given laws.  Rome was the great power who dominated the ancient Mediterranean world and occupied Israel, as well as much of Europe, North Africa, the Middle East and beyond.  Jews in the first and second centuries BC increasingly longed for a Messiah, a deliverer, a savior.  While there was diversity of expectation and hope, the dominant model that emerged was hope for one who, as a literal descendant of King David, would like David be a military ruler and an earthly king and lead the Jewish troops in battle and deliver them from Roman occupation and oppression.

One important way of conceiving of Jesus' message about the kingdom is to recognize that, in countless ways, He stressed that it was not deliverance from Rome that was the most crucial issue.  Rather deliverance from the realm of sin and the domain of Satan was crucial, whether or not they lived in a free piece of geography.  Following N.T.Wright's very influential book, Jesus and the Victory of God, we can speak of Jesus' message of the kingdom boiled down to one short sentence as His announcement that the exile or the occupation or the enslavement was indeed over.  But it was not as many were hoping.  It was not because Rome was about to be vanquished, but because He was God's representative to deal with sin and with the devil.

So, what are some of the most crucial texts in the synoptic gospels with respect to the kingdom?  We have time to canvas only a small handful.  But the ones we have chosen are those that scholars have regularly turned to as among the most central and telling in helping us to come to grips with this concept.

Mark 1:15, the Marcan parallel to Matthew 4:17 to which we have already alluded says: "The time has come," Jesus said, "the kingdom of God has come near.  Repent and believe the good news."  As the headline over Jesus' ministry in the oldest of the four gospels, in perhaps the form that is closest to the most literal translation of Jesus' original Aramaic words, we see a verb in the Greek ēyyiken (from the verb eyyizō) in the perfect tense: "has come near", "has drawn near".  It does not quite seem to affirm the full arrival of the kingdom at this point.  And indeed, since this is at the beginning of Jesus' ministry rather than after His death and resurrection, even the fully realized eschatological approach would acknowledge that there is more to come.  But the dominant sense of this text is that a new era is dawning in human history.  This is not by standards that would call the attention of people thinking as historians of world civilizations.  Rather it is from God's perspective in His history of redeeming humanity.

Matthew 12:28 and parallels in Mark and Luke expand on this present sense of the kingdom.  Jesus is casting out demons and some among the Jewish leadership have charged that He drives them out by demonic powers themselves.  His reply, beginning in Matthew 12:25 declares: "Every kingdom divided against itself will be ruined and every city or household divided against itself will not stand.  If Satan drives out Satan, he is divided against himself.  How then can his kingdom stand?  And if I drive out demons by Beelzebul [another name for Satan], by whom do your people drive them out?  So then they will be your judges."  In other words, He refutes the claim that He is casting out demons by demonic power.

But then verse 28 argues the converse, "But if it is by the Spirit of God that I drive out demons, then the kingdom of God has come upon you."  Here we have the comparatively rare verb ephthasen, the aorist or simple past tense of the verb phthanō.  It is almost impossible, despite Schweitzer's attempts, to see this as merely imminent, very soon to come in the future.  It is almost impossible to avoid some present tense sense, particularly in the context of Jesus' response to His miracle-working ministry.  This is not looking ahead even to just the crucifixion and resurrection a year or two down the road.  Rather, this is saying that these new supernatural signs and wonders – My miracles and particularly My vanquishing of Satan in exorcisms – are a sign that the messianic age is now in these very events beginning to arrive.  But if the messianic age (the age of God's kingly reign is here), then the Messiah must be here.  The unstated implication is that He is that Messiah.

Or again, we may consider in the gospel of Luke 17:20-21.  "Once, having been asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God would come, Jesus replied: 'The coming of the kingdom of God is not something that can be observed, nor will people say "Here it is" or "There it is, because the kingdom of God is in your midst'."  This is not to deny what we have just seen: namely, Jesus' claim namely that outward, visible signs such as miracles are pointers to the arrival of the kingdom.  But rather, this is a reminder that the kingdom is not to be localized to one particular place or territory or national entity.  The kingdom of God is present with them wherever Jesus was present with them.

Some translations render the Greek here entos humōn as "within you" which would lead Jesus to have said: "Because the kingdom of God is within you".  But this seems much less likely, since His audience is a group of Pharisees who are typically Jesus' opponents rather than His followers in the gospels.  Jesus would not have affirmed that the kingdom had already taken up residence inside these Pharisees, as He might have if He were addressing His disciples.  Rather, it is an affirmation that, with the presence of Jesus, God's kingly reign is present as well.

Finally, we may take a look at a very puzzling and hard to translate text in Matthew 11:12.  It too has a parallel in Luke.  Jesus, speaking to the crowds about John the Baptist after John was imprisoned, declares: "From the days of John the Baptist until now, the kingdom of heaven has been subjected to violence and violent people have been raiding it."  It is possible to translate the first reference to violence in this text in a more positive sense: "the kingdom of God has been forcefully advancing" – so forcefully it seems to be a violent disruption on earth.  But more likely, both of these words from the Greek root biaz, leading to the verb biazomai and the noun biastēs (to suffer violence and a violent person respectively), it is more likely that both of these occurrences reflect the negative perspective of the translation I have just read.

The more important observation, however, is that, beginning already with John according to the headline over his ministry that we already discussed back in Matthew 3:2, the kingdom was sufficiently present that it could be rejected.  This sometimes even happened violently: John has now been imprisoned; Jesus will, in not too many more days or periods of time, be crucified.  Therefore, God's new kingly power must be on earth so as to generate this visible reaction which has not been present in the immediate past to any of God's spokespeople the way it now is.  In some senses the kingdom was present.  It had arrived in the ministry of Jesus.

b. The God of the Kingdom

So what?  If we reflect on the topic for a moment of what has been called the God of the kingdom, we note that characteristic and dominant and to a certain degree distinctive of the synoptic gospels is the description of Jesus' own form of addressing God.  He calls Him "Father".  And the one place where His Aramaic language is preserved in Greek transliteration ("Abba" in Mark 14 when Jesus prays in that amazingly intimate and poignant scene in the Garden of Gethsemane), discloses a term that could almost be translated in English as "daddy".  This is a term of dear intimacy for God as Father relatively unparalleled in other previous Jewish literature.

This by no means excludes the focus on God's holiness that we find in no less than the Lord's Prayer: "Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed it be Thy name".  But it is a holy, transcendent God who may be intimately addressed because of His deep love for His people.  Jesus is not coming, as the kingdom is coming, to reveal a new God.  This is still Yahweh, the Lord God of Israel.  And Yahweh's love has been present from the beginning of creation and even before.  But the way in which it is being clearly and visibly demonstrated in the ministry and teaching, and culminating in the death and resurrection of Jesus, is now ratcheting that love up to another level in terms of the extent of its disclosure to humankind.  This creates a deep mystery.

c. Jesus Uses Parables to Illustrate that the Mystery of the Kingdom is that it has Arrived but not without Irresistible Force.

Indeed, one of the expressions that comes particularly from Jesus' teaching in parables (a very dominant and characteristic form of teaching consistently about God's kingdom) is that to you the secrets or the mystery of the kingdom have been revealed (see Matthew 13:11 and Mark 4:1).  What is this mystery that is portrayed, particularly prominent in Jesus' parables about seeds and planting and their growth (particularly in Mark 4 and Matthew 13 and Luke 8)?  George Ladd would appear to have gotten it exactly right when he describes this mystery as the fact that the kingdom has arrived, but not with irresistible force.  It has arrived in seed-form.  It may seem as small as a mustard seed or as hidden as leaven in a loaf of bread, but over time it will grow to a surprising size.

Not all can accept this redefinition of God's kingly power and relegation of the arrival of the messianic era to two periods of time with a period of growth in between.  And so, particularly in Mark 4:11-12 and parallels, Jesus goes on to say: "Not only to you have the secrets of the kingdom been given, but not to those outside."  And then, quoting a passage from Isaiah 6, He speaks of how some will hear, but not really hear or understand.  Some will see but not really see or perceive – lest they turn again and be forgiven.  It is almost as if to say that God was initiating and choosing some to respond properly and others not to.  But in the context of Isaiah 6, what was originally a prophecy against the wickedness of Israel centuries earlier, it is clear that this is God's response to prolonged willful disobedience of some of His people.  And it is not an irrevocable response, because Isaiah 6 ends with a promise of a holy stump (a portion of the tree) from which the plant could again sprout left in the land, when proper repentance would come.  But Jesus' appropriation of this Isaianic text, at the very least, explains the growing polarization of response to His kingdom teaching and ministry.

d. Some Parables Describe an Emphasis on Forgiveness and Grace

The parables also describe a uniquely tender emphasis on forgiveness and grace from this God of the kingdom.  This is seen in such well-known passages as the parable of the Prodigal Son and of the Pharisee and Tax-collector.

e. Shift in the Dominant Thinking about Uncleanness vs. Holiness

And there seems to be a shift in the dominant thinking about issues like uncleanness versus holiness, as Jesus is regularly as characterized as going out of His way to touch and to have fellowship and even the intimacy of table-fellowship with those who are sinners in order to call them to repentance.  That repentance (that proper response to His kingdom) is envisioned as entering the kingdom like a little child, acknowledging one's utter dependence on God and inability to save oneself.

f. Cost of Discipleship

But it goes on to speak of the cost of discipleship, particularly in the area of the stewardship of one's material possessions.

g. Final Judgment

And the God of the kingdom looks ahead to a time of final judgment of all people and peoples of the world when Christ returns and, as in Matthew 25 for example, separates the metaphorical sheep from the goats.

III. Shift from the Old Covenant to the New Covenant

a. In the OT, Five Dominant Features of God's Role as the King of the Universe

Bruce Chilton, in a book called Pure Kingdom, summarizes much of what is involved in the turn of the ages – what today we would call the shift from the old to the new covenant or testaments.  In Jewish backgrounds, indeed even entrenched in the Hebrew Scriptures (the Christian Old Testament itself), are five dominant features of God's role as king of the universe.  These are not to the exclusion of other features, but nevertheless they are clearly dominant.  God's kingly reign is regularly spoken of as still primarily future, as very transcendent, as bringing judgment, as demanding ritual purity and as centered in national Israel.

b. Jesus' Distinctives in the Synoptic Gospels

Chilton goes on, rightly in my opinion, to point out that Jesus' distinctives in the synoptic gospels, while not obliterating any of these five previous prevailing trends, focus much more on the presence of the kingdom, its eminence (that is, its special closeness to people), to the joy of salvation rather than the fear of judgment, to the need for moral repentance rather than ritual purity, and for a much more universal offer and composition of representatives and subjects of the kingdom.

c. Calling Twelve Apostles

How did Jesus see this fleshing itself out, especially after His death when God's kingly power could not simply be equated with His presence and His ministry as a human figure?  He begins by calling twelve apostles, particularly close followers and leaders among His wider group of followers.  Matthew 19:28 in particular confirms our hunch that when a Jewish prophet and self-styled Messiah would gather twelve followers, he almost certainly had the twelve tribes of Israel in mind.  Indeed, this text in Matthew 19:28 declares that the twelve apostles will sit on twelve thrones and judge the twelve tribes of Israel in the final judgment.

d. "New" or "Renewed" Israel

Jesus is thus making a claim to constitute what has been variously described as a new or renewed or true or freed Israel.  That is to say, the elect (and therefore saved people of God) are no longer going to be faithful Jews who live out their commitment to Yahweh by following Torah, both those born into ethnic Judaism and those who through conversion adopt the Jewish religion.  But rather the elect, saved people of God will be those of any nationality or ethnicity who become Jesus' followers.  They will be those who have faith in Him and live out their allegiance by following  His commands and His fulfillment of the Old Testament, with all of the continuity and discontinuity with the law that that produces (and about which we shall speak more when we turn to the ethics of Jesus).

Because of this radical and bold claim, a majority of the Jewish people and especially of their leadership, increasingly over the approximately three years of Jesus' public ministry, come to reject His claims.  But a minority accept, akin to those many periods of Israelite history when there was only a righteous remnant.  And Jesus uses similar imagery when He speaks of His followers as a little flock or of the recovery of some of the lost sheep of the house of Israel.  Indeed, Luke in 19:10 gives what may be Luke's take as a one verse or sentence summary of Jesus' ministry when Jesus declares: "I came to seek and to save the lost."

e. Claims of Jesus' Teachings being Anti-Semitic are Baseless

Because of this radical difference from conventional Judaism and because so many did reject Him and He in turn rejected them, there are those who have accused the portrait of Jesus and His teaching of the arrival of the kingdom in the synoptic gospels, and indeed even in John, of being anti-Semitic.  But that would require Him not to have been a Jew.  It would require all of His first followers not to have been Jews.  But they were.  And indeed, there is nothing even in the harshest of Jesus' woes against the scribes and Pharisees (for example, in Matthew 23 and parallels) that does not parallel as harsh or even harsher indicting prophecies by some of the writing prophets of the Old Testament against many, though never all, in their generations.  And, as with those prophets, there is a hint (no more than that), of future restoration in such texts as Matthew 23:39 and parallels.  Also in Matthew 24:30, when Jesus looks ahead to the time when people will cry blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord and will mourn (possibly including the mourning of repentance) when they see Him returning and coming on the clouds back to earth.  The kingdom then is a powerful and central concept.

f. Relationship between the "Kingdom" and the "Church"

Today, many people use the term kingdom as if it were interchangeable with the word church, but it is much, much bigger.  This brings us to the question of the relationship between the kingdom and the church.  Some have argued that: "Jesus preached the kingdom, the Jews rejected it, so the church was God's plan B."  Or they argue that Jesus preached the kingdom and His later followers misinterpreted or deliberately changed His teaching to be about the church.  But, in fact, the Greek word (appearing three times in two verses in Matthew 16 and 18), ekklesia, is simply the Septuagint's translation of the Hebrew qahal.  And indeed, in secular Greek this also was a common term, as it was in these Old Testament contexts, for an assembly (in this case, the assembly of God's people).

The church as the elaborate institution that it began to evolve into beginning already in the second century is most admittedly not in view in the synoptic gospels, or arguably anywhere in the New Testament.  But that Jesus expected a community of His followers, who regularly gathered together for distinctive purposes just as the children of Israel had done (in the tabernacle, in the temple and eventually in synagogues), seems beyond reasonable doubt.

Matthew 16:18-19 promises that Peter will be the leader of that group, the rock on which the church is built.  And we need not reinterpret that most straightforward understanding of the text in light of those who later supplemented this simple concept with far more elaborate definitions not found in Scripture.  The book of Acts in its first twelve chapters describes Peter as the leader of the initial apostolic band.  That may well be the sum total of the fulfillment of Jesus' prophecy here.  What Jesus predicts will be permanent is, not Peter's leadership or that of any of his successors, but rather that the gates of hell will not prevail against His church (the sum total of Jesus' disciples now and in the future) and that what they loose on earth or bind on earth will have been loosed or bound in heaven (see Matthew 18 where this promise is extended to all of the disciples when they announce the forgiveness or the lack thereof due to lack of genuine repentance of those who either accept or reject the gospel).  They are, as it were, opening the doors to entrance into God's kingdom.

g. Jesus' Ethical Teaching Requires a Gathered Community Extending into Time

And the fact that much of Jesus' ethical teaching appears to require a gathered community extending into time for a significant period also supports the idea that Jesus expected an assembly of His followers to outlive Him.  His ethical teachings on such topics as marriage and divorce and remarriage or celibacy (Matthew 19:1-12); on paying taxes; on living with and among earthly governments (in Mark 12:13-17 and parallels); on coming hardships and persecution (in Matthew 10:17-42 and parallels) and other such teaching, all suggest that the fullness of the arrival of the kingdom was not as imminent as Schweitzer first thought. 

h. George Ladd's Concluding Five Points

George Ladd, then, gives an outstanding concluding set of five points to explain the relationship of the church to the kingdom.  From the interpretation of the parable of the wheat and the tares in Matthew 13 (especially 38 and 41), we learn that the church is not identical to the kingdom.  The church is a group of people; the kingdom is God's regal reign.  Indeed the kingdom creates the church (Matthew 13:47, 50) – the parable of the dragnet sifting the good fish from the bad fish.  The church, furthermore, witnesses to the kingdom (see those missions already commissioned by Jesus of the twelve disciples in Matthew 10 and of the seventy in Luke 10).  The church is furthermore the instrument of the kingdom (Matthew 10:8, Luke 10:17 and Matthew 16:18).  God's regal rule works throughout the entire cosmos in all kinds of ways, but most centrally through the gathered community of His people, and then as they are sent out for mission in the fullest sense of being God's conduit to meet people's spiritual and physical or material needs.  And then finally the church is the custodian of the kingdom: the expression Ladd uses to describe the role of the keys in locking and unlocking doors in such texts as Matthew 16:19, 18:18 and John 20:23.

What is your vision of the Christian life?  Do you think of it as just individuals in glorious isolation trying to do various spiritual things?  Do you think of it as the role of one local church that you may be heavily involved in?  No, Jesus casts the vision as grand as it possibly can be.  God wants to transform the cosmos and has promised ultimately that it will be so transformed after Christ's coming.  Then a millennial kingdom arrives and that will give way to eternal new heavens and new earth.  Will you be a subject to, a witness to, an instrument and custodian of that kingdom – not putting personal or local church priorities first, but God's universal vision and purposes and reign at the forefront of all you do?