"What is God's Kingdom like? What story can I use to explain it?...It's like a seed sown, shooting up and growing quietly" (Mark 4:30). Jesus constantly undermined the nationalistic fervour and demand for open revolt, warfare or revolution that so many Jews hankered after. There would be no violent upheavals. The Kingdom is about a quiet, social and spiritual revolution, not a bloody and political one.
But more than that it is to be a place of flourishing for the oppressed and marginalized rather than the realm of continual self-interest for the already privileged. It was ordinary, poverty-stricken (shalom denied) and oppressed Jewish people that desperately needed God to do something for them, and to do it now!
So, it is that Jesus begins his three years of teaching with the explicit declaration that the Kingdom, the inbreaking shalom of God, had finally arrived. Some might not recognize it, for its shape was different to everybody's expectations. It was different, however, not because it promised less, but rather because it delivered far more.
-Steve Chalke (pages 38-39)
"We live with the idea that the gospel's chief aim is to make us fit for heaven, when in reality Jesus' message is focused on making citizens and recipients of the Kingdom of God today...As the Victorian preacher Charles Spurgeon put it, 'A little faith will take you to heaven, but I pray for the kind of faith that will bring heaven to earth.' Authentic Christian faith isn't so much about ordering your private world as ordering the whole world...'The truth is,' he said (an African preacher who has a twist on prosperity preaching), 'the Bible doesn't preach prosperity in our narrow twenty-first century understanding of the word. But what it does teach is the shalom of God. Something that is far richer, deeper and broader than the temporary and shallow happiness that economic prosperity gives people'...Shalom, a word that appears over two hundred and fifty times in the Hebrew Scriptures, is a kaleidoscopic vision of what life is like when lived in line with God's agenda. It incorporates contentment, health, justice, liberation, fulfillment, freedom and hope...shalom is the equipping of a person so they can cope with life's suffering and sorrows while basking in the beauty and joys it brings. Shalom is about comprehensive well-being and flourishing at every level of life - socially, economically, spiritually and politically."
- Steve Chalke (Page 36-37)
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