When Thinking About God’s Kingdom, We Need a “Normandy Perspective”
On June 6, 1944, Allied forces of the United States, Great Britain and Canada landed on the beaches of Normandy. This extraordinary feat of arms, unquestionably one of the greatest in history, was the death knell for the barbaric Nazi regime.
Yet Berlin, the heart of Hitler’s Germany, was more than 640 miles from the Allied landing. It took more than ten months of incredibly difficult fighting across a wide swath of Europe to finally bring the sordid epoch of Nazism to a welcome end.
Many American Christians are discouraged these days. Dissatisfied, to say the least, with both the Republican and Democratic presidential candidates, aggravated by the course and pace of cultural collapse, disappointed that their political efforts have born such limited fruit, there is anguish bordering on despair among many faithful believers.
That’s why we need a “Normandy perspective” on the status of God’s kingdom in the age in which we live. His kingdom has “landed,” but there will be resistance until the final victory of the King at the end of the age.
First, in what ways has the Kingdom of God arrived? Let’s start at the beginning: Jesus ushered in the “final days” of human history — His resurrection and ascension marked the beginning of the last period in which men could repent. In that sense, we have been living in the “last days” since the Lord lifted from earth into the Father’s presence.
In this last epoch of history, Christians have for nearly 2,000 years been heralding the most joyous news ever: Jesus is Lord, offers salvation freely to all who will receive Him, and has inaugurated His rule as King of kings.
As the great theologian George Eldon Ladd wrote in his classic book, The Presence of the Future:
Before the eschatological appearing of God’s Kingdom at the end of the age, God’s Kingdom has become dynamically active among men in Jesus’ person and mission. The Kingdom in this age is not merely the abstract concept of God’s universal rule to which men must submit; it is rather a dynamic power at work among men.
Consider just a few ways the power of the King and His kingdom have been shown and continue to grow in reach: The Gospel began to be spread by 12 Palestinian Jews in the mid-30s AD and has gone to the far corners of the earth, bringing millions of people into God’s eternal family. Christian ministries have touched hundreds of millions of lives, from rescuing unwanted infants on the trash piles of ancient Rome to pregnancy care centers here in the US. Christians have fought disease, slavery, child abuse, cruelty to animals and assaults on human dignity of all kinds wherever they have gone.
Churches are often oases of hope in deserts of pain. In the U.S. and Canada, faithful churches of many denominations provide food and clothing to the poor, needed resources to young women with crisis pregnancies and adoption services for their babies, counseling to the unemployed, language classes for the newly arrived, and facilities for city sports leagues, among scores of other ministries designed to demonstrate, in practical ways, the love of Jesus.
Our record has been imperfect and, at times, shameful. Perhaps most obviously, we did not do enough to fight slavery or then work to end legal bigotry against persons of color. Yet the greatest advances in human progress, from the founding of great universities to the inception of the hospital movement, has been grounded in faith in Jesus Christ. In all of these efforts, there is an underlying theme: The Prince of Life has come, and is opening swaths of transformation in a broken world.
With that said, one has only to look around at our local communities, our country as a whole, and a vast sea of global need and bloodshed to recognize that the kingdom of God has not fully been realized. Every news site, newspaper and news network is, for the most part, a catalog of human fallenness.
In addition, if you travel to Jerusalem, you won’t find Jesus reigning visibly on the earth. Most people in the world are not submitting to His Lordship. Sin remains engrained in fallen man, and continues as a corrosive patina on image bearers of God of every tribe and nation.
Yet Scripture offers the assurance of the full realization of the Kingdom of God: One day, the King will come and abolish the reign of sin and death “far as the curse is found.”
I don’t want to expound on the chronology of Christ’s return — pre-trib, amill or anything in between. The critical issue is that Jesus will come again. There will be a new heaven and a new earth. Sin will be vanquished in history as the Lord’s resurrection ensured that it would. We will realize a day when God will exalt Jesus Christ “to the highest place.” Having given Him “the name that is above every name … at the name of Jesus every knee (shall) bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue acknowledge that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father (Philippians 2:9-11).”
“The kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ, and he shall reign forever and ever” (Revelation 11:15).
The Normandy analogy is imperfect. We will not storm the gates of Satan’s Berlin and raise the cross above the gates of hell and then stand by as the great King descends from heaven to thank us for our victory on His behalf. He will establish His kingdom at the time and with the permanency and totality He alone can bring. Until then, we will keep battling against the hydra of sin everywhere it is found. And that means everywhere, period. As the Anglican pastor and theologian John Stott, one of God’s great 20th century servants, wrote:
Is the kingdom of God a future reality to be hoped for or a present reality to experience now? … The answer is that it is partly present and partly future. Many of its blessings are here to be enjoyed now; but many of them are not yet here. Some of its power is available now but not all of it. Some of the curse and misery of this old age can be overcome now by the presence of the kingdom. But some of it cannot be. The decisive battle against sin and Satan and sickness and death has been fought and won by the King in his death and resurrection, but the war is not over. Sin must be fought, Satan must be resisted, sickness must be prayed over and groaned under (Romans 8:23), and death must be endured until the second coming of the King and the consummation of the kingdom.
Amen. The Allies in the cause of the Risen One fight on. Even so, come, Lord Jesus.