Matthew 4:17

So, Yeshua has been washed and anointed as King and Priest and has entered into the wilderness fasting forty days and nights and last week we discussed about the Temptations He faced from a being we identify as ha Satan.

After victoriously shutting his temptations down, He learned that John had been put in prison and He left His home turf of Nazareth then went to Galilee, called several men to follow Him and this brings us to verse 17

17From that time Yeshua began to preach, saying: “Repent for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.”

Just one chapter back we had John the Baptist come forth in his mission to prepare the way for this promised King and we remember that he said the exact same words – and listen - there is perhaps no better statement to help bible readers today establish the setting and purpose of what they read in this Apostolic Record – that in that day and at that time the Nation of Israel (because that is whom John and Yeshua came to) was to repent and the reason that they BOTH GIVE for this is BECAUSE/FOR “the Kingdom of Heaven was at hand.”

Later in the Gospel of John when Yeshua was being put on trial He was asked by Pilate if “He was a King” and his replay was, “you’ve spoken rightly that I am a king and adds, “for this reason I was born,” but then he says a super important line many people overlook today, saying, “But My kingdom is not of this world, for if it was, my servants would fight.”

Turn on any Christian radio program today, listen to any Evangelical leader, any Pastor over any Christian church and the call from all of them is that Christ expects His children to get involved politically in fighting against the evil of this world – every one of them – but from BOTH the life example and the teachings of our King we find an absolutely different message.

Until His true disciples choose to take a higher path in this world, and until we elect to serve others unconditionally in agape love, letting this world and its kingdoms run themselves ragged on fixing human failure, the world will roil in unfixable defects.

As Yeshuan’s our family ardently but peacefully protests against this method of Man’s application of the faith in this world, and we plainly maintain that we follow, in spirit and truth, the ways of Him in His Kingdom and not those of flesh who use His name and person for moral, political or social reform.

So, let’s talk about what this Kingdom that “was at hand” to them was going to be, why they needed to “repent” in the face of it coming, and when it was going to arrive according to what the scripture says.

The first thing to note is how the world of religious buffoonery answers the question, “has the Kingdom of God come?”

Here is a summary of what I found from the collective mouth of nearly every organized Christ-affirming religion on earth – ready?

They say that the “Kingdom of God has come in a spiritual sense through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, establishing his reign in believers' hearts.

But they add,

“However, it is not yet fully realized physically, as Christians await the second coming of Christ to consummate the Kingdom.”

Then they deliver the man-made explanation of this by adding:

This "already, but not yet" reality means the kingdom is present inwardly/among believers now, but will be fully established in the future materially and on this earth.

In the collective mind of errant and misinformed scolars, teachers, pastors and leaders, John and Yeshua were able to say that the Kingdom of God was “at hand” then because it was spiritually coming forward into the world through the finished work of Christ and this refers to the words, “already,” but because He has not returned physically in their opinion, his Kingdom has not yet fully materialized.

And this has led most Christians to believe that we are living in a present reality when the Kingdom exists now as God's spiritual rule over his people but will come to a future material Consummation when the invisible kingdom that dwells in the hearts of believers will transfer to a material kingdom over which Jesus will reign someday called “a new heaven and new earth.”

Problems arise however in this modern day logic when we read that Yeshua plainly taught in places like Luke 17:21 that the kingdom is not a physical location, but is "in the midst" of people (and/or within them) and that it does not “come with visual observation,” so Christians today, misinterpreting scripture, have convinced themselves that we are all awaiting and patiently waiting and watching for the arrival of His future earthly material kingdom to land on earth upon His promised return and that He will rule and reign over the new earth from here.

We maintain that there are far far far too many contradictions to this stance in the scripture for it to be correct, and taking those in hand we suggest plainly that when John the Baptist and Yeshua came into their work in that day, and said to the people in that day that they needed to repent, because the Kingdom of heaven was at hand, they meant it, that there was no already but not yet caveat possible, and that sets the basic understanding of who that Kingdom was coming to first in its totality, of what that Kingdom consists, and how it has been spiritually established in heaven and on earth and there is nothing more to expect rather than choosing to live according to it or not.

In many ways the Bible is sort of based on a number of different kingdoms being presented, of them being at war, and them being either God’s or of another whether it be of Men, other countries, darkness and or evil.

In some ways we might see Adam and Eve presiding over a garden Kingdom given humanity all the way back in Genesis – until that Kingdom fell into the hands of beings that essentially hated both God and Man and won the right to rule over them.

We see the kingdom of this fallen world beginning at the fall and then inaugurated through the murder of Abel by Adam and Eve’s first son and the profligarations of fallen man manifesting themselves in dark enterprises almost immediately among man through human sacrifice, idolatry of every non-God thing imaginable.

We see that the earthly inhabitants got to the point that God wiped out most of the earths human and animal population during the time of Noah because of violence.

The narrative shows us, however, that God did not leave the world to roil in misery and bondage to evil but in the face of human freewill He worked bringing forth a man of faith and his wife out from Mesopotamia promising him and his posterity a kingdom, amidst all the dark empires of the world that would include

Abraham becoming a great nation that He would bless, making his name great, as the very symbol of human faith in God.

We note that from Abraham comes the Nation of Israel, the Muslims and the Christians – all walking by faith in different and unique ways.

God then promised Abraham and his elect descendants (who would proceed from the loins of His promised Son Isaac) the land of Canaan (from the river of Egypt to the Euphrates) as an everlasting possession for that Kingdom.

Everlasting based on their willingness to be obedient to God and His commands as all promises in that first material Kingdom were predicated conditionally on the peoples responding in faith through obedience.

That land and that people were also promised that kings would descend from them establishing a royal lineage.

God also told Abraham that through Abraham's seed (offspring), all nations of the earth would be blessed.

These were all of the material blessings God gave the Nation that would spring forth from Him and the Son of Promise.

But the through-line of the biblical narrative only in-part describes the material Kingdom on earth given to the material nation because the text is super abundantly clear that all of these material promises to that material nation that would come from material Abraham and Sarah’s chosen son of Promise would result in a spiritual and therefore an eternal Kingdom that would come which would never be shaken or moved.

This was the Kingdom that both John and Yeshua came forth saying was at hand.

Between the lines of all of this most believers even today have failed to see that the material kingdom promises were all to “them/then,” the people of the Old Testament but that even most of the Jews in Yeshua’s day missed the fact that the Kingdom He would ultimately establish would be entirely spiritual, with no material fulfillment necessary once Christ had won back all things materially, culminating in His victory over Satan, sin, death, the grave and reconciling God forevermore to the world of the creation made in His image.

Christ’s finished work serve to move or return every human being back to the first garden of Eden spiritually where all of us live with His presence within and choosing, like our first parents, what to believe and how to live all as a means to enter His Kingdom now and then finally once our mortal live are over.

For that Nation, who were once under the Law given to them by God, had to receive the Messiah of this coming Kingdom by first repenting, which is why both John and Jesus said to them/then,

“Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.”

Why repent? That people, Yeshua’s own brethren born under the law, were all part of the Nation that God had elected to be His bride, and who had agreed to do all He asked of them.

He was a cloud to them by day and a pillar of fire of them by night, delivered them from bondage, fed them and gave them water in the wilderness and gave them His Law and prophets.

Truly they were blessed by the True and Living God but by the time John and Yeshua came on the scene the Nation was all but lost to the traditions of Man and their need to serve other Gods.

Because of their long history with idolatry, God allowed them to be put into bondage and when they came out, they were cured of pursuing the false gods of other nations but turned the Law God had given them into their newest idol and served it instead of God Himself.

Going back into the Old Testament to Exodus, God calls Israel “a Kingdom of Priests” and these priests, after their Exodus from Egypt served the kingdom of Israel consisting of twelve tribes.

This Kingdom was God’s material earthly Kingdom and if we know anything from the biblical record is was ensconced in material affectations.

In other words, a person was only a citizen of that kingdom if they had the correct genealogical line, and if they were materially circumcised, and complied with all the material demands upon them relative to diet, marriage, dress, travel, Sabbath days, tabernacle rites and rituals, days of the week and month and year, offering material sacrifice, money and goods, and all sorts of other material devotions demanded of them.

God had given the Nation a Bill of Divorce all the way back in Jeremiah but promised that He would come and take her up again as His own and this is what John and Yeshua had come to do – to reach out to the lost sheep of the house of Israel who would hear the truth, repent of their false ways, and prepare themselves to receive the Kingdom of God when it arrived by in and through Him, their promised Messiah.

When we get to the Apostolic Record the promised kingdom to come is called, the "kingdom of Christ" "the kingdom of Christ and of God" "the kingdom of David," the Kingdom of Heaven, the Kingdom of His dear son and just “the kingdom," all of these were synonymously describing what Christ and His finished work on earth would bring to first His own from the Nation of Israel, that former material kingdom, then to Gentiles as promised, and ultimately to the world forevermore.

This kingdom was not in operation when John and Yeshua cried, “repent, for the Kingdom of heaven is at hand,” as the words, “at hand” meant close but was not there yet.

It is really important to know that anciently when a King over a Kingdom would enter a village or would return from war another would go before him and prepare the way.

This is the symbolism of John preparing the way of the Messiah as He was coming into the world to collect His people and bring them into His Kingdom.

In the case of Christ the Kingdom of David was on the way of being overtaken (via prophetic fulfillment) and as we have said was materially based and literally operated off genetic lines, dress, dietary and sanitation rules, actual animal sacrifice, travel rules, marriage rules, a male priesthood, a material temple, history and artifacts.

The people did not realize that their promised Messiah was coming to be their Spiritual savior and King, to establish a Spiritual Kingdom that is not of this world, and that this Kingdom would first reside within them and once fully present, would perfectly exist and operate from the heavenly realm and not on earth in the material.

Because He came to His own, who were members of that material Kingdom under the law, they were not ready to receive His definition of the Kingdom but repeatedly mistook His work as establishing another material expression operating from the material earth.

Unfortunately, many Christians today have the same misunderstanding of Christ the King and His reign over His Kingdom as most accept, again as stated, that He is reigning over His disciples from the heart today but that someday He is going to return to reign over the physical world - nothing could be further from the truth once a simple audit of the text is done.

Instead, the Bible plainly shows that Yeshua came and

Fulfilled all the prophesies about Him.

Perfectly obeyed the Law and the prophets on behalf of the material Nation that was supposed to honor God in the same way,

Would become Israel to God Himself, doing some of the very same things Israel did before Him (like come out of Egypt)

Would then offer Himself up as the Sacrificial Lamb for the sins of the world

And be the promised Messiah who would set the captives free, and be the payment once and for all for the sins introduced by our first parents.

Once His work on earth as a mortal was finished, and He died on that Cross, everything before Him started to shift from the material to the Spiritual, beginning with His material body being resurrected and qualified to enter into the presence of His Father in the heavenly spiritual realm.

He promised His disciples that He would not leave them alone, but that He would send what would forever serve to govern His people (his very Spirit) that would fall at Pentecost then He ascended into the heavenly realm as the only human qualified to enter therein and took His place at the right hand of His father in the heavenly holy of Holies, mediating between God and man UNTIL (that is a super important word when it comes to understanding Christ and His Work) until the prophesied great and dreadful day when God would put an end to everything about the former economy under the law which would begin to unravel when the Mediatorial Christ would exit the Holy of Holies above, return as promised to His own Bride, and rescue her from that dreadful day of judgement that would fall on them that were of that Nation, under that Law and the prophets given them.

At Pentecost, when the believers were overcome with the Spirit of Christ that had fallen upon them, and the Jews watching thought that they were drunk, Peter said (again in that day and in that age, to that audience then) as the first apostle to start calling his brethren to repent and receive their Messiah and we read,

Acts 2:14-21 But Peter, standing up with the eleven, lifted up his voice, and said unto them, Ye men of Judaea, and all ye that dwell at Jerusalem, be this known unto you, and hearken to my words:

15 For these are not drunken, as ye suppose, seeing it is but the third hour of the day.

16 But this is that which was spoken by the prophet Joel;

17 And it shall come to pass in the last days, saith God, I will pour out of my Spirit upon all flesh: and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams:

18 And on my servants and on my handmaidens I will pour out in those days of my Spirit; and they shall prophesy:

19 And I will shew wonders in heaven above, and signs in the earth beneath; blood, and fire, and vapour of smoke:

20 The sun shall be turned into darkness, and the moon into blood, before that great and notable day of the Lord come:

21 And it shall come to pass, that whosoever shall call on the name of the Lord shall be saved.

We know that the ravages of that great and dreadful day that put an END to the material world of religion happened – actually and materially. When?

When some forty years after Yeshua and the apostles prophesied of all of these things and their work in going into all of Israel to gather unto Him a holy and pure bride ended, that all the things of that former age were eradicated materially as foretold and those who had repented because the Kingdom of Heaven was at hand, were taken up by Christ who upon His return to them/then, launched the new heaven and new earth into being, establishing a spiritual kingdom that could not ever be shaken above and in the hearts of those mortals who received their citizenship within it by acknowledging the presence of God in them and choosing to love accordingly.

And that this Kingdom, established by His coming out of the heavenly holy of holies and back to earth to show Himself and to take His worthy bride has continued ever since in the lives of those who are truly His in Spirit and Truth.

This is the beginning of the end of material religion and all of God’s promises and prophecies about His solution to the plight of sin and death, bondage and captivity heaped upon the human race through the acts of our first parents and the start or launch of the Kingdom of Christ whose reign will never ever fail to rightly govern the human realm of freewill and God’s love.

But to conclude todays teaching we cannot overlook at the full impact of what both John and Christ said to that nation then – it was not just, “the Kingdom of heaven is at hand” was it, but it was “repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.”

John a Brodus, a Baptist theologian and teacher from the 19th century once reported that the WORSE translation in the New Testament was using the English word repent to convey the meaning of both John and Christ.

What’s the problem?

In English the term repent, which originates from the Latin “Repo-nee-tah” means to put back or replace, as in “if you stole a candy bar to repent means to replace it and/or even “to be sorry again.”

But neither John nor Yeshua were calling on the people to be sorry as in an emotional response but to turn around in their minds, to change course in the brain and heart first – inwardly – as this is the operation center for the soul and once the mind has decided to turn and change, the body and actions will follow.

To repent in the Latin meaning is more perfunctory of a religious action and not an internal u-turn of thoughts, ideas and beliefs.

See, the Nation had the Law and the prophets behind them but from their mind had embraced another way of thinking and being.

The Greeks have a term that speaks to what the English word repent should mean - and that word is Met-an-o-ey-o and in the word we find the Greek word for mind.

Change your mind about things is what John and Christ were saying BECAUSE the Kingdom of heaven is close – it is at hand.

That Greek term includes the Greek word for mind – noeo – add meta as the prefix and the combined word is meta (with or even beyond) and Noeo (the mind).

The trouble is English does not have a suitable word for this call and so we appealed to the Latin and used one of theirs which is wanting.

The Vulgate has it "do penance" and Wycliff has followed that line of thinking.

The Old Syriac has it better by saying, "Turn ye."

The French (Geneva) has it "Amendez vous," which is sort of like better yourself.

Metanoia is John's great word and it has been hopelessly mistranslated and understand, the Greek does have a word that means to be sorry, (meta-mel-ahm-ahee) but that is NOT what is meant here.

The second problem with our interpretation of the world repent is it was specifically to them then as a people under the law.

They had 1500 years of God leading them that they had turned from and so to call them to turn back first in their minds, was wholly appropriate.

The ONLY time Paul uses the term toward Gentiles in that day, in fact the only time metanoeo is used outside of the Gospels, Acts, and Revelation is in Paul’s second letter to the Church at Corinth and this is what he says,

2Co 12:20 For I fear, lest, when I come, I shall not find you such as I would, and that I shall be found unto you such as ye would not: lest there be debates, envyings, wraths, strifes, backbitings, whisperings, swellings, tumults:

21 And lest, when I come again, my God will humble me among you, and that I shall bewail many which have sinned already, and have not repented of the uncleanness and fornication and lasciviousness which they have committed.

So John was a new prophet with the call of the old prophets we read Joel, Isaiah and Ezekiel calling on the Jews of that nation to do – to turn in their minds -from the things they were thinking.

What is super hard for people to really understand in the world of faith today is that when someone says,

“You need to repent,” we think it means feel sorry and change your behavior.” That is the sad injustice of what this poor translation in the Bible has come to mean.

But the fact of the matter is, whether someone today is a jew or a Gentile, the call of God on us is to first and foremost change our minds about something, from error to truth, and that once the inward has occurred the outward has the chance to actually follow.

Changing actions first, stopping a sin without first changing ones mind about it is merely religion – its faking it until we make it.

It is stopping outwardly an action or behavior to show oneself approved first, then qualifying ourselves to others.

But God wants the change to begin and continue in the heart or hearts – to recognize and literally know for yourself what is true and of Him first even if your will and ways fail to do what your mind has concluded.

For instance, I know in my mind now why adultery is wrong and I have changed my mind about it because of coming to understand the impact of it and the historical significance of being faithful relative to idolatry.

Before this change of mind adultery was something I was constantly battling in my flesh because my inward man had not come to see nor understand the egregious nature of it.

John and Yeshua was telling that nation, under the Law, to change their minds about all they were currently believing and thinking, and that this was the precursor necessary to be saved from the Great and Dreadful day that was going to fall on them when the Kingdom of Christ would come; that the only way to be saved from the wrath was to literally change their minds

(and by the way, the mind is not just the brain but it really is most likely contained in what we also loosely call the heart) and so it really means to change ones heart felt convictions first)

But for them to ready themselves to be accepted in the approaching Kingdom of Heaven.

This is the setting of the entire apostolic record – those people then – members of the Nation of Israel, given one last chance to change before the great and dreadful day of the Lord which would once and for all establish the Kingdom of Christ above and in the hearts of all people who come into it.

With all of that under our belt we are ready to move on out into the rest of Matthew.

Thanks for tuning in.