Currently they lived in a kingdom. It was a kingdom ruled by the Romans through the use of governors. Pilot ruled over Judea and one of Herod’s sons ruled over Galilee, the region where this story took place.
Example flying into Israel on the Sabbath
To Jewish people the Kingdom of God had a very specific meaning, to us it is ambiguous. When we run into terms like these in scripture we have to do our best to figure out how the people at the time would have understood what Jesus was saying and how this would have affected them. The first thing we need to know is that Jewish people believed God was going to come to earth and set up his kingdom in Jerusalem. There are several passages in the Old Testament that support this. Probably the most famous is from Micah chapter 4. Read the text.
Many Jewish people believed that God was going to come to earth and setup a physical kingdom from Jerusalem. He would rule from there and all the nations of the world would come from all over the world to visit him. He would bring complete peace to all the world. Jewish people had different ideas about how this kingdom would come about. Some Jews believed a Messiah figure, that is a human king would bring about this kingdom. (Does everyone know what I mean when I say Messiah?)
Others, and I just learned this as I was studying for this week, believed God’s kingdom would come when the Jewish people obeyed the law. As they obeyed God and his law the world would be changed and God would come down to earth and rule. To the average Jewish person, the kingdom of God was a physical kingdom where God would reign sometime in the future.
Many Jews during Jesus’ time also believed that they would rule with God in his kingdom. This idea comes in a few places but especially from the book of Daniel. Daniel was a Jewish prophet who was taken to Babylon from Israel when the Babylonians took over Israel. Eventually he ended up prophesizing about Israel and their future.
In Daniel 7 Daniel prophesized,
The kingship, authority, and power
of all kingdoms under heaven
will be given to the people,
the holy ones of the Most High.
Their kingship is an everlasting one; every authority will serve them and obey.
The idea that God’s people, the Jewish people would reign together with God in his kingdom was common during Jesus’ time. If you have your bible turn quickly to Mark chapter 11:35-40 In Mark 11, James and John, 2 of Jesus’ disciples come to Jesus. Here we see James and John both asking Jesus who would sit where would Christ reigned. They had this Old Testament idea in mind. To James and John the Kingdom of God was going to be physical and they, the Jewish people, were going to reign with Christ in it over everyone else.
There are few books that were written between the end the Old Testament and the time of Christ. These are called the Apocrypha. These books aren’t scripture but they can help us to understand the culture and beliefs of the Jewish people when Christ came. The book of Enoch is one of these books. In it we learn that many people also believed that the Kingdom of God would come about after God’s judgement. Let me read a portion to you of this ancient document:
The Holy Great One will come forth from His dwelling, And the eternal God will tread upon the earth, even on Mount Sinai, And appear from His camp And appear in the strength of His might from the heaven of heavens. And all shall be smitten with fear, And the Watchers shall quake,3 And great fear and trembling shall seize them unto the ends of the earth. And the high mountains shall be shaken, And the high hills shall be made low, And shall melt like wax before the flame. And the earth shall be wholly rent in sunder, And there shall be a judgement upon all men…. And behold! He cometh with ten thousands of His holy ones. To execute judgement upon all, And to destroy all the ungodly:4 And to convict all flesh Of all the works of their ungodliness which they have ungodly committed, And of all the hard things which ungodly sinners have spoken against Him" (1:3-9).
The belief that judgement would come before the coming of God’s kingdom is probably one of the reasons John the Baptist went around and told everyone to repent for the Kingdom of God is at hand. Repenting would be the obvious thing to do if one thought that judgment was going to precede the coming of the kingdom of God. Many of the people who Jesus is addressing would have believed that the Kingdom of God was going to be a physical kingdom where the Jewish God reigned from Jerusalem over the whole world with the help of his people, righteous Jewish people. And that this reign would be preceded by a physical kingdom.
So this is what Jewish people around at the time of Christ would have believed about the kingdom of God. And John the Baptist comes and he flat out tells the people that the kingdom of God, the physical reign of God on earth is here. And he isn’t the only one who is saying it, so is Jesus. In Matthew 4, Jesus says the same thing, “repent for the kingdom of God is here.” The people begin to believe that the Kingdom of God was arriving. And they begin to think that Jesus might be the Messiah sent by God to help bring the kingdom. And he begins to heal people and he speak out against the religious leaders who many people didn’t like, and he even forgives sins. To many it was just a matter of time before Jesus led an armed revolt against Rome.
These thoughts were in the heads of the people as we come to our passage in Luke and as they heard Jesus talk about the Kingdom of God. Previous to our text, Jesus had healed a very sick women, a women who had been disabled due to the work of an evil Spirit on the Sabbath.
What Jesus says about the Kingdom of God is linked to the previous story. Luke even connects the two passages with a conjunction translated as “then” or “therefore.” In other words Jesus considers what he did to the women an example of the Kingdom of God. The coming of God’s kingdom will free people from the power of Sin and Satan. But there is more he wants to say. He gives two analogies one with yeast and one with a Mustard seed. Both of these analogies are going to challenge what the crowds would have believed about the Kingdom of God and also what we think about the nature of God’s life in our own lives.
The first analogy he uses is the mustard seed. Read verse 18… and 19…
What is Jesus telling the crowd about the kingdom? Does anyone know how small a mustard seed is? A mustard seed is roughly the size a large grain of sand. It is 1-2 millimeters. It was a common plant in Israel and was more like a weed or a vine than a tree. Some variations of the plant could grow as large as 8-10 feet high. Jesus calls it a tree here in order to emphasize the difference in size between the seed and what it produces.
His second illustration reinforces the same thing. Yeast is small compared to how much dough it can effect. This is a picture of the kingdom. The kingdom of God starts small and grows large. In emphasizing the small size of the Kingdom, of Jesus is telling the crowds he hadn’t come to start a revolution. God wasn’t going to come from heaven to earth and setup his kingdom. Instead the kingdom was coming through small acts, like healing a women from a disease she had had for 20 years. The kingdom was coming from the bottom up instead of the top down.
What would his audience have thought of this? Many of them would have been very confused. Some would have been dismayed. They were sick of injustice, sick of captivity, sick of being told what to do… They wanted freedom from Roman rule. They wanted God to come and fix everything that was wrong with their world. They didn’t want to wait any longer. They wanted something big and they wanted it now.
I talked a few months about how I understand the kingdom. I don’t know if you remember this, but I defined the kingdom of God as the place where God’s rule is perfectly carried out. These places can be both inside of people as well as with systems, governments, neighborhoods ect. When Jesus tells the crowds the kingdom starts small, he is telling us this: God’s rule in our lives always starts small.
When I was in high school our church invited a man named Billy Schneider to come and speak. He was a former drug addict who had contracted Aids from his drug use. In the midst of his drug addiction he contemplated Suicide. In the midst of this God found him and changed his life. Billy traveled around the country telling his story. He would speak in schools and churches. Whenever he spoke he would begin his message laying in the bottom of the casket hidden from view. He would then sit up and resurrect dramatically. God did a big thing in Billy’s life. God’s rule, his reign came in a large way.
I have always been slightly jealous of people like Billy. They have the best stories. I don’t have that kind of story. I grewup in a Christian home. Struggled a little but never got to far off the path. And yet sometimes it doesn’t feel like God has changed me much. I don’t have a before and after. Most of our stories are this way. Most of us came to faith as children. Most of us don’t have much of a before and after story. Most of us have things we have struggled with our whole lives. And most of us want the big thing.
We want a dramatic change. We want the equivalent of God coming down and sitting in our living room and setting up his kingdom. Here Jesus tells us that that is probably not going to happen.
Instead we are given this tiny seed. This seed is given to us for free as we admit we are sinners in need of Christ to save us. Once inside of us. It grows. Slowly. But we have the opportunity to nurture it. To water it. It begins to grow as we make choices everyday to live through God’s power. To ask him to help us do what we can’t do ourselves. It grows when we ask others for help. When we ask others for accountability. As we do these things we change. Many times not dramatically. Maybe we have one drink less this week, or we have one less angry outburst, or one more minute of patience with our kids, or one less gossip at work.
I don’t know why God doesn’t start big. I don’t know why he doesn’t just fix us. I don’t know why he allows us to struggle, to battle sin in our lives, to fight for him to rule more of our lives. I have some philosophical guesses, but I think from a theological perspective its clear that God values the process of change. Perhaps he isn’t as concerned about our perfection as he is about what we learn during the process. The character we develop. We learn about repentance. We learn about failure. We get to experience joy and a sense of pride in having resisted temptation.
The mustard seed and the yeast teach us that the Christian life starts small. They also teach us that the Kingdom of God will not be stopped. The seed will grow into a tree, the dough will rise.
In saying this Jesus is assuring the crowds of God’s faithfulness. God will not forget his promise to Israel to bring justice and peace in the world through his presence. It might take longer than they thought but he has not abandoned them nor is he breaking his promise to come and rule. God is faithful. The kingdom will come in full.
To us today Jesus is saying I am not done with you. I have not abandoned you. I am faithful. You struggling with addiction. I am not done with you. You struggling with bitterness… I am not done with you… You struggling with self control… I am not done with you. You struggling with the consequences of your past… I am not done with you. You may think you haven’t changed or you aren’t being transformed into something new but you are and someday you will be fully transformed into the person God wants you to be.
If you have your Bibles turn to Philippians 1.
Philippians 1:1 Paul and Timothy, servants of Christ Jesus, To all God's holy people in Christ Jesus at Philippi, together with the overseers and deacons:
2 Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.
3 I thank my God every time I remember you.
4 In all my prayers for all of you, I always pray with joy
5 because of your partnership in the gospel from the first day until now,
6 being confident of this, that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus. (Phi 1:1-6 NIV)
Here, Paul is in essence saying what Jesus was saying. God is going to complete what he started in all of us. The small work of God’s rule in us is going to someday grow so large that no one will be able to deny what God has done. God is faithful. Our role is simply to make small choices, to play a small part in what God is doing. He will do the rest.