See my review yesterday of Jared Wilson's Your Jesus Is Too Safe.

Today I'm posting an excerpt from the book in which Jared writes about the Kingdom of God.
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“The kingdom is forcefully advancing, and forceful men take hold of it” (Matthew 11:12). Some translations read “violently” and “violent men.”

What did Jesus mean by that? What did this decidedly non-violent man who went around instructing people to turn the other cheek and bless those who persecute them mean with this violent imagery? In a time when some men really were trying to usher in the kingdom of God on earth through military insurrection and violent zealotry, what could Jesus be getting at?

I think he really meant that the kingdom comes in and smashes up worldviews and systems and tears apart the bondage created by sin and Satan. The kingdom coming into this world in the arrival of Jesus the King wreaks havoc among those opposed to it.

The proclamation of the kingdom’s arrival even begins with a battle in the wilderness as Jesus withstands the temptations of Satan (Matt. 4:1-11). And at the end he dispatches the devil, banishes him. Later, Jesus will tell a story to his followers outlining that the way to plunder someone’s house is by invading it and binding the strongman (Mark 3:27). This is Jesus alluding to what he’s doing to the sinful corruption of the prevailing system. He’s come in, whooped up on the devil, hogtied him, and now he’s taking all his stuff. He’s rescuing all held captive by fallenness.

Indeed, if you look at what Jesus goes around doing in his ministry, it really reflects this invasion-and-rescue idea. He makes sick people well, he makes paralyzed people get up, he makes the dead live, and perhaps most vividly connected to the notion of spiritual invasion, he goes around casting demons out of people. He literally frees them of their spiritual possession. He’s releasing the captives

Like any new king, he’s issuing pardons.

This is a pretty “violent” arrival for this kingdom. In Luke 10:18, Jesus tells the disciples, “I saw Satan fall like lightning from the sky.” Now, a lot of people believe this is Jesus referring to the fall of the devil way back at the beginning of time when he was an angel ousted from heaven by God for his insurrectionist pride. And Jesus’ words may indeed refer to that event, but in the context of this incident, the disciples are marveling at their ability to cast out demons, and Jesus is basically saying, “No duh. I gave that guy the boot. His power is subject to mine.”

So that’s what the kingdom does. Its arrival is violent, cataclysmic, shaking strongholds, putting the fear of God into rulers and religious leaders. It knocks the enemy out and sets the enemy’s prisoners free. It turns the tables over in the worldly culture. It turns almost everything upside down, which is to say, in God’s view, rightside up.

            So Jesus goes around making these kingdom proclamations, announcing and flat-out demonstrating that a new king is in town, but he also makes some declarations. His actions demonstrate the new reality of the kingdom’s presence, but his teachings tell us what life is like in the new kingdom. This is sort of like his first royal declarations. His unfurling of the new constitution. “This is how things used to be,” he says, “but now that there’s a new a king in town, things are gonna be like this . . .”

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Buy Your Jesus Is Too Safe.