The scripture reading today comes from Daniel chapter 2. The sermon text is in Mark 1. But before that, we will have a scripture reading from Daniel chapter 2. Daniel chapter 2, verses 31 to 45. Daniel chapter 2, verses 31 to 45. This is the word of the Lord. You saw, O king, and behold a great image. This image, mighty and of exceeding brightness, stood before you, and its appearing was frightening. The head of this image was of fine gold, its chest and arms of silver, its middle and thighs of bronze, its legs of iron, its feet partly of iron and partly of clay. As you looked, a stone was cut out by no human hand, and it struck the image on its feet of iron and clay and broke them in pieces. Then the iron, the clay, the bronze, the silver, and the gold all together were broken in pieces. became like the chaff of the summer threshing floors and the wind carried them away so that not a trace of them could be found. The stone that struck the image became a great mountain and filled the whole earth. This was the dream. Now we will tell the king its interpretation. You, O king, the king of kings, to whom the God of heaven has given the kingdom, the power, and the might, and the glory, and into whose hand he has given, wherever they dwell, the children of man, the beasts of the field, and the birds of the heavens, making you rule over them all, you are the head of gold. Another kingdom inferior to you shall arise after you, and yet a third, kingdom of bronze, which shall rule over all the earth. And there shall be a fourth kingdom, strong as iron, because iron breaks to pieces and shatters all things. And like iron that crushes, it shall break and crush all these. And as you saw the feet and toes, partly of potter's clay and partly of iron, it shall be a divided kingdom. But some of the firmness of iron shall be in it, just as you saw iron mixed with the soft clay. And as the toes of the feet were partly iron and partly clay, so the kingdom shall be partly strong and partly brittle. As you saw the iron mixed with soft clay, so they will mix with one another in marriage, but they will not hold together, just as iron does not mix with clay. And in the days of those kings, the God of heaven will set up a kingdom that shall never be destroyed, nor shall the kingdom be left to another people. It shall break in pieces all these kingdoms and bring them to an end, and it shall stand forever. Just as you saw that a stone was cut from a mountain by no human hand, and that it broke in pieces, the iron, the bronze, the clay, the silver, and the gold. A great God has made known to the king what shall be after this. The dream is certain and its interpretation sure. Please turn now in your Bibles to the first chapter of the Gospel of Mark. Sermon text today is Mark chapter 1 verses 14 and 15. Mark chapter 1 verses 14 and 15. I will begin reading at the beginning of the chapter. This is the word of the Lord. The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. As it is written in Isaiah the prophet, behold I send my messenger before your face who will prepare your way. The voice of one crying in the wilderness, prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight. John appeared, baptizing in the wilderness and proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. and all the country of Judea and all Jerusalem were going out to him and were being baptized by him in the river Jordan confessing their sins. Now John was clothed with camel's hair and wore a leather belt around his waist and ate locusts and wild honey. And he preached saying, after me comes he who is mightier than I, the strap of whose sandals I am not worthy to stoop down and untie. I have baptized you with water But he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit. In those days, Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan. And when he came up out of the water, immediately he saw the heavens being torn open and the Spirit descending on him like a dove. And a voice came from heaven. You are my beloved son. With you I am well pleased. the spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness. And as he was in the wilderness 40 days, and he was in the wilderness 40 days, being tempted by Satan, and he was with the wild animals, and the angels were ministering to him. Now, after John was arrested, Jesus came into Galilee, proclaiming the gospel of God and saying, The time is fulfilled and the kingdom of God is at hand. Repent and believe in the gospel. Thus far the reading of God's word. Let us now pray his blessing upon its preaching. Let's pray. Gracious Heavenly Father, this is your word inspired by the Holy Spirit. And we, your people, saved by your grace, have been regenerated by that self-same Holy Spirit, God, the third person of the Trinity. And we ask, O Lord, now that you would illumine our hearts and minds so that we might understand this word as deep calls to deep. We ask, O Lord, for this. We ask this for your glory and for our good. It is in Christ's name that we pray. Amen. Brothers and sisters, the Bible teaches in many places that God is a king. And it teaches he is a king in two senses. First, he is king over all the creation by virtue of being its creator and its sustainer. We could call this God's general kingship. But he is also a king in a particular way. By virtue of his covenants, His covenants with a set-apart people, Israel, or the church, the one assembly of his people. And we can call this his special kingship, which he enjoys by right of purchase, or redemption, for that is what the word redemption means, purchase. From Exodus we read, you yourselves have seen what I did to the Egyptians, and how I bore you on eagles' wings and brought you to my cell. Now therefore, if you will indeed obey my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my treasured possession among all peoples, for all the earth is mine, and you shall be to me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation. Brothers and sisters, there is a problem as we come to grapple with God's kingship. His kingship over either his people or over this world. And that is the lawlessness and the wickedness that infect his dominions in both church and in the world. There is a tension then between what the Bible teaches and what we see in the world and what we see in his church. This tension was both keenly felt and openly acknowledged in the scriptures of the Old Testament. If God is king, not only over his people, but also over the whole world, then how can God be exercising kingship over either of them when both of them are in such a state? And how long will he allow this state of wickedness to prevail in both church and world? And that is a refrain in the Old Testament. You may be familiar with it. How long, O Lord? That is, how long shall things go on like this? The Scriptures dealt with this tension, and it dealt with it by means of promises and prophecies. God, we were told, the people of God were told, would one day come into the world to reassert his kingly rights. and forever establish his direct personal rule over the heavens and the earth, delivering his people and destroying the wicked in the process. I've divided today's sermon into three parts. The first I call the coming of the kingdom. The second, thy kingdom come, thy will be done. And the third, the gospel of God. So part one, the coming of the kingdom. Let's first consider this phrase, the time is fulfilled in our text. The word in Greek for time here is kairos and it communicates more of an idea of a critical or opportune moment as opposed to the idea of progressive time. But what critical moment is our Lord referring to here? What critical moment is he telling us in this text has been fulfilled? What the Jews had hoped for for centuries had in fact come about with the arrival of Jesus of Nazareth. God's kingdom, we are being told here, has finally come. Now there were in fact two main strands of Jewish expectation and hope with regard to the coming of the kingdom of God. First, the first strand was that God would come in person. He would come personal to reassert his royal claims and his prerogatives over this world in general and over his set apart people in particular. This was called in scripture the great and terrible day of the Lord. On that day, God would come, as I said personally, to save and to judge. Second, the second strand of Jewish expectation about the coming of the kingdom of God involved a coming Messiah called the Lord's anointed, who would be a human king, who would be David's greater son. who would also come to save Israel and also to defeat and to judge the wicked. This second strand of thought was thought of as the coming age. That was the language used, the coming age or the age to come. And that's what the arrival of the coming of the Messiah would inaugurate, the age to come. So, God himself was coming with the day of the Lord, and the Messiah was coming too, to bring in the age to come. And to this point, where we have just reached together with the coming of the Lord himself, and the coming of the Messiah too, to bring the age to come, Jewish expectation matched what the Old Testament had taught. The Old Testament contains promises and prophecies that God was coming as King to save, to judge, and to conquer, and that the Lord's anointed, the Messiah, was coming as King to save, to judge, and to conquer. We need to understand this much before we can proceed to try to comprehend these really complimentary, but yet apparently paradoxical statements of our Lord in our text. The time is fulfilled and the kingdom of God is at hand. Fulfilled implies accomplishment. That verb in the Greek is in the perfect tense. But at hand, although it implies something very near to us, that phrase at hand still communicates something yet to be accomplished. For we can wrestle with that paradox, we need to be sure that we have this basic understanding, again, that in Jewish eschatology, God was coming to save and to deliver, and the Messiah, the Lord's anointed, was coming to save, to judge, and to deliver. How those two strands of promise and prophecy actually work together was not made obvious in the page of the Old Testament. And so human sin and interpretation, in addition to ordinary human limitations, led to a number of misconceptions creeping into Jewish expectation regarding the coming of the kingdom. Let's focus for a moment now on two misconceptions that the Jews had about the coming of the kingdom. First, they conceived of the coming kingdom in crass political terms. Of course moral concerns were present in that the law of Moses would be established as the law of the land as it were. The focus was that the heathen emperors and the legions of Rome would be crushed. They expected the kingdom of God and of his Christ to be a kingdom of this world. A kingdom that would come with observation. they anticipated a kingdom that would summon Israel to arms in order to overcome the wicked by the edge of the sword. In short, they were looking for a son of David who would be very much like David, that is, a man of action, a man of war, a man of blood. So the arrival of the Messiah they were expecting, the coming of the kingdom they had hoped for, would be a call unto God's people to take up arms and to fight. They fondly expected, to put it in the words of Matthew Henry, they fondly expected the Messiah to appear in external pomp and power, not only to free the Jewish nation from the Roman yoke, but to make it have dominion over all its neighbors, and therefore thought when that kingdom of God was at hand, they must prepare for war and for victory and for preferment and for great things in the world. But in fact, the Jews were cherry picking passages from the Old Testament. They preferred to latch on to only those glorious prophecies that emphasized a conquering Messiah and overlooked those passages that suggested that the Messiah would also come to suffer. This way of thinking was indulged in not only by the Pharisees, and other Jews of Jesus' day, but also by Jesus' own disciples. And even by John the Baptist. And that's why when John the Baptist found himself imprisoned by the wicked, he comes across through the text as puzzled. He had believed that Jesus was the Lord's anointed. But why wasn't Jesus overthrowing the Romans in Herod? Why wasn't he treading them underfoot? and establishing his throne in power. And so he even sent messengers to Jesus to ask him, are you the one who is to come or shall we look for another? This misconception of the coming of the kingdom was in fact tied to yet another misconception. The Jews of Jesus' generation, all of them, read the Old Testament as teaching that the coming of the kingdom would occur all at once. One way we can see that is the different ways that the Baptist and our Lord proclaimed the coming of the kingdom. Let's consider their separate proclamations about the coming of the kingdom to see this difference. In Matthew's account, we read this. In those days, John the Baptist came preaching in the wilderness of Judea, repent for the kingdom is at hand. And that was it. For John the Baptist, the kingdom simply was at hand. But our Lord said something different in our text in Mark. He not only says, like John, that the kingdom is at hand, he also says, as we can see, that the time has been fulfilled. John doesn't say anything about fulfillment. John's remarks, they reflect the fact that the Lord had not yet revealed himself. For John, the kingdom was wholly yet to come and was therefore simply at hand. When the Lord Jesus Christ appears, however, things change. We now learn that the time is fulfilled with the arrival of himself, Jesus of Nazareth. As promised, God has come in the appearance of Jesus. and the Messiah has come in his appearance as well. But how could the promised time be both fulfilled and at hand? And no doubt the two expressions should be understood as being connected to one another. We must do justice to both of these ideas. The kingdom of God has come and the kingdom of God is coming. It has arrived, Jesus proclaims, and yet it also remains at hand. Our Lord speaks this way because the coming of the kingdom is, and this was news to the people of his generation, the coming of the kingdom is a two-staged affair. The coming of the kingdom has arrived with the appearance on the scene of the Lord Jesus Christ, but the kingdom of God is not yet consummated. You can think of it this way. The coming of the kingdom is a two-staged affair because the coming of the king is a two-staged affair. The king has come, so the time is fulfilled, and yet the king will come again. So the kingdom is, in a very real sense, still at hand. The kingdom has both come and is still to come because Jesus has come and is to come again. And all that time, brothers and sisters, all that in-between time, and including these two comings of the divine and anointed King, is in fact, in the conception of the Scriptures, the Day of the Lord. It is the Day of the Lord when God separates the wicked from the just. This is because the sifting aspect of the Day of the Lord has, in a very real way, already begun. The day of the Lord has begun with this gospel, this gospel call right here in our text. It has begun with this accompanying proclamation, repent and believe the gospel. Those who repent and believe in obedience to this command are being gathered now into his garners, into his church. Those who do not heed this call are being bound into sheaves, thieves of pears prepared for the fire. So the sheep are now already being separated from the goats and are being washed by Christ as with fuller soap and refined as by a refiner's fire. So you can think of the two comings of the Lord Jesus Christ as two bookends. Between these two bookends Between and including the first and second comings of the Lord Jesus Christ fall the Old Testament prophecies and promises regarding the coming of the kingdom of God, including the day of the Lord's great wrath. As Paul says at Romans 118, the wrath of God is revealed. Now, not just at the last day. But how is it that the prophets, brothers and sisters, did not understand that? How is it that they, and John the Baptist, the greatest in the line of the Old Testament prophets, how did they not perceive this? That the day of the Lord was not a single literal day? And that the coming of the king and of the kingdom would involve two stages? Well, it is simply because of where they stood. It is because of their perspective given where they stood, where they were standing in redemptive history. The two separated things looked like one big thing. Let's turn together, brothers and sisters, to a passage of the Old Testament to illustrate this. Let's turn to Malachi chapter 3, the last book of the Old Testament. Malachi is also the last work product, you could call it, of the last of the writing prophets. So Malachi chapter 3 verses 1 through 5, well the beginning of verse 5. Malachi 3, 1 through 5. Behold I send my messenger and he will prepare the way before me and the Lord whom you seek will suddenly come to his temple and the messenger of the covenant in whom you delight behold he is coming says the Lord of hosts but who can endure the day of his coming and who can stand when he appears for he is like a refiner's fire and like fuller's soap he will sit as a refiner and purifier of silver he will purify the sons of Levi refine them like gold and silver, and they will bring offerings in righteousness to the Lord. Then the offering of Judah and Jerusalem will be pleasing to the Lord as in the days of old and as in former years. Then I will draw near to you for judgment." The coming of the Lord, brothers and sisters, preceded by his messenger, John the Baptist, he will come to his temple. And we know that this part of the prophecy is fulfilled by Christ and his first coming. What Malachi didn't fully realize, nor did the Jews of Jesus' day realize at all, was that verse five would be fulfilled in its fullest sense only at the Messiah's second coming. We are told in the New Testament that Jesus did not come to judge during his earthly ministry. But we are also told in the New Testament that after his ascension and after his exaltation, judgment was committed to him by the Father. In the words of Gerhardus Vos, it must be admitted that the Old Testament does not distinguish between several stages in the fulfillment of the promises regarding the kingdom, but looks upon its coming as an undivided whole. John the Baptist also seems to have still occupied this Old Testament standpoint. This, however, was due to the peculiar character of prophecy in general, in which there is a certain lack of perspective. This lack of a full perspective, or what we could call prophetic perspective, works like this. Have you ever been driving along a highway and observed a range of hills, of mountain peaks off in the distance? When you first see them, they appear to be the same range of hills. The peaks actually appear to be right next to one another. But as you draw closer to those peaks, there comes a point when you realize that these mountains are actually separated from one another by a great distance. And that's what happened with the Old Testament prophecies about the events of the day of the Lord, about the coming of the kingdom, and about the coming of the Lord's anointed. They thought that all the great events being described to them by the Holy Spirit were but one undivided event. That's the way it appeared to them, then, in their place in redemptive history. From their perspective, far removed in time from the events themselves. So it fell to Christ and it fell to his apostles to teach us. that the two peaks of that one mountain range, that is, the two phases of the coming divine king and his work prophesied about in the Old Testament were actually separated by many generations. The coming of the king, the coming of Christ to suffer for sin, that is, his coming in his humiliation, and the coming of Christ to conquer that is His coming in His exaltation were actually separated by many generations. And that is why we need the New Testament to interpret the Old Testament. Otherwise we continue to make the same interpretive mistakes that the Jews of Jesus' day did. The promised Lord has come and He has ascended His throne. He has begun His reign. But as Hebrews 2 puts it, At present, we do not see everything in subjection to Him. At present, God and His rule is in a sense hidden. But at His appearing, it will then become manifest and unambiguous. It is only with the eye of faith we believe this good news of Christ's present reign. The day of the Lord, the judgment, has in a very real sense already begun. Christ is even now gathering and separating. But this is hidden to every eye but the eye of faith. Let's move on to part two. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done. So we just considered the two-staged nature of the coming of the kingdom. We also considered how the day of the Lord of the Old Testament promise includes not only the second coming of the king in power, but in a very real sense includes the present time, since his first coming in weakness. And that is because through the gospel call, the gospel call to repentance for sin and to faith in Christ, God has visited the earth begun to divide humanity into those who bend the knee to the sun and to those who remain in rebellion. Now I would like us briefly to consider the kingdom from another aspect. The kingdom of God did not usually be understood, brothers and sisters, as a realm. While in English and American idiom, kingdom usually denotes a place or even a parcel of ground, For the Hebrews, the notion of kingdom was usually more abstract, and it denoted less a realm and more the idea of a rule or a reign. The idea of kingdom here is that of the sway of a king, not the territories in his possession. So the essence of the kingdom should be thought of as those who are ruled over by the king. those who bend the knee to the king's authority, those who obey the king's laws. So more often than not in the Bible we should be thinking of the kingship of God when we are talking about the kingdom of God. Our Lord even defines greatness in this kingdom in terms of one's obedience to God's law at Matthew 5.19. Our Lord tells us at Matthew 5.19 Whoever relaxes one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do the same will be called least in the kingdom of heaven. But whoever does them and teaches them will be called great in the kingdom of heaven. The kingdom of God on our lips must be attended by the rule, the reign, the kingship of God in our lives. or it is hypocrisy. It is a kind of trespass. As the king himself says in Luke 6, 46, listen to this from your Lord, brothers and sisters. Why do you call me Lord, Lord, and do not do what I tell you? The kingdom of God then is accurately conceived of as the humans who obey God's laws. And yet only those who have been saved by God's grace in Christ have the spirit, and can hope to do so? For the law, we are told in Romans 7, is spiritual. Only those united by faith to Christ, united to the only one who ever did obey all God's law, can hope to do so. Are you a Christian? This is just to ask, who is your king? Note now the intimate connection between these two petitions of our Lord's Prayer, very familiar to us. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done. These two petitions rest side by side in the Lord's Prayer because the hallowing of God's name and the doing of his will are synonymous with the manifestation of his kingdom. That being said, that God's special kingship is made up of those who obey his laws, we must, however, take pains to reiterate that no one obeys his laws unless and until they are given new hearts by grace. And this leads us to the third and the final section of today's sermon. But before we leave this section, let me leave you with a consideration, something to take away with you. Avoid the common misstep of thinking that the Lordship of Christ is somehow disconnected from the Messiahship of Christ. Christ comes to both save and govern at the same instant. Those whom he saves, them he rules. Note how Jesus ties together his gospel call to his proclamation of the arrival of the kingship of God. This gracious salvation of the gospel involves redemption and deliverance, but not only from sin's guilt through justification, but also from sin's government, from sin's tyranny through sanctification. In other words, the deliverance that sets us free from sin's guilt sets us free from sin's dominion as well in order to obey God. And so to show the Lord Jesus Christ to be not only our Savior, but to be truly our Lord as well. As Dr. Gaffin puts it, the faith that truly rests in Christ is restless to do His will. The faith that truly rests in Christ is restless to do His will. This kingdom of our Lord proclaimed in your hearing today is described as a kingdom of holiness. It is a kingdom, we are told, where righteousness dwells. So part three now, brothers and sisters, the gospel of God. The Lord Jesus Christ, in our text today, he begins his public ministry with these words. The time is fulfilled the kingdom is at hand, repent and believe the gospel. With this proclamation, this premier ambassador of God, the Lord Jesus Christ, the Lord's anointed, has initiated what we could call the great diplomatic stage in the history of divine human relations. When a great king is confronted by an enemy, or if that great king is confronted by a rebellion, a province, an open revolt, he will often first open up a more diplomatic than belligerent means of communication to give peace a chance. When nations of men try to first resolve their differences peacefully, this is frequently called the diplomatic stage. This good news spoken of here in our text is that although this world is in rebellion against its Lord and its sovereign, he has sent this great diplomat, this divine and human mediator between God and man. He has sent him into this world to open up a way for a peaceful resolution to man's revolt against its king. before God commences full-on hostilities. Our Lord opens up that line of conciliatory communication with these words in our text, with these terms of peace. In a sense, our Lord cries out, the particular kingship of God is about to become general. His imperial standard is about to be planted over a purified new heavens and new earth, where no unclean thing will be any more permitted, where no rebellion will be further tolerated or found. Lay down your arms then and kiss the sun, lest he be angry and you perish in the way, for his wrath is quickly kindled. and blessed we are told in the scripture are all those who take refuge in him. Let us pray. Lord, we pray that you would prosper your word in our hearts and minds, and that you would make that word accomplish those ends for which you sent it out this day in our hearing. And we pray this, O Lord, for your glory and then for our own good. And it is in Christ's name alone that we pray. Amen.