Thy Kingdom Come
In the model prayer of Jesus, found in Matthew 6, we read these words in verse 10, “Your kingdom come, Your will be done On earth as it is in Heaven.” We remember that when John the Baptist came on the scene, he started preaching “Repent for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” When Jesus started His ministry, He also began preaching the same message. This was not something new to the Jews. According to the Old Testament, they knew about and were looking for this Kingdom. According to historians, the Jews “concluded their synagogue services with a prayer (the Kaddish) that is strikingly similar to this section of the Lord’s Prayer: ‘Exalted and hallowed be his great name in the world which he created according to his will. May he let his kingdom rule in your lifetime and in your days and in the lifetime of the whole house of Israel, speedily and soon. Praised be his great name from eternity to eternity. And to this say: Amen.’”
When we read through the book of Matthew, we find something interesting concerning the Kingdom of God. As we said above, John the Baptist and Jesus both said the kingdom of Heaven was at hand. The phrase ‘at hand,’ is one Greek word, ‘eggizo.’ It means “to make near.’ We also read the words of Jesus, found in Matthew 12:28, where He said, “But if I cast out demons by the Spirit if God, surely the kingdom of God has come upon you.” But He tells us to pray, in this model prayer, that His Kingdom would come. To get a proper sense of this, we must look also at the phrase, ‘Your will be done.’ They are both connected together. It is for sure that involved in the coming kingdom is for His will to be done.
So, to bring all of this together, we must understand that those who penned the New Testament were using the term ‘kingdom’ to represent the reign of God as a whole, and not necessarily a certain place. Also, they understood that the Kingdom of God, as one scholar put it, “does not occur at a single moment in time. Instead, the coming of the kingdom involves a series of events that occur over a period of time.”
We will continue this next week, but we can know that these two thoughts, His Kingdom to come, and His Kingdom being already here, are in keeping with Scripture. And we will see how that it is so. May we continue to pray this prayer, that His Kingdom would come and His will be done on earth as it is in Heaven.