Jesus’ Kingdom Teachings: Practical Ways to Embrace Your Divine Mandate

From that time Jesus began to preach and say, “Repent [change your inner self—your old way of thinking, regret past sins, live your life in a way that proves repentance; seek God’s purpose for your life], for the kingdom of heaven is at hand” (Matthew 4:17 AMP).

That is what Jesus said in the first recorded words of His teaching:

From that time [immediately after His baptism and forty days in the wilderness] Jesus began to preach and to say, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand” (Matthew 4:17 NKJV).

From that time on Jesus began to preach, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near” (Matthew 4:17 NIV).

The words at hand and near mean the same thing. The Kingdom was approaching, and Jesus was announcing its coming. As a matter of fact, He was ushering it in. He didn’t give people more laws and religious rituals to learn. They had enough of those already. He wanted to tell people what to do with their lives, how to become naturalized—perhaps I should say “supernaturalized”—citizens of the Kingdom of Heaven.

Jesus did not come to set up a religion. He came to establish an outpost of the Kingdom of Heaven.

After He spent three years teaching, preaching, and demonstrating what the Kingdom was like, some people objected to His ideas so much that they plotted to have him killed. You would think that would have taken care of it. Dead men can’t preach against your cherished religion, and a man in a tomb can no longer claim to be leading the way to this so-called Kingdom. His opponents especially disliked the fact that He seemed to be claiming some kind of kingship.

Killing Jesus didn’t stop His teachings from being spread worldwide for the next 2,000-plus years.

Earth, the Kingdom of Heaven Outpost

Then God said, “Let us make human beings in our image, to be like us. They will reign over the fish in the sea, the birds in the sky, the livestock, all the wild animals on the earth, and the small animals that scurry along the ground.” So God created human beings in his own image. In the image of God he created them; male and female he created them (Genesis 1:26-27 NLT).

Jesus’s death and subsequent resurrection completed the purpose of His mission to earth—to re-establish a Kingdom outpost among the people who lived under the human jurisdictions of the world, to reclaim the territory of earth for the Kingdom of Heaven.

Originally, the Kingdom of Heaven had established an outpost in a place that people know as the Garden of Eden. Here is how the first book of the Bible describes it:

Then God said, “Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.” So God created man in His own image; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them (Genesis 1:26-27 NKJV).

“Let them have dominion,” God said. The word used in the original Hebrew is mamlakah, which is the same word that gets translated into English as “kingdom.” It also gets translated as “reign,” “sovereignty,” and “realm.” So dominion is the same as kingdom. You can see the “dom” syllable in both words because the words dominion and kingdom are closely related.

All of these words indicate that someone is in charge of something. Having dominion means having authority over. It means reigning, leading, managing, ruling over. According to the account in Genesis, human beings were created to manage the rest of creation. We can see this throughout the rest of the story about the first man and woman, and on through all of human history up to the present day.

King God was assigning dominion to the people He had created. What were the people supposed to have dominion over? Their assignment on earth was to manage the real estate He had created as an extension of His rule in Heaven. First He created the earth and all the living things that fill it, and then the King brought Heaven to earth and set up His government, His system of management.

God created humans with the intention of having them represent His authority on the planet He had created.

Jesus Preached the Kingdom

[Jesus said,] “And this gospel of the kingdom will be preached in the whole world as a testimony to all nations, and then the end will come” (Matthew 24:14 NIV).

The New Testament documents Jesus’s numerous messages and teachings about the most unique Kingdom of God and Heaven. Jesus even kept talking about the Kingdom after He rose from the grave: “After his suffering, he presented himself to them and gave many convincing proofs that he was alive. He appeared to them over a period of forty days and spoke about the kingdom of God” (Acts 1:3 NIV).

Jesus never stopped talking about the Kingdom. He was careful about referring to Himself as the King, and yet His disciples could tell that He was the One all of the prophets from Joshua to Malachi had been talking about when they announced the coming of a future Messiah. Some of the books in the Old Testament had given details about His lineage (the book of Ruth, for example). Others proclaimed the future coming of an unnamed, magnificent king who would take care of all the injustices that plagued the nation of Israel. Psalmists such as King David provided tantalizing details (see Psalms 22 and 45). The prophet Micah included the name of the village in which Jesus’s mother, Mary, would give birth to Him:

But you, Bethlehem Ephrathah, though you are little among the thousands of Judah, yet out of you shall come forth to Me the One to be Ruler in Israel, whose goings forth are from of old, from everlasting (Micah 5:2 NKJV).

As that first man had lost the heavenly assignment for the whole race, the “Second Adam,” Jesus, restored it. Now all we have to do is to recognize what He has done and get on board.

So many Scriptures prove positive that Jesus came to reconcile the Kingdom of God and the people of the outpost.