The Son of Man Has Come: Jesus and the Kingdom of God
Confirmation Class: Lesson Four
Last week, we outlined the core of the Christian story: God is recognized as Creator and Covenant-keeper. He created the world, intended to live with us in it, observed it fall into sin, and chose not to abandon it. He called Abraham, made promises, formed a people, and through Israel’s story began the long process of restoring creation.
But the story kept falling apart. The exile tore everything apart. The king was gone. The temple was destroyed. The people were scattered. And God — according to the prophet Ezekiel — had left. The glory of the Lord rose above the temple, passed out through the east gate, hovered over the Mount of Olives, and disappeared (Ezek 10:18–19; 11:23). God had forsaken his people because of their sin. He could no longer stay with them.
So the question the exile raises — the question the whole second half of the Old Testament is trying to answer — is this: Will God return?
We will come back to this question.
The Apostles’ Creed and What It’s Missing
The Apostles’ Creed says this about Jesus:
I believe in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord, who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried. He descended to the dead. On the third day he rose again. He ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father. He will come again to judge the living and the dead.
That’s all true. But notice what it doesn’t tell you. It gives you the skeleton: born, died, rose, ascended, coming again. What it doesn’t give you is the story — the reason those events are the climax of Israel’s history and not just an isolated miracle. The creed is sufficient; it just isn’t the whole picture.
So let’s start filling it in, beginning with the first word, “Christ.”
Jesus the Messiah
“Christ” is not Jesus’s last name. It is a title. It is the Greek translation of the Hebrew word Mashiach — Messiah, the Anointed One. Try a mental exercise: every time you read “Christ” in the New Testament, replace it with “the Messiah.” Most of the time, the sentence suddenly makes a lot more sense, because “Messiah” is not a generic honorific. It invokes a specific story about a specific people waiting for a specific act of God.
The Messiah was expected to be the king from David’s line who would bring Israel’s exile to an end, rebuild the temple, restore the Torah, and establish the kingdom of God. Jesus’s Jewishness as part of his incarnation is not a historical accident. God became a Jew because he was bringing to its climax every promise he ever made to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Through the Messiah, God was bringing the story of Israel to its appointed goal.
Jesus is Lord
The creed then calls Jesus “our Lord.” In the first century, the word “Lord” was a political declaration as much as a theological one. The Roman emperors demanded that their subjects confess Caesar is Lord. The early Christians, at the cost of their lives, said something different: Jesus is Lord.
To understand how explosive that claim was, you need to know a little about how Jews read their scriptures. The divine name — YHWH, sometimes rendered Yahweh — was considered too holy to pronounce. So when Jews read the Hebrew Bible aloud, they substituted Adonai, meaning “Lord.” When the Hebrew scriptures were translated into Greek, Adonai became Kyrios — Lord. Every time the Greek Old Testament reads Kyrios, what the Hebrew says is YHWH.
When the early Christians called Jesus Kyrios, they were applying the divine name to him. To call Jesus Lord is to say three things at once:
Jesus is God — he bears the name of YHWH.
Jesus is the world’s true ruler — not Caesar, not any earthly government, not any empire ancient or modern.
Jesus has authority over how we live — he is Kyrios, master, the one to whom we owe our allegiance.
The Kingdom of God: What Jesus Actually Announced
When Jesus begins his public ministry in Mark’s Gospel, he doesn’t announce a new moral system. He doesn’t say, I’ve come to teach you how to be nicer to each other. He says:
“The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the gospel” (Mark 1:15).
To a first-century Jewish audience, that sentence was loaded. The time is fulfilled — whose time? The timetable set by Daniel, who calculated that the exile would last not seventy years as Jeremiah predicted (Jer 29:10), but seventy weeks of years — 490 years — before God would finally act to end it (Dan 9:24). That time is now up.
And the kingdom of God is at hand. What does that mean?
It does not mean heaven — the place we go when we die. It does not mean a feeling of peace in our hearts. To understand what Jesus meant by the Kingdom of God, we have to look at the book of Daniel.
Daniel 2: The Stone That Fills the Earth
Nebuchadnezzar dreams of a colossal statue: a head of gold, chest of silver, middle of bronze, legs of iron, feet of iron and clay. Each metal represents a successive empire. Then a stone, cut without human hands, strikes the statue at its feet and obliterates it. The stone becomes a great mountain that fills the whole earth (Dan 2:31–35).
Daniel’s interpretation leaves no room for ambiguity:
“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 all these kingdoms and bring them to an end, and it shall stand forever” (Dan 2:44).
The kingdom of God is not a spiritual abstraction. It is a real, physical reign on earth that will outlast and overwhelm every human empire that has ever existed. This kingdom, Jesus says, is at hand.
Daniel 7: The Son of Man
But Daniel has a second vision that belongs alongside the vision in chapter two. In chapter 7, he sees four beasts rising from the sea—violent, monstrous, subhuman. These are the same four empires from chapter 2, now shown for what they really are: powers that operate like wild animals rather than like the human beings God intended.
Then the Ancient of Days takes his throne, the court sits in judgment, and someone appears riding the clouds of heaven:
“Behold, with the clouds of heaven there came one like a son of man, and he came to the Ancient of Days and was presented before him. And to him was given dominion and glory and a kingdom, that all peoples, nations, and languages should serve him; his dominion is an everlasting dominion, which shall not pass away, and his kingdom one that shall not be destroyed” (Dan 7:13–14).
The stone of Daniel 2 and the Son of Man of Daniel 7 are parallel images. (In Aramaic, the words for stone and son — eben and ben — differ by a single letter. The connection is deliberate.) Against the beast-kingdoms, which are subhuman, there rises one who is truly human — the representative of what humanity was always supposed to be, and he is given dominion over all the earth.
Jesus’s favorite title for himself is Son of Man. Every time he uses it, he is invoking this vision. He is saying, “I am the one Daniel saw.” The kingdom is arriving. In me.”
Mark’s Opening Words
This brings us back to Mark 1. Mark begins his Gospel not with a genealogy but with two Old Testament quotations:
“Behold, I send my messenger before your face, who will prepare your way (Mal 3:1). The voice of one crying in the wilderness: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight’ (Isa 40:3)” (Mark 1:2-3).
These verses are not random proof texts. Israel was waiting for the end of the exile and the return of YHWH to Zion. Malachi 3 promises that the Lord himself will come suddenly to his temple — but he also warns that when he does, it may not go the way his people expect. Isaiah 40 opens the great section of Isaiah that announces the end of the exile: God is coming back, coming in power, coming to restore his people. Isaiah 40 is the promise of the end of the exile and YHWH’s return. Malachi 3 is the threat that hangs over that promise.
John the Baptist is preparing the way. But for whom? The text is clear: the Lord. So often we say that John the Baptist was the forerunner of the Messiah, and that’s not totally wrong, but the Bible actually makes a much more significant point. Mark announces from his first sentence that the story of Jesus is the story of YHWH returning to his people. The exile is ending. The Lord is coming home. John is not the forerunner of the Messiah, but as the text says, he is preparing the way of “the Lord.”
Jesus is not simply the Messiah; he is the God of Israel, returning at last to his people.
If the question was “Will God return?”, the answer of all the Evangelists is, “Yes, he already has, in the person of Jesus of Nazareth.”
How the Kingdom Arrives
Here is where things get strange. And where the first disciples — reasonable, intelligent people — were completely blindsided.
If the kingdom of God is arriving, and Jesus is the Son of Man to whom dominion has been given, the obvious next move is to raise an army, defeat Rome, take back Jerusalem, and restore the temple. That’s what Messiahs do. That’s what every would-be messiah in the century surrounding Jesus attempted. Some of them got pretty far before the Romans crushed them.
Jesus does something completely different. He heals the sick. He welcomes tax collectors and prostitutes. He talks about the poor being blessed, the meek inheriting the earth, peacemakers being called sons of God (Matt 5:3–9). He tells his disciples to love their enemies, turn the other cheek, and go the extra mile (Matt 5:44; 5:39–41).
What is going on?
The answer is in Mark 5. Jesus encounters a man possessed by a demon who calls himself Legion — the name of a Roman military formation. When Jesus casts the demons out and sends them into a herd of pigs that rushes into the sea and drowns, the image is unmistakable: this is the army of Egypt drowning in the Red Sea (Exod 14:28). The New Exodus is underway.
But notice who is being drowned. Not Romans. Not Egyptians. But Demons. Paul writes:
“Our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world” (Eph 6:12).
The real enemy was never Rome. The real enemy is sin, death, and the devil. And those enemies cannot be defeated by swords.
The Way of the Cross
In Mark 8, everything shifts. Jesus has been speaking in parables; now he speaks plainly. And what he says plainly is this:
“The Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders and the chief priests and the scribes and be killed, and after three days rise again” (Mark 8:31).
Peter pulls him aside and rebukes him. And we should feel the weight of Peter’s reaction. Peter’s not being stupid. A dead Messiah is a failed Messiah. There had been other would-be messiahs before Jesus, and there would be others after. Do you know what happened to their movements when they died? Nothing. The movement ended. Their followers scattered. Nobody claimed that any of them rose from the dead.
Peter’s objection makes perfect sense. And Jesus calls him Satan for it.
By Mark 10, the disciples still don’t understand. James and John ask for the best seats in the coming kingdom. Jesus’s response reframes everything:
“You know that those who are considered rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them... But it shall not be so among you. Whoever would be great among you must be your servant, and whoever would be first among you must be slave of all. For even the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.” (Mark 10:42–45)
Daniel 7 said explicitly that the Son of Man would come to be served — that all peoples and nations would bring him their worship. Jesus says the Son of Man came to serve. He reads Daniel 7 through Isaiah 53 — the Suffering Servant — and fuses them together. The path to vindication runs through the cross. The way the Son of Man will bring in the kingdom of God and crush the idolatrous statue is by giving his life away.
The Passover and the Cup
Jesus shares his final meal with his disciples at Passover. He takes the bread and the cup — elements that Jewish families had used for centuries to remember the Exodus — and says something staggering:
“This is my body... This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many” (Mark 14:22–24).
The Exodus meal has become his meal. He is the Passover Lamb. John’s Gospel is careful to note that Jesus is crucified at the precise hour when the Passover lambs are being slaughtered in the temple (John 19:14). He is not dying despite the Passover. He is fulfilling it.
In Jeremiah, the cup symbolizes God’s stored-up wrath against human sin (Jer 25:15–17). When Jesus prays in Gethsemane, “Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me” (Matt 26:39), he is not speaking about wine. He is asking whether there is any other way to absorb the full weight of human sin and judgment.
There isn’t. So he drinks it.
Paul puts it plainly:
Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us — for it is written, ‘Cursed is everyone who is hanged on a tree’” (Gal 3:13; citing Deut 21:23).
The cross is not an accident. It is the mechanism by which the Son of Man takes upon himself the curse that belongs to us — the exile, the judgment, the death — and exhausts it.
The Resurrection Changes Everything
And then God raises him from the dead.
This is the hinge of everything. Every other would-be messiah died. Nobody claimed they rose. When they died, their disciples gave up and went home. There is no natural explanation for why the disciples of a crucified man would go to their own deaths insisting that he was alive again and was the world’s true Lord — unless he actually was.
The resurrection is not resuscitation. It is not spiritual survival. It is bodily, physical, irreversible return to life — the beginning of the new creation, the first fruits of the age to come (1 Cor 15:20). It is God’s answer to the empire: you did your worst. I undo it. Death is not the last word.
When the empire kills you, the story is supposed to be over. When God raises you back to life, the empire is exposed as a paper tiger. The last weapon of the tyrant has been turned back. And the Son of Man — the one Daniel saw receiving dominion and glory and an everlasting kingdom — takes his seat at the right hand of the Father (Mark 16:19; Dan 7:13–14).
The Prodigal Son as Exile Story
One more piece before we close.
Jesus tells a story about a son who demands his inheritance early, leaves home for a distant country, wastes everything, and ends up feeding pigs in a foreign field (Luke 15:11–32). We call it the Parable of the Prodigal Son.
But it is also a parable about Israel in exile. The son has gone to a far country — cut off from home, from his father, from everything that was his. And when he comes to his senses and turns back, something remarkable happens. His father sees him from a long way off and runs to meet him.
The God who left his people in exile has not abandoned them. He has been watching the road. And when they turn back — regardless of how far they have wandered, regardless of what they have done — he is running toward them.
This is the gospel Jesus announced. Not a new moral code. Not a spiritual self-improvement program. The exile is ending. The Father is running. There is a place at the table for everyone who has been far from home.
What This Means for Us
N. T. Wright puts it simply: Christianity is not primarily about a new moral teaching. It is about something that happened — something that happened to Jesus of Nazareth, and something that happened through Jesus of Nazareth, through which the world has been changed.
The kingdom of God is not up in heaven, waiting for us to arrive. It is not merely a feeling in our hearts. It is the real reign of the real God breaking into the real world — inaugurated in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, and being extended now through the people who bear his name.
To say “Jesus is Lord” is not a religious sentiment. It is a claim about the way the world actually works. Caesar does not have the last word. No empire does. No ideology, no political program, no earthly power has the authority that belongs to the one who rose from the dead.
And the one who rose from the dead — the one to whom all authority in heaven and on earth belongs — spent his life washing feet.
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