Scripture Reference: Mark 4:1-34
The Kingdom Keeps on Growing – Continued
From Last Lesson: The Jews of Israel expected the Day of the Lord would come at once, and God’s enemies would immediately be subjugated.
The story would end with God’s chosen king reigning over the world from Jerusalem and the Jews in their proper place as top nation. So they certainly were not comfortable with this picture of slow, almost invisible growth. The idea that when God’s kingdom arrived it would grow within an evil world, that the harvest would be long delayed, that God’s people would still need a lot of patience, that was totally unexpected. This, I am wholly convinced, is why Jesus spends so much time teaching them through the parables about the kingdom, using these images of peaceful, quiet, steady growth. As all these parables show, the kingdom does end up in triumph, in a successful harvest, but it doesn’t all happen in a matter of minutes.
The beginning of the kingdom was indeed like a single seed, tiny, apparently insignificant. It truly began as a small seed in Mary’s womb. It then transitions with Jesus appearing by Lake Galilee, preaching to the crowds and beginning to gather around Him a nucleus of followers. It continues as He sets His face to go up to the capital in Jerusalem, where He faces His own death. At that point it seems even to His followers that this tiny plant, this new kingdom, has been finished off before it has even begun. But a couple of days later Jesus has risen from death. A few weeks after that, He returns to His Father God’s side in heaven, but the plant continues to grow. Now at last His followers realize that Jesus’ death is actually the key to it all. Only after Jesus has died and planted in the earth and then has left the earthly scene, and the Holy Spirit has been given, does the kingdom really start to grow. Within days it is sending out shoots in all directions. In a few years it has branched out beyond Israel into the whole region and then far beyond. It’s the kingdom that goes on growing, even today.
God is growing His kingdom, Jesus is growing His church from among every nation on earth. You can go anywhere in the world and meet people who are part of this kingdom, people who love and follow the Lord Jesus. But the time for growth is limited, because the harvest is coming. Have you seen what a field of wheat looks like when the harvesters have finished with it? There is nothing left. Everything living has gone. The world we know is coming to an end. It may be sooner or later, we don’t know the exact time, but it will happen.
This parable gives a positive picture: a field of ripe grain, all safely gathered in. It’s a positive picture because it’s a picture of the kingdom, of people who are rooted and grounded in Jesus Christ. But the Bible gives us other pictures too, and they don’t make such cheerful reading. For people who are outside Christ, people who don’t know Him intimately, there is a harvest too, but a harvest of judgement and condemnation. Revelation 14:14-20 gives a vision of a double harvest. There is the happy picture of the grain in the field being gathered in, God’s people being brought home at last to Him. But coupled with that is the haunting picture of people being gathered in for judgement, thrown into the winepress of God’s wrath, crushed by God’s anger against the evil things they have done. The harvest is coming, and the only way to be ready is to be in Christ, to be part of His great, worldwide kingdom that is growing to fill the whole earth.
FOR THE LOVE OF GOD 
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