What Is God’s Kingdom?

Exodus 19-24 (Exodus 3:1-15; Exodus 19:2-6)

God is forming and shaping, again, community as a part of God’s plan for creation. God has appointed Moses to lead, has brought the Israelites out of Egypt, God has led them around the desert wilderness as a pillar of cloud by day and pillar of fire by night. And now, God is forming them into a community, into a people. God gives Moses a message for the people: “You saw firsthand, you lived, what I did for you in Egypt. I brought you out. Now if you obey me fully and keep my covenant, then out of all nations you will be my treasured possession. Although the whole earth is mine, you will be for me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.”

Each covenant God makes is a restoration attempt, an attempt to reestablish and move forward with God’s vision for creation. We have several names for what this vision will be called when it is realized. Scripture often refers to it as the Kingdom of God – with God’s will reigning on the throne, or the Kingdom of Heaven, God’s will done on earth just as it is already done in heaven. Notice that the Kingdom of God is not something we look forward to when we die, it is a vision for life on earth. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. called it Beloved Community, living with the love of God operating in the human heart. Cuban-American theologian Dr. Ada Maria Isasi-Diaz used the term kin-dom to describe God’s vision for all humanity to live together as communal family. The term kin-dom eliminates the male dominant language of king-dom and accentuates the cultural interconnection of la familia in Latino culture. In the kin-dom of God, all live together as brothers and sisters in Christ. In short, the Kingdom of God is any title we give to life lived as God intends: as it was in the Garden of Eden before the Fall, as it would be without sin, life lived in community, harmony, love, joy, justice, and peace. It’s not that God can’t create this vision. It’s not that God has failed to create this vision. The problem is that the motivation for God to create life on earth is relationship. And to have relationship, it takes two, both free to choose the other, or not.

And from the beginning, despite God’s faithfulness and love and eagerness to be in relationship with human beings, human beings have consistently been..well, within 10 generations God started over with a flood and then promised never again to destroy the earth. And God made a one-sided covenant with Noah: Never again would God do a “hard reset”…10 generations more and God decides to begin small and grow the kingdom. And God makes a what I would call and invitational covenant with Abraham to be a co-operator in nurturing the kingdom into being, sort of a gardening method, promising Abram a land, descendants, and blessing so that through them the whole world would be blessed. From here the story gets really good – family deception, favorites, jealousy. Ultimately there is famine, Abraham’s descendants, the sons of Jacob, leave the land and go south to Egypt, where one of their brothers, Joseph is now second in command to Pharoah – no thanks to his brothers who sold him to slave traders headed to Egypt.

ANYWAY, the Israelites settled in Egypt. At first, it was all good. But, over time, the Pharaohs forgot the story of Joseph and – well, there just were a lot of them – and they became the “other”. They were a threat to the Egyptians in their own land. So, they treated them like the foreigners they were. They oppressed them, enslaved them, and eventually there were so many of them that Pharaoh commanded the baby boys be thrown in the Nile River. Moses’ mother placed him in a basket in the river rather than throwing him in, and Pharaoh’s daughter found him and thought he was awfully cuddly.

So, Moses was born an Israelite and was raised in Pharaoh’s house. Solid preparation for God to use him to negotiate with Pharaoh and lead the Israelites out of Egypt. Only, he saw an Egyptian beating an Israelite and he killed the Egyptian and then he ran away to Midian, which today would be in Saudi Arabia. That’s where he married and God spoke to him in the burning bush and sent him back to Egypt. 10 plagues later, the Egyptians were ready for the Israelites to GO. After years of being slaves, always told what to do, they needed leadership. God guided them by day in a pillar of cloud, by night in a pillar of fire. God communicated through Moses. It was the desert and there was no food, so God provided them manna and quail to eat and water to drink.

God was leading. God was providing. They were depending on God. They were following God. God will return them to the promised land, the land God gave their ancestor Abraham. But God is not giving up on God’s vision for creation. First, God will form them as a covenant community, with rules for living that will guide them and form them to be God’s Kingdom. We know them as the 10 Commandments, but that’s not all the laws God gave. These are followed by what is known as the Covenant Code, longer, more detailed instructions for religious practice, social practices, political relations. The Mosaic covenant is two-sided, God leads and provides and in gratitude the people respond faithfully living according to the laws of community. They readily agreed!

In fact, they planned a special worship service, built an altar at the foot of the mountain, sacrificed oxen. Then, Moses took half of the blood and put it in basins, and half of the blood he threw against the altar. Then he took read the whole covenant, all the ordinances for how to live in community and everybody, there in worship responded, “All that the LORD has spoken we will do, and we will be obedient.” Moses took the blood and dashed it on the people, and said, “Here is the blood of the covenant that the LORD has made with you in accordance with all these words.”

The covenant is sealed with blood between God – splashed blood on the altar – and Israel – splashed blood on the people.

And then, one of the most beautiful moments in Scripture – it is so much like the vision of heaven that John will record in Revelation.
Moses and Aaron, Nadab and Abihu, and seventy of the elders of Israel went back up on the mountain and they saw the God of Israel. Under his feet there was something like a pavement of sapphire stone, like the very heaven for clearness. They saw God, and they ate and drank. A covenant sealed in blood and bread, sacrifice and meal.

And God tells Moses to wait there on the mountain and God will put it all down on tablets of stone. So he stays, and he leaves Aaron and Hur in charge of the others. Moses is there on the mountain 40 days and 40 nights.

He comes back down the mountain with the tablets and to find the Israelites worshiping a golden calf. WHAT? I will go back and see if I can work out for God to forgive this! And after hearing Moses’s plea for God to forgive them, God did not destroy them, and he promised to continue to lead them as promised, but he also warned that “when the day for punishment comes, I will punish them for their sin.”

And the struggle to allow humans free will and to live out God’s vision for creation, the Kingdom of God, the Kingdom of Heaven, the beloved community, the Kin-dom…continues.