Geerhardus Vos has a fine statement on the kingdom of God in his introduction to The Teaching of Jesus Concerning the Kingdom of God and the Church (Presbyterian and Reformed, n.d.).He first draws attention to Luke 4:43 where Jesus says, "I must preach the good news of the kingdom of God to the other towns as well; for I was sent for this purpose" (ESV). He adds that the importance of this concept of the kingdom of God "will best be felt by considering that the coming of the kingdom is the great event which Jesus connects with his appearance and activity...(p.9)."
Having made a brief case for the centrality of this idea in the Bible and in the teachings of our Lord, he then cautions the reader against interpretive excess.
While thus recognizing that the kingdom of God has an importance in our Lord's teaching second to that of no other subject, we should not go to the extreme into which some writers have fallen, in finding in it the only theme on which Jesus actually taught, which would imply that all other topics dealt with in his discourses were to his mind so many corollaries or subdivisions of this one great truth. The modern attempts to make the kingdom of God the organizing center of a theological system have here exerted a misleading influence upon the interpretation of Jesus' teaching. From the fact that the proximate object of his saving work was the realization of the kingdom, the wrong inference has been drawn, that this must have been also the highest category under which he viewed the truth. It is plain that the one does not follow from the other. Salvation with all it contains flows from the nature and subserves the glory of God, and we can clearly perceive that Jesus was accustomed consciously to refer it to this divine source and to subordinate it to this God-centered purpose, cf. John 17:4. He usually spoke not of "the kingdom" absolutely, but of "the kingdom of God" and "the kingdom of heaven," and these names themselves indicate that the place of God in the order of things which they describe is the all-important thing to his mind.
It is only with great artificiality that the various component elements of our Lord's teaching can be subsumed under the one head of the kingdom. If any deduction and systematizing are to be attempted, logic and the indications which we have of our Lord's habit of thought on this point alike require, that not his teaching on the kingdom but that on God shall be given the highest place. The relation observable in the discourses of the Fourth Gospel between the person of Christ and salvation, is also the relation which we may conceive to exist between God and the kingdom. Because god is what he is, the kingdom bears the character and embodies the principles which as a matter of fact belong to it. Even so, however, we should avoid the modern mistake of endeavoring to derive the idea of the kingdom from the conception of the divine fatherhood alone. This derivation expresses an important truth recognized by Jesus himself, when he calls the kingdom a fatherly gift to the disciples, Lk 12:32. But it represents only one side of the truth, for in the kingdom other attributes of God besides his fatherhood find expression. The doctrine of God in its entire fulness alone is capable of furnishing that broader basis on which the structure of his teaching on the kingdom can be built in agreement with Jesus' own mind.
It is worth noting that the Great Commission speaks of authority and obedience, but makes no explicit reference to the kingdom of God. Jesus' restatement of it before his ascension in Acts 1 is similarly silent. Vos is saying that not the kingdom but God himself is the comprehensive theme in the Bible and thus in Jesus' teaching, more specifically the glory that he is due and that sinful man, made in his image, has denied him, but which will be his in the end, in heaven, on earth, and under the earth.
But the kingdom is the most prominent expression of that. When the angel announces the Messiah's birth to Mary, he uses kingdom terminology: "...the Lord will give him the throne of his father David. And he will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end" (Lk 1:32-33 NKJV). As this gospel is heading for the ends of the earth, Luke tells us in the very last verse of the Book of Acts, "[Paul] lives two whole years at his own expense, and welcomed all who came to him, proclaiming the kingdom of God and teaching about the Lord Jesus Christ with all boldness and without hindrance" (Acts 28:30-31 ESV). The Apostle Luke equates the kingdom of God with the gospel.
Having adequately prepared the reader, Vos then states the unparalleled importance of this kingdom theme.
On the other hand, it cannot be denied that in many respects the idea of the kingdom acted in our Lord's thought and teachings as a crystallizing point around which several other elements of truth naturally gathered and grouped themselves in harmonious combination. That is the idea of the church, where it emerges in his teaching, is a direct outgrowth of the development of his doctrine of the kingdom, will appear in the sequel. But not only this, also the consummation of the world and the final state of glory were evidently viewed by him in no other light than as the crowning fulfilment of the kingdom-idea. Still further, what he taught about righteousness was most closely interlinked in his mind with the truth about the nature of the kingdom. The same may safely be affirmed with reference to the love and grace of God. The great categories of subjective religion, faith and repentance and regeneration, obviously had their place in his thought as answering to certain aspects of the kingdom. Even a subject apparently so remote from the kingdom-idea, in our usual understanding of it as that of miracles in reality derived for Jesus from the latter the larger part of its meaning. Finally, the kingdom stood in our Lord's mind for a very definite conception concerning the historical relation of his own work and the new order of things introduced by it to the Old testament. All this can here be stated in general only; our task in the sequel, will be to work it out in detail. But what has been said is sufficient to show that there is scarcely an important subject i9n the rich repertoire of our Lord's teaching with which our study of his disclosures concerning the kingdom of God will not bring us into contact.
You can find the book online here.
You can buy the Westminster Discount Books reprint of the book from the Westminster Seminary Bookstore here.
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