Repent, For the Kingdom of Heaven Is at Hand

By Paul Earnhart

After Jesus made the journey to Judea where he met Nicodemus and preached and baptized with great success, He returned to Galilee where He had grown up.  And Matthew 4:17 reports that “From that time Jesus began to preach and to say, ‘Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.’”  This was precisely what John the Baptist had been preaching in the wilderness, Matthew 3:1-2.

This message of Jesus (and of John) gives us a clue as to the kind of kingdom that was to be established.  The Jews were expecting an earthly political kingdom.  At the time, they were under the domination of Rome.  They hoped that the Messiah would overthrow the Roman government and establish Jerusalem as the capital of the world.  If this had been the kind of kingdom to be established, Jesus and John would have said, “Arm yourselves, learn to use your weapons, get yourselves into condition, for the battle will soon begin to establish the kingdom of God among men.”  But this was not what Jesus said.

Rather, Jesus and John said REPENT.  The kingdom was to be a kingdom of righteousness.  It was to be made up of individuals who had left the service of Satan to yield themselves completely to the authority of God.  This required a change of heart, and that’s what repentance is.  This was the reason Jesus told Nicodemus that he would have to be born again to enter the kingdom, John 3:3-5.  He would have to be changed within and without.

Many people today express an interest in the kingdom of God.  Their attention, however, is riveted on the Near East and the political and military events that take place there.  That’s the wrong place for our concerns to be centered.  Our concern must be with our own hearts—getting them right with God through repentance.  We must be born again.  That is the condition of our acceptance into the kingdom.  That is where the kingdom must exist—within us!